Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Obama

PART

I

THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION

Do not be deceived by the strong face, the look of monolithic power that the Communist dictators wear before the outside world. Remember that their power has no basis in consent.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

The course we have chosen … involves building military strength, but it requires no less the buttressing of all other forms of power—economic, political, social, and moral.

—DEAN ACHESON

1

THE SHATTERING OF EXPECTATIONS

Force is the only thing the Russians understand.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

UNITED STATES OFFICIALS PRESIDING OVER the end of World War II, even before nuclear weapons were used against Japan, stood in awe of the terrible physical power humankind had developed. They had little confidence, however, in the capacity of nations still existing in a basically anarchic interstate system to exercise the self-control required to channel their tremendous power into constructive purposes. Throughout the government there was wide consensus that the survival of civilization required the strengthening of international institutions and also the eventual reduction of the amount of destructive power in the hands of individual nations. Yet this would require the kind of statesmanship that in the past had run afoul of strong American attachments to the values of self-reliance and national sovereignty. Thus, remembering the fate of Woodrow Wilson’s sponsorship of the League of Nations, U.S. delegations to the founding conferences for the United Nations were carefully selected on a bipartisan basis to ensure that influential Republicans as well as Democrats would have a stake in the development of the world organization.

But in a more geopolitically oriented posture than Wilson’s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarded the wartime cooperation of the United States and Britain with the Soviet Union against the Axis powers as the embryo from which postwar patterns and organs of international cooperation would have to evolve. The premise of continued U.S.-Soviet cooperation had two faces: its internal, government aspect, where it was viewed as a necessary condition for managing the postwar world; and its public aspect, where the premise was viewed as a prediction that the presumed harmony would last. Characteristically, upon returning from his February 1945 conference in Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, FDR in his speech to a joint session of Congress sounded remarkably like Wilson, proclaiming that the structure of peace being built ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.¹

The popular myth that Harry S. Truman, upon assuming the presidency on April 12, 1945, at the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, inherited a set of idealistic beliefs from the Roosevelt administration about Soviet-American postwar cooperation is not borne out by historical research. Rather, FDR, in negotiating with Generalissimo Stalin at the Big Three wartime meetings in Tehran and Yalta, operated from premises very similar to the realpolitik notions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Despite differences in style and nuance between the Briton and the American, both viewed Stalin as interested primarily in the security of the Soviet Union but also in exploiting opportunities for an expansion of Soviet control in the direction of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Both Western statesmen sought to relieve Stalin’s paranoid fears—of wartime Anglo-American collusion to weaken Russia and of postwar capitalist encirclement—by granting the Soviet Union a sphere of predominant influence in Eastern Europe and special awards in the Far East (including the Kurile Islands and lower Sakhalin from Japan, an independent outer Mongolia, and partial control or leases of key railway networks and ports in northeast China). In return, Stalin was supposed to accept British and American spheres of predominant influence outside these areas. The basic bargain having been struck, the Big Three could then manage other conflicts over secondary issues through consultation, since none of their vital security interests would be threatened. The new UN organization, with its veto procedures in the Security Council, was designed to work on the basis of this essential East-West modus vivendi.

At his Big Three meeting with Stalin and top British statesmen at Potsdam in the summer of 1945, Truman did little more than endorse this basic realpolitik deal worked our earlier with Stalin by FDR and Churchill.² But there was soon to be a major shift away from the Churchill/Roosevelt spheres-of-influence approach and toward what became known as containment. This took place at the top levels of the Truman administration a good year before being revealed to the public in the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Yet during the first two postwar years the general public got its ideas on the administration’s assumptions about international relations from the official rhetoric, which for the most part conveyed a set of more optimistic expectations:

1.  That important international disputes would be settled by reasoned debate leading to an expression of majority will through the United Nations

2.  That in important international disputes the Big Five (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) usually would find themselves on the same side—the veto thus being an exceptional rather than a frequently used device

3.  That any required sanctions against international lawbreakers would be organized by this international community

The actual premise of East-West tension as well as the shift away from FDR’s view that we can, and must, do business with Uncle Joe to Truman’s more pessimistic perspective of 1946 that force is the only thing the Russians understand was kept from the public.

In less than a year as president, however, Truman had come to believe the Soviets would expand as far as they could, were highly motivated to dominate the world, and would aggressively exploit all opportunities to enlarge their sphere of control unless effective countervailing power was organized to stop them. Yet before 1947, Truman felt that a candid presentation to the public of the internal government perception of the Soviet drive for power ascendency might shock the country into total abandonment of the laborious effort to build up international institutions. This would be tragic, since such institutions, if strengthened by support of most of the peoples of the globe, were truly regarded as the best long-term hope for peace. Yet without such candor, the public and their representatives in the Congress would probably not approve the stopgap military and economic measures that might be necessary to induce the Soviets to keep their end of the postwar bargain to become constructive participants in the building of a world order acceptable to a majority of nations.

The effort by Truman’s subordinates to reconcile the president’s fear of shattering public expectations with his belief that standing up to the Russians now might be a precondition for the eventual realization of these expectations is the central story of the Truman administration’s early gropings toward a coherent foreign policy.³

Truman recalls that during the first weeks of his presidency he gave much weight to the analysis of Soviet policies conveyed to him by Averell Harriman, at that time the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Harriman was urging a reconsideration of our policy toward the Soviet Union, fearing that to some extent the existing policy might be the product of illusions that the Soviets shared our commitment to an international order based on peaceful national self-determination.

