Weeks 8-9: The Challenge of Nationalism - Success and Failure

I decided to blog about the past two class sessions at once, since they form a kind of diptych. First we explored the successful U.S. covert operations that overthrew elected governments in Iran in 1953 (that one in cooperation with Britain) and in Guatemala in 1954 (all ours). That was last week. This week - failure. Cuba and Vietnam.

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.

You might smile too if you were him. All upside, no downside, minimal expense. That's how it looked to Ike.

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.

Week 7: The Cold War Goes Global

Yeah, global a-go-go. All kidding aside, the Cold War - goes the argument - could have been contained, pun intended, to Europe by 1949. The US-allied and USSR-controlled blocs there had gelled, through force and local desire both, and were stable. From the US point of view, the danger of the Italian elections had passed, with lots of covert (or barely covert) American involvement, and the attachment of a unified West Germany to the emerging NATO alliance was looking good. From the Soviet view, Poland and Czechoslovakia appeared well under control, and what we came to call East Germany was some small consolation, at least, for their West German losses (see Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line for all the details you could want). Stalin was no longer pushing in Iran or Turkey.

Why did the Cold War at just this time escalate into an - at least perceived - world conflict of terrible urgency and increasing danger? Could it not have deescalated into a great-power understanding at exactly this time? This was the question for this week's class.

Before going further: I distributed midterm course evaluation forms at the end of this week's class session. This works differently in Norway than in America. Characteristically, there is a far more casual attitude toward student confidentiality in Norway. The forms (produced by the department staff) ask just a few obvious, open-ended questions about the course and instructor. Students will do further evaluations at semester's end. But I do not, as in the US, deputize a student to collect the anonymous forms in an envelope, which said deputy seals and deposits in a locked box somewhere on campus. No, I just collect the forms from the students. I did tell them not to sign them, and I left the room for a short while to give them a comfortable, professor-free environment in which to record their thoughts.

So I was able to read the forms right after class. The take-away? Students like the class. (Yay!) But the most common suggestion for improvement: More time for discussion. Less me, more them. (Although students do like the PowerPoints.)

So, next time - less me, more them. I'll try to keep my own presentation shorter. As I suspect many who teach this course know, when you get to the start of the Cold War, there is an awful lot of material you feel you need to cover. Next week, a little more relaxed. But I will try to start afresh here and not go on for too long.

OK, back to the question. Why the expansion and escalation of the Cold War into what appeared a global death-struggle around 1949-50?

I'd say there are two answers to this question. One focuses on the surface, the other on deep global forces. Here's what I mean:

The surface answer: It's very important. I don't mean this is a superficial answer. But it concerns things that every sentient adult in the United States probably knew about in 1950. In 1949, The USSR detonated an atomic bomb. That same year, the Chinese Communist party achieved victory in their country's civil war, driving the defeated Guomindang, allies of the US, to Taiwan (or Formosa as Americans often called it). These were the events that led Joseph McCarthy to say that there were traitors within the US - only the assistance of such American turncoats could explain such achievements by Russian or Chinese Communists. That's what McCarthy said. He was kind of a johnny-come-lately to the whole Communists-in-government issue (long story). But he put on a good show, and he summarized the charge of conspiracy pretty sharply.

These were serious blows to American perceptions of the world situation and America's place in it. The Communists actually beat our guys in China?  Even that nice lady who is friends with Clare Booth Luce? Yeah, they did. And the loss of the US atomic "monopoly," however much it was hastened by espionage and however inevitable it was regardless of exactly how long it took, was disturbing. You can say it wasn't as meaningful strategically as it seemed, since the US wasn't about to attack the USSR in 1948 - and the US proved willing to go to war elsewhere, even against forces supported by the Soviets - so the deterrent effect of the Soviet bomb maybe wasn't such a big deal, really. But you can see how it would seem like it was.

Then, in 1950, Kim Il Sung's forces in the DPRK ("North Korea") invaded - or should I say "invaded," since, as Bruce Cumings writes at some length, neither the US nor anyone else recognized the 38th parallel as an international border - the ROK ("South Korea").

