From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (97 page)

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was a "massively transformative event," David Kennedy has written.
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Globally, it shattered the old order, giving rise to a new international system. Those nations that had dominated world politics for years were either devastated by the war or, like Britain, financially and emotionally exhausted by the process of wreaking that destruction. The Soviet Union and especially the United States emerged the only nations capable of exerting great influence beyond their own borders. In part because of the circumstances of the war, in part because of the way it was fought, the United States alone among nations came out stronger than at the beginning. At war's end, it possessed the most powerful military establishment the world had ever known—plus the atomic bomb. An economy still stagnant in 1940 had shown incredible productive capacity. The U.S. homeland was scarcely touched by the war; civilian casualties were negligible. The nation's position in traditional areas of interest was stronger than ever. More important, its areas of interest had expanded exponentially. During the war, places formerly obscure to Americans became familiar.
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Through various kinds of wartime service, millions of Americans were internationalized. Many leaders believed more fervently than ever that their nation had been called to world leadership. The war had demonstrated the "moral and practical bankruptcy of all forms of isolationism," Luce proclaimed in 1941. It was America's "manifest destiny" to be "the Good Samaritan of the entire world."
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At war's end, the
New Republic
spoke for much of the nation's intellectual elite in calling Washington "the newly created World-Capital-on-the-Potomac" and proclaiming America's destiny to reorder a world destroyed.
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On the day of victory, according to Churchill, the United States stood "at the summit of the world."

With a touch of modesty—and no small hyperbole—former secretary of state Dean Acheson titled his 1969 memoir
Present at the Creation
and in the introduction called the Truman administration's task after World War II "just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis." The challenge, Acheson remembered, was to create from the chaos left by war "half a world, a free half . . . without blowing the whole to pieces in the process." Acheson took understandable pride at "how much was done."
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In fact, the results in terms of U.S. foreign policy were more revolutionary than even he allowed. Responding to the turmoil that was the new world "order" and to a perceived global threat from the Soviet Union, the Truman administration between 1945 and 1953 turned traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions upside down. A country accustomed to free security succumbed to a rampant insecurity through which nations across the world suddenly took on huge significance. Unilateralism gave way to multilateralism. Through the policy of containment, the Truman administration undertook a host of international commitments, launched scores of programs, and mounted a peacetime military buildup that would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier. The age of American globalism was under way.

The Second World War shattered the international system beyond recognition. Across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, the greatest conflict ever waged left a broad swath of destruction and human misery. An estimated 60 million people were killed, more than 36 million of them Europeans. The Soviet Union lost as many as 24 million, 14 percent of its prewar population. In China, an estimated 1.3 million soldiers were dead,
perhaps 15 million civilians. Japan lost almost 3 million people out of a prewar population of 70 million. Through much of the world, cities lay in ruins, factories demolished or idle, roads and bridges destroyed, fields unplowed. Food and water were in short supply if available at all, causing starvation, malnutrition, and disease. The war took an especially heavy toll on civilians. Millions of people were homeless—9 million in Japan alone. Hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons roamed the continent of Europe. In Berlin, according to U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy, "the odor of death was everywhere," the canals "choked with bodies and refuse." Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane described Warsaw as a "city of the dead." The war ended at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, and the especially gruesome destruction of those cities marked in horrific fashion the end of one era and the beginning of another.
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The war produced a redistribution of power more sweeping than in any previous period of history. Among the leading nations in the multipolar prewar international system, Japan, Italy, and Germany were defeated and occupied. Exhausted and nearly bankrupt, once-dominant Britain was reduced to a second-rank power. Defeated at the outset of the war and liberated by its allies, France suffered even greater loss of status and power. The Eurocentric world largely through a process of self-destruction came to an inglorious end. A new bipolar system replaced the old. Only the United States and the Soviet Union emerged from the war capable of wielding significant influence beyond their borders.

Decolonization, the liquidation of colonial empires that had been an established feature of world politics for centuries, further upset the old order. The war graphically displayed the weakness of the ruling powers, giving a huge boost to already potent nationalist movements.
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In the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia at war's end, revolutions erupted against onetime colonial masters. For the most part the colonial powers acquiesced in independence, leading to the creation of hundreds of new nations over the next three decades. The resulting instability shook the foundations of an already fragile international system and in the context of the Cold War provided a fertile breeding ground for Soviet-American conflict.

The war caused domestic political turmoil throughout much of the world. The discredited regimes of the 1930s vied with insurgent groups for
power; leftists challenged the more entrenched, conservative elites. In Poland, Greece, France, Yugoslavia, Korea, and China, to name a few, contending factions bitterly fought for power, causing instability and presenting opportunities for U.S. and Soviet intervention. In a broader sense, historian Thomas Paterson has written, the war "unhinged the world of stable politics, inherited wisdom, traditions, institutions, alliances, loyalties, commerce, and classes."
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Technology dramatically—and to contemporaries frighteningly—altered the postwar international system. Advances in transportation, especially aviation, drastically shrank distances. The world seemed more compact, more accessible—and more menacing. A people who historically had enjoyed relative freedom from danger portrayed these new threats in the most alarming way. "If you imagine two or three hundred Pearl Harbors occurring all over the United States," one official warned in 1944, "you will have a rough picture of what the next war might look like."
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Add to this what Secretary of War Henry Stimson called "the most terrible weapon ever known in human history"—the atomic bomb—an enormously destabilizing element in the postwar years.
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In this smaller and more menacing world, places and events that previously seemed unimportant suddenly took on great significance, drawing the attention, and often the intervention, of the two major powers.

