From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (89 page)

World War II also thrust the military into a central role in formulating U.S. foreign policy. Traditionally, the armed forces had carried out policies designed by civilian leaders, but the nation's full-scale engagement in a total and global war and its involvement with a coalition pushed them into the realm of policymaking and diplomacy. Military ascendancy also resulted from Hull's rigid insistence on the artificial distinction between political and military matters and Roosevelt's growing dependence on his uniformed advisers. FDR initiated the process in 1939 by bringing them into the Executive Office of the President, thus bypassing the war and navy secretaries. In February 1942, he created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, composed of the service chiefs. In July, he named former chief of naval operations Adm. William Leahy his personal chief of staff with the primary duty of maintaining liaison between the White House and the Joint Chiefs. In this new role, the top brass formulated strategic plans. They accompanied the president to all his summit meetings, where they coordinated with Allied counterparts plans and operations. The emergence of the military into a key policymaking position brought enduring changes in civil-military relations and the formulation of national security policy.
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The military's new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, symbolized its growing importance in the Washington power equation. Begun on September 11, 1941, and occupied in 1942, this five-sided monstrosity with its miles of baffling corridors—"vast, sprawling, almost intentionally ugly"—housed some thirty thousand employees in 7.5 million square feet of floor space. Roosevelt disliked the building's architecture and assumed at war's end it would be used for storage. In fact, it remained in full operation. The very word
Pentagon
in time came to represent throughout the world the enormous military power of the United States—and, in the eyes of domestic and foreign critics, the allegedly dominant and sinister influence of the military in American life.
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Responsibility ultimately rested in the firm hands of the commander in chief. By this time sixty years old, FDR was weary from the strains of eight demanding years in the White House and his long struggle with polio. But the new challenges of global war reinvigorated him. He retained the undaunted optimism that was such an essential part of his personality, as necessary in 1942 as a decade earlier. "I use the wrong end of the telescope," he wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter in March, "and it
makes things easier to bear."
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He inspired Americans and others with his lofty rhetoric. He reveled in the ceremonial aspects of his job as commander in chief and delighted in the formulation of grand strategy. Always inclined toward personal diplomacy, he took special pleasure in his direct contact with world leaders such as the sinister and Sphinx-like Joseph Stalin and the bulldog Churchill. His broad circle of personal contacts provided him invaluable information outside regular channels. His chaotic administrative style supposedly left him firmly in control, but as the problems of global warfare became more numerous, more diffuse, and more complex, it also produced serious policy snafus (an acronym that grew out of bureaucratic foul-ups in World War II and stood for "situation normal, all fucked up") and gave clever subordinates the opportunity for freelancing, sometimes with baleful results. Not surprisingly, he continued to rely on obfuscation and outright deceit. "You know I am a juggler," he confessed in the spring of 1942, "and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. . . . I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war."
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Some critics claim that Roosevelt's wartime leadership lacked guiding principles, that he drifted from crisis to crisis without a clear sense of purpose or direction. Others insist that in fighting the evils of Nazism he was blind to the dangers of Communism. Still others contend that he and his military advisers focused too much on winning the war and gave insufficient attention to crucial political issues.

In truth, FDR was in many ways a brilliant commander in chief. He effectively juggled the many dimensions of the job. He skillfully managed the war effort and doggedly defended U.S. interests. Keenly aware of the dynamics of coalition warfare, he alone among Allied leaders had what he called a "world point of view."
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He correctly gave highest priority to holding the alliance together and winning the war, essential given the desperate situation of 1942 and the vastly divergent interests and goals of the major Allies. At times he seemed to act on whim or to muddle through, but he had a coherent if not completely formulated or publicly
articulated view for the peace. Like Wilson, he firmly believed in the superiority of American values and institutions. He was also certain that postwar peace and stability depended on the extension of those principles across the world and that other peoples would accept them if given a chance. By providing a middle ground between the totalitarianism of left and right, the New Deal, in his view, pointed the way to the future, and he saw in the war an opportunity to promote world reform along those lines. At the same time, as Robert Sherwood observed, "the tragedy of Wilson was always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness."
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He saw better than his mentor the limits of American power; he intuitively understood that diplomatic problems were not always susceptible to neat solutions. Roosevelt's pragmatic idealism, Warren Kimball has observed, thus "sought to accommodate the broad ideas of Woodrow Wilson to the practical realities of international relations."
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Global war provided the ultimate test for his enormous political skills; the untimeliness of his death ensured for him an uncertain legacy.

