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Introduction
history of the relations between states, especially the great powers, from
approximately 1900 to 2000.
The history of the 20th century was shaped by the changing relations of
the world's great powers. The first half of the century, the age of the
World Wars and the start of the Cold War, was dominated by the rivalries
of those powers. The second half saw the replacement, largely through the
agency of those wars, of the European state system by a world system with
many centres of both power and discord. This article provides a single
integrated narrative of the changing context of world politics, from the
outbreak of World War I to the 1990s. Because domestic affairs figure
heavily in the analysis of each state's foreign policies, the reader should
consult the histories of the individual countries for more detail.
For discussion of the military strategy, tactics, and conduct of the World
Wars, see World War I and World War II.
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Russia was also a multinational empire, but with the exception of the
Poles her subject peoples were too few compared to Great Russians to
pose a threat. Rather, Russia's problem in the late 19th century was
backwardness. Ever since the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War,
tsars and their ministers had undertaken reforms to modernize
agriculture, technology, and education. But the Russian autocracy,
making no concession to popular sovereignty and nationality, was more
threatened by social change even than the Germans. Hence the
dilemma of the last tsars: they had to industrialize in order to
maintain Russia as a great power, yet industrialization, by calling into
being a large technical and managerial class and an urban proletariat,
also undermined the social basis of the dynasty.
In sum, the decades after 1871 did not sustain the liberal progress of
the 1860s. Resistance to political reform in the empires, a retreat
from free trade after 1879, the growth of labour unions, revolutionary
socialism, and social tensions attending demographic and industrial
growth all affected the foreign policies of the great powers. It was as
if, at its pinnacle of achievement, the very elements of liberal
progresstechnology, imperialism, nationalism, cultural modernism,
and scientismwere inviting Europeans to steer their civilization
toward calamity.
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of millions of men.
The French tide receded, at the cost of more than a million deaths
from 1792 to 1815, never to crest again. Population growth in France,
alone among the great powers, was almost stagnant thereafter; by
1870 her population of 36 million was nearly equal to that of
Austria-Hungary and already less than Germany's 41 million. By 1910
Germany's population exploded to a level two-thirds greater than
France's, while vast Russia's population nearly doubled from 1850 to
1910 until it was more than 70 percent greater than Germany's,
although Russia's administrative and technical backwardness offset to a
degree her advantage in numbers. The demographic trends clearly
traced the growing danger for France vis--vis Germany and the danger
for Germany vis--vis Russia. Should Russia ever succeed in
modernizing, she would become a colossus out of all proportion to the
European continent.
Population pressure was a double-edged sword dangling out of reach
above the heads of European governments in the 19th century. On the
one hand, fertility meant a growing labour force and potentially a
larger army. On the other hand, it threatened social discord if
economic growth or external safety valves could not relieve the
pressure. The United Kingdom adjusted through urban industrialization
on the one hand and emigration to the United States and the British
dominions on the other. France had no such pressure but was forced to
draft a higher percentage of its manpower to fill the army ranks.
Russia exported perhaps 10 million excess people to its eastern and
southern frontiers and several million more (mostly Poles and Jews)
overseas. Germany, too, sent large numbers abroad, and no nation
provided more new industrial employment from 1850 to 1910. Still,
Germany's landmass was small relative to Russia's, her overseas
possessions unsuitable to settlement, and her sense of beleaguerment
acute in the face of the Slavic threat. Demographic trends thus
helped to implant in the German population a feeling of both
momentary strength and looming danger.
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Social rifts also hardened during the period. Challenged by unrest and
demands for reforms, Bismarck sponsored the first state social
insurance plans, but he also used an attempt on the kaiser's life in
1878 as a pretext to outlaw the Social Democratic Party. Conservative
circles, farmers as well as the wealthier classes, came gradually to
distrust the loyalty of the urban working class, but industrialists shared
few other interests with farmers. Other countries faced similar
divisions between town and country, but urbanization was not
advanced enough in Russia or France for socialism to acquire a mass
following, while in Britain agriculture had long since lost out to the
commercial and industrial classes, and the working class participated
fully in democratic politics. The social divisions attending
industrialization were especially acute in Germany because of the
rapidity of her development and the survival of powerful precapitalist
elites. Moreover, the German working class, while increasingly
unionized, had few legal means of affecting state policy. All this made
for a series of deadlocks in German politics that would increasingly
affect foreign policy after Bismarck's departure.
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Why, then, was the flag planted in the first place? Sometimes it was to
protect economic interests, as when the British occupied Egypt in
1882, but more often it was for strategic reasons or in pursuit of
national prestige. One necessary condition for the New Imperialism,
often overlooked, is technological. Prior to the 1870s Europeans could
overawe native peoples along the coasts of Africa and Asia but lacked
the firepower, mobility, and communications that would have been
needed to pacify the interior. (India was the exception, where the
British East India Company exploited an anarchic situation and allied
itself with selected native rulers against others.) The tsetse fly and the
Anopheles mosquitobearers of sleeping sickness and malariawere
the ultimate defenders of African and Asian jungles. The correlation of
forces between Europe and the colonizable world shifted, however,
with the invention of shallow-draft riverboats, the steamship and
telegraph, the repeater rifle and Maxim gun, and the discovery (in
India) that quinine is an effective prophylactic against malaria. By
1880 small groups of European regulars, armed with modern weapons
and exercising fire discipline, could overwhelm many times their
number of native troops.
The scramble for Africa should be dated not from 1882, when the
British occupied Egypt, but from the opening of the Suez Canal in
1869. The strategic importance of that waterway cannot be
overstated. It was the gateway to India and East Asia and hence a vital
interest nonpareil for the British Empire. When the khedive of Egypt
defaulted on loans owed to France and Britain, and a nationalist
uprising ensuedthe first such Arab rebellion against the Western
presencethe French backed away from military occupation, although
with Bismarck's encouragement and moral support they occupied Tunis
in 1881, expanding their North African presence from Algeria. Prime
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By 1914, therefore, the political and moral restraints on war that had
arisen after 17891815 were significantly weakened. The old
conservative notion that established governments had a heavy stake in
peace lest revolution engulf them, and the old liberal notion that
national unity, democracy, and free trade would spread harmony,
were all but dead. The historian cannot judge how much social
Darwinism influenced specific policy decisions, but a mood of fatalism
and bellicosity surely eroded the collective will to peace.