As recounted in Truman’s Memoirs, the gist of the Harriman analysis as of April 1945 was that Stalin was misinterpreting our generosity and our desire to cooperate as a signal that the United States would do nothing to prevent the extension of Soviet control over its neighbors. The Soviets, reported Harriman, had no wish to break with the United States, because they needed our aid for their program of postwar reconstruction, but Stalin would not hesitate to push his political frontiers westward if he felt he could do so without serious political challenge. We had to disabuse Stalin of his illusion of American softness, counseled Harriman. We could be firm with the Soviets without running serious risks because they could not afford to alienate a critical source of aid.⁴

Truman claims to have bought this evaluation and was disposed to follow Harriman’s advice that the way to exert a positive influence on Soviet policy was to be tough with them on specific postwar issues as they arose. The assumption was, as Truman put it, anyway the Russians needed us more than we needed them.⁵ The Soviets, because of their economic needs, had more to lose than to gain by the collapse of amicability between the great powers. We wished to preserve an atmosphere of United States–Soviet cooperation because this was the key to an effective universal collective security system, which in turn, it was hoped, would induce more responsible Soviet behavior. It was not yet considered necessary or desirable to be able to force a general showdown with the Soviet Union over any specific issue by pointing explicitly or implicitly to the military power at our disposal.

When Truman had his first high-level confrontation with the Soviet diplomats Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Gromyko at the White House on April 23, 1945, and used language that, according to Admiral William Leahy, was blunt and not at all diplomatic, he was evidently still leading from a perceived position of economic leverage. In his Memoirs, the president recalls the Soviet foreign minister responding, I have never been talked to like that in my life, to which Truman shot back: Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.⁶

THE BOMB

The day after Truman’s confrontation with Molotov, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote an urgent note to the president, requesting a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. … It … has such a bearing on our present foreign relations … that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay. The secretary of war met with the president on April 25 and told him of the nuclear development program and that in four months a completed weapon would be ready. The discussion with Stimson, reports Truman, centered on the effect the atomic bomb might likely have on our future foreign relations.⁷ The bomb was henceforth to be very much a part of Truman’s overall calculus of the international balance of power, for ending the war with Japan, and for bargaining with the Soviets over postwar arrangements.

If the bomb could bring about the surrender of Japan quickly, the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers would not have to be risked in the invasion planned for the fall. It is not clear from memoirs and the archival records whether the president shared the belief of Secretary of State James Byrnes and other advisers that using it in early August might preempt the promised entry of the Soviets into the war and thus obviate the need to share the occupation of the Japan with them, avoiding the complications that were emerging in Germany.⁸ The historical evidence does show, however, that various of Truman’s advisers felt that the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not have been necessary to get Japan to surrender before the planned costly invasion of its home islands.

The popular version of Truman’s moment-of-truth dilemma and choice—either I put some one million U.S. soldiers directly in harm’s way on Japan’s beaches or I use the superweapon against Japan’s cities—turns out to be a gross simplification. So is his own memoir recollection: Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.⁹

First, the president was apprised of the intelligence findings in mid-summer 1945 that, militarily, Japan was approaching the brink of complete collapse. The Joint Intelligence Committee of the Combined Chief of Staff reported that effective air attacks can be directed against all important areas under Japanese control. Also, the Home Islands were being basically strangled—blockaded at sea by U.S. mining, submarine, and aerial activities against both sea traffic and seaborne communications. On the continent the Japanese are now forced to depend upon inadequate and vulnerable land communications.¹⁰ Truman was also receiving reports based on MAGIC intercepts of Japanese coded messages that the Japanese high command, fearing the impending Russian entry into the war, was seriously contemplating suing for peace. Thus, the purpose of using the atomic bomb (in addition to continuing the devastating incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other population centers) was mainly psychological and political: to shock Japan’s government into complete capitulation, no deals—only the unconditional surrender of Japan, which had been proclaimed repeatedly as the U.S war aim.

Second, Secretary of War Stimson, along with other officials in the administration, tried to persuade the president to modify the unconditional surrender demand so as to let Japan keep its emperor. There was a severe split over this issue at the highest levels of the Truman administration, with Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes adamantly opposed to Stimson’s effort, plus division within the departments themselves as well as among the military.

The argument came to a head and compelled Truman to take sides over the effort to get such a provision inserted into the proclamation demanding Japan’s immediate surrender, which was to be issued at the forthcoming summit meeting in Potsdam. The proponents of permitting the emperor to stay on, at least as spiritual head of the nation, claimed that without such an allowance, Japan’s military, and even its ordinary citizenry, would fight on fanatically to their deaths, but if Japan could retain the emperor, an early pre-invasion surrender would not be as humiliating to the regime in Tokyo or to the people. Moreover, if it was their emperor who called on the military to stop fighting, the nation as a whole would be much more willing to accept its defeat and cooperate with the American occupation regime. But Secretary of State Byrnes and other proponents of unconditional surrender prevailed with the president on the grounds that the American people would not take kindly to any reneging on the promise to totally smash and forever remove the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor from power and that any backing off from the unconditional surrender demand would signal to Japan that America’s will to fight was weakening.¹¹

So the joint declaration issued at Potsdam on July 26 provided no exception for the emperor at all in its demand that there must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest. The document was explicit that nothing less than such an unconditional surrender (the term was retained in the document) was acceptable. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.¹²

Third, Truman’s posthumously published diary, as distinct from his memoir, reveals that what he was about to order did bother him. There is an entry on July 25 (the day before the Potsdam Declaration and his issuance of the military order to proceed with the plan to use the bomb on Japan) that even his admiring biographer David McCullough finds puzzling. The most terrible weapon in the history of the world, wrote Truman is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.¹³ Could it be that the president was not clued in to the basis on which Hiroshima was selected as the first target city by the Interim Committee (which was charged to develop the target list)—namely, that it contained a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by worker’s houses?¹⁴ Besides, if it was such a terrible weapon, simply the fact that it was to be dropped on cities would mean that many women and children would be killed.

