The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (72 page)

Given the extraordinarily favorable economic and strategical position which the United States thus occupied, its post-1945 outward thrust could come as no surprise to those familiar with the history of international politics. With the traditional Great Powers fading away, it steadily moved into the vacuum which their going created; having become number one, it could no longer contain itself within its own shores, or even its own hemisphere. To be sure, the war itself had been the primary cause of this projection outward of American power and influence; because of it, for example, in 1945 it had sixty-nine divisions in Europe, twenty-six in Asia and the Pacific, and none in the continental United States.
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Simply because it was politically committed to the reordering of Japan and Germany (and Austria), it was “over there”; and because it had campaigned via island groups in the Pacific, and into North Africa, Italy, and western Europe, it had forces in those territories also. There were, however, many Americans (especially among the troops) who expected that they would all be home within a short period of time, returning U.S. armed-forces deployments to their pre-1941 position. But while that idea alarmed the likes of Churchill and attracted isolationist Republicans, it proved impossible to turn the clock back. Like the British after 1815, the Americans in their turn found their informal influence in various lands hardening into something more formal—and more entangling; like the British, too, they found “new frontiers of insecurity” whenever they wanted to draw the line. The “Pax Americana” had come of age.
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The economic aspects of this new order were, at least, predictable enough. During the war, internationalists like Cordell Hull had argued, with some reason, that the global crisis of the 1930s had been in large part caused by a malfunctioning of the international economy: by protective tariffs, unfair economic competition, restricted access to raw materials, autarkic governmental policies. This eighteenth-century Enlightenment belief that “unhampered trade dovetails with peace”
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was joined by the pressures exerted by export-oriented industries, which feared that a postwar slump might follow the decline in U.S. government spending unless new overseas markets were opened up to absorb the products of America’s enhanced productivity. To this was added a determined, and perhaps excessive, advocacy by the military to ensure American control of (or unrestricted access to) strategically critical materials such as oil, rubber, and metal ores.
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All this combined to make the United States committed to the creation of a new world order beneficial to the needs of western capitalism and, of course, to the most flourishing of the western capitalist states—though with the longer-term, Adam Smithian assurance that “the more efficient
distribution of resources brought about by unimpeded trade would raise productivity all around and thus increase everybody’s purchasing power.”
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Hence the package of international arrangements hammered out between 1942 and 1946—the setting-up of the International Monetary Fund, of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—and then the later General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Those countries wishing to secure some of the monies available for reconstruction and development under this new economic regime found themselves obliged to conform to American requirements on free convertibility of currencies and open competition (as the British did, despite their efforts to preserve imperial preference)
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—or to stand clear of the entire system (as the Russians did, when they perceived how incompatible this was with socialist controls).

The practical flaws in such arrangements were, first, that the amount of money available was simply insufficient to deal with the devastation caused by six years of total war; and, secondly, that a laissez-faire system inevitably works to the advantage of the country in the most competitive position—in this case, the undamaged, hyper-productive United States—and to the detriment of those less well equipped to compete—nations devastated by war, with boundaries altered, masses of refugees, bombed-out housing, worn-out machinery, ruinous debts, lost markets. Only the later American perception of the twin dangers of widespread social discontent in Europe and growing Soviet influence, which stimulated the creation of the Marshall Plan, permitted funds to be released for the substantial industrial redevelopment of the “free world.” By that time, however, the expansion of American economic influence was going hand in hand with the erection of an array of military-base and security treaties across the globe (below, pp. 389–90). Here, too, there are many parallels with the expansion of British bases and treaty relationships after 1815; but the most noticeable difference was that Britain, on the whole, was able to avoid the plethora of fixed and entangling alliances with other sovereign countries which the United States was now assuming. Almost all of these American commitments were, it is true, “a response to events”
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as the Cold War unfolded; but regardless of the justification, the blunt fact was that they involved the United States in a degree of global overstretch totally at variance with its own earlier history.

Little of this seems to have worried the decision-makers of 1945, many of whom appear to have felt not only that this was the working out of “manifest destiny,” but that they now had a golden opportunity to put right what the former Great Powers had managed to mess up. “American experience,” exulted Henry Luce of
Life
magazine, “is the key to the future.… America must be the elder brother of nations in the brotherhood of man.”
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Not only China, in which extremely high
hopes were placed, but all of the other countries of what was soon to be termed the Third World were encouraged to emulate American ideals of self-help, entrepreneurship, free trade, and democracy. “All these principles and policies are so beneficial and appealing to the sense of justice, of right and of the well-being of free peoples everywhere,” Hull prophesized, “that in the course of a few years the entire international machinery should be working fairly satisfactorily.”
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Whoever was so purblind as not to appreciate that fact—whether old-fashioned British and Dutch imperialists, or leftward-tending European political parties, or the grim-faced Molotov—would be persuaded, by a mixture of sticks and carrots, in the right direction. As one American official put it, “It is now our turn to bat in Asia”;
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and, he might have added, nearly everywhere else as well.

