From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (102 page)

The Berlin Blockade also helped bring about the most radical U.S. step of the early postwar era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Drawing upon their own historical experience in the Articles of Confederation, Americans in promoting the Marshall Plan urged the Western Europeans to find security through unification. The Czech coup underscored their importuning, and in April 1948 Britain joined four European nations in forming the Brussels Pact, a mutual defense treaty. For their part, the Europeans insisted that a U.S. defense commitment was the key to their political security and economic recovery. "Political and indeed spiritual forces must be mobilised in our defence," Bevin, a founder of the North Atlantic alliance, intoned.
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Looking toward the Atlantic as well as the continent and fearing Soviet intimidation and subversion more than its military power, the ruddy, hard-drinking, fiercely anti-Communist former labor leader went further by seeking to bring the Scandinavian nations and the United States and Canada into a regional alliance. Some Americans like Kennan vigorously objected that the military emphasis of the discussions would harden the division of Europe, but the Berlin Blockade gave urgency to Bevin's warnings, leading to formal talks in Washington in July 1948, "the crucible in which NATO was formed."
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Over the next year, the alliance took shape. The most difficult issues were those of membership and the nature of the U.S. commitment. Western Europeans objected to Bevin's Atlantic focus, "a fabulous monster," French foreign minister Georges Bidault protested.
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They bent to U.S. pressure, however, and Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Canada, along
with Italy and Portugal, became charter members. The Europeans sought from the United States a binding pledge as in the Brussels Treaty requiring signatories to give member nations under attack "all military and other aid and assistance in their power." Wary of entanglement in Europe and especially of provoking a reaction from isolationist remnants in Congress, U.S. negotiators preferred a more restricted commitment. The participants eventually agreed that in response to an attack on a signatory, each member individually and acting with others should take "such actions as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force." The Treaty of Washington was signed in April 1949 with appropriate pomp and ceremony; the only discordant note, Acheson later recalled, was the Marine Band playing Cole Porter's "It Ain't Necessarily So," a tune that might have fed lingering European doubts about the sanctity of U.S. promises. By this time accustomed to radically new foreign policy measures, the Senate approved the treaty with little dissent in July 1949. What has been called the "American Revolution of 1949" was complete.
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An alliance designed in the words of NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay, to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down" would turn out to be one of the most enduring such arrangements in world history.
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By the late 1940s, the Cold War began to influence policies in other regions. In Latin America, the United States shifted from neglect to concern to active involvement centered around anti-Communism. The Good Neighbor spirit of the 1930s had reflected U.S. insularity during the depression. As the United States addressed a wide range of urgent global issues after the war, attention naturally shifted from the hemisphere. Unlike Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, the Atlanticists who directed postwar policy had little interest in or knowledge of Latin America. Many held distinct prejudices about the peoples and cultures. While lavishing billions of dollars on Western Europe, the Truman administration responded to Latin American appeals for economic aid with proposals for limited technical assistance, loans, private capital, and increased trade. United States diplomats did expand and institutionalize the collective security arrangements created before Pearl Harbor. The 1947 Rio Pact was the first of the postwar regional military alliances authorized under Article 51 of the UN Charter and provided a model for NATO. By the spring 1948 inter-American meeting in Bogotá, the State Department had identified
Communism as a potential danger to the hemisphere. Riots in the Colombian capital as the meeting took place—which U.S. officials incorrectly attributed to Communist influence—seemed to underscore the threat. The United States at Bogotá first began to mobilize anti-Communist sentiment in the hemisphere. The conferees created the Organization of American States to enforce regional security and passed an anti-Communist resolution sponsored by the U.S. delegation.
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Once more viewing the hemisphere as threatened by an alien ideology, the United States fell back on the reliance on dictators pioneered by Stimson in the 1920s. With U.S. support, democracy had flourished in Latin America during and immediately after the war, spawning reformist governments, a militant labor movement, left-wing political parties, and even a surge of Communist activity. Increasingly concerned about Communism elsewhere, U.S. officials believed that Latin America's "Hispano-Indian culture—or lack of it," as Acheson condescendingly labeled it, left the region especially susceptible to Communist penetration.