The reality of what he had authorized evidently did produce a shock of recognition after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. Having been informed of the success of the Nagasaki operation, Truman gave orders to stop further atomic bombing. According to Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace, He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible, he didn’t like the idea of killing as he said ‘all those kids.’¹⁵

Diplomacy now took over. By August 14, Japan and the United States converged on the terms of surrender. The sequence bears recounting.

On August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, and its military forces moved across the Manchurian border on August 9, shortly before Nagasaki was bombed. On August 10 the Japanese government offered to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration but with the understanding that the said Declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler. Hours of intense debate in front of Truman produced the U.S. response of August 11 to which the Japanese authorities finally conceded:

From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.¹⁶

Ironically, despite the triumphant rhetoric coming from Washington, it was ultimately a conditional surrender, with the condition being the status of the emperor. But Truman continued to insist throughout the rest of his life that it was the use of the atomic bomb that brought the war against Japan rapidly to an end in August 1945, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers.

STANDING UP TO STALIN

Certainly the bomb had changed the global balance of power. Truman now was confident that if it became necessary to lay all of his cards on the table in a confrontation with Stalin, he could soon do so from a unique position of strength. But the president was evidently unwilling at this stage—although recent scholarship shows he was pressured hard to do so—to make the bomb a visible and immediate part of his bargaining hand in diplomatic negotiations. At Potsdam in July he could have done so (having received news of the successful Alamogordo test while the conference was in session), but he still chose to rely on the Harriman strategy of catering to the expected Soviet hunger for economic assistance.

Soon after Potsdam, however, the president joined those in his administration who believed that a U.S. diplomatic stance characterized mainly by firm verbal expressions of disapproval and implications of shutting off economic help would not be sufficient to reduce Stalin’s apparent appetite for expansion. I’m tired of babying the Soviets, Truman told Secretary of State Byrnes in January 1946.

The past nine months had been filled with what the president saw as a series of Soviet power plays. The Soviet Union’s failure to implement the Yalta provisions for free elections in Eastern Europe was only part of the story that Truman now recounted to Byrnes with evident exasperation: the actual disposition of Soviet military forces, sheer physical control, was the critical factor in subsequent negotiations over the future of Europe. Under the circumstances, confessed the president, we were almost forced to agree at Potsdam to Russian occupation of eastern Poland and the compensatory occupation by Poland of German territory east of the Oder river. It was a high-handed outrage.

The situation in Iran was another case in point—Iran of all places! The friendship of Iran had been critical for the Soviet Union’s survival in the war; the United States had conducted a major supply operation to the USSR through Iran. Without these supplies furnished by the United States, maintained Truman, the Soviets would have been shamefully defeated. Yet now the Kremlin was stirring up rebellion and keeping troops on the soil of Iran.

Evidently, the original Harriman analysis that the Soviets would respond positively to our blunt talk was inadequate. Stalin, according to Truman’s personal reading of events, obviously placed a higher value on expanding the Soviet sphere of control than on maintaining good relations with the United States. The threat of decisive action had to be added to the blunt talk: Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making, concluded the president. Only one language do they understand—‘how many divisions have you?’ I do not think we should play compromise any longer.¹⁷

These developing perceptions of Soviet aims were very much a part of the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report to the president on the international control of atomic energy, which became, in effect, the plan presented to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission by Bernard Baruch in June. In contrast to the Soviet plan, which put destruction of existing weapons stockpiles before inspection and controls, the United States plan demanded prior establishment of a comprehensive international inspection and control apparatus with access to and authority over all relevant national facilities, including plants where raw materials could be converted into fissionable materials. Moreover, the veto was not to apply to the operations of the international control authority. Truman’s instructions to Baruch unambiguously outlined the considerations that were to be kept paramount: It was in our interest to maintain our present advantage, thus, we should attempt to gain a system of reliable international control that would effectively prevent the Soviets from proceeding with their own atomic weapons development program. And under no circumstances should we throw away our gun until we were sure others could not arm against us.¹⁸

While President Truman and a few of his official intimates had an early perception of the dominant means by which the emerging political conflict with the Soviet Union would be waged, they were not ready in late 1945 and 1946 to make it the explicit central premise of our foreign policy. To do so would have required a major reversal of the rapid postwar military demobilization already in full gear. It would have shattered the public’s expectations, reflected in the congressional agenda, that the most urgent business before the nation was to convert to a peacetime economy.

James Forrestal’s notes of a combined State-War-Navy meeting of October 16, 1945, recount that it was agreed by all present that … it was most inadvisable for this country to continue accelerating the demobilization of our Armed Forces at the present rate. The secretary of war contended the situation was of such gravity that the President ought to acquaint the people with the details of our dealing with the Russians and with the attitude which the Russians have manifested throughout.¹⁹

Appeals to the president for governmental candor with the people about the international situation were made during the next few months by Secretary Forrestal, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and other members of the cabinet.²⁰ But Truman apparently needed more than individual instances of Soviet belligerence in order to go before the American people and tell them, brutally, that their fondest hopes for returning to the pursuit of happiness were based on false premises. Even as the increasing newspaper reports of Soviet totalitarianism at home and expansion abroad became a part of the public consciousness, Truman’s public posture toward Soviet belligerence continued to stress the mobilization of world opinion to back up the principles of the United Nations Charter—issue by issue, situation by situation.