That's Kim on the right. In this case a poster is better than any photograph could be, don't you think? On the left is Syngman Rhee, Kim's counterpart in the ROK.

Did Harry Truman and Dean Acheson overreact by taking the country quickly to war over Korea? It's easy to say "yes." Everyone and his cousin knows that Acheson had said only recently that Korea wasn't important to US national security. Of course people said after the "invasion" (OK, last time for the quote marks) that Acheson had caused Kim's aggression with his statement - which probably made him and Truman feel like they really needed to do something. But go to war? Oy. 38,000 Americans dead, hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Chinese. And no, I do not think that life in the DPRK has ever been a picnic. But there is more to the story. I guess I can't get into it in detail. But suffice it to say that most Americans, I'd wager, didn't even know in 1950 that the United States Army had ruled "South Korea" from 1945 to 1948. There was a good deal of conflict and repression during that time in the South.

Let's cut to the chase. Korea immediately became a test of US credibility. That's right - the argument of last resort came out quickly. Once the Korean war was fully on, and once it was Americans versus Chinese on the ground, with Russians pretty involved (even flying fighter jets) - well, it was the first full-scale proxy war of the Cold War, in East Asia, and it put both that part of the world and the Cold War in a new light. Everything was illuminated, everything was global.

The second, deeper answer to the question of why the Cold War went global was: decolonization. How was the US going to respond to the unstoppable wave of political independence that was sweeping South and Southeast Asia beginning in the 1940s? How would the US view the nationalists taking power from Pakistan to Indonesia to Korea? Unfortunately, the Cold War provided a too-ready lens through which to view these historic changes and the attendant conflicts.

I do want to keep this brief. What did the Cold War lens do to American perceptions of world events? A few answers:

1. It DID NOT make Americans see Communist aggression where there was none. There was Communist aggression, certainly in some places and times. You can quibble about whether to call it that, but it's descriptive enough.

2. It DID make Americans exaggerate the strategic significance of conflicts that had little relevance to US national security. Korea, case in point. You can make a moral argument for going to war if you like, but that's a separate issue. American leaders, given the global framing they gave to the Cold War starting about 1950, really seemed almost to have no capacity to make distinctions between vital theaters of conflict and peripheral theaters.

3. It DID make Americans filter out complications. Aggression by our own allies? The legacy of colonialism? The local sources of conflict and radicalism? Fuggeduboudit. None of that matters. It's all because of the Soviets, and maybe the Chinese too. If it weren't for them - no "problems" in Korea, not "problems" in Vietnam. You get the idea.

OK, that's the bottom line. Next week, less talk, more listen.

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From Hot War to Cold War

Ah, my poor students.

This week their "qualifying paper" was due. What is a qualifying paper? you ask. At least if you are an American, you might ask this, as did I.

Apparently here in Norway's universities, the "traditional" European model of graded student work is followed: students take an exam at semester's end, and that is the basis for their grades. That's it. No midterms, no points for class attendance, no nothing else. A bit scary, yes? One bite of the apple is all they get.

However, there is one wrinkle here. Midway through the course, students also write this qualifying paper. It does not count toward their course grades. All they need to do is earn a passing grade - or, since there are no grades for the paper, write a paper that would earn a passing grade if it were really graded - in order to continue in the course and take the ultimate examination.

It took me a little while to figure this out.

Anyway, my students submitted their papers yesterday, and since we have no class next week, I get to spend time with them only vicariously, through their written work.

Yesterday we also began a new phase of this course on America and the world, since the topic of the week was the beginning of the Cold War. We had a good bit of reading on the docket for this week, including the opening chapters of Robert McMahon's outstanding volume on the Cold War in Oxford's "very short introductions" series, a real winner. But since the paper was due yesterday before the start of class, I did not assume, as an graybeard teacher with many years in the classroom under his belt, that students would have found time also to do the assigned reading. (There is next week's break to catch up!) So I came prepared with plenty of material.

(One aside: At my home institution, I normally teach class sessions that are three hours and twenty minutes long, once per week for each class. The weekly sessions here in Oslo are one hour and forty-five minutes. So I have had some adjusting to do. I sometimes have too much material. Well, honestly, I always have too much material. But it's all good. A bit under two hours seems like only half a class session to me. But my suffering Norwegian students are desperate for a break after about fifty minutes - build some stamina! - and when I am feeling kind I accommodate them.)