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The United States thus acquiesced in and in some cases encouraged a movement on the part of conservative elites to turn back democracy. "We cannot be too dogmatic about the methods by which local communists are dealt with," Kennan observed.
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Military dictators seized power in numerous countries. With U.S. sympathy and even support, they outlawed Communist parties, suppressed leftist organizations, and with AFL assistance drove out left-wing unions. To curry favor with Washington, Latin governments reduced or cut off trade with the Soviet Union and even severed diplomatic relations, which, ironically, had been established in wartime at Washington's behest. By 1950, U.S. officials viewed Latin America as an "arena for Cold War competition."
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The Cold War created dilemmas for the United States in faraway South Africa. Facing rising anger at the end of World War II on the part of their oppressed black populations, the minority white governments of southern Africa silenced dissent with brute force and dealt with their racial problems by imposing rigid and brutal systems of segregation called apartheid. The Truman administration confronted racial protests of its own at home, and African American leaders increasingly linked the evils
of racial discrimination at home and colonialism abroad. United States officials also sought to take an enlightened position on racial issues to counter increasingly shrill Communist propaganda and win the allegiance of peoples of color across the world. The administration would have preferred to distance itself from South Africa's racial policies. Instead, as historian Thomas Borstelmann has pointed out, Cold War exigencies made the United States a "reluctant uncle—a godparent—at the baptism of
apartheid
."
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United States leaders had long-standing ties with the South African ruling class. South Africans shrewdly waved the anti-Communist banner to win points with the United States. American corporations found South Africa a lucrative place for exports and investments. But the most vital link was through strategic raw materials. Nuclear weapons were vital to U.S. Cold War strategy, and uranium was essential for nuclear weapons, "an absolute requirement of the very life of our nation," Nitze observed. South Africa possessed large quantities of uranium. "Faced with the juggernaut of
apartheid
in a country of profound strategic importance to the United States," Borstelmann concludes, the administration chose to "ally itself closely with the world's leading apostles of racial discrimination."
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One place where Cold War imperatives did not rule was in the rapidly escalating conflict between Arabs and Jews. The postwar situation in Palestine defied solution. Under a now defunct League of Nations mandate, Britain exercised nominal control. But Zionists agitated more determinedly for a Jewish state and with the moral force of the Holocaust behind them pressed for rescission of the 1939 white paper to permit thousands of refugees into Palestine. Terrorists such as Menachem Begin launched deadly attacks against Arabs and British alike. Arabs girded to defend what they considered their homeland. An Anglo-American study group in 1946 recommended the admission of one hundred thousand Jews to Palestine and partition through the creation of a single state with separate Arab and Jewish provinces. Others proposed a UN trusteeship. Britain tossed the hot potato into the lap of the United Nations. Backed by the Soviet Union and the United States—a rare moment of agreement—the world organization in late 1947 approved partition by a bare two votes. As violence mounted, the beleaguered British announced they would leave in May 1948. The Jews vowed to create a provisional government.
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The Palestine issue posed a huge dilemma for the United States. Support for a Jewish state risked alienating those Arabs who sat on top of the world's richest oil deposits and controlled territory deemed strategically vital, perhaps driving them into the arms of the Soviet Union. Top diplomatic and military officials thus repeatedly urged the president not to endorse an independent Jewish state. The White House drew different conclusions. Truman brought to the presidency a strong sympathy for the underdog. Like others worldwide, he was horrified by grim postwar accounts of the Holocaust and troubled by the plight of thousands of Jewish refugees. Some of his advisers had close ties to Zionist groups. Facing an uphill struggle for election in 1948, the president could not but be sensitive to the Jewish vote, especially in key states like New York. Truman at first equivocated, backing a UN trusteeship but giving vague private assurances of support to prominent Jews.