The one area where American influence was highly unlikely to penetrate was that controlled by the Soviet Union, which in 1945 (and ever since) claimed to be the true victor of the fight against fascism. According to the Red Army’s statistics, it had smashed a total of 506 German divisions; and of the 13.6 million German casualties and prisoners lost during the Second World War, 10 million met their fate on the eastern front.
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Yet even before the Third Reich had collapsed, Stalin was switching dozens of divisions to the Far East, ready to unleash them upon Japan’s denuded Kwantung Army in Manchuria when the time was ripe; which turned out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, three days after Hiroshima. The extended campaign on the western front more than reversed the disastrous post-1917 slump in Russia’s position in Europe; indeed, it actually restored it to something akin to that of the period 1814–1848, when its great army had been the gendarme of east-central Europe. Russian territorial boundaries expanded, in the north at the expense of Finland, in the center at the expense of Poland; and in the south, recovering Bessarabia, at the expense of Rumania. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were reincorporated into Russia. Part of East Prussia was taken, and a slice of eastern Czechoslovakia (Ruthenia, or Subcarpathian Ukraine) was also thoughtfully added, so that there was direct access to Hungary. To the west and southwest of this enhanced Russia lay a new
cordon sanitaire
of satellite states, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and (until they wriggled free) Yugoslavia and Albania. Between them and the West, the proverbial “iron curtain” was falling; behind that curtain, Communist party cadres and secret police were determining that the entire region would operate under principles totally at variance with Cordell Hull’s hopes. The same was true in the Far East, where the swift occupation of Manchuria, North Korea, and Sakhalin not only avenged the war of 1904–1905, but allowed a link-up with Mao’s Chinese Communists,
who were also unlikely to swallow the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism.

But if this growth of Soviet influence looked imposing, its economic base had been badly hurt by the war—in contrast to the United States’ undisturbed boom. Russia’s population losses were appalling: 7.5 million in the armed forces; 6–8 million civilians killed by the Germans; plus the “indirect” war losses caused by the reduced food rations, forced labor, and vastly increased hours of work, so that “altogether probably some 20–25 million Soviet citizens died premature deaths between 1941 and 1945.”
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Since the casualties were mainly men, the consequent imbalance between the sexes greatly affected the country’s demographic structure and caused a severe drop in the birthrate. The material damage done in the German-occupied parts of European Russia, the Ukraine, and Belorussia was so large as to be beyond normal imaginings:

It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that when the Russians moved into their “occupation zone” in Germany, they attempted to strip it of all movable assets, factory plant, rail lines, etc., as well as demanding compensations from other eastern European territories (Rumanian oil, Finnish timber, Polish coal).

It was true that the Soviet Union had outproduced Greater Germany in the armaments battle as well as outfighting it at the front; but it had done so by an incredibly single-minded concentration upon military-industrial production and by drastic decreases in every other sector—consumer goods, retail trade, and agricultural supplies (though the decline in food output was chiefly caused by German plunderings).
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In essence, therefore, the Russia of 1945 was a military giant and, at the same time, economically poor, deprived, and unbalanced. With Lend-Lease cut off, and having rejected later American monies because of the political conditions attached to them, the Soviet Union reverted to its post-1928 program of enforced economic growth from its own resources—with the same strong emphasis upon producer
goods (heavy industry, coal, electricity, cement) and transport to the detriment of consumer goods and agriculture, and with a natural reduction in military expenditures from their wartime levels. The result, after initial difficulties, was “a minor economic miracle”
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so far as heavy industry was concerned, with output nearly doubling between 1945 and 1950. Obsessed by the need to rebuild the sinews of national power, the Stalinist regime had no problems in achieving that crude aim or in keeping the standard of living for most Russians down at pre-Revolution levels. Yet it also ought to be noted that, as with the post-1922 growth, much of the “recovery” of industrial production consisted of getting back to the
prewar
output; in the Ukraine, for example, metallurgical and electrical output around 1950 had reached, or just exceeded, the 1940 figures. Once again, because of war, Russia’s economic growth had been choked back by a decade or so. More serious still, in the longer term, was the continued failure of the vital agricultural sector: with the emergency wartime incentive measures suppressed, and because of the totally inadequate (and misdirected) investment, farming wilted and food output slumped. Until his death, Stalin maintained his bitter vendetta against the peasantry’s preference for private plots, thereby ensuring that the traditional low productivity and high inefficiency of Russian agriculture would continue.
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By contrast, Stalin was clearly intent upon maintaining a high level of military security in the postwar world. Given the need to rebuild the economy, it was not surprising that the enormous Red Army was reduced by two-thirds after 1945, to the still very substantial total of 175 divisions, supported by 25,000 front-line tanks and 19,000 aircraft. It still would remain, therefore, the largest defense establishment in the world—a fact justified (in Soviet eyes, at least) by its need to deter future aggressors and, more prosaically, to keep control of its newly acquired satellites in Europe as well as its conquests in the Far East. Although this was an enormous force, many of its divisions existed only in skeleton form, or were essentially garrison troops.
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Moreover, the service ran the danger which had befallen the gigantic Russian army in the decades after 1815—increasing obsolescence, in the face of new military advances. This was to be combated not only by a substantial reorganization and modernization of the army’s divisions,
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but also by committing the economic and scientific resources of the Soviet state to the development of new weapon systems. By 1947–1948, the formidable MiG-15 jet fighter was going into service, and—in imitation of the Americans and British—a long-range strategic air force had been created. Captured German scientists and technicians were being used to develop a variety of guided missiles. Even during the war, resources had been allocated for the development of a Soviet A-bomb. And the Russian navy, which had been a mere ancillary
arm in the struggle against Germany, was also being transformed, with the addition of new heavy cruisers and even more oceangoing submarines. Much of this weaponry was derivative and, by western standards, unsophisticated. What could not be doubted, however, was the Soviet determination not to be left behind.
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