I started by asking students if they could tell me what the Cold War was. There were some smart responses, but these answers also had some curious holes in them. Here's what I mean. One student said the Cold War was a contest for power between two superpowers who fought "proxy wars" with each other in the Third World. I thought this was quite sophisticated, and said so. Another student said the Cold War was a struggle between two ideologies. Which ideologies? Communism and "liberal capitalism," he said.

Ah. Here we see some basic differences over how to think about the forty years' struggle we call the Cold War, as I explained. Was it a power struggle between two great powers - different only in scale and scope from great-power conflicts of earlier times? Or was it a death-struggle between rival ways of life, ideologies, and values? I quickly informed the class that there is no consensus on this question among scholars. I don't know if students took comfort from this revelation or not. Another serious debate (I said) occurs among those who think the Cold War was an ideological struggle: not everyone agrees about what names to give those ideologies. Was the USSR an exponent merely of communism - or was its "side" the broader cause of socialism? A lot of socialists have hotly disputed the notion that communism is simply a stronger version of socialism, although others on the left, not all of them Communists, have been quite comfortable saying that the Soviet side - or, if you like, the anti-US side - of the Cold War was "the socialist camp." There are complexities within complexities here. But perhaps a more overt and passionate disagreement has come over what to call the American side in the Cold War. Was America's cause the cause of political democracy or the cause of capitalism? Like my thoughtful student, you can merge these two ideas into the cause of "liberal capitalism," but that does kind of sidestep the question of whether the Cold War was primarily a struggle between different political systems or different economic systems. As I told my students, the rhetoric of the United States, throughout the Cold War, sidestepped this question by simply naming the US cause "freedom." The free world, etc. All you had to do to qualify as part of the free world was to side with the US against the USSR. You certainly didn't have to be a political democracy - as my students clearly were aware - and you didn't have to be an enthusiast of laissez-faire capitalism. The question is, what kind of freedom was this fight about? An endlessly debatable question (the fun kind).

Funny, but in all the responses I got about what the Cold War was - and there were others - there was something missing. I suggested to students that they really go down to the basics, and imagine they were explaining to a visiting space alien (who, miraculously, could understand English, or Norwegian) or to a twelve-year-old child (this could happen someday to all of them, I warned) what the Cold War was. They seemed puzzled. But no one to that point had named the antagonists! Who were they? I asked. Oh, America and Russia, everyone said. Or the Soviet Union. Whatever. Not really sure why this was so hard to drag out of them. Perhaps they were somehow afraid of offending their American professor?

Then I asked the million-dollar question: Who is to blame for the Cold War? Who started it? Students in general seemed content to spread the blame around, or basically to split it between the US and the USSR. They both broke promises, one student said (Stalin broke his Yalta pledge to have an inclusive Polish government - I actually had cautioned students not to take that one very seriously; I think FDR and Churchill were just getting a fig-leaf from Stalin to hide the Polish shame, clearly a fait accompli in 1945, but that's just me - and America and Britain misled Stalin about their willingness to open a major second front in western Europe in 1942). Well, OK. Other students saw more blame on one side than the other - some seemed to share this view a bit sheepishly. We talked about the "He started it. No, he started it!" quality of some of the recriminations over the Cold War's origins. Childish, perhaps. In most seemingly intractable conflicts (think of Israel-Palestine) there is this tendency by each side's advocates to locate the original sin on the other side, and hence disputes are endless over when to date the conflict's beginning. It seems like you can always find some anterior offense on the other side, if you're willing to go back far enough.

Apparently NRK, Norway's national public television service, broadcast Oliver Stone's ten-part history of the United States last year. The student who mentioned this, a rather leftish sort, said he thought it let Stalin off a bit easy. So that says something. Haven't seen it myself.