"There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies," Churchill asserted on the eve of victory in World War II, "and that is fighting without them!"
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Although an exercise in Churchillian hyperbole, the observation underscores a fundamental reality of coalition warfare: Alliances are marriages of convenience formed to meet immediate, often urgent needs. They contain built-in conflicts; their usefulness rarely extends beyond achievement of the purposes for which they were formed. Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States were forced into partnership in the summer of 1941 by the mortal threat of Nazi Germany. They agreed that Hitler must be defeated. They collaborated effectively to that end. But they brought to the alliance deep-seated mutual suspicions. They disagreed sharply on how and for what goals the war should be fought.

Throughout their wartime partnership, the major Allies viewed each other with profound distrust. The Soviet leaders had gained power by conspiratorial means and were suspicious by nature. Indeed, there is ample evidence that at various points Stalin suffered from acute paranoia. Communist ideology taught hatred of capitalism and seemed validated by history: the Allied interventions of 1918–19 designed in the Soviet view to overthrow their fledgling government; the long period of diplomatic
ostracism by the West; and the Munich agreement that left the Soviet Union exposed to Nazi power. They had no choice but to turn to the Western nations in June 1941 but remained wary of their allies. While traveling in the West, Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov slept with a revolver under his pillow. "Churchill is the kind who, if you don't watch him, will slip a kopek out of your pocket . . . ," Stalin told a Yugoslav Communist in 1944. "Roosevelt is not like that. He dips his hand in only for bigger coins."
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Westerners reciprocated Soviet suspicions. Churchill brought to the alliance a well-earned reputation as a Bolshevik-hater, and many Britons shared his view. The deeply emotional antipathy of Americans toward Communism was reinforced in the 1930s by Stalin's bloody purges of top party officials, his sordid 1939 pact with Hitler, and the "rape" of Poland and Finland. They only grudgingly acquiesced in Roosevelt's 1941 efforts to assist the Soviet Union. They warmed to the Russian people and even "Uncle Joe" Stalin somewhat during the war, but old fears never entirely dissipated.
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During World War II, the United States and Britain achieved probably the closest collaboration by any allies in time of war. Top military leaders worked together through a Combined Chiefs of Staff. The nations shared economic resources. They even agreed to share vital information on such top-secret military projects as the atomic bomb (which was not given the Soviet Union), although in this area Britain repeatedly protested that its ally did not keep its promises. Roosevelt and Churchill established a rare camaraderie, communicating almost daily during much of the war. Yet these two extraordinarily close allies remained deeply suspicious of each other. An ancient strain of Anglophobia in American life manifested itself repeatedly during the war. Britons saw better than Americans, and naturally resented, that the seat of world power was passing to the trans-Atlantic upstart. The two nations fought bitterly over strategy and trade issues. Despite their genuine friendship, Roosevelt and Churchill suspected one another and clashed over sensitive questions like the future of the British Empire.
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The three Allies were deeply divided on grand strategy. With much of its territory occupied by the Wehrmacht, the Soviet Union desperately needed material aid and the immediate opening of a second front in Western Europe to ease pressure on the embattled Red Army. Some U.S. Army planners agreed with the Soviet approach, if not with its timing. But U.S. Navy leaders after the humiliation of Pearl Harbor pushed for all-out war against Japan, and they gained support from Gen. Douglas MacArthur and much of the American public. The British posed a major roadblock to Stalin's demands. They vividly recalled the slaughter of 1914–18 and perceived that an early second front would necessarily be made up mainly of British troops. Thus they opposed an invasion of Western Europe until the Allies had gained overwhelming preponderance over Germany. Britain and especially Churchill also promoted operations around the periphery of Hitler's Fortress Europe to protect their imperial interests in the Middle East, southern Europe, and South Asia. For Stalin, such operations, however useful, were not enough. The U.S. brass vigorously objected to what they considered pinprick operations to pull British imperial chestnuts out of the fire.
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The Allies also disagreed sharply over war aims. Even with the Red Army reeling in the summer of 1941, Stalin made clear his determination to retain the Baltic States and those parts of Poland acquired in his deal with Hitler. His larger aims, like the man himself, remain shrouded in mystery, probably shifting with the circumstances of war. Ideology undoubtedly shaped the Soviet worldview, but Stalin's goals seem to have originated more from Russian history.
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He had no master plan for world conquest. Instead, he was a cautious expansionist, improvising and exploiting opportunities. At a minimum, the Kremlin sought to prevent Germany from repeating the devastation it had inflicted on Russia in the First World War and the early stages of the Second. Stalin also wanted a buffer zone in Eastern and Central Europe made up of what he called "friendly" governments, which meant governments he could control.
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The British hoped to restore a balance of power in Europe, the traditional basis of their national security, which required maintaining France and even Germany as major powers. Despite an explosion of nationalism in the colonial areas during the war, Churchill and other Britons clung to
the empire. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," the prime minister once snarled.
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The war aims of the United States were less tangible but no less deeply held. Political settlements should be based on the concept of self-determination of peoples; colonies should be readied for independence; an Open Door policy should govern the world economy; and a world organization should maintain the peace.