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The dawn of the 20th century was thus a time of anxiety for the British
Empire as well. Challenged for the first time by the commercial,
naval, and colonial might of many other industrializing nations, the
British reconsidered the wisdom of splendid isolation. To be sure, in
the Fashoda Incident of 1898 Britain succeeded in forcing France to
retreat from the upper reaches of the Nile. But how much longer could
Britain defend her empire alone? Colonial Secretary Joseph
Chamberlain began at once to sound out Berlin on the prospect of
global collaboration. A British demarche was precisely what the
Germans had been expecting, but three attempts to reach an
Anglo-German understanding, between 1898 and 1901, led to naught.
In retrospect, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. The
German foreign minister and, from 1900, chancellor, Bernhard, Frst
(prince) von Blow, shared the kaiser's and Holstein's ambitions for
world power. If, as Germany's neo-Rankean historians proclaimed, the
old European balance of power was giving way to a new world balance,
then the future would surely belong to the Anglo-Saxons (British
Empire and America) and Slavs (Russian Empire) unless Germany were
able to achieve its own place in the sun. Blow agreed that our
future lies on the water. German and British interests were simply
irreconcilable. What Britain sought was German help in reducing
Franco-Russian pressure on the British Empire and defending the
balance of power. What Germany sought was British neutrality or
cooperation while Germany expanded its own power in the world.
Blow still believed in Holstein's free hand policy of playing the
other powers off against each other and accordingly placed a high
price on German support and invited Britain to join the Triple Alliance
as a full military partner. Understandably, the British declined to
underwrite Germany's continental security.
The failure of the Anglo-German talks condemned both powers to
dangerous competition. The German navy could never hope to equal
the British and would only ensure British hostility. But equality was not
necessary, said Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. All Germany needed was a
risk fleet large enough to deter the British, who would not dare
alienate Germany and thus lose their only potential ally in the
continuing rivalry with France and Russia. In this way Germany could
extract concessions from London without alliance or war. What the
Germans failed to consider was that Britain might someday come to
terms with its other antagonists.
This was precisely what Britain did. The Edwardian era (190110) was
one of intense concern over the decline of Britain's naval and
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breaking the Entente Cordiale, the affair prompted the British to begin
secret staff talks with the French military. The United States, Russia,
and even Italy, Germany's erstwhile partner in the Triple Alliance, took
France's side. For some years Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean
had been thwarted, and the attempt to conquer Abyssinia in 1896 had
failed. The German alliance seemed to offer little, while Rome's other
foreign objective, the Italian irredenta in the Tirol and Dalmatia, was
aimed at Austria-Hungary. So in 1900 Italy concluded a secret
agreement pledging support for France in Morocco in return for French
support of Italy in Libya. The Russo-Japanese War also strengthened
ties between France and Russia as French loans again rebuilt Russia's
shattered armed forces. Finally, and most critically, the defeated
Russians and worried British were now willing to put to rest their old
rivalry in Central Asia. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 made a
neutral buffer of Tibet, recognized Britain's interest in Afghanistan,
and partitioned Persia into spheres of influence. Foreign Secretary Sir
Edward Grey also hinted at the possibility of British support for Russian
policy in the Balkans, reversing a century-old tradition.
The heyday of European imperialism thus called into existence a
second alliance system, the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and
Russia. It was not originally conceived as a balance to German power,
but that was its effect, especially in light of the escalating naval race.
In 1906 the Royal Navy under the reformer Sir John Fisher launched
HMS Dreadnought, a battleship whose size, armour, speed, and
gunnery rendered all existing warships obsolete. The German
government responded in kind, even enlarging the Kiel Canal at great
expense to accommodate the larger ships. What were the British,
dependent on imports by sea for seven-eighths of their raw materials
and over half their foodstuffs, to make of German behaviour? In a
famous Foreign Office memo of January 1907, Senior Clerk Sir Eyre
Crowe surmised that Weltpolitik was either a conscious bid for
hegemony or a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship not
realizing its own drift. As Ambassador Sir Francis Bertie put it, The
Germans aim to push us into the water and steal our clothes.
For France the Triple Entente was primarily a continental security
apparatus. For Russia it was a means of reducing points of conflict so
that the antiquated tsarist system could buy time to catch up
technologically with the West. For Britain the ententes, the Japanese
alliance, and the special relationship with the United States were
diplomatic props for an empire beyond Britain's capacity to defend
alone. The three powers' interests by no means coincideddisputes
over Persia alone might have smashed Anglo-Russian unity if the war
had not intervened. But to the Germans the Triple Entente looked
suspiciously like encirclement designed to frustrate their rightful
claims to world power and prestige. German attempts to break the
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taxed for the defense program after they had paid higher prices for
bread. Popular resentment tended to increase the socialist vote, and
the other parties could command a majority only by banding together.
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the side of the entente. Moltke had already raised the notion of
preventive war, and in the kaiser's war council of December 1912 he
blustered, War, the sooner the better. To be sure, jingoism of this
sort could be found in every great power on the eve of the war, but
only the leaders in Berlinand soon Viennawere seriously coming to
view war not as simply a possibility but as a necessity.
The final prewar assault on the Ottoman empire also began in 1911.
Italy cashed in her bargain with France over Libya by declaring war on
Turkey and sending a naval squadron as far as the Dardanelles.
Simultaneously, Russian ministers in the Balkans brought about an
alliance between the bitter rivals Serbia and Bulgaria in preparation
for a final strike against Ottoman-controlled Europe. The First Balkan
War erupted in October 1912, when Montenegro declared war on
Turkey, followed quickly by Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. The Young
Turks ended the conflict with Italy, ceding Libya, but failed to contain
the Balkan armies. In May 1913 the great powers imposed a
settlement; Macedonia was partitioned among the Balkan states, Crete
was granted to Greece, and Albania was given its independence.
Landlocked Serbia, however, bid for additional territory in Macedonia,
and Bulgaria replied with an attack on Serbia and Greece, thus
beginning the Second Balkan War in June 1913. In the peace that
followed in August, Bulgaria lost most of her stake in the former
Turkish lands plus much of the southern Dobruja region to Romania.
Serbia, however, doubled its territory and, flushed with victory,
turned its sights on the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bosnia and
Hercegovina.
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Greater Serbia. Hence, the archduke was a marked man among the
secret societies that sprang up to liberate Bosnia. Such is the logic of
terrorism: its greatest enemies are the peacemakers.