Here are some of our leading cast members for this week. These were two of Harry Truman's four Secretaries of State. (Yes, bonus points for naming the other two, please don't use Wikipedia.) On top, General George Marshall, not yet in mufti, looking a bit dour. But didn't he always? I love the story about him meeting Truman for the first time, after Truman became president - maybe this isn't true, but it's a great story, I sure hope it's true. Truman said, I hope I can call you George. Marshall said, Call me General. You gotta love this guy. Below is Dean Acheson, the original stripey-pants diplomat with a fake British accent - credit to Joe McCarthy for that description (more on this next time). If anyone authored America's Cold War, it was Acheson, I suppose, with an assist from Marshall. But then, perhaps we really should credit Truman, who chose both these men.

Did America merely react to Soviet aggression in the late 1940s? Is that why the wartime alliance of odd ideological  bedfellows broke down? Did the United States wish to withdraw within its own borders in 1945 - it did demobilize its uniformed person-power quite rapidly after war's end, after all - or did American leaders actually have big plans for a global role and a far-ranging security perimeter in 1945? I do think these questions matter, and historians don't all tell the tale in the same way. McMahon does an exemplary job of summarizing the important insights of different interpretive camps. He points out that the US, beyond emerging as by far the stronger of the two great powers in 1945 in virtually all essential ways, had very big plans for an expansive, indeed global, security role for itself in the postwar period. Both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were to be American lakes, and that was just for starters. Yet other authors persist in depicting the US as almost entirely reactive in its foreign policy in the late 1940s. Grasping the reality, the nature, and the extent of aggressive plans and moves by both US and USSR in these years is crucial to a clear understanding of why the Cold War broke out. Stalin was definitely aggressive. But it is also true that Soviet aggression was geographically limited, basically to a belt of countries that had land borders with the USSR (plus a couple more further away, Czechoslovakia primarily). Lots of land borders.

Consider this map:

Now, I'm not sure what this highlighted stretch of territory from Bangladesh to Scotland is supposed to convey, exactly. But it is handy for my purpose, which is to show Iran, Turkey, and Greece on a map, along with the larger geographic context of Europe, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. The first three Cold War conflicts came in 1946-7: in Iran - where Stalin had an army camp out and refused to leave, as he had pledged, until diplomatic pressure got him to withdraw; in Turkey, where Stalin tried to threaten Ankara into renegotiating a treaty governing Russian rights in the Dardanelles, which gave the Soviet navy access to the Mediterranean; and in Greece, where Stalin kept out of the civil war between monarchists and Communists, just as he had promised Churchill he would, but where Yugoslav aid to the Greek Communists had Britain and the US badly worried about a victory by indigenous Communist forces. The Turkish and Greek crises led Truman to go to the Congress and ask for money for a global fight for "freedom" after the British told the US that they were out of money and couldn't continue as the sugar daddies for the Greek monarchists and the Turkish government. Then it was off to the races.

Consider the location of Iran, Turkey, and Greece on the map. Contiguous countries, together they have a geographic integrity that is rather suggestive. Or is it just a coincidence? Each of these three conflicts was quite distinct, even if to some Americans (probably not to those in government) they formed a single crisis brought on by Soviet aggression.

Consider this map, of the British dominion between the world wars:

If you could zoom in on the right-hand side of this map, what pattern would you see? The British imperium, or much of it, ringed the Indian Ocean basin - the Indian Raj, of course, but also Burma and Malaya, then Australia and New Zealand to the southeast; in the other direction, various bits of Arabia and the Levant - I also might have shaded Saudi Arabia in red, frankly - along with much of East Africa. Before the First World War, the Ottoman Empire had been known as "the sick man of Europe." It was running on fumes, its days were numbered - its territories were ripe for plucking. After the war, Britain and France did the plucking, at least in the Asian provinces. Well, wasn't Britain the new sick man of Europe in 1945? Despite Churchill's lingering imperial pretensions, his country was soon to give up most of its empire, fighting to keep it only in Kenya and Malaya. The Greece-Turkey-Iran tier appears as a gateway to the petroleum deposits of the Middle East (as my students volunteered). It also separated the USSR from Britain's vital control over the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, its gateway to its eastern colonies. In a broader sense, this zone of immediate postwar conflict was the buffer between the USSR and Britain's Indian littoral empire, which was near to toppling right after the Second World War. What if the Soviets could move in on Britain's empire the way Britain and France had moved in on the Ottomans'? Hence, perhaps, the full strategic importance of this first zone of conflict.