Unlike Wilson, who had insisted that the United States fight as an "associated" power, Roosevelt assumed leadership of the United Nations—indeed, he coined the term during Churchill's late 1941–early 1942 visit to Washington, delightedly wheeling into the prime minister's quarters and informing him while he bathed.
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The challenges were formidable. The president had to resist domestic political and navy pressures to scrap the Germany-first strategy and avenge Pearl Harbor. He had to deflect demands from his top military advisers to push U.S. rearmament at the expense of the Allies' immediate and urgent material needs. He had to resolve strategic disputes among the Allies and avert or resolve incipient conflicts over war aims. Above all, he had to hold the alliance together and employ its resources in ways best calculated to defeat its enemies.

To avoid divisive and possibly fatal conflict over war aims—and also the unpleasant situations he so disliked—FDR insisted that political issues not be resolved—or even for the most part discussed—until the war had ended. Such a course held great risk. The momentum and direction of the armies would likely determine, possily to U.S. detriment, the shape of territorial settlements. Roosevelt was also criticized after the war for failing to extract major political concessions from both allies while they were most dependent on the United States. Such arguments do not hold up under close scrutiny. Stalin might well have acceded to U.S. demands in 1941 only to break agreements later if it suited him. In any event, in the dark days of 1941–42, to have extorted concessions at the point of a gun might have critically set back or destroyed the Allied war effort.

Roosevelt used lend-lease to hold the alliance together and also as an integral part of what historian David Kennedy has called his "arsenal of democracy strategy."
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After Pearl Harbor, his military advisers insisted on top priority for precious supplies, arguing that if the United States was
ever to take the offensive, "we will have to stop sitting on our fannies giving out stuff in driblets all over the world."
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Looking at the war from a broader perspective, FDR perceived that lend-lease could assure allies of U.S. good faith and increase the fighting capabilities of armies already in the field, thus keeping maximum pressure on the enemy while his nation mobilized. He was also shrewd enough to recognize that supplying Allied armies would produce victory with less cost in U.S. lives. He thus gave Allied claims equal, in some cases higher, priority than U.S. rearmament. He used supplies with an eye to psychological as well as military impact. After Britain's devastating defeat at Tobruk in the summer of 1942, he sent three hundred of the newest Sherman tanks, a huge morale booster. He gave aid to Russia top priority among all competing claims and exerted enormous effort to deliver the goods.
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The administration rejected British proposals to pool resources. Nor did it ever completely do away with the "silly, foolish old dollar sign," and at Congress's insistence it kept detailed records of the cost of every item shipped. Under FDR's leadership, the United States provided more than $50 billion in supplies and services to fifty nations, roughly half of it to the British Empire, around one-fifth to the USSR. Aid to Britain alone included some 1,360 items, everything from aircraft to cigarettes to prefabricated housing for factory workers. Soviet leaders often complained about the paucity and slowness of U.S. lend-lease shipments, but at Yalta in February 1945 the normally laconic Stalin paid eloquent tribute to its "extraordinary contribution" to Allied victory.
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