Governmental conceptions of the emerging struggle with the Soviet Union are supposed to have been given new cohesion and direction in February 1946, however, by George Kennan’s eight-thousand-word cable from Moscow, where he was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy. The essentials of the Kremlin’s grand design, the motives (rational and irrational) behind its imperialistic policies, and the meaning of its style of diplomacy were analyzed in historical and psychological depth and with great cogency (see the end of this chapter for a fuller account of Kennan’s analysis). Here was the authoritative and coherent analysis of the Soviet threat that many within the administration, particularly Forrestal, were seeking. But there is no evidence that this early report from Kennan contained, either explicitly or by logical implication, the concrete policy prescriptions Forrestal wanted the president to champion.

Kennan did urge, like Forrestal and his colleagues, the importance of having the public educated to the realities of the Russian situation. And he discounted any uncontrollable deterioration of Soviet-American relations that might result from such a campaign. Yet he saw no urgency for paying particular attention to the military components of power. Gauged against the Western world as a whole, observed Kennan, the Soviets are still [this was early in 1946] by far the weaker force. Thus their success will really depend upon the degree of cohesion, firmness, and vigor which the Western world can muster.²¹

But Truman was fully aware of the military implications Forrestal and others in the administration were drawing from Kennan’s analysis of Soviet intentions and capabilities—implications starkly presented to him in September 1946 in a special highly classified report titled American Relations with the Soviet Union, prepared by White House Counsel Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey. It must be made apparent to the Soviet Government, Clifford concluded, synthesizing the views of scores of high-level officials he interviewed, that our strength will be sufficient to repel any attack and sufficient to defeat the USSR decisively if a war should occur. And this meant the United States had to be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare.²² Truman, wary of the Kremlin’s reactions if the Soviets got hold of the Clifford-Elsey report, ordered all copies to be locked away.²³

Also, if Truman’s Memoirs are accurate, he personally, as early as the winter of 1945–46, saw the Russian pressures on Iran and Turkey as a dire threat to the global balance of power. Russia’s failure to withdraw its armies from Iran stemmed from its central geopolitical interests in Iranian oil and control of the Black Sea straits. Russian possession of Iranian oil, the president was convinced, would seriously alter the world’s raw material balance and would be a blow to the economy of Western Europe. But the power play in Iran was also directly related to the demands the Soviets had been making on Turkey for special privileges and territorial concessions. Turkey had been resisting these demands but would be in a much weaker position to resist if outflanked in the east by Russian armies or a Russian puppet state.²⁴

Truman saw Soviet geopolitical ambitions revealed starkly in the Kremlin’s proposal to put the Black Sea straits under joint Turkish-Soviet control. Recalling his own studies of Middle Eastern history, the president recognized in the present communist thrust a continuation of czarist Russian attempts to gain control of the strategic exits to the Mediterranean Sea. If the Soviets were to succeed now, he deduced, it would only be a question of time before Greece and the whole Near and Middle East fell to them.²⁵ There isn’t a doubt in my mind, he wrote less than a year after the close of the Second World War, that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean.²⁶

Moreover, Truman did begin to show the flag in 1946 in his dealings with the Russians on Middle Eastern issues. The battleship Missouri was sent to Istanbul to demonstrate support for Turkey’s refusal to accede to Soviet demands for joint control over the straits. And he sent Stalin a secret ultimatum on the issue of Soviet troops in Iran, informing him that the United States would send troops in if the Russians did not get out and that he had ordered preparations for the movement of American ground, sea, and air forces.²⁷

But however effective Truman’s early moves were as gambits in the management of the particular crisis situations, they were not yet presented to the public as parts of a grand strategy toward the Soviet Union in which the American military potential would be consciously and more or less continuously displayed in back of diplomatic efforts to moderate Soviet behavior.

Nor was the administration ready to openly embrace the balance of power ideas Winston Churchill was then advancing. When the British leader delivered his sensational Iron Curtain speech in March 1946, with President Truman sitting on the platform, the premises Churchill advanced about Soviet motives and behavior were already widely shared in U.S. policy-making circles. But the main policy conclusion he drew, that there ought to be a publicly proclaimed Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, was still not acceptable at the highest levels in the American government.

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE

Those officials who favored the Churchillian grand strategy for dealing with the Soviets were provided an opportunity to push their case in February 1947, when a note from the British government headed by Clement Attlee informed the United States that drastic economic conditions made it necessary for the United Kingdom to withdraw all support from Greece by the end of March. The president’s top political and military advisers were of the opinion that it was only the presence of British troops in Greece since the war that had prevented that faction-ridden nation from being swept into the Soviet orbit. The prevailing view within the State Department was that unless the tottering Greek government received immediate assurances of large-scale military and financial aid, the regime would lose all authority and the increasingly successful communist guerrillas would seize control of the country. Truman translated the local situation into the starkest global terms: if Greece fell to the communists, Turkey would become highly vulnerable to Soviet power plays and subversion. Inevitably, the entire eastern Mediterranean would be sealed behind the Iron Curtain.²⁸

To save the situation this time, more than a White House decision—which had been sufficient for deploying the navy and sending blunt diplomatic notes in the earlier Turkey and Iran crises—was required. Large-scale economic and military assistance, to be directly administered by American officials, would need congressional authorization and special appropriations. But Republican majorities had just taken control of both houses and, according to Speaker Joseph Martin, were determined to fulfill election promises for a 20 percent across-the-board reduction in income taxes with a collateral reduction in government spending. Administration supporters in the Congress, their numbers severely diminished in the 1946 elections, were disposed to regard the Republicans as being in tune with popular sentiment.