Oh, and by the way - there are two essential things to understand about the Truman Doctrine, which Truman announced in order to justify his request for Greek and Turkish aid.

#1. It meant that the United States was willing to intervene in other countries' civil wars. (Recall the deep reluctance to do so in Spain during the 1930s, when it was a question of a rightist insurgency against a legal left-wing government.)

#2. It meant that the United States was claiming a global role for itself. It didn't mean that the US would intervene everywhere around the world. But it meant that the US might intervene anywhere in the world.

The stage was set for an expansion of the new conflict between the newly ascendant powers. Some observers, notably Walter Lippmann, thought as early as 1947 that the Cold War should be declared over. Europe was divided between a US and a Soviet sphere of control and influence, that wasn't going to change, and the two superpowers should reach an understanding that would insure peace. The face-off could be confined to Europe.

Didn't happen. More on that in two weeks.

(Answer to bonus question: Edward Stettinius and James Byrnes.)

Weeks 4‒5: To the Holocaust

I’m not talking about the Shoah here – or at least not just about that. I’m talking about the world’s slide toward a global conflagration that killed tens of millions, of which the six million were a part. Last week (Week 4) our topic was the interwar period – the years of the 1920s and much of the 1930s, when the United States was at peace. I didn’t have a chance to do a blog post about that, because of other commitments. So this is a combined post dealing with last week’s class as well as this week’s, whose topic was the Second World War as seen from America.

In Week 4, my students and I discussed the question of “isolationism” and US isolation during the 1920s and 1930s. There really is a kind of legend of isolationism during this time, one that numerous historians have challenged, but it won’t die. This is because – as I explained to my students – whenever, since World War II, Americans have debated whether or not to go to war, those in favor have accused those against of isolationism. It became a kind of swear word, not so different from appeasement – a word that actually did not have such obviously negative connotations as it has today until 1938 or so.

Was America an isolationist country between the world wars? Akira Iriye, a very eminent historian of international affairs and the author of a book my class continued to read for the past two weeks, makes a strong case that it wasn’t. Only to state the obvious, going to war or forming defense alliances is not the only way to be involved internationally. Iriye views the 1920s in particular as, in fact, a decade when the US came into its own as a global influence, financially, culturally, and even diplomatically. Even though the US declined to join the League of Nations, it took the lead in this era in negotiating limits to a naval arms race and in restructuring German war debt.

But putting this aside, I asked students if they were even familiar with the term isolationism. Yes. Had they heard it applied to countries other than the United States? Yes. Which other countries?

One hand went up: “North Korea.” Well…maybe we’re talking about two different things here. Another: “China.” That’s a bit more interesting as a comparison to the US. I doubt you could call China isolationist today, but there was a time, say in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when China tried to keep Westerners out of the country physically.

This was only getting us so far. I changed tack, and asked students to consider how the world viewed the United States during the interwar period. Think about the rising financial presence of the US in this period – having replaced Britain during the World War as the leading lending nation in the world, for one thing – and also the quickly growing cultural footprint of America in this era, most obvious in the field of cinema, a communication and entertainment medium that took the world by storm and in which the US was dominant by a long way. Think about the phenomenon of the “new woman,” as embodied in the flappers of the 1920s, and the image of liberated youth that America conveyed at that time. Think about the “Fordist” system of mass production and mass consumption, admired across the board by people ranging from Communists to fascists. But also think about the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrants and anarchists executed in 1927 on murder charges in Massachusetts after a trial that was widely viewed as very unfair. There were mass demonstrations in protest around the world. This was the image of American “justice.” Moshik Temkin’s great book, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial, makes clear how many people around the world viewed the American state through the prism of this case. America was viewed with fascination, and with a mixture of admiration and deep criticism. Not totally unlike the way China is an object of worldwide fascination today, despite all the profound differences between the two countries.

