Of course this is supposed to be provocative. One country's success is another's failure, and vice-versa. No one seems to have any difficulty understanding that. But from the U.S. perspective, the lessons of 1953-54, when the new Eisenhower administration acted boldly and aggressively, were that the United States could decide who would rule in countries around the world, that it could do so with quite a low investment of resources, and that it could do so while effectively denying that America had overthrown anyone. It was the Iranians and the Guatemalans! Think about how confident Eisenhower must have been in 1955, specifically about the Third World. We could handle that. No problem.
To Iranians? Well, maybe not so good. Goodbye, Mossadegh.
Welcome back, Shah. Sorry you skipped town for a short while.
And Guatemala? Even grislier. Hundreds of thousands ultimately killed by the regime inaugurated by the U.S. coup there.
And, really, why? My students agreed that, in a way, these regime overthrows seem a little puzzling. Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran were nationalists who were supported by Communists in each country - but no one even seems to claim today that they were Communists themselves. Did Eisenhower truly fear that they would welcome Soviet influence? Or was the U.S. simply hostile - really, really hostile - to Arbenz's redistribution of fallow land and Mossadegh's nationalization of Iranian petroleum? We read in Peter Hahn's book on the U.S. in the Middle East during the Cold War, Crisis and Crossfire, that the U.S. was willing to countenance a new, more equitable split of the proceeds from Iranian oil with the Iranian government - after getting rid of Mossadegh. And, according to Hahn, this is probably what Mossadegh was after in the first place. So...why take the radical step of overthrowing him? An interesting question.
We had a stimulating class discussion about whether it is socialist or revolutionary for a government to nationalize its precious resources, e.g., oil. I learned a thing or two about the Norwegian government's relationship to Statoil, the Norwegian oil company. But, long story short, students here in Oslo don't seem to think it's all that radical, and certainly not so unreasonable, for a government to assert national sovereignty of some kind over its oil. Now, of course, this is Norway. But I'm guessing this is a fairly common view in a lot of countries with oil and gas. We talked about whether the U.S. is the outlier on this issue of public vs. private control. But I noted that the U.S. government does own an awful lot of land and the resources under it, especially in the western states.
Perhaps Eisenhower didn't think through all that carefully why he found it so all-fired important to get rid of Mossadegh and Arbenz. And perhaps there is another, rather simple - if shocking - reason why Eisenhower overthrew these two governments.
Because he could.
Does this sound ridiculous? Maybe. Then again, the U.S. in the mid-1950s was feeling its oats. It really was. Eisenhower saw the CIA just sitting there, ready for action, he saw these nationalists - one in the "American lake," i.e., the Caribbean Basin, the other sitting on top of huge oil deposits - acting kind of uppity, and maybe he thought, Why the hell not? I don't need to come to terms with these people. Low cost. Potentially big upside.
Whatever you think the true reasons were, the result was an even greater sense of U.S. confidence that Washington could just decide who would rule in almost any place it chose to exert itself in the Third World. Americans were getting used to thinking of themselves as responsible for political outcomes everywhere, such that it could become politically effective to argue for armed intervention (overt or covert, publicly or only within government offices) by charging that if we did not intervene, we were responsible anyway for the outcome, possibly for an outcome we would not like. Action and inaction were equivalent. This was the ethical logic of global "responsibility," as it was called by theologians of empire like Reinhold Niebuhr (sorry - that's how I see him). And yes, it is still with us today.
Now, did this lead to Vietnam? Of course it did. Eisenhower made the most fateful decision of any U.S. president in the whole sorry history of that American war when he resolved, in 1954, to prevent the implementation of an international agreement to unify Vietnam under a single government. It would have been a Communist government. But no one would have expected America to have prevented this, since the U.S., while it had funded the French War in Vietnam that ended in 1954, had not been fighting the war. Eisenhower had to do absolutely nothing - just sit still and let the Geneva Accords take effect - and the U.S. never would have fought a war in Vietnam.
Easy to say in hindsight, eh? To be sure.
Ike did not, surely, foresee what would come in Vietnam. This was right after Iran and Guatemala. Why the hell not? Send in a small CIA team, find a guy we can support, try to lop off half the country permanently as a pro-American bastion. A small investment. Low cost. Potentially big upside. What's the worst that could happen?