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The previous day Poincar and Viviani had finally arrived back in Paris,
where they were met with patriotic crowds and generals anxious for
military precautions. In Berlin, anti-Russian demonstrations and
equally anxious generals called for immediate action. On the 31st,
when all the other powers had begun preparations of some sort and
even the British had put the fleet to sea (thanks to Winston Churchill's
foresight), Germany delivered ultimatums to Russia, demanding an end
to mobilization, and to France, demanding neutrality in case of war in
the east. But Russia and France could scarcely accede without
abandoning the Balkans, each other, and their own security. When the
ultimatums expired, the Schlieffen Plan was put into effect. Germany
declared war against Russia on August 1 and against France on August 3
and demanded safe passage for its troops through Belgium. Refused
again, Germany invaded Belgium in force.
On August 3, Italy took refuge in the fact that this was not a defensive
war on Austria-Hungary's part and declared its neutrality. That left
only Britain, faced with the choice of joining its entente partners in
war or standing aloof and risking German domination of the Continent.
Britain had little interest in the Serbian affair, and the kingdom was
torn by the Irish question. The cabinet was in doubt as late as August
2. But the prospect of the German fleet in the English Channel and
German armies on the Belgian littoral settled the issue. On the 3rd
Britain demanded that Germany evacuate Belgium, and Grey won over
Parliament with appeals to British interests and international law. On
August 4, Britain declared war on Germany.
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After World War II and the Cold War had left the issues of 1914 pass,
a committee of French and German historians agreed that World War I
had been an unwilled disaster for which all countries shared blame.
Only a few years later, however, in 1961, that consensus shattered.
The German historian Fritz Fischer published a massive study of
German war aims during 191418 and held that Germany's government,
social elites, and even broad masses had consciously pursued a
breakthrough to world power in the years before World War I and that
the German government, fully aware of the risks of world war and of
British belligerency, had deliberately provoked the 1914 crisis.
Fischer's thesis sparked bitter debate and a rash of new interpretations
of World War I. Leftist historians made connections between Fischer's
evidence and that cited 30 years before by Eckhart Kehr, who had
traced the social origins of the naval program to the cleavages in
German society and the stalemate in the Reichstag. Other historians
saw links to the Bismarckian technique of using foreign policy
excursions to stifle domestic reform, a technique dubbed social
imperialism. Germany's rulers, it appeared, had resolved before 1914
to overthrow the world order in hopes of preserving the domestic
order.
Traditionalist critics of Fischer pointed to the universality of
imperialistic, social Darwinist, and militaristic behaviour on the eve of
the war. The kaiser, in his most nationalistic moods, only spoke and
acted like many others in all the great powers. Did not Sazonov and
the Russian generals, in their unrecorded moments, yearn to erase the
humiliation of 1905 and conquer the Dardanelles, or Poincar and
General J.-J.-C. Joffre wonder excitedly if the recovery of
Alsace-Lorraine were finally at hand, or the Primrose and Navy leagues
thrill to the prospect of a Nelsonian clash of dreadnoughts? Germans
were not the only people who grew weary of peace or harboured
grandiose visions of empire. To this universalist view, leftist historians
like the American A.J. Mayer then applied the primacy of domestic
policy thesis and hypothesized that all the European powers had
courted war as a means of cowing or distracting their working classes
and national minorities.
Such new left interpretations triggered intense study of the
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The central fact of global politics from 1890 to 1914 was Britain's
relative decline. This occurred naturally, as industrial power diffused,
but was aggravated by the particular challenge of Germany.
Overextended, the British sought partners to share the burdens of a
world empire and were obliged in return to look kindly on those
partners' ambitions. But the resulting Triple Entente was not the cause
of Germany's frustrations in the conduct of Weltpolitik. Rather it was
the inability of Germany to pursue an imperial policy outrance.
Situated in the middle of Europe, with hostile armies on two sides, and
committed to the defense of Austria-Hungary, Germany was unable to
make headway in the overseas world despite her strength. By contrast,
relatively weak France or hopelessly ramshackle Russia could engage in
adventures at will, suffer setbacks, and return to the fray in a few
years. Schroeder concluded: The contradiction between what
Germany wanted to do and what she dared to do and was obliged to do
accounts in turn for the erratic, uncoordinated character of German
world policy, its inability to settle on clear goals and carry them
through, the constant initiatives leading nowhere, the frequent
changes in mid-course. All Germany could do was bluff and hope to
be paid for doing nothing: for remaining neutral in the Russo-Japanese
War, for not building more dreadnoughts, for letting the French into
Morocco, for not penetrating Persia. Of course, Germany could have
launched an imperialist war in 1905 or 1911 under more favourable
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circumstances. It chose not to do so, and German might was such that
prior to 1914 the other powers never considered a passage of arms
with Germany.
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World War I can be divided, without undue violence to reality, into three
periods: the initial battles, struggles for new allies, and mobilization on
the home fronts, occupying the period from 1914 to 1916; the onset of
ideologized warfare in the Russian revolutions and American entry in 1917;
and the final four-way struggle of 1918 among German imperialism, Allied
war-aims diplomacy, Wilsonian liberal internationalism, and Leninist
Bolshevism.
Like the Germans, the French had discarded a more sensible plan in
favour of the one implemented. French intelligence had learned of the
grand lines of the Schlieffen Plan and its inclusion of reserve troops in
the initial assault. General Victor Michel therefore called in 1911 for a
blocking action in Belgium in addition to an offensive into
Alsace-Lorraine. But this required twice the active troops currently
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The traditional British way of war had been maritime: destroy the
enemy's fleet, impose a blockade, and use land forces only to secure
key points or aid continental allies at decisive moments. In Sir John
Fisher's phrase, the army should be regarded as a projectile fired by
the navy. The prewar conversations with France, however, led the
War Office to consider how Britain's army might help in case of war
with Germany. General Henry Wilson insisted that even Britain's six
divisions of professionals could tilt the balance between France and
Germany and won his case for a British Expeditionary Force. Privately,
he conceded that six divisions were fifty too few and hoped for a
mass conscript army on continental lines.
By October 1914 all the plans had unraveled. After the German defeat
in the Battle of the Marne, the Western Front stabilized into an
uninterrupted line for 466 miles from Nieuwpoort on the Belgian coast
south to Bapaume, then southeast past Soissons, Verdun, Nancy, and
so to the Swiss frontier. Both sides dug in, elaborated their trench
systems over time, and condemned themselves to four years of hellish
stalemate on the Western Front.