But, for all the deep involvement of the US with the outside world in the interwar period, the idea of isolationism still meant something. For it was true that a strong majority of the American public, in the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, felt badly burned by its experience in the Great War. Woodrow Wilson had sold the American public on entry into the war as a mission for lofty goals – ending war, spreading democracy. It had ended with European powers grabbing a lot of land from vulnerable or losing combatants. The feeling of Don’t be fooled again was extremely powerful. Americans were determined not to get dragged into European conflicts again.

That is where we started Week 5, and this is where these fellows come in:

The guy on top is Smedley Butler – his name sounds like it belongs to a cartoon character, but he was as real as you or I. Beneath him is Lucky Lindy, one of the great names of the interwar era, the famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

I explained to my students that the main passenger terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is called the Lindbergh Terminal (Lindbergh was from Minnesota, his dad was a Farmer-Labor congressman representing part of the state in the Congress for a time), but that lately I have noticed the airport starting to refer to it as Terminal 1 instead. I think it’s still called Lindbergh, but it’s as if they no longer want to advertise that fact so widely as before. I don’t know what’s changed.

But go back to Butler for a moment. Old Gimlet Eye, he was apparently called. He rose to become Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, the service branch that most often was given the task of invading and occupying countries to the south of the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Butler saw a lot of action in a lot of countries in the Caribbean Basin. He retired in 1931 and started giving speeches – really just one speech, over and over again with small variations. He eventually published it in extended form as a pamphlet with the title War Is a Racket. It was widely circulated in the mid-1930s. It then got forgotten for a long time, only to be rediscovered during the US-Vietnam War, when the first large protest movement, among Americans, against any US war since the late 1930s arose. There was, in the 1930s, quite a vigorous protest movement against a potential US war in Europe – this was a kind of proactive antiwar movement – which partook of both the political left and the right, as well as people harder to label.

Some of Butler’s speech remains quite well known. Here are some pieces of it, which I read to my class:

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket....

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

In the 1935 and 1936, a US Senate committee, led by Gerald Nye, Republican of North Dakota, investigated the role of the munitions and banking industries in allegedly scheming to get the United States into World War I. These hearings, and Nye’s findings, were considered rather sensational in their time. Now, why would events of 1917 seem a fit subject for investigation in 1935? Clearly this reflected a desire by many Americans, including some in Washington, to remind their fellow Americans of what had really happened, the last time, underneath the idealistic rhetoric, in getting the country into the World War. Don’t be fooled again.

But the political left in the US started to shift its views about foreign affairs, and specifically about Europe, around 1936. The really important event at this time was the rebellion by Spanish militarists, led by Francisco Franco, against the legal (and progressive) government of Spain. Fascist Germany and Italy jumped in on the rebels’ side, the USSR did so on the government side. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep out of the Spanish Civil War, as did most Americans.

FDR followed the same trajectory, even though he didn’t want any part of Spain. By 1937 and 1938 he clearly was preparing the ground for US involvement, even if only indirect involvement, in the brewing wars in both East Asia and Europe, by moving step by step to provide military assistance to Great Britain, France, and China. He kept saying this was a way of keeping America out of war – help others to keep the fascists at bay and we won’t have to do it ourselves.

Here is some of what Roosevelt said on 29 December 1940, in his great (and rather lengthy) radio broadcast calling on America to be “the arsenal of democracy,” i.e., to convert industrial plant to munitions production, in order to supply Great Britain in its desperate war against Germany. By this time France was defeated, out of the war. So was Norway, and so were Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium. I also read this to my students:

"...the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and you grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours....

"The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world....

"...the Axis not merely admits but the Axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.

"In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted, properly and categorically, that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace, until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world....

"Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us. But it is a matter of most vital concern to us that European and Asiatic war-makers should not gain control of the oceans which lead to this hemisphere....

"If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas - and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun - a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military....

"Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your Government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out....

 

"Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on....

"There is no demand for sending an American Expeditionary Force outside our own borders. There is no intention by any member of your Government to send such a force. You can, therefore, nail - nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth."

Finally I read the class some excerpts from Lindbergh’s famous speech – many would call it infamous – in Des Moines, Iowa, on behalf of the antiwar America First Committee, on 11 September 1941, only three months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, which ended all debate about the wisdom of America joining the war. Here is some of what Lindy said:

"...Why are we on the verge of war? Was it necessary for us to become so deeply involved? Who is responsible for changing our national policy from one of neutrality and independence to one of entanglement in European affairs?...