The stage was set for the administration to level with the nation that a dramatic turn in U.S. foreign policy was needed, that high national interests were at stake. But to service these interests, the nation would have to reorder its priorities. The public expression of this fundamental démarche was Truman’s address to Congress on March 12, 1947, requesting assistance for Greece and Turkey—the so-called Truman Doctrine. But for many in the administration responsible for foreign diplomatic, economic, and military programs, Truman’s formal request to Congress was only the exposed tip of an iceberg of massive intellectual and bureaucratic activity.

The seminal statement conceptualizing and catalyzing the new orientation was probably neither Truman’s address nor Secretary of State George Marshall’s at Harvard a few months later, but Under Secretary of State Acheson’s effort to educate the bipartisan group of congressional leaders Truman summoned to the White House on February 27, 1947. According to a State Department official who was present, the leadoff presentation by Secretary Marshall went very badly. Marshall, rather than expounding on the central strategic importance of Greece and Turkey (a subject on which he was very well versed), conveyed the impression that the reasons for extending aid to Greece and Turkey flowed essentially from humanitarian impulses toward these countries and loyalty to Britain. Many of the congressional leaders present were not at all impressed, preoccupied as they were with reducing taxes.

Acheson got Marshall’s attention and was given the floor. In bold strokes, he displayed the view of Soviet Middle Eastern strategy that had prevailed at the White House and top State Department levels for more than a year. The under secretary described the continuing Soviet pressures on Turkey for territorial cessions and for military and naval bases in the Turkish straits, which, if granted, would mean the end of Turkish independence. Soviet pressures on Iran were portrayed as encircling movements, also apparently focused on the straits. It was only because the Turks, with strong diplomatic backing from Britain and the United States, had stood up to the Russians that these moves had failed for the time being. As a result, the communists were currently concentrating their pressure on Greece, Acheson explained, where all reports indicated communist insurgents would succeed in seizing control within a matter of weeks unless the government of Greece received prompt and large-scale aid.

This was obviously more than helping the British salvage their interests, said Acheson, building up to his main message. The substance and tone of this message are best rendered in the account of the State Department official whose account is the basic public source for the White House meeting of February 27:

Only two great powers remain in the world, Acheson continued, the United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth. Moreover, the two great powers were divided by an unbridgeable ideological chasm. … And it was clear that the Soviet Union was aggressive and expanding. For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Communist subversion was not to pull British chestnuts out of the fire; it was to protect the security of the United States—it was to protect freedom itself. For if the Soviet Union succeeded in extending its control over two-thirds of the world’s surface and three-fourths of its population, there could be no security for the United States, and freedom anywhere in the world would have only a poor chance of survival. The proposed aid to Greece and Turkey was not therefore a matter of bailing out the British, or even of responding on humanitarian grounds to the need of a loyal ally. It was a matter of building our own security and safeguarding freedom by strengthening free peoples against Communist aggression and subversion. We had the choice, he concluded, of acting with energy to meet this situation or losing by default.²⁹

Here, full-blooded, were the central premises of what came to be called the Cold War: the two-way polarization of the international system around two great powers; an unbridgeable ideological hostility between the two groupings, with the group led by the United States committed to individual liberty and a pluralistic international system and the group led by the Soviet Union committed to totalitarian statism and a monistic international system organized on the Soviet model; and an intention by the Soviet-led group to impose its way of life on the rest of the world.

From these premises it was deduced that any allowance of an extension of Soviet control over additional areas, even if they were limited extensions, would not reduce Soviet aggressiveness but, on the contrary, would stimulate further aggressiveness by adding to the material and political resources with which the Soviets hoped to impose their will. The policy implications for the U.S.-led group were clear: a balance of power had to be maintained against the Soviet-led group, and the intention to apply this power wherever and to whatever extent necessary to prevent any further extension of Soviet control had to be unambiguous.

President Truman’s address before Congress on March 12, 1947, asking for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey was based on these premises, but he deliberately refrained from making them as explicit as Acheson had done in the private session. A number of statements that emphasized strategic considerations were deleted from one of the last drafts of the speech on the recommendation of Acheson, whose view was that too much emphasis on the strategic considerations might be alarming to the American people, who were not accustomed to thinking in these terms in time of peace. The emphasis in public was to be on the global ideological conflict and on the economic assistance needed by governments friendly to the United States to successfully combat subversion:³⁰

I believe [Truman told the nation] that it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we must surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.³¹

THE MARSHALL PLAN

The Marshall Plan for the economic recovery of Europe, announced just four months after the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, was also conceived of by Truman and Acheson as a geopolitical counterthrust to Soviet-sponsored subversion of the West, but it was presented to the public largely as a compound of humanitarian largesse and enlightened economic statesmanship, the latter proceeding from the premise that an economically healthy Europe was a precondition for the world trade required by an expanding U.S. economy. It was a conscious policy decision to underplay the global balance-of-power considerations.