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In the wide world, the Allies cleared the seas of German commerce
raiders and seized the German colonial empire. In the Pacific, New
Zealanders took German Samoa and Australians German New Guinea.
On Aug. 23, 1914, the Japanese empire honoured its alliance with
Britain by declaring war on Germany. Tokyo had no intention of aiding
its ally's cause in Europe but was pleased to occupy the Marshall and
Caroline archipelagos and lay siege to Germany's Chinese port of
Tsingtao, which surrendered in November. Germany's African colonies
were, on the outbreak of war, immediately cut off from
communications and supply from home, but military operations were
needed to eliminate the German presence. By early 1916, Togoland
(Togo) and Kamerun (Cameroon) fell to Anglo-French colonial forces
and German South West Africa (Namibia) to the South Africans. Only in
German East Africa was a native force under Lieutenant Colonel Paul
von Lettow-Vorbeck, numbering initially just 12,000 men, able to
survive for the entire war, tying down 10 times that number of Allied
troops.
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The first of the European neutrals to join the fray was the Ottoman
Empire. Having lost the Balkans before 1914 and fearing partition of
their Arab possessions by the Triple Entente, the Young Turks under
Enver Paa looked to Germany, whose military efficiency they
admired. Enver led in negotiating a secret German-Ottoman treaty,
signed Aug. 2, 1914. But the Grand Vizier and others in the Sultan's
court held back, even after extracting a German loantantamount to a
bribeof 5,000,000. The war party then resorted to more extreme
measures. The Ottoman fleet, reinforced by two German cruisers,
entered the Black Sea in October, bombarded Odessa and the Crimean
ports, and sank two Russian ships. The commander then falsified his
account to make it appear that the enemy had provoked the action.
The outraged Russians declared war on November 1. The Ottoman
Empire's alliance with the Central Powers was a serious blow to the
Entente, for it effectively isolated Russia from its Western allies and
weakened their hand in the Balkan capitals. The Turks concluded,
however, that a Triple Entente victory in the war would lead to the
partition of their empire even if they remained neutral (Allied
negotiations had already begun to this effect), whereas joining forces
with Germany gave them at least a fighting chance to survive and
perhaps even win some spoils from Russia. Enver also declared a jihad,
or holy war, inciting Muslims to rise up against British and Russian rule
in India, Persia, and Central Asia.
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Turkish forces deployed along the coasts of the Dardanelles and on the
Caucasus frontier with Russia, where severe fighting began in the
rugged mountains. Enver, with German encouragement, took the
strategic offensive when he ordered 10,000 troops from Syria to attack
the Suez Canal in late January 1915. After crossing the Sinai Peninsula
the tired soldiers found Indian and Australasian divisions in training, as
well as gunboats and other equipment they could not match. The Turks
fell back to Palestine and never menaced the canal again.
The vulnerability and value of the Dardanelles in turn attracted the
British. When Russia requested a Western assault on Turkey to relieve
the pressure in the Caucasus, War Secretary Lord Kitchener and First
Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill promoted an attack on the
Dardanelles. By capturing Constantinople, the British could link up
with the Russians, knock Turkey out of the war, and perhaps entice
the Balkan states to rally to the Allied cause. The British War Council
created an amphibious force of British, Australians, and New
Zealanders to capture the heights of the Gallipoli Peninsula. On April
25 the Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) forces went ashore, but
their assaults on the heights of Sari Bair were turned back through the
charismatic leadership of the young Turkish officer Mustafa Kemal. A
sweltering, bloody deadlock dragged on into the summer. Five more
divisions and another amphibious landing, at Suvla Bay in August,
failed to take the rugged heights in the face of human wave
counterattacks by the Turks. Cabinet opinion gradually turned against
the campaign, and the Allied force of 83,000 was evacuateda
dangerous operation conducted with great skillin January 1916. The
Turks had lost some 300,000 men, the Allies about 250,000 to battle
and disease. Gallipoli was, in Clement Attlee's words, the one
strategic idea of the war. Its failure, through bad leadership,
planning, and luck, condemned the Allies to seek a decision in bloody
battles of attrition on the Western Front.
The other peripheral front that enticed Allied strategists was Austria's
border with Italy. Though a member of the Triple Alliance, the Rome
government maintained on Aug. 3, 1914, that it was not bound to fight
since Austria had not been attacked nor had it consulted with Italy as
the treaty required. Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, a nationalist
dedicated to the Irredentists' goal of recovery of Trentino and Trieste
from Austria, announced that Italy would be informed by sacro
egoismo. This, he explained, was a mystical rather than cynical
concept, but it set off seven months of haggling over what the Allies
would offer Italy to enter the war, and what the Central Powers would
offer for neutrality. Some considerations were objective: Italy's 4,160
miles of coastline made defense against the Anglo-French fleet
virtually impossible; any gains extorted from the Central Powers for
neutrality would hardly be secure should those powers win the war;
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After Turkey and Italy, attention turned to the neutral Balkan states.
The entry of the Balkan states on the side of the Central Powers would
doom Serbia and open direct communications between Germany and
Turkey. Balkan participation on the Allied side would isolate Turkey
and complete the encirclement of Austria-Hungary. The Central
Powers had the upper hand in Bulgaria, still smarting from its defeat in
the Second Balkan War and allied with Turkey as of Aug. 2, 1914. The
Allies had little to offer Bulgaria except bribes, especially after their
failure at Gallipoli. German offers proved irresistible: Macedonia (from
Serbia) and parts of the Dobruja and Thrace should Romania and
Greece intervene. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers on Sept. 6, 1915.
In Romania the Allies had the upper hand despite a treaty, renewed in
1913, binding Bucharest and its Hohenzollern dynasty to the Triple
Alliance. Romania's main ambition was to annex Transylvania, a
Habsburg province populated largely by Romanians, but Prime Minister
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By the end of 1916 what may be called the traditional phase of the war
had run its course. Despite ever greater expenditures of men and
matriel and the accession of neutral powers to one side or the other,
victory remained elusive. Henceforth the coalitions would rely all the
more on breaking the internal cohesion of the enemy or on calling
forth global forces to tip the balance. The resort to revolution,
especially in Russia, and extra-European powers, especially the United
States, would have profound consequences for Europe's future in the
20th century, while internal mobilization for total war had already
gone far to reshape European societies.