"The subterfuge and propaganda that exists in our country is obvious on every side. Tonight, I shall try to pierce through a portion of it, to the naked facts which lie beneath.

"When this war started in Europe, it was clear that the American people were solidly opposed to entering it. Why shouldn't we be? We had the best defensive position in the world; we had a tradition of independence from Europe; and the one time we did take part in a European war left European problems unsolved, and debts to America unpaid....

"The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration....

"It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

"No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

"Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority do not.

"Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

"I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

"We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also much look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other people to lead our country to destruction...."

He was quite bitter about Roosevelt’s maneuvering, which Lindbergh seemed to liken to Wilson’s engineering of US entry into the previous European war. Now, put aside for the moment the fact that Lindbergh had visited Nazi Germany several times and been awarded honors by the German government. (I know, I know. But just as a thought experiment.) What is wrong with what he says? Well, a lot of it was wrong. But his reputation didn’t suffer the damage it did (and despite the airport naming thing, which has always surprised me a little, it did) because a lot of people thought he was wrong. It was because a lot of people thought his speech was anti-Semitic. Was it? I tried asking my Norwegian students what they thought of Lindbergh’s speech. But I have to say, they weren’t biting. Seemed like kind of an edgy subject to raise, I suppose.

Despite what some say, I don’t think it was anti-Semitic of Lindbergh to say that there was an organized Jewish effort to lobby Americans on behalf of involvement in the European war. I’m not sure there was much of an organized effort along those lines. But sometimes people are too touchy about the very idea of ethnic lobbies in the United States, and particularly about the idea of American Jews trying to influence public opinion or government action. It happens.

What was anti-Semitic about Lindbergh’s speech was something else. Take a look at his language. He contrasts “Jews” with “Americans.” Jews are the formal equivalent of the British government in his speech. They are the agents of a foreign nation. Neither Jews nor Britons have “American reasons” for wishing to see the United States enter the war against fascism. How can they? They’re not Americans.

Anyway, it was on to the war itself after this. But this may be enough for now. The tight US-British relationship that developed during the war - Winston Churchill basically moved into the White House for long stretches - portended the US “assuming” British “responsibilities” around the world after the war.

That comes next week.

I wondered if students would compare the debate over the wisdom of the US entering the European war in the 1930s to the debate right now over whether the US should bomb Syria. No takers – except for one student during the break between Hour One and Hour Two. That was better than nothing.

Week 3: Great War and Revolution

This week in class we discussed the first two decades of the twentieth century, an era of "gunboat diplomacy" for the United States in the Caribbean Basin and Latin America, and one that culminated in the awful conflagration of the World War, otherwise known as the Great War, otherwise known (now) as World War I. I explained to students (well, I really couldn't convey this adequately, but I told them about it) how shattering the wartime experience was to so many Europeans. This was the first major war, involving numerous belligerents and lasting a long time, in Europe since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain lost more men than it would in World War II - not even to mention the traumatic experiences of the French and the Germans. The war destroyed empires, spawned revolutions, redrew maps in large areas of the world.

The drama of America's step-by-step motion into a combatant role in the European war, ending its long period of proud abstention from European conflicts, is well narrated in Akira Iriye's volume in the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, from which students read several chapters this week. Iriye is rather sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson, seeing him as a genuine idealist and internationalist liberal who desired a new system of free trade and peaceful resolution of conflicts between states. Actually, many close scholars of this subject likewise see Wilson as sincere and truly reluctant to get involved in the war, even though skeptics and antiwar critics long have viewed him more cynically.

"He kept us out of war": Wilson's reelection slogan in 1916. Very nice, yes?

But let's back up a minute. What about the years between the Spanish-American War and the World War? What was the United States up to in its foreign dealings in this fifteen-year period?