Between Truman’s address to Congress in March 1947 and Marshall’s speech at Harvard in June, the Moscow conference of foreign ministers adjourned in recognized failure to make any progress in resolving the East-West discord over the future of Germany and Austria. The Americans came home from Moscow, Walt Rostow recalled, firm in the conclusion that the United States should never again negotiate from a base of weakness. … The picture of Europe was one of mammoth slow-moving crisis. There was a growing awareness that something big had to be done in Europe to avoid a disaster to the American interest; that a substantial program of economic aid addressed constructively to the problems of economic recovery was required to deal with the multiple threats to the Eurasian power balance.³² Secretary of State Marshall reported to the country over the radio that disintegrating forces are becoming evident. The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate … action cannot await compromise through exhaustion.³³

In a then secret memorandum, George Kennan and the policy planning staff recognized that the communists are exploiting the European crisis and … further communist successes would create serious danger to American security. But Kennan advised Secretary of State Marshall that the American effort to aid Europe should be directed not to the combating of communism as such but to the restoration of the health and vigor of European society. Its target should be the economic maladjustment that was making European society vulnerable to exploitation by the Marxist movements in Europe, which the Russians were exploiting in turn.³⁴

Significantly, there was a brief separate section at the end of the memorandum advising that steps should be taken to remove two damaging impressions which are current in large sections of American public opinion. These were:

a. That the United States approach to world problems is a defensive reaction to Communist pressure and that the effort to restore sound economic conditions in the other countries is only the by-product of this reaction and not something we would be interested in doing if there were no Communist menace.

b. That the Truman Doctrine is a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area of the world where Communists show signs of being successful. It must be made clear that the extension of American aid is essentially a question of political economy in the literal sense of the term and that such aid will be considered only in cases where the prospective results bear a satisfactory relationship to the expenditure of American resources and effort.³⁵

Secretary of State Marshall heeded this advice. Launching the program for European recovery at Cambridge on June 5, 1947, he claimed, Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. And the offer to join in the cooperative effort was made to all European nations.³⁶ Under Secretary of State Acheson worried that the Kremlin would have its East European satraps participate in order to sabotage it. But Marshall did not want the United States to be the one to be blamed for closing the curtain between Eastern and Western Europe. Although the offer was genuine, many in the United States government and Western Europe were relieved when—as Kennan had predicted—Stalin prevented the Eastern European states from joining the effort.³⁷

Marshall had a multifaceted view of the balance of power considerations: he believed that the revival of Western European economic vigor, which was based in large measure on manufacturing, would have been facilitated by the raw material resources that once again could be tapped in the Eastern European areas. Eastern Europe in turn could provide a market for the West’s manufactured goods. To maintain an advantageous balance of power against the Soviet Union, the West needed a strong Western Europe; it did not require an unhealthy Eastern Europe. Moreover, there were some in the United States government who felt that an Eastern Europe largely dependent for its own well-being upon economic relations with the West would be less subject to total Soviet control.³⁸

But such conjectures became academic as the Soviet Union moved even more swiftly during the summer of 1947 to transform the lands it had occupied militarily into dependent units of a tightly integrated economic and political system. The last hopes for some preserve of Western liberalism in Eastern Europe died in February 1948, when the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia, backed by Soviet armed might, demanded and was granted full powers of government.

Meanwhile the public dissemination in the summer of 1947, through the medium of Foreign Affairs magazine, of George Kennan’s analysis of Soviet grand strategy and the concept of containment as a countervailing grand strategy of the West provided the missing link for policy-oriented intellectuals who were trying to piece together the real basis, as distinct from the surface rationale, for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Kennan’s coherent analysis and prescriptions were, of course, only one of a number of alternative formulations of the emerging official premises about U.S.-Soviet relations. In some accounts of U.S. Cold War policy the X article is treated as the official position of the government. This is incorrect. Many of its premises continued to be debated within the highest levels of the administration. But it did take the public wraps off a core set of beliefs around which there was an operating consensus among the responsible decision makers: the Soviets’ unfriendliness of purpose, as Kennan put it, was basic. It proceeded from the inner structure of Soviet-Russian society. Soviet policies over the foreseeable future would reflect no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and Capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power. Consequently, if the Soviet government occasionally sets its signatures to documents which would indicate the contrary, this is to be regarded as a tactical maneuver permissible in dealing with the enemy. Moreover, the Soviets, believing in the ultimate triumph of their cause, were as patient as they were relentless. The Russians look forward to a duel of infinite duration. The implications for American policy needed to be faced: Sporadic acts of standing up and talking tough to the Russians were not enough, even if they seemed to produce temporary Soviet retreats. The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. This policy would require the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.³⁹

Notably, Kennan’s basic containment prescription in the X article had more military-sounding overtones than did the wording in his earlier long telegram from Moscow. He subsequently insisted this was not his intent; rather, he meant to emphasize the nonmilitary means of countering Soviet policy.⁴⁰

2

IMPLEMENTING CONTAINMENT

The question we have had to face is whether the Communist plan of conquest can be stopped without general war. Our Government and other countries associated with us in the United Nations believe that the best chance of stopping it without war is to meet the attack in Korea and defeat it there.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

THE X ARTICLE IN Foreign Affairs was designed to share with the public the premises about Soviet intentions, on which there was an emerging consensus among Truman administration officials, and their implications for U.S. policy, which had been outlined by Secretary of State Marshall in a report to the cabinet in early 1947. According to the account in James Forrestal’s diary, Marshall stated that "the objective of our policy from this point on would be the restoration of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia and that all actions would be viewed in light of this objective ." ¹

There was still a significant lack of consensus, however, on the components of the balance of power Marshall wanted restored. The administration was broadly divided between those who regarded the industrial strength of the United States, based on a sound economy, as the weightiest ingredient in the global balance, and those who viewed the extension of Soviet control over new areas of the globe as the most important factor. In the pre–Korean War period, the Bureau of the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the White House staff tended to stress domestic economic considerations, whereas State and Defense tended to emphasize stopping the Soviets.