Well, there he is, Ngo Dinh Diem, the Miracle Man of Asia, our man in Saigon. He really was U.S. policy up until John Kennedy decided to get rid of him in 1963, just before Kennedy himself was murdered.
I asked students this week, after they had read a very good, detailed summary of the US-Vietnam conflict in Arc of Empire by Hunt and Levine, if they found anything especially surprising.
Right off the bat: Didn't realize JFK was so gung-ho on the whole Vietnam thing.
(Sigh.) I've heard it many, many times. Some students thought Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam (some had seen Oliver Stone's JFK), while others just hadn't realized the US was so involved there so early in the 1960s. Yup. Not much different than the reactions I would expect from American students.
Kennedy, of course, ran hard against Richard Nixon in 1960 from Nixon's right on foreign policy issues. The Communists are stealing a march on us in the Third World, he said. We need to take the fight to the enemy, not just sit back and stockpile nuclear weapons. Why haven't you done something about Cuba ("Cuber")?
If there was anything Kennedy was more obsessed with than scoring a victory in Vietnam (I try to avoid saying "South Vietnam," since there was never any such country; I explained to students that, in Vietnam as in Korea, there were two rival regimes, each of which laid claim to sovereignty in the whole country), it was getting rid of Castro.
That didn't work out as Kennedy planned (although he very smoothly spun the Missile Crisis into a triumph of his leadership).
Let's step back a little. If the US succeeded in overthrowing governments in the Third World in the 1950s, why did it fail in Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s? (In the case of Cuba it was trying to oust Castro, just like Arbenz; in Vietnam, it was trying to do something rather different, push Diem in, but it was still trying to defeat the revolutionary nationalists in half the country).
I put this question to my students. They came up readily with a couple of answers. One: the Cuban and Vietnamese regimes had stronger popular support than Mossadegh and Arbenz. Two: the Cubans and Vietnamese, and especially the Vietnamese, had important outside support that Mossadegh and Arbenz lacked.
Both reasonable answers. Take them in reverse order. Outside support: Hunt and Levine stress the importance of Chinese and Soviet support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Overall, taking Korea as well as Vietnam into account, they sometimes seem to equate China's rise with America's declining power in East Asia (as they depict it). When you compare Vietnam and Korea to the US war in the Philippines and all the subsequent counterinsurgency warfare in the latter country, you see a sharp contrast in terms of outside support. The Filipino insurgents, whether in 1899 or 1946, really had none. The isolation of an island nation meant that even if they'd had outside sympathizers, getting material support to them would have been a challenge. But the main thing is there wasn't any on offer. The DRV had a secure rear border with China and had solid back-up from China as well as, at least intermittently, the Soviets. Not that the DRV got a lot of material support from outside in the early going after 1945, but it did grow with time. And the US clearly was well aware, especially after Korea, of the dangers of greater Chinese involvement in a US-Vietnam war. The Chinese sent the US warnings about this through intermediaries. And, basically, all you needed to do was look at a map to realize the possibilities. This points up all the more clearly Eisenhower's - and Kennedy's - hubris in jumping into Vietnam feet first. And no, I'm not letting Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon off the hook. But I never can get over my feeling that it would have so much easier for Kennedy or Eisenhower to have made a different choice in this matter. Really, who would have cared? But I'll climb down off my soapbox.
What about the first factor mentioned - popular support? Mossadegh and Arbenz had plenty of support in their countries. But they weren't revolutionaries, and they weren't leading revolutionary states. Their peoples were not mobilized in the way Cubans and (revolutionary) Vietnamese were in the 1960s. The kind of near-total mobilization of a revolutionary state, putting society on a permanent wartime footing, is an essential dimension of what it means to live in a revolutionary environment. Arm the people, keep them ready to repel an invasion. These were some of the lessons that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara took from the coup against Arbenz, as Stepen Rabe points out clearly in The Killing Zone, which my students also have been reading, an excellent, very detailed history of US-Latin American relations during the Cold War. The DRV, of course, was mobilized from their 8-9 years of war with France. I'm sure they were anguished beyond words at the thought of going through that all over again with the Americans. But they knew how. It would take more than a CIA-funded mob in the capital to depose a government, or install one, in these cases. Some things had changed in various parts of the Third World. Washington, unfortunately, had difficulty recognizing how much had changed.
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