Of all the world's nations, only the United States emerged stronger and richer at war's end. An economy recently devastated by depression soared to new heights from the demands of war. The gross national product skyrocketed from $886 million in 1939 to $135 billion in 1945. The nation's productive capacity doubled in wartime; the losses suffered by the rest of the world, the Soviet Union especially, made America's economic power relatively—and artificially—much greater. Economically, without question, the United States was the world's dominant power.
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America's relative military power exceeded its economic strength. On V-J Day, the United States had 12.5 million people under arms, more than half of them overseas. Its navy exceeded the combined fleets of all other nations; its air force commanded the skies; it alone possessed atomic weapons. Washington took London's place as the capital of world finance and diplomacy. Not surprisingly, the new United Nations Organization was located in New York.

Americans faced the postwar years with both optimism and concern. They reveled in Allied victory and took enormous pride in their nation's awesome military power. They were cheered by the return of abundance. At the same time, they worried that postwar demobilization could bring a return of economic depression, even the rise of a new fascism. The war had exposed a horrible capacity for evil and destruction, highlighted by the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Some Americans naturally feared that another conflict could exceed even the scale of World War II, perhaps destroy humankind. Despite their vast power, perhaps indeed because of it, some Americans worried about their nation's postwar security. Because of advances in technology, the United States could no longer depend on the oceans, allies like Britain, or hemispheric defense for its security. It could prevent future Pearl Harbors, Navy Secretary James Forrestal insisted, only by maintaining enough military power to make it "obvious that nobody can win a war against us."
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The United States could no longer focus its attention on the Western Hemisphere, Gen. George C. Marshall warned. "We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world."
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Other Americans recognized that their nation had a special opportunity—a new manifest destiny—to straighten out the mess made by the Europeans. "We have . . . the abundant means to bring our boldest dreams to pass—to create for ourselves whatever world we have the courage to desire," Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish exulted.
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Postwar periods generally bring major problems of readjustment, and World War II was no exception. Demobilization of millions of troops and reconversion of industry to civilian production brought hardship to many Americans. After decades of sacrifice and deprivation, a people eager once again to enjoy the fruits of abundance was frustrated and increasingly angered by recurrent strikes, shortages of consumer goods, and skyrocketing inflation. The Truman administration responded clumsily to these events and increasingly bore the brunt of public outrage. "To err is Truman" was a common witticism. For those who plaintively queried "What would FDR do if he were alive?" the jocular answer was sometimes "What would Truman do if he were alive?"
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Languishing in the political wilderness since 1932, power-hungry Republicans sharpened
their political knives and savored the prospects of regaining control of Congress and the White House.

Policymaking changed dramatically under Truman's very different leadership style. Understandably insecure in an office of huge responsibility in a time of stunning change, the new president was especially ill at ease in the unfamiliar world of foreign relations. Where FDR had been comfortable with the ambiguities of diplomacy, Truman saw a complex world in black-and-white terms. He shared the parochialism of most Americans of his generation, viewed people, races, and nations through the crudest of stereotypes, and sometimes used ethnic slurs. He assumed that American ways of doing things were the correct way and that the peace should be based on American principles. An avid student of history, he drew simple lessons from complicated events. He preferred blunt talk to the silky tones of diplomacy, but his toughness on occasion masked deep uncertainties and sometimes got him in trouble. His courage in facing huge challenges and his "buck stops here" decisiveness—a sharp contrast with his predecessor's annoying refusal to make commitments—have won him deserved praise. But decisiveness could also reflect his lack of experience and sometimes profound insecurity. An orderly administrator, again in marked contrast to FDR, he gave greater responsibility to his subordinates and insisted upon their loyalty.
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Given his lack of experience and knowledge, Truman at the outset had no choice but to turn to the experts. But he shared Roosevelt's disdain for State Department professionals—"the striped pants boys," he called them—and he profoundly distrusted the advisers he had inherited. To fill an enormous vacuum, he first turned to former South Carolina senator James F. Byrnes, FDR's "assistant president" for the home front. Truman may have felt a twinge of guilt at having taken the 1944 vice presidential nomination from the more prominent Byrnes. The secretary of state was next in line for the presidency, and he certainly felt the South Carolinian was better qualified than the earnest but out-of-his-depth incumbent Edward R. Stettinius Jr. Truman also mistakenly believed that because Byrnes had been at Yalta he could provide much-needed foreign policy expertise. Small of stature, possessed of a "characteristic Irish charm," according to a British diplomat, the new secretary of state was a skillful politician and master fixer—"conniving," Truman said of him admiringly.
On the other hand, his background was as provincial as his new boss's, and he too lacked knowledge of and fixed ideas about foreign policy. But he was not without confidence, and with the apparent blessings of the president, he set out to run foreign policy as he had managed wartime domestic programs. His lone ranger approach quickly got him into trouble with the bureaucracy and the man who had appointed him.
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As with domestic issues, between V-J Day and the end of 1945 Truman and Byrnes responded hesitantly and uncertainly to the baffling new world bequeathed by war. Like many other Americans, they yearned for simpler times, what Warren Harding had called normalcy. The United States' power was at its pinnacle, but it brought uncertainty instead of security, and Americans felt threatened, as Byrnes put it, by events from "Korea to Timbuktoo."
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They worried about instability in Western Europe and the strategically vital Mediterranean region. Not ready to scrap wartime cooperation with the USSR, they were increasingly alarmed by Soviet behavior. They especially feared that an aggressive Stalin might exploit global instability. Truman and Byrnes thus veered between tough talk and continued efforts to negotiate. By the end of the year, the administration had branded the onetime ally as an enemy.