But even among those who were most oriented toward a global, geostrategic view of the power rivalry with the Soviet Union there were important differences over both the components of the balance of power and of the American strategies required to stop Soviet expansion. The divergent points of view in 1947–1948 clustered around Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of Defense Forrestal.

MARSHALL VERSUS FORRESTAL

Marshall’s most passionate commitment now was to the success of the European Recovery Program. But he did concede that a militarily strong Western Europe was essential to right the global balance of power and provide the means locally to dissuade the Russians from attempting an easy fait accompli either by political subversion or military aggression. Western Europe itself could not contain the Soviets in a major war, but it could provide the front line of defense. The United States would have to come to the direct aid of Europe in any such war, but as in the Second World War, the full weight of American power would be felt in the later stages of the war as mobilization went into high gear. Marshall favored universal military training in the United States to provide the base for such mobilization should it ever be required and to signal in advance the refusal of the United States to tolerate Soviet aggression; but he did not view Soviet aggression as sufficiently imminent to require a major increase in U.S. military forces. Even in response to the Soviet provocations around Berlin in the spring of 1948 and the blockade of 1948–1949, Marshall pressed for priority to be given to European rearmament.

Marshall, of course, was sensitive to the strong political motivations in the White House and Congress for keeping the lid on expenditures and very likely saw universal military training plus European rearmament—neither of which would require any sudden major increases in the U.S. budget—as compatible with continued congressional financing of the multibillion-dollar project for rebuilding Europe’s economy just getting under way.²

Secretary of Defense Forrestal gave priority to the rearmament of the United States as the most effective means of preserving the balance of power against the Soviet Union. To procrastinate on the buildup of an effective U.S. military posture would be to deny Marshall the cards to play in current crisis situations.³ Strengthening European military capabilities was important, but Forrestal was skeptical of the Europeans’ ability to sustain their level of effort on economic reconstruction and simultaneously build the kind of military establishments needed to balance Soviet military power in Europe. In the meantime—he wrote in late 1947—under current budget allocations reflecting the existing policy of assisting European recovery before American rearmament, we were taking a calculated risk. That risk involved reliance on the American strategic advantage, consisting of American productive capacity, the predominance of American sea power, and the exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. But the last factor, he warned, would be of indeterminate duration. The years before any possible power can achieve the capabilities to attack us with weapons of mass destruction are our years of opportunity.⁴ It is clear that had Forrestal been given his way, he would have attached greater urgency to the buildup of a balanced U.S. military posture that did not bank too heavily on either the perpetuation of the atomic monopoly or the rapid recovery of Europe that would allow Europeans to assume the major burden of sustaining the balance of power on the continent.⁵

This difference between Marshall and Forrestal over the components of effective international power was in fact resolved in favor of Marshall by the White House and the Bureau of the Budget. Considerations of domestic political economy rather than a systematic analysis of the capabilities needed to carry out the nation’s foreign policy commitments seemed to determine the executive choice to stick with military budgets well below $15 billion a year until the Korean emergency revised the prevailing priorities.

NSC-68

Actually, a systematic appraisal was called for by the president and undertaken by a special State-Defense task force months before the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The Soviet blockade of Berlin during 1948–1949 and the collateral negotiations of the North Atlantic Treaty had focused attention in the State Department and the White House on the limitations of the usable military power at the disposal of the West in case of major conflict in Europe. The Soviet atomic bomb detonation in August 1949, three years ahead of U.S. intelligence estimates, gave immediacy to the alarms Forrestal had been sounding on the temporary nature of the U.S. strategic advantage. And the fall of China to Mao Zedong the next month, placing the bulk of the Eurasian heartland under communist control and raising the specter of a division of the world’s population into two halves, was suddenly seen by many in the administration, as it had not been when only hypothetical, as an immense strategic fact of life. The convergence of these events with the need for Truman to say yes or no to an H-bomb program produced a requirement for some kind of coherent doctrine on our military capabilities, just as the withdrawal of the British from Greece in 1947 produced the need for a doctrine on U.S. intentions. Truman’s decision in January 1950 to give the green light, tentatively, to the H-bomb program was accompanied by a directive to the secretaries of state and defense to make a comprehensive review of U.S. foreign and defense policies in light of the developments just mentioned.⁶

In the process of preparing the general strategic appraisal called for by Truman, a dialogue on the components of the global balance of power, analogous to that conducted between Marshall and Forrestal in the 1947–1948 period, was now reenacted within the State Department between George Kennan and Paul Nitze.⁷

Kennan laid greater stress on the nonmilitary components of the bipolar struggle and felt the Soviets were so reluctant to become involved in a major war against the United States that the most important fact in the strategic equation was a clear resolve by the United States not to tolerate piecemeal opportunistic extension of Soviet control. Translating this into military terms was difficult and apparently uncongenial to Kennan. However, he is reported to have urged the organization of mobile, quickly deployable U.S. task forces that could be rushed to the scene of brushfire conflicts and thus confront the Soviets with the choice of desisting from their provocation or engaging the United States in a military clash that might expand into a major war. Kennan’s analysis of the Soviets convinced him the Soviets would back down when confronted with such a stark choice. Kennan thus did not feel that a general rearmament program was necessary. Moreover, rearmament would further focus national energies on the cruder means of waging the Cold War, as opposed to flexible and subtler forms of diplomacy and a stress on improving the quality of life of the Western nations.