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were the only acceptable end, then any means could be justified in
pursuit of it.
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front, subvert that of the enemy, and sway the opinions of neutrals. A
variety of techniques for manipulating information were used,
including particularly censorship and vilification of the enemy. German
propaganda depicted Russians as semi-Asiatic barbarians and the
French as mere cannon fodder for the bloated, envious British Empire
lusting to destroy Germany's power, prosperity, and Kultur. The French
Maison de la Presse and British Ministry of Information took German
war guilt for granted and made great play of the atrocities committed
by the Hun in Belgium and on the high seas, where defenseless
passenger ships were treacherously torpedoed. War hatred whipped up
by such propaganda made it all the more difficult to justify negotiating
a truce.
The Allies proved more adept than the Germans at psychological
warfare. Propaganda was distributed across German lines by shells,
planes, rockets, balloons, and radio. Such activities were given into
the hands of an Inter-Allied Propaganda Commission in 1918. The Allies
also, especially after 1917, identified themselves with such universal
principles as democracy and national self-determination, while the
German war effort had only a narrow national appeal. The most
important target of propaganda was the United States. In the first
weeks of war the British cut the German transatlantic cables and
subsequently controlled the flow of news to America. German
attempts to influence U.S. opinion were invariably clumsy, while the
British, aided by the common language, reminded Americans of their
common values for which German militarism had no respect. In
political warfare, German attempts to arouse the Muslim world and
incite India to rebellion were stillborn, while their exploitation of the
situation in Ireland, culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916,
backfired. The aristocratic and continental German officials seemed
out of their element when either trying to appeal to the masses or
looking beyond Europe. But their one success was nothing less than the
Russian Revolution of 1917 (see below The Russian Revolution).
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war broke out, but when it resumed in November 1914, Europeans sold
most of the $4,000,000,000 worth of securities they held before the
war. U.S. loans to belligerents were at first declared inconsistent
with the true spirit of neutrality, but the large Anglo-French orders
for U.S. munitions, raw materials, and food created an economic
boom, and by 1915 the Allies needed credit to continue their
purchases. An initial 200,000,000 loan in September 1915 led
eventually to billions being floated on the U.S. market and a complete
reversal of the financial relationship between the Old World and the
New. By 1917 the United States was no longer a debtor nation but the
world's greatest creditor. U.S. firms also inherited many overseas
markets, especially in Latin America, which the British and Germans
could no longer serve.
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other belligerents also ducked the suggestion lest they compromise the
determination of their people or incur the distrust of allies.
By the end of 1916 Germany had 102 U-boats ready for service, many
of the latest type, and the chief of the naval staff assured the Kaiser
that unrestricted submarine warfare would sink 600,000 tons of Allied
shipping per month and force Britain to make peace within five
months. Bethmann fought to delay escalation of the submarine war in
hopes of another Wilsonian peace move. But the President held off
new initiatives during his reelection campaign. When he had still not
acted by December 1916, Bethmann was forced to make a deal with
his own military, which consented to tolerate a German peace offer in
return for Bethmann's endorsement of unrestricted submarine warfare
if the offer failed. But the army helped ensure that the German note
(released December 12) would fail by insisting on implicit retention by
Germany of Belgium and other battlefield conquests. Wilson followed
on the 18th with an invitation to the two camps to define their war
aims as a prelude to negotiation. The Allies demanded evacuation of
occupied lands and guarantees against Germany in the future. The
Germans stuck to their December note, and the military command
decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1.
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For every belligerent, 1917 was a year of crisis at home and at the
front, a year of wild swings and near disasters, and by the time it was
over the very nature of the war had changed dramatically. A French
offensive in the spring soon ground to a standstill, sparking a wave of
mutinies and indiscipline in the trenches that left the French army
virtually useless as an offensive force. The British offensive of
JulyNovember, called variously Passchendaele or the Third Battle of
Ypres, was a tactical disaster that ended in a viscous porridge of mud.
That offensive action could be ordered under such conditions is a
measure of how far Western Front generals had been seduced into a
gothic unreality. Allied and German casualties in Flanders Fields,
where poppies grow numbered between 500,000 and 800,000. The
British Army, too, neared the end of its offensive capacities.
For two years the Italian front had been left unchanged by the first
nine battles of the Isonzo, but the underfinanced and
underindustrialized Italian war effort gradually eroded. The Tenth
Battle of the Isonzo (MayJune 1917) cost Italy dearly, while the
Eleventh (AugustSeptember) registered a success amounting to
some five miles of advance at a cost of over 300,000 casualties,
pushing the total for the war to more than 1,000,000. With peace
propaganda, strikes, and Communist agitation spreading throughout
Italy, and the Austrians in need of stiffening, the German high
command reinforced the Austrians at Caporetto. Within days the
Italian commander had to order a general retreat. The Germans broke
the line of the Tagliamento as well, and not until the Italians
regrouped at the Piave on November 7 did the front stabilize.
Caporetto cost Italy 340,000 dead and wounded, 300,000 prisoners,
and another 350,000 deserters: an incredible 1,000,000 in all,
suggesting that the Italian army, like the French, was on strike against
its own leadership.
Among the Central Powers also, 1917 intensified the yearning for
peace. Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav leaders had formed committees in
exile to agitate for the autonomy or independence of their peoples,
while war-weariness among those at home grew with food shortages,
bad news from the front, and desertions among the troops. When
Emperor Francis Joseph died in November 1916 after 68 years on the
throne, there was a sense that the empire must die with him.
Austro-Hungarian officials already had begun to look for a way out of
the warwhich meant a way out of the German alliance. The new
Habsburg foreign minister, the Polish Ottokar, Graf Czernin, raised the
issue of war aims and peace at his first ministerial meeting with the
new emperor, Charles. A negotiated peace could only be one without
victors or vanquished, conquests or indemnitiesso said Czernin 10
days before Wilson's own Peace Without Victory speech. The only
means of achieving such a peace, however, was for Austria-Hungary's
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The Ottoman Empire in 1917 began to give way before the relatively
mild but incessant pressure on fronts the other powers considered
sideshows. Baghdad fell to British forces in March. Sir Edmund Allenby,
having promised Lloyd George that he would deliver Jerusalem to the
British people as a Christmas present, made good his promise on
December 9. The political future of Palestine, however, was a source
of confusion. In the war-aims treaties, the British had divided the
Middle East into colonial spheres of influence. In their dealings with
the Arabs the British spoke of independence for the region. Then, on
Nov. 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration promised the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, albeit without
prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was persuaded that
this action was in British interest by the energetic appeals of Chaim
Weizmann, but in the long run it would cause no end of difficulty for
British diplomacy.
