Empires Apart (61 page)

CHAPTAR 13

HOT AND COLD RUNNING WAR

The writing and rewriting of history is no less powerful for being largely unconscious. There have been examples, especially in Russia, of history being deliberately rewritten to present whatever message is politically correct at the time, but more often rewriting merely reflects a change of emphasis. The choice of one word over another fundamentally alters historical perceptions. Empires usually expand through military might. Texas, Tibet and Turkestan have all been absorbed into imperial neighbours, but American sources would say that Texas was ‘united with' the rest of America whereas Tibet was ‘seized by' China. Official communist histories still reported that the tsars had ‘united' Turkestan with the rest of the Russian empire.

‘Communism' and ‘capitalism', like ‘right' and ‘left', are similarly terms that mean very different things to those who wave them as banners or hurl them as epithets. Communism melded the slogans of the left on to the traditions of totalitarian autocracy to produce a new ideology that served only the interests of its leadership. Communism came to signify no more than the supremacy of the Communist party – first in the person of Stalin, then in the more diffuse form of the party nomenklatura; a collective leadership with all the classic attributes of oligarchy. Similarly corporatism borrowed the slogans of the right to disguise an ideology that in practice gives enormous power to corporate leaders, another oligarchy.

The competing empires of the twentieth century were often described as capitalist and communist, but this is misleading. Capitalism is a way of describing economic and commercial processes; communism is a theory of how society has, does, will and should function. Capitalism can be observed; communism must be believed. When societies describing themselves as communist have been observed, the startling fact is that they bear virtually no resemblance to communist doctrine. Communism is more religion than science. The ideological opposite number is not capitalism but ‘corporatism', a belief system that like communism purports not just to explain the world but to define the values that are ordained to bring about the perfect society.

To identify the ‘left' with communism and the ‘right' with corporatism is also misleading. Many on the left were deceived by Stalin's slogans, but others provided some of the new ideology's fiercest critics. Men like George Orwell saw exactly what Stalin had done to the ideals of the Russian Revolution, whereas President Truman insisted that Stalin was ‘honest' and ‘straightforward' and compared him admiringly with his colleagues in Missouri politics. On the other hand some of the most articulate critics of corporatism – from Thomas Jefferson through President Eisenhower to Chief Justice Rehnquist – have not come from the sloganising left.

What communism and corporatism really show is that using terms like left wing and right wing to describe historical forces obscures more than it clarifies. The philosophies of both left and right originated in an ideal of individual liberty from which the two great new ideologies of the twentieth century effectively turned aside.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Russia and America annexed territory and seized resources from supposedly savage natives and Christian states alike. By the beginning of the twentieth century the boundaries of the continental United States were fixed and a ragbag of dependencies, territories and colonies speckled the Pacific from Alaska
to Manila, with a couple of Caribbean left-overs from the Spanish American War – Puerto Rico and Cuba – thrown in. The borders of the Russian empire had never been fixed, and as the twentieth century erupted into war and revolution it looked as though the empire of the tsars might vanish with the Romanovs; in fact it shrank but was far from disappearing. Between the First and Second World Wars the new Russian leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his tsar-like hold on his people, and American corporations continued their gradual globalisation in search of resources and scale.

The Second World War was to change everything and nothing. The Red Army emerged from the war by far the largest military force in the world, and used its overwhelming superiority to seize half of Europe; the United States emerged from the war by far the largest economy in the world, and used this financial might (rather than its nuclear superiority) to expand and consolidate its informal commercial empire. It seemed that the prediction made by Alexis de Tocqueville more than a century earlier had come true: one day America and Russia would each be ‘called by some secret desire of Providence to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world'. The Second World War increased the size of the two empires and destroyed or weakened competing empires, but the basic character of each superpower remained unchanged. Russia had an empire when the war began – stretching from Mongolia in the east to the Caucasus in the south and Ukraine in the west – and it had an empire when it ended, albeit a larger one. America had switched from formal empire to informal empire after the Spanish-American War, and despite ending the war with its army occupying Japan and a large part of Germany continued with this policy.

In some ways the decade after the Second World War was as critical in shaping the two empires as the war itself. It was then that the United States developed ways of ensuring that less powerful governments around the world would support, not hinder, its commercial empire, and Russia showed the first signs that its empire had reached its zenith and was destined to fail.

Initially it seemed that old-fashioned military imperialism survived, and would continue to thrive, in the Russian empire, but that elsewhere it had been replaced by the benign ministrations of dollar diplomacy. Yet paradoxically in the half century that followed it was not to be Russia that most frequently resorted to gunboat diplomacy. The Red Army was in action outside its borders only a handful of times, whereas the US averaged around eight overseas military ‘interventions' a year (albeit some on a very small scale).

If in some ways the Second World War created a whole new world, with Russia brutally repressing half of Europe and US troops waging war from south-east Asia to the Middle East, the motivations of the two nations remained constant. Russia wanted two things: a security cordon between itself and its enemies, and to pursue its age-old quest for territory. America wanted two things: the scale that its corporatist economic model demanded, and to pursue its age-old quest for resources (including, from 1941, oil). What both nations had in common was that these objectives – unsurprisingly in both cases naked self-interest – were rarely acknowledged. Instead for the rest of the twentieth century both nations would once again ride to battle under the banner of ideology. From Prague to Kabul the Red Army crushed any signs of independence in the name of universal brotherhood, while US marines fought to impose liberty on unwilling Vietnamese peasants and Caribbean islanders. The ideology of communism crossed swords with that of a newly rampant democracy, a force that before the war had been written off by many on both the left and the right.

In the 1920s and '30s, as the world tumbled into depression, democracies had failed. Men like Mussolini, Hitler and Franco stormed to power promising salvation to their nations and replacing free elections with trains that ran on time. Little men fighting for the ‘little man', they delivered short-term gain and long-term pain. Their appeal was not confined to Europe; in America a travelling salesman named Huey ‘Kingfish' Long did for Louisiana what Mussolini did for Italy: providing new roads, new schools and corruption on a monumental scale. In 1934 he set his sights on
the White House by doing what was then revolutionary: buying time on the radio to spread his message across the nation. Under the slogan ‘Every Man A King' he built a movement that soon had 7 million members, nearly three times the size of the Nazi party that had carried Hitler to power the year before. Long promised to give every American family $2,500 and to provide free old age pensions, pledges to be funded by a 100 per cent tax on incomes over $1m and a 100 per cent tax on personal fortunes over $3m. His campaign against corporations and oligarchs struck a chord with large parts of the American population and President Roosevelt is said to have told friends that he feared that he might be the last constitutional president. Huey Long's assassination ended that threat. American democracy had been saved by an assassin's bullet, and Americans sat back to watch the demagogues of Europe lurch into war.

Although fascism and communism were ideologically at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the new generation of European dictators had much in common. Left and right launched bitter attacks on each other, both verbal and, in the Spanish Civil War, on the battlefield, and yet in August 1939 the two supreme autocrats Stalin and Hitler signed a nonaggression pact that paved the way for war. In secret annexes they carved up eastern Europe. The following month Hitler launched the blitzkrieg on Poland that signalled the beginning of the Second World War, and the Red Army rolled west to grab eastern Poland and end the short-lived independence of Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Stalin had recreated the boundaries of the Romanov empire, but he wanted more. In November 1940 he sent his foreign minister to Berlin to negotiate an alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan, but the negotiations foundered on Stalin's insistence on gaining Iran and western India. Instead Hitler turned on Russia, something Stalin had refused to believe could happen; even after the German attack had started, Stalin insisted that the assault must have been launched by renegade generals without Hitler's authorisation. Hitler, of course, did not share his opposite number's sense of solidarity with a fellow autocrat, and Germany and Russia plunged into one of the bloodiest struggles of all time.

America's involvement in the Second World War was far more gradual. In November 1939 the United States agreed to sell arms to the British and French, but strictly on a ‘cash and carry' basis. After the fall of France Churchill's pleas for assistance became ever more desperate. Britain was running out of money, a situation exacerbated by losing much of what it had bought from America in German submarine attacks. Roosevelt finally agreed in September 1940 to give Britain and Canada fifty obsolete destroyers in return for rent-free bases in Bermuda, British Guiana and – achieving an ambition that had been there since the nation's founding – Newfoundland. This was not enough to sustain the British war effort and, as Britain had by now largely exhausted its reserves, in March 1941 Congress approved the Lend-Lease programme. Nine months later came the Japanese attack on Hawaii.

One of the myths about the Second World War is that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused the US to join the allied cause. In fact the US response was to declare war only on Japan. It was three days later, when Hitler declared war on America, that Russia and the United States suddenly discovered they were allies, albeit with very different objectives. How different those objectives were was illustrated by negotiations going on at the very same time on the other side of the world.

In December 1941, as the Japanese bombed Hawaii and prepared to attack the American colony in the Philippines, German troops were poised outside Moscow. Inside the city the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden held discussions with Stalin. With Russian prospects in the war looking as bleak as the Russian winter, Eden was amazed when Stalin declared that the ‘main question' for him was British recognition of the territorial gains Russia had made under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact (the conquest of Finland, the Baltic states, Romania and part of Poland). As if to illustrate his imperial mindset, Stalin proposed that Britain should take permanent military bases in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. There was no doubt in British minds that Russian imperialism was on the roll once more. Much of Britain's wartime strategy was predicated on containing Stalin's imperial ambitions, but
when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met in Tehran in 1943 it appeared to the British that Roosevelt regarded Britain's undoubted imperial past as a bigger threat to the post-war world than Russia's potential imperial future. In the debate about opening a new front against Hitler, in which Stalin wanted the British and Americans to invade France and Churchill wanted to strike at the Balkans to forestall possible Russian intervention, America sided with Russia, effectively consigning the peoples of central and south-eastern
Europe to half a century of servitude as part of the Soviet empire. As American men, and more importantly materiel, turned the tide of war against the Axis powers, Russia moved on to the offensive. When Hitler's short-lived empire collapsed, Stalin was able to achieve what earlier tsars had only dreamt of.

Debate still rages over Stalin's intent: was he seeking world domination or merely a security cordon on his frontier? Those with a more limited view of Stalin's intentions point to his actions in places like Greece, where after the war a communist guerrilla army fought a bloody civil war with very little support from Stalin. The Russian leader seems to have regarded his agreements with Roosevelt at Yalta as a division of spoils between their two empires. It is not clear that Roosevelt saw it that way, but the position of the western allies was not always clear. Churchill in particular combined cynical realpolitik with a sincere commitment to protecting other nations from slipping into Russia's maw. In the last days of the war he flung British troops north to the German coast, to stop the Red Army seizing Denmark and fulfilling Peter the Great's ambition of making the Baltic a Russian sea; but the previous October he had met Stalin in Moscow and carved up much of eastern Europe so that, for example, Russia was given a free hand in Romania in return for leaving Greece to Britain.