Paul Nitze, who became a liaison between State and Defense when Acheson became secretary of state in January 1949, gave greater weight than did Kennan to the overall balance of military force between the Soviets and the United States. Succeeding Kennan as director of the policy planning staff in 1950 and chairing the ad hoc study group that produced the strategic paper requested by the president, Nitze had critical input in shaping the advanced planning concepts being developed at the time. Kennan retained his influence as State Department counselor, and his knowledge of the Soviet Union was influential in the deliberations of the study group, but Nitze was known to have the full support of Secretary of State Acheson, who took the study very seriously. Forrestal’s economy-minded successor at Defense, Louis Johnson, was a weak secretary who provided little support or guidance to Defense Department participants in the study. Any initiative or major departures in overall strategic planning, then, would be responses to the momentum generated by Nitze in fulfilling Truman’s desire for a new strategic appraisal.

Nitze contended that the nation’s military planning was seriously constrained by the strict budgetary limits imposed by the White House and the Bureau of the Budget. In light of the emergence of a Soviet nuclear weapons capability, the United States would need not only to improve its massive destructive capabilities (as was contemplated in the H-bomb program) but also to balance the Soviet capabilities for conventional war.

These ideas emerged as major premises in NSC-68 (the paper’s file number upon referral to the National Security Council).⁸ For the first time since the war, military planning concepts were tied to an explicit body of assumptions about the political and technological state of the world. On the basis of an analysis of Soviet economic strengths and weaknesses, the study projected that in four years the Soviets would have a nuclear arsenal sufficient to neutralize the U.S. nuclear capability for deterring local wars. Moreover, the Soviets would build this capacity without any diminution in their local war capability. Thus, by 1954, if the West did not take significant compensating measures, the balance of military power would have shifted in favor of the Soviets. When this happened, economic and technical assistance would be insufficient to contain Soviet expansion.

NSC-68 also challenged prevailing premises about the U.S. economy. Reflecting Nitze’s view, it argued that the nation could well afford to devote 20 percent of the gross national product to national security purposes as compared with the 5 percent then being spent. In budget terms, defense expenditures could and ought to rise as high as $60 billion a year from the $15 billion then programmed. Nitze had an important ally in Leon Keyserling, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, who was a consistent advocate of economic expansionist policies.⁹ In retrospect it is not possible to say whether this alliance of Nitze and Acheson at State and Keyserling in the White House would have moved Truman away from his conservatism on defense expenditures and allowed him to order the implementation of NSC-68 had the Korean invasion not taken place in June 1950. ¹⁰

Acheson had begun to lay the groundwork with his talks in February 1950 on the need to create situations of strength vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to attempting any kind of global spheres-of-influence settlement (as was again being suggested by Churchill). But as yet these declarations did not go much beyond making the aspiration explicit to wider public audiences.¹¹ Any diversion of a larger portion of the nation’s resources to affect the global balance of military power was still not administration policy. Truman understood that such a shift in the allocation of resources would have to rest on popular consent; and the people, he believed, did not yet appreciate the current function of the military balance of power in global diplomacy.

THE KOREAN WAR

Truman and his advisers had little doubt that the North Korean attack across the thirty-eighth parallel on June 25, 1950, was masterminded in the Kremlin, with Stalin calculating that the United States had neither the capability nor the will to commit its forces to defend the South Korean dictatorship of Syngman Rhee. The Unites States had pulled its post–World War II occupation forces out of Korea and, implementing its side of an agreement with the Soviets, had not provided the South with the wherewithal to build up its own military forces to counter the North’s Soviet-assisted military buildup.¹²

Moreover, perhaps Soviet spies in the Pentagon were aware of a 1947 planning document of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) writing off Korea as strategically necessary to hang onto in the event of a United States–Soviet war.¹³ And then there was Secretary of State Acheson’s response to a reporter’s question at the National Press Club on January 12, 1950, in which, consistent with the JCS strategy, he stated that the U.S. defensive perimeter for the Pacific area and Japan runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukus, adding that it runs from the Ryukus to the Philippine Islands.¹⁴ The public omission of South Korea from the defensive perimeter might have confirmed Kremlin assumptions that their well-armed proxy in North Korea could swiftly overwhelm the South’s inferior forces and reunify Korea under a communist government, presenting the United State with a fait accompli that it had no will to fight to undo.

Truman immediately decided that although Korea itself was not worth a general war, Stalin had to be disabused of his calculation that the Soviets or their allies could breach containment lines wherever the local defensive forces were weak; the Russians had to be put on notice in no uncertain terms that such moves on their part did risk general war. Truman, Acheson, and Marshall (now secretary of defense) also feared that letting the communists (was Mao also involved?) get away with the invasion would crucially undermine the confidence of the NATO allies and Japan that the United States would come to their defense if they were attacked.

Swift military counteraction was imperative. Not wanting to wait upon a declaration of war from Congress and operating under the aegis of two emergency UN Security Council resolutions,¹⁵ the president ordered General Douglas MacArthur (then still in Japan overseeing its rehabilitation) to provide immediate assistance to the South Korean military and to organize a UN peace action to compel the North Koreans to withdraw behind the thirty-eighth parallel. (The Soviet Union could not veto the Security Council authorizations of these actions, having absented itself from the UN deliberations in protest against the organization’s refusal to let the new communist regime in Beijing occupy China’s seats in UN agencies.) Within days, as it became evident that logistic and air support for the South Korean forces could not turn the tide, Truman acceded to MacArthur’s request for authorization