The one flank on which Turkey had not been besieged was the Balkan,
where an Allied force remained in place at Salonika pending resolution
of the Greek political struggle. The Allies continued to back Prime
Minister Eleuthrios Venizlos, who, because King Constantine still
favoured the Central Powers, had fled Athens in September 1916 and
set up a provisional government under Allied protection at Salonika.
Finally, the Anglo-French forces deposed Constantine in June 1917 and
installed Venizlos in Athens, whereupon Greece declared war on the
Central Powers. By the end of 1917, therefore, Turkey, like Austria,
was exhausted, beleaguered on four fronts, and wholly dependent on
German support.
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The Allies stood aloof from the nationalities while hope persisted of
detaching Austria-Hungary from Germany. But in 1918 the Allies took
up the revolutionary weapon. In April 1918 Masaryk sailed to the
United States, won personal recognition from Wilson and Secretary of
State Robert Lansing, and concluded the Pittsburgh Convention by
which Slovak-Americans, on behalf of their countrymen, agreed to join
the Czechs in a united state. The Czechoslovak National Council won
official recognition as a co-belligerent and de facto
government-in-exile from France in June, Britain in August, and the
United States in September. Only their quarrel with Italy kept the
Yugoslavs from achieving the same. Thus, de facto governments were
prepared to assume control of successor states as soon as Habsburg
authority should collapse, internally or on the military fronts.
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the 13th.
The first U.S. note responding to the German request for an armistice
was sent on October 8 and called for evacuation by Germany of all
occupied territory. The German reply sought to ensure that all the
Allies would respect the Fourteen Points. The second U.S. note
reflected high dudgeon about Germany's seeking assurances, given her
own war policies. In any case, the British, French, and Italians (fearing
Wilsonian leniency and angry about not being consulted after the first
note) insisted that their military commands be consulted on the
armistice terms. This in turn gave the Allies a chance to ensure that
Germany be rendered unable to take up resistance again in the future,
whatever the eventual peace terms, and that their own war aims
might be advanced through the armistice termse.g., surrender of the
German navy for the British, occupation of Alsace-Lorraine and the
Rhineland for the French. Wilson's second note, therefore, shattered
German illusions about using the armistice as a way of sowing discord
among the Allies or winning a breathing space for themselves. The
third German note (October 20) agreed to the Allies setting the terms
and indicated, by way of appeasing Wilson, that Maximilian's civilian
cabinet had replaced any arbitrary power (Wilson's phrase) in Berlin.
The third U.S. note (October 23) specified that the armistice would
render Germany incapable of resuming hostilities. Ludendorff wanted
further resistance, but the Kaiser instead asked for his resignation on
the 26th. The next day Germany acknowledged Wilson's note.
Some Allied leaders, most notably Poincar and General John Pershing,
bitterly disputed the wisdom of offering Germany an armistice when
her armies were still on foreign soil. Marshall Ferdinand Foch drafted
military terms harsh enough for the skeptics, however, and Georges
Clemenceau could not in good conscience permit the killing to go on if
Germany were rendered defenseless. Meanwhile, House, sent by
Wilson to Paris to consult with the Allies, threatened a separate
U.S.-German peace to win Allied approval of the Fourteen Points on
November 4 (excepting a British reservation about freedom of the
seas, a French one about removal of economic barriers and equality
of trade conditions, and a clause enjoining Germany to repair war
damage). House and Wilson jubilantly concluded that the foundations
of a liberal peace were in place: substitution of the Fourteen Points
for the Allies' imperialist war aims and the transition of Germany to
democracy. The fourth U.S. note (November 5) informed the Germans
of Allied agreement and the procedures for dealing with Foch.
Germany, however, seemed to be moving less toward democracy than
toward anarchy. On October 29 the naval command ordered the High
Seas Fleet to leave port for a last-ditch battle, prompting a mutiny,
then full insurrection on November 3. Workers' and soldiers' councils
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The damage wrought by war would live on through the erosion of faith in
19th-century liberalism, international law, and Judeo-Christian values.
Whatever the isolated acts of charity and chivalry by soldiers struggling in
the trenches to remain human, governments and armies had thrown
away, one by one, the standards of decency and fair play that had
governed European warfare, more or less, in past centuries. Total war
meant the starving of civilians through naval blockade, torpedoing of
civilian craft, bombing of open cities, use of poison gas in the trenches,
and reliance on tactics of assault that took from the private soldier any
dignity, control over his fate, or hope of survival. World War I
subordinated the civilian to the military and the human to the machine.
It remained only for such imperious cynicism to impose itself in
peacetime as well, in totalitarian states modeled on war government,
until the very distinction between war and peace broke down in the
1930s.
Peacemaking, 191922
The bells, flags, crowds, and tears of Armistice Day 1918 testified to the
relief of exhausted Europeans that the killing had stopped and underscored
their hopes that a just and lasting peace might repair the damage, right
the wrongs, and revive prosperity in a broken world. Woodrow Wilson's call
for a new and democratic diplomacy, backed by the suddenly commanding
prestige and power of the United States, suggested that the dream of a
New Jerusalem in world politics was not merely Armistice euphoria. A
century before, Europe's aristocratic rulers had convened in the capital of
dynasties, Vienna, to fashion a peace repudiating the nationalist and
democratic principles of the French Revolution. Now, democratic
statesmen would convene in the capital of liberty, Paris, to remake a
Europe that had overthrown monarchical imperialism once and for all in
this war to end war.
In fact, the immense destruction done to the political and economic
landmarks of the prewar world would have made the task of peacemaking
daunting even if the victors had shared a united vision, which they did not.
