Empires Apart (64 page)

From their earliest days the imperialism of the north-eastern states was largely commercial. Much of their wealth came from trade, particularly in the early days from the slave trade, and their merchants wanted above all to have easy access to foreign markets and to stop foreigners having access to theirs. The southern states were primarily concerned with direct conquest, in order to gain more land for cultivation. The two imperialisms fused – especially in the march west – but the two strands could still be distinguished: in the debates on the League of Nations after the First World War and most clearly in the debates about the Marshall Plan after the Second. The Marshall Plan was very much the work of the north-eastern establishment, whose bankers occupied key positions in its administration and made huge profits from its implementation. A major beneficiary of the scheme was the investment bank Brown Brothers, Harriman, one of whose partners, Averell Harriman, was sent to Europe to run the plan. By and large southern and western states
would have much preferred the funds to be spent at home or devoted to projects in Latin America and Asia, where US corporations would find it easier to exert quasi-colonial control.

Cynics have also pointed out that a large part of the Marshall Plan aid did not end up in Europe. $2bn went to American oil companies, and much of the rest was spent with other US corporations. The aid to France, for example, roughly covered the cost of France reconquering Indo-China, something achieved largely with weapons bought from the US. Similarly the Netherlands was funded to reconquer Indonesia.

In Russia there was no debate about foreign policy, not just because under Stalin there was no fundamental debate about anything but because the over-riding policy objective was clear. At the end of the Second World War Russia had expanded its empire, established a security cordon around the motherland and had the largest and most powerful army in the world. The Russian autocrat had a degree of personal power equal to any tsar and exercised it through an elaborate apparatus of secret police and concentration camps, torture and intimidation, judicial murder and perpetual propagandising. Stalin's primary objective now was consolidation – to extend the fearsome level of control he exercised at the centre over his new colonies in eastern Europe. Guerrilla attacks against the Russian occupiers continued in the Baltic states and Ukraine into the 1950s. Endless streams of propaganda photographs and films of happy throngs in various eastern European nations welcoming their Red Army liberators could not disguise the reality that only a handful of Communist party stalwarts had looked forward to their countries being absorbed into the Soviet empire. Further territorial expansion was a prize Stalin would grab if the opportunity arose but for the time being he could rest on his laurels; isolating his empire from western contamination was more important than enlarging it.

For Truman, returning to the isolationism of the interwar years was not an option, however much vocal sections of the American population might disagree. Two forces were keeping America engaged with the
rest of the world: the insatiable lust of US corporations for ‘scale' and the nation's need for oil. Both forces have continued until today. The discovery of oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska falsified the dire war-time predictions that America's domestic oil supplies would run out at some point in the 1950s, but the new discoveries merely extended the timelines: US domestic oil production excluding Alaska peaked in the early 1970s, and including Alaska it peaked in 1988. From then on the United States has become increasingly dependent on foreign oil producers, and since 1998 the majority of the oil consumed in America has been imported. Before the Second World War America was the world's largest oil producer; now it is the world's largest oil importer. As more American historical documents become available the impact of oil on US imperial designs has become more apparent. One instance that is now in the public domain is the plan presented to the US cabinet, in response to the global oil crisis in the early 1970s, for US airborne forces to seize the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

Initially the need to keep foreign markets open for American corporations and protect Middle Eastern oil supplies did not seem much of a problem. America emerged from the war as the world's only true superpower. Not only was this because of its economic might but also because the United States, and the United States alone, possessed the atomic bomb. Russia, the only other conceivable claimant to superpower status now that British empire was in terminal decline, might have the legions of the Red Army, but Stalin would never dare unleash them when faced with certain nuclear annihilation. Then in August 1949 a project involving hundreds of thousands of gulag prisoners digging deep into the earth, and controlled personally by Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, came to fruition; in a remote corner of Kazakhstan uranium from the gulag mines exploded: Russia had its own atomic bomb. The world had changed for ever: it had divided into two armed camps whose only threats against each other seemed to be literally mad – Mutually Assured Destruction. It was time to step back and find another way forward.

In the Second World War Britain and America had fought to make the world safe for democracy, but democracy remained the prerogative of just a small part of the world's population. Throughout the old colonial empires national liberation movements of one form or another had sprung into prominence, and in Asia it became clear that the end was in sight for British rule in India, Dutch rule in Indonesia and French rule in Indo-China. America, in particular, had made its antipathy to traditional forms of imperialism plain, and led the way with the granting of independence to the Philippines – although the impact was somewhat reduced six years later when after a local referendum another left-over from the Spanish American War, Puerto Rico, became incorporated within the United States as a ‘commonwealth'.

Not only was change coming to the colonies but the rhetoric of liberation was having its effect in western Europe, where many on the left championed the cause of those like Gandhi and Nehru who campaigned for the right to self-determination. The left had gained a new authority, in part reflecting the sacrifices made by the Red Army and the communist resistance movements in the war against fascism. The communist parties of western Europe gloried in bringing down fascism, while ignoring the fact that in their name Stalin was exerting control over Russia's new imperial possessions in eastern Europe with the same crude application of power that had characterised Russian imperialism for centuries. Practising imperialism at home, communists were eager to further anti-imperialism abroad. (Even so, it could be argued that Stalin's own contribution to the national liberation movements in the third world was wholly negative: scores of potential leaders had gone to Russia for training in the 1930s and never returned, murdered to appease the Soviet leader's increasing paranoia. Men like Jomo Kenyatta and Ho Chi Minh were the exceptions who managed to return home to lead their nations to freedom.)

Russian imperialism might be unchanging, but America's was evolving yet again. During the interwar years isolationism had been a powerful feature of American public opinion, and America's imperial
power increased not by seizing new territories but through the increasing dominance of its corporations, occasionally supported in the western hemisphere by direct but temporary military intervention. After the Second World War the picture changed. The Russian empire and ‘international communism' emerged as a serious potential threat, and at the same time the operations of American corporations became more extensive so that parts of the worlds that had been of little or no strategic interest to the United States started to impinge on the consciousness of policy-makers in Washington. The difficulty faced by these policy-makers was that despite their involvement in the war the American public had never wholly lost its innate isolationism. Having defeated Japan and Germany, most Americans had no great desire to charge around the world defending other people from the threat of communism or American corporations from threats to their profits.

How then could the US thwart communism, promote corporatism and protect its oil supplies while not appearing to rush into foreign entanglements? Russia could use its military power and secret police apparatus to protect its imperial interests in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the other nations of eastern Europe. What weapons could the US use in its sphere of influence? Up to the Second World War US influence on the rest of the world was primarily economic and cultural. Where Stalin tried consciously to promote communist values through crude propaganda, American values spread around the world by simple osmosis. Accounts of American life in the press and on the radio demonstrated the benefits of living in the land of the free; Hollywood films exemplified the frontier values that seemed to have made America great; and the ever-growing presence of American companies demonstrated the vitality of corporatist democracy. Western Europeans might moan lightheartedly that Americans were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here', but the plight of the citizens in the other half of the continent was immeasurably worse. Seduction by GIs bearing nylons and real coffee was infinitely preferable to the organised mass rape the Red Army inflicted on women in the territories they conquered.

But if the United States wanted to ensure that governments on its side of the iron curtain followed its lead it would need something more than a few Hollywood films. That something more was first demonstrated in Italy: ideology, money and the CIA.

The end of the war signalled the end of the road for the old European empires and the old European style of imperialism. No longer would governors' mansions throughout the world house white-skinned bureaucrats sent out from London, Paris, Brussels, The Hague, Madrid, Rome or Lisbon. Moscow might rule Ukraine or Lithuania in the old tsarist manner, but in its new colonial capitals like Prague and Sofia local apparatchiks were imposed and the puppet-master's strings were carefully hidden from view. The strings emanating from Washington were even less visible. The essence of both American and Russian imperial policy was to exercise power indirectly through local regimes. The policy worked as long as the local regimes acted as expected. When they didn't, Moscow and Washington needed a rationale for changing the regimes; in both cases that rationale was to be found in ideology. The ideology of democracy had glued the American revolutionaries together in the crucible of their nation's birth; now its universality was intended to inspire men and women all over the world.

In the interwar years communism had been a spectre raised at home by those fighting to smash organised labour or obstruct civil rights for blacks, but America's isolationism left it with little interest in communist imperialism abroad. The naïve view of Stalin held by men like Roosevelt disappeared after the war when the reality of Russian imperialism became apparent. The turning point was the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Up to that point the US Congress had been refusing to authorise full funding for the Marshall Plan, had opposed Truman's military plans and was nervous about the role of the newly formed CIA. After the coup Marshall Plan funding was endorsed in the Senate by sixty-nine votes to seventeen, the US signed the Brussels Treaty, establishing mutual defence arrangements with western European countries (a seismic shift in US foreign policy in itself), and the role of the CIA was enormously extended.

President Truman had signalled these developments a year earlier. In Greece a civil war pitched left against right with autocratic Stalinists in one camp and corrupt royalists in the other. Truman wanted to support the royalists but the American population had no desire to get involved in obscure European squabbles. Speaking to a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, Truman chose to present the arguments in global terms: a conflict was being waged between good and evil, democracy and dictatorship, America and Russia. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine he announced a foreign policy that was at the same time a radical departure from anything that had gone before and the logical extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the whole world. In one sentence Truman declared the United States to be the world's policeman. ‘It must be the policy of the United States', he said, ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.' After more than half a century the principles of the Truman Doctrine have become such an integral part of US foreign policy that it is difficult to remember that they were once so revolutionary, or how they came into being. The Monroe Doctrine, which gave the US the right to intervene anywhere in the western hemisphere, was originally a response to the messianic musings of Tsar Alexander I and was intended explicitly to protect the hemisphere from invasion by European powers. Only over time did it become a charter for intervention in the internal affairs of countries in the region even when no prospect of foreign invasion was in sight. The Truman Doctrine was a response to the messianic musings of Joseph Stalin, but from the first it was aimed at suppressing internal enemies as well as external. Just as Lenin and Stalin had proclaimed their duty to support the communist cause everywhere in the world, the US was now proclaiming a similar duty. The Truman Doctrine signalled not just the end of pre-war isolationism but the beginning of an ideological empire, with its heart in Washington DC. This was not to be an empire in the traditional sense, in which occupying armies subjugated native populations (for such subjugation was entirely contrary to the ideology of democracy that the new empire professed), but rather was to be, in
the phrase used by American presidents to describe military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘a coalition of the willing' – with one proviso; that where the willing were not willing enough the US would apply suitable persuasion to encourage their participation. The purpose of the new empire was not to enrich and glorify the United States, although that is what it did, but to enrich and glorify the ideology of corporatist democracy.