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I have a (relatively) insightful writeup about how the lessons learned during the run up to World War II were applied to the early Cold War, more specifically the Truman years, if anyone would care to read it. It would be a big, unbroken wall of text and there is nothing about air power, just early Cold War foreign policy, but if anyone wants I'll post it up.
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Dec 21, 2010 21:41
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OK, I warned you though. Primary sources are: Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace, John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War and Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas' The Wise Men. Some information is also from lectures and anecdotal knowledge. In the wake of communist Soviet expansion after World War II American policy makers were faced with a new and difficult problem. The only real experience and tools they had to solve this problem were developed prior to and during World War II and whether they fit the scenario or not, the lessons learned in that period were going to be applied to the current situation. In the military Generals are often accused of fighting the last war, that is training their troops and gearing their tactics to the last major conflict fought, they do this because it is what they know and the grounds of future conflicts are uncertain and have uncertain outcomes. This is very similar to what American policy makers did in the early stages of the Cold War and instead of defusing the situation this approach may have aggravated it beyond what was necessary. Of course there is no way to truly tell and no use in trying to armchair General the situation, but it is quite clear that the lessons learned in the run up to World War II influenced policy making regarding Russia in the run up to the Cold War. To understand the conflict it is important to start from the beginning and to analyze some of the motivation behind the moves made on both sides. Since the advent of modern warfare Russia has been something of a whipping boy, constantly being invaded via Eastern Europe. Stalin realized this fact and as such wished to secure his Western border by padding it with Eastern European satellite states, friendly governments or, ideally, governments controlled by Russia her self. He had the perfect opportunity at the end of the war when he was already in possession of these desired Eastern European nations that he had liberated from the Nazis and was currently occupying. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin came to a private understanding regarding these countries at the Yalta conference, that understanding being that Russia would take them for the needed protection of her Western border. This private understanding was all well and good, except that Roosevelt was soon out of office, replaced by Harry Truman, and Truman was not privy to this information. When the Soviets did not allow the publicly agreed upon (at Yalta) fair elections in those nations that they held Truman then saw the Soviets as breaking promises while Stalin saw the U.S. as doing the same. For Truman this was the first battle of the Cold War, with the U.S. on the side of national self determination and the Soviets on the side of aggression. This is where American policy makers applied one of the first lessons learned in World War II, one about aggression. The piecemeal aggression of the Nazis in the 1930s was met with appeasement by the rest of the world and that policy of appeasement blew up in everyone's faces. Following that train of logic Truman believed that the piecemeal aggression of the Soviets was of the same nature and, not wanting to get caught up in yet another World War, decided that where they had appeased Nazi aggression toward Poland prior to World War II, they would stop Soviet aggression in Europe. Stalin saw any American interference in the region as interloping by an outside party with no security interests in the area and frowned upon it, to say the least. This among other things led to increasing tensions amongst the former allies. Between 1945 and 1946 the U.S. and the Soviets tried time and again to make diplomatic inroads with one another, but their points of view were so completely different that all attempts inevitably failed. By 1946 there were deep anti communist sentiments in congress and Truman's Undersecretary of State, Dean Acheson, had come to regard Stalin as the Russian version of Adolf Hitler. Acheson was an important policy maker in the Truman administration and his view of Stalin as another Hitler means that he would not appease nor would he negotiate with the man and he generally took a hard line when it came to the Soviets. Acheson is a fairly hard man in general, one who believed that one should always negotiate from a position of strength, never weakness, and he treated the Soviets as he would have the Nazis. Acheson had the skills of the leading Soviet expert in the State Department, George Kennan, to draw upon when it came to making policy in regards to the Soviets. Unlike Acheson, Kennan saw the Soviet problem as mostly a political one and designed his strategy accordingly. Kennan was the architect of the containment strategy that was, under him, built on the knowledge that Stalin was, while a very bad man, not Hitler. He seemed to realize that most of Stalin's actions were predicated on Russian nationalism. He believed that Soviet expansion was done with traditional Russian security interests in mind and not because Stalin believed in the rabid spread of communism. Kennan also believed that if the world drew a line for the Soviets that they would stop there because their move into Eastern Europe was more opportunistic than anything else. Along this same line of thought a power vacuum in Western Europe would be very dangerous and allow the Soviets to opportunistically move in, much as they had in Eastern Europe, and the best way to prevent that from happening was to economically prop up Western Europe and ally with them. Kennan also believed that if the world could contain the Soviets for long enough that it would quell their aggression and perhaps even crumble the Soviet Union (a position which proved to be true in the long run).Ultimately, though, Acheson was Kennan's boss and Acheson had a slightly different idea about which direction to take regarding the containment strategy. Acheson, being the hard man that he was in regards to the Soviets, wanted to add military power to the containment strategy. In 1947 the Greeks were undergoing a civil war between royal forces, backed by the British, and communist forces, backed by the Soviets. When the British were no longer able to fund the royal forces America was asked to step in and Acheson jumped at the chance. This is the beginning of the implementation of containment strategy, typified by the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine was delivered to congress while asking for funds to help the Greek royal forces and was an open ended U.S promise to help anyone in the world fighting communist aggression and as such was a departure from the neutralism of the 1930's. This statement was essentially the declaration of the Cold War and represents the political element of the containment strategy. The next step in the plan was the economic element which was announced by Secretary of State George Marshall at the Harvard commencement address in 1947 and became known as the Marshall Plan. After World War II the U.S. had become very wealthy and had the only intact economy out of all of the allies. This part of the plan consisted of taking some of that wealth and funneling it in to Western Europe to prop up the economies and help support the favorable governments in the face of rising communist sentiment after the war. This would successfully set up Western Europe as an anti communist buffer zone for the U.S. and the rest of the world. The third part of the containment strategy was the military element and the element of the strategy that Kennan disagreed with. Acheson proposed a new military alliance between America and Western Europe, with the basic idea of intertwining their security with U.S. security. This was yet another strategy to ward off piecemeal aggression by the Soviets and came from the lessons learned from Nazi aggression. This move also effectively put the nuclear umbrella over Western Europe and committed the U.S. to the kind of collective security agreement that it had resisted prior to World War II. The result of this treaty was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which still exists to this very day. The Cold War was now militarized and the purpose of Western Europe in this conflict had become containing the Soviet Union within its present boundaries. The Cold War quickly spread its boundaries beyond those of Europe to the Asian continent, in large part because China was a major power in the region and had, after a civil war, become a communist country. U.S. policy makers compounded the problem in the region by refusing to recognize China's sovereignty as a communist nation, but at this point anti communist sentiment in the U.S. was so high that they would have refused to recognize any communist country's sovereignty. U.S. intervention in Korea was then opposed by Chinese intervention in Korea and the battle there slowed until the front line finally settled on the 38th parallel. Negotiations were opened up to no avail and a stalemate was reached in 1951 that, more or less, still exists. In the wake of the Korean war and in seeing that further conflicts were inevitable, National Security Council Report 68 called for a quadrupling of the defense budget to rebuild the standing military in preparation for any upcoming Cold War conflicts. Truman did not want to do this, but he did reluctantly begin to build up America's standing conventional forces. This move, which can really be seen as the end of the early Cold War, set all the pieces in place for every upcoming Cold War conflict from Vietnam all the way through Afghanistan. Most major players in American policy making during this time viewed the Soviets as yet another Nazi encroachment of world freedom, but not all of them did. George Kennan was an exception to this norm in that he saw the Soviets as more looking out for their own best interest than as the evil empire everyone else thought them to be. In his Long Telegram, which was published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947, Kennan did not portray the Soviets as new Nazis. His most important point in that document was that the communist ideals of the Soviet government were not, in fact, aligned with the views of the Russian people, in essence pointing out that these ideals had been forced on the people and given time they would throw them off. Kennan probably did not see the lesson learned preceding World War II as entirely applicable to the situation the U.S. was now facing, mainly because he was the foremost Soviet expert in the State Department and he actually understood them rather than seeing them as boogeymen. This view Kennan had was why he did not wish to have a military element in the containment strategy that he had outlined; he did not feel it was necessary. Whether he was right or wrong can never be proven, but U.S. policy makers acted as if he was incorrect and that got America into many ugly conflicts that cost many, many lives and may have been avoided if they had taken a different approach to the problem. Yes this was a History paper, but it fits the subject and I figured why not get some more mileage from it. MesquiteLog fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 21, 2010 |
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Dec 21, 2010 22:08
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iyaayas01 posted:Well done. Don't think I could improve upon that any, and if I had done it the thing probably would've been 10 times longer than it needed to be. I just wanted to footstomp the fact that Kennan was rather out of step with the rest of the U.S. national security establishment, particularly after the stuff prescribed in NSC-68 began to take effect. There's actually a very good book out there titled The Hawk and the Dove that is about Kennan and Nitze (who was the primary driver behind NSC-68, among other things). Also, I firmly believe that the cry of "No more Munichs"/"NO APPEASEMENT EVER" has done more to damage U.S. foreign policy over the last 60 years than anything else...that is particularly ironic given that Chamberlain's policy at Munich arguably wasn't even appeasement. Honestly I could drat near write a book on it because I just took the class, but this was just a short paper done at the end of this semester. I didn't mean to imply that Kennan was out of step with the rest of the political establishment, but he certainly did view the problem from a different perspective that was probably more accurate at the beginning of the Cold War. I'm with you on the "no more appeasement" nonsense also and I found Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile crisis more specifically, to be the worst about it. He had many opportunities to get the missiles out of Cuba while giving very little in return and letting both sides save face, but he refused to give an inch and drat near caused a war. He may have made the Russians look silly by making them back down, but he also got a fairly moderate Soviet leader (Nikita Kruschev) run out of office because of it to be replace by Leonid Breshnev who managed to expand the sphere of Soviet influence more dramatically than Kruschev ever could have. Stupid move dude. Also if anyone still in school has a chance to take an American foreign relations class, do it, it is terribly interesting
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Dec 22, 2010 16:38
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