Central and eastern Europe were in a turmoil in the wake of the German,
Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman collapses. Revolution sputtered in Berlin
and elsewhere, and civil war in Russia. Trench warfare had left large
swaths of northern France, Belgium, and Poland in ruin. The war had cost
millions of dead and wounded and more than $236,000,000,000 in direct
costs and property losses. Ethnic hatreds and rivalries could not be
expunged at a stroke, and their persistence hindered the effort to draw or
redraw dozens of boundaries, including those of the successor states
emerging from the Habsburg empire. In the colonial world the war among
the imperial powers gave a strong impetus to nationalist movements. India
alone provided 943,000 soldiers and workers to the British war effort, and
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the French empire provided the home country with 928,000. These men
brought home a familiarity with European life and the new anti-imperialist
ideas of Wilson or Lenin. The war also weakened the European powers
vis--vis the United States and Japan, destroyed the prewar monetary
stability, and disrupted trade and manufactures. In sum, a return to 1914
normalcy was impossible. But what could, or should, replace it? As the
French foreign minister Stphen Pichon observed, the war's end meant only
that the era of difficulties begins.
The Paris Peace Conference ultimately produced five treaties, each named
after the suburban locale in which it was signed: the Treaty of Versailles
with Germany (June 28, 1919); the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria
(Sept. 10, 1919); the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (Nov. 27, 1919); the
Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (June 4, 1920); and the Treaty of Svres
with Ottoman Turkey (Aug. 10, 1920). In addition, the Washington
Conference treaties on naval armaments, China, and the Pacific (192122)
established a postwar regime in those areas.
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Liberal internationalism set the tone for the Paris Peace Conference.
European statesmen learned quickly to couch their own demands in
Wilsonian rhetoric and to argue their cases on grounds of justice
rather than power politics. Yet Wilson's principles proved, one by one,
to be inapplicable, irrelevant, or insufficient in the eyes of European
governments, while the idealistic gloss they placed on the treaties
undermined their legitimacy for anyone claiming that justice had
not been served. Wilson's personality must bear some of the blame for
this disillusionment. He was a proud man, confident of his objectivity
and prestige, and he insisted on being the first U.S. president to sail to
Europe and to conduct negotiations himself. He had visited Europe
only twice before, as a tourist, and now delayed the peace conference
in order to make a triumphant tour of European capitals. Moreover,
the Democrats lost their Senate majority in the elections of November
1918, yet Wilson refused to include prominent Republicans in his
delegation. This allowed Theodore Roosevelt to declare that Wilson
had absolutely no authority to speak for the American people.
Wilson's flaws exacerbated the difficulty of promoting his ideals in
Paris and at home. Still, he was a prophet in world politics, both as
lawgiver and as seer. Only a peace between equals, he said, can last.
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Postwar France faced a severe triple crisis. The first involved future
security against German attack: Germany remained far more populous
and industrial than France, and now France's erstwhile eastern ally,
Russia, was hors de combat. The French would try to revive an
anti-German alliance system with the new states in eastern Europe,
but the only sure way to restore a balance of power in Europe was to
weaken Germany permanently. The second crisis was financial. France
had paid for the war largely by domestic and foreign borrowing and
inflation. To ask the nation to sacrifice further to cover these costs
was politically impossible. Indeed, any new taxes would spark bitter
social conflict over which groups would bear the heaviest burdens. Yet
France also faced the cost of rebuilding the devastated regions and
supporting an army capable of forcing German respect for the eventual
treaty. The French, therefore, hoped for inflows of capital from
abroad to restore their national solvency. Third, France faced a crisis
in her heavy industry. The storm of steel on the Western Front made
obvious the strategic importance of metallurgy in modern war.
Recovery of Alsace-Lorraine lessened France's inferiority to Germany in
iron but by the same token worsened her shortage of coal, especially
metallurgical coke. European coal production was down 30 percent
from prewar figures by 1919, creating acute shortages everywhere. But
France's position was especially desperate after the flooding of French
mines by retreating German soldiers. To realize the industrial
expansion made possible by the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, France
needed access to German coal and markets and preferably a cartel
arrangement allowing French industry to survive German competition
in the peacetime to come.
Wilson's program was not without promise for France if collective
security and Allied solidarity meant permanent British and American
help to deter future German attacks and restore the French economy.
In particular, the French hoped that the wealthy United States would
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forgive the French war debts. On the other hand, if Britain and the
United States pursued their own interests without regard to French
needs, then France would be forced to find solutions to its triple crisis
through harsher treatment of Germany.
In some respects, Britain stood between France and the United States.
It would be more accurate, however, to view Britain as the third point
of a triangle, attached to the interests of France in some cases, to the
principles of the United States in others. Hence, Prime Minister David
Lloyd George, second only to Wilson in liberal rhetoric, was accused by
Americans of conspiring with Clemenceau to promote old-fashioned
imperialism, and, second only to the French in pursuing balance of
power, was accused by Clemenceau of favouring the Germans. But
that was Britain's traditional policy: to prop up the defeated power in
a European war and constrain the ambitions of the victor. To be sure,
in the election campaign held after the Armistice, Lloyd George's
supporters brandished slogans like Hang the Kaiser and Squeeze the
German lemon til the pips squeak, but at the peace conference to
come, Lloyd George equivocated. Britain would take the toughest
stand of all on German reparations in hopes of ameliorating its own
financial situation vis--vis the United States, but otherwise promoted
a united, healthy Germany that would contribute to European recovery
and balance the now ascendant power of France. Of course, Lloyd
George also demanded a ban on German naval armaments and
partition of Germany's colonies.
Exhausted Italy was even less able than France to absorb the costs of
war. Labour unrest compounded the usual ministerial instability and
enhanced the public appeal of anti-Communist nationalists like Benito
Mussolini. But the hope that the war would prove somehow worthwhile
put peace aims at the centre of Italian politics. In April 1918 the terms
of the Treaty of London were proclaimed on the floor of Parliament,
sparking months of debate between nationalists and Wilsonians over
their propriety. By January 1919, however, Prime Minister Vittorio
Emanuele Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino had won a
mandate for a firm position at the peace conference in favour of all
Italy's claims with the exception of that to the entire Dalmatian coast.
The other victorious Great Power, Japan, suffered the least human
and material loss in the war and registered astounding growth.
Between 1913 and 1918 Japanese production exploded, foreign trade
rose from $315,000,000 to $831,000,000, and population grew 30
percent until 65,000,000 people were crowded into a mountainous
archipelago smaller than California. Clearly Japan had the potential
and the opportunity for rapid expansion in the Pacific and East Asia.