This is an editorial cartoon from 1913-14, when Wilson ordered U.S. troops to seize positions in the Mexican port of Veracruz, supposedly to bring order and protect U.S. personnel who had been abused. There was a revolution in Mexico that had started a few years previous. Wilson was not entirely happy with the possible outcomes of this turbulence. He had no personal involvements in Mexico, but several high-ranking members of his administration, specifically those from Texas - Hello, Texas! - were closely tied to U.S. interests that had bought large landholdings and mineral exploration rights in Mexico in recent years (this means oil), as John Mason Hart documented extensively in his eye-opening book, Revolutionary Mexico.  So Wilson not only sent the troops to Veracruz. They then turned over large weapons caches stored there to the more conservative forces in the ongoing Mexican struggle. In 1916, Wilson again ordered U.S. forces into Mexico, this time in the country's north, in a failed effort to punish or capture Francisco "Pancho" Villa, the famed revolutionary leader of northern Mexico, who had attacked a town inside the U.S. as part of the border skirmishes that had been occurring. This is Villa:

 Not our kind of guy, I guess.

Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson ordered U.S. military forces (usually the marines) to "intervene" in and occupy various countries in the Caribbean Basin - Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, etc. - about twenty times in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Sometimes this was a matter of putting the U.S. thumb on the political scales to determine who would run the show, sometimes it was a matter of taking over another country's customs and tariff administration, sometimes it was more full-blown "nation-building." So, an isolationist power? No. But the question of whether the pattern of U.S. intervention in the Western Hemisphere is really distinctive and exceptional within the larger history of U.S. foreign relations remains salient. But, you know, when you start adding the Philippine conquest, U.S. armed intervention in China to help repress the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and other things - well, that's a lot of exceptions.

I talked to students yesterday about the famous "Open Door" notes of John Hay, McKinley's secretary of state, which ultimately asserted that China's territorial integrity needed to be respected (long story), but which focused on the U.S. desire for a free-trade regime in Asia and, by implication, everywhere else. This is a major American tradition, the demand for free trade. I explained that traditionally a central part of the U.S. critique of European empires has been that they tend to form closed trading systems, that this has been more consistent and has a longer history as an American anti-imperialist argument than does an humanitarian or democratic argument. Students found this intriguing, but asked whether the U.S. did not, in the period in question, maintain its own protective tariffs against imported manufactured goods?

Yes, it did.

We also focused on the challenge posed by the Bolshevik revolution to Wilson's ideas of "good" and responsible nationalist revolutions, of the kind he was willing to countenance in Mexico or China (where the Qing were overthrown and the monarchy abolished in 1911). I talked about the decision by the Bolsheviks, once they seized power in Russia in 1917, to get out of the Great War - keenly disappointing the Allied powers - to accept a highly punitive separate peace with the Germans, and to publish the secret treaties they found in the government archives, which showed that the Allied governments had been planning to slice up, and help themselves to, conquered territories after the war (as Britain and France ultimately did, at least informally, in the old Ottoman lands of the Middle East). But most of all, the forthright anti-imperialist position taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917, despite any future compromise or contradiction of it, was a direct challenge to Wilsonian liberalism, since Wilson hedged in a big way on this issue. He came to the Versailles peace conference following the war trumpeting his call for "self-determination," but this seemed in the event only to apply to Central and Eastern Europe. Despite Wilson's disappointment of many nationalists in Asia and other colonized areas of the world, the popular and wide-ranging enthusiasm for him as an idealistic leader was quite genuine at the war's end, and it was not entirely damaged by his compromises and failures. A long future rivalry between American liberalism and Communist internationalism and anti-imperialism was in the offing.

Oh, and after the Bolsheviks seized power and were fighting a desperate civil war with conservative forces in their own country, Wilson sent several thousand U.S. troops there in another failed intervention, along with Japanese troops in Siberia and with others in Russia's North. There were some circumstantial justifications offered - keep the Germans from getting their hands on munitions in the North, help ferry stranded Czechs (don't ask) out of the East - but the Bolsheviks, of course, saw this as an effort to help their enemies strangle their revolution in its crib. Not that much action, really. Americans soon forgot about it. The Russians, not so much. Funny how that works.

Also, I talked with students about the "qualifying paper" that they are going to write. Quite an interesting idea! More about that another time.