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The issue came to a head in the spring of 1948. As Britain prepared to depart and Jews hurried to establish a government, debate raged in Washington. At a tense meeting on May 12, Clifford reported that a Jewish state was inevitable. Employing the Cold War arguments that usually prevailed, he warned that since the Soviet Union would likely recognize the new government, the United States should seek an edge by doing so first. The normally in-control Marshall exploded, dismissing Clifford's proposal as a "transparent dodge to win a few votes" and vowing that if it went through he, for one, would vote
against
Truman. Clifford fretted that Marshall's "righteous God-damned Baptist" arguments might sway the administration against recognition. Facing a grim domestic political situation, the president held firm. Through intermediaries, Clifford persuaded Marshall not to oppose recognition. When the announcement came three days later, the United States recognized the new government within eleven minutes. Truman acted on what he considered principle as well as political expediency. The move no doubt helped his stunning electoral upset over Republican Thomas Dewey in November. This essentially political act, taken against the advice of foreign policy experts, also infuriated the Arabs and represented the first step in building what would be the U.S.-Israeli special relationship. It sparked an Arab-Israeli war, the initial engagement in an ongoing struggle that would persist into the next century.
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By the beginning of Truman's second term, the Cold War had expanded to East Asia, a region that would command U.S. attention for the
next four years. Neither Truman nor Acheson knew much about that part of the world; what they knew tended to have a European bias. The United States became hopelessly ensnared in Chiang Kai-shek's losing cause in the epic Chinese civil war, blundered into hot war in Korea, and then foolishly provoked Chinese Communist intervention. Drawing a ring of containment from Korea to India, it laid the groundwork for long-term conflict with the new government in Beijing and a war in Vietnam.

A tangle the United States could never unravel during World War II, China posed even greater challenges after V-J Day. Japan's sudden surrender left that vast conflict-ridden nation in turmoil, and in August 1945, a civil war that had begun long before World War I entered its climactic phase. The nominal government headed by Chiang's Nationalists and isolated in the southwest corner of China and Mao Zedong's Communists, based in the north, immediately began jockeying for position. At U.S. urging, Stalin had recognized the Nationalists, but as the Red Army withdrew from Manchuria it facilitated Communist takeover of the positions vacated. Nervous about Soviet intentions, the United States saw little choice but to back Chiang. To block Communist gains and ensure his control, military officials ordered the Japanese to surrender only to the Nationalists, mounted a massive air and sea lift of half a million Nationalist troops to strategic locations ahead of the Communists, deployed fifty thousand U.S. Marines to guard railroads and major cities, and provided Chiang more than $1 billion in emergency military aid. Clashes between Communists and Nationalists in Manchuria and northern China and signs of Soviet support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reinforced U.S. fears that conflict in China would provide opportunities for Soviet expansion, risking direct conflict with the United States. To head off a ruinous civil war and keep the USSR out of China, U.S. officials reverted to enticing the Communists into a coalition government in which Chiang would retain the upper hand.
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To implement this policy, Truman in late 1945 dispatched General Marshall to China on one of the most thankless missions ever undertaken by a U.S. diplomat. The task—shot through with contradictions—was to arrange a compromise between two warring parties while keeping a presumably reformed Nationalist government in power and checking Soviet and CCP influence. It was based on the naive assumptions that Chiang would reform his government and the two sides could reach meaningful agreements. Marshall had only limited leverage in the form of promises
of aid to each side. In the initial stages, he seemed to accomplish miracles. Called "the professor" by those Chinese he worked with, the illustrious general arranged a cease-fire and an end to troop movements. Even more remarkable, he sketched out the framework for a coalition government and integration of the armed forces. The Communists again spoke of promoting free enterprise and a "U.S. styled" democracy. Mao expressed interest in visiting Washington. It was a "stupendous accomplishment," the commander of U.S. forces in China, Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, exulted.
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