Finally, the defeated Germans also looked with hopes to the peace
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the status quo. Upon final rejection in April of a Franco-Italian plan for
tougher collective security and an international force adequate to
enforce peace, French newspapers scorned the League as a toothless
debating society. And since Clemenceau had succeeded in having
Germany barred from the League pending good behaviour, the German
press denounced it as a League of Victors.
In mid-February Wilson returned to the United States to attend to
presidential duties, and in his absence committees went to work on
the details of the German treaty. Foremost in the minds of the French
was security against future German attack. As early as November 1918
Marshal Ferdinand Foch drafted a memo identifying the Rhine as the
frontier of democracy and arguing for the separation of the Rhineland
from Germany and its occupation in perpetuity by Allied troops. This
plan echoed earlier French war aims: The victory of 1871 had created
a unified Germany; the defeat of 1918 should undo it. Foch's
occupation forces tried also to locate and encourage the Rhenish
autonomist tendencies that grew up for a brief time in 1919 out of the
desire to escape the burden of defeat and fear of the Communist
agitation in Berlin. But the primary French argument was strategic:
Four times in a century German armies had invaded France from the
Rhineland (1814, 1815, 1870, 1914), and a united Germany would
remain potentially overwhelming. As General Fayolle put it, One
speaks of the League, but what can this hypothetical society do
without a means of action? One promises alliances, but alliances are
fragile, like all human things. There will always come a time when
Germany will have a free hand. Take all the alliances you want, but
the greatest need for France and Belgium is a material barrier.
Andr Tardieu, Clemenceau's chief aide, sought to give the Rhineland
scheme a Wilsonian gloss in a lengthy memo distributed on February
25. The Rhenish people, he claimed, were largely Celtic, Catholic, and
liberal and resented the rule of Germanic, Protestant, and
authoritarian Prussia. They had been loyal citizens of the French
Republic and Empire from 1792 to 1815. Thus an autonomous
Rhineland would serve both self-determination and the defense of
democracy. The British and Americans rejected Tardieu's brief in the
strongest terms and warned that dismemberment of Germany would
only create a new Alsace-Lorraine and the seeds of a new war. In
April, after Wilson returned to Paris, he and Lloyd George countered
with an unprecedented offer: an Anglo-American guarantee to fight on
the side of France in case of future German aggression. The French
were again skeptical. In a future war the United States and Britain
would need months or years to raise and transport armies, by which
time France might be lost. On the other hand, how could Clemenceau
refuse an unlimited extension of the wartime coalition? On March 17
he proposed a mixed solutionthe guarantee treaties, plus material
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Allied delegates and populations were scarcely happier with the treaty
than the Germans. British diplomat Harold Nicolson echoed the views
of disillusioned Wilsonians when he left the signing ceremony in
disgust, and thence to bed, sick of life. Economist John Maynard
Keynes quit the peace conference in protest and returned to Britain to
write a scathing critique of Wilson and the treaty, whose economic
clauses, he said, stymied European recovery. Nor were the French
satisfied. Marshal Foch despaired of containing the power of a united
Germany and prophesied: This is not peace, but a truce for 20 years.
Poincar predicted willful German default and Allied disputes over
execution. Clemenceau had to exploit all his prestige to win
parliamentary ratification, and still he lost the presidential election
that followed.
As for Wilson, the treaty he had personally helped to fashion, and the
global obligations it imposed on the United States, proved unpopular
with various factions in American politics, including nationalists,
isolationists, Monroe Doctrine regionalists, xenophobes, and tariff
protectionists. The immediate postwar years also gave rise to the red
scare, the first legislation limiting immigration to the United States
on an ethnic basis, and the belief that Wilson had been duped by the
clever Europeans so that the war redounded only to the benefit of
Anglo-French imperialism. But it is not true that the United States
retreated at once into isolationism. The debate over Versailles was
essentially a debate over the terms on which the United States would
continue to play a role in world affairs. Most important was fear that
Article 10 of the League Covenant might embroil the United States in
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French and British workers and soldiers. On the other hand, the Red
Terror launched by the Bolsheviks in 1918, including the murder of the
royal family, convinced many in the West that this new breed was
beyond the pale. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing called
Bolshevism the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human
mind has ever conceived. When, in August 1918, the Cheka (secret
police) arrested 200 British and French residents of Moscow, invaded
their consulates, and murdered the British naval attach, opinion
spread in Paris and London that the Bolsheviks were thugs and bandits,
if not German agents. In the autumn the Allies imposed a blockade on
the Moscow regime and broke the last contacts (diplomatic missions
and the Red Cross) that still existed.
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The Russian Civil War was a vast, protean struggle fought out in five
major theatres with rapid thrusts over hundreds of miles made possible
by railroads and cavalry. The Reds took good advantage of their
interior lines, while their control of Russia's industrial heartland and
trunk rail lines and their ruthless requisitioning (known as War
Communism) procured enough food and supplies for them to outlast
their enemies. The outcome was not inevitable, but the inability of
the far-flung White forces to coordinate their actions exposed them to
defeat in detail. Denikin took Kiev in September 1919, but a Soviet
counteroffensive forced him steadily back until his last base fell in
March 1920. Command in the south fell to General Pyotr Wrangel.
Meanwhile, the Red Army drove out Kolchak and recaptured Omsk in
November 1919. On April 25, 1920, war broke out between the Soviets
and Poland as the Polish leader, Marshal Jzef Pisudski, pursued his
ambition of a grand Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian empire. On May 7 the
Poles captured Kiev, but a Soviet counterstroke drove them out (June
11), captured Vilnius (July 15), and soon threatened Warsaw itself.
Alarms arose in western Europe over the possible sovietization of
Poland and even a German-Bolshevik alliance to overthrow the Treaty
of Versailles. But Pisudski, with advice from French attach General
Maxime Weygand, hurled back the overextended Reds, took 66,000
prisoners, and recaptured extensive Belorussian territories. Distressed
by the resistance of the Poles to the Revolution, Lenin counseled
peace, as at Brest-Litovsk, even on humiliating terms. A preliminary
treaty (October 12) and final Treaty of Riga (March 18, 1921) fixed the
Soviet-Polish border just to the west of Minsk and far to the east of the
Curzon Line proposed at Paris.
Peace with Poland freed the Red Army to turn south and eliminate the
last resistance from Wrangel, who evacuated the Crimea on Nov. 14,
1921. Soviet forces invested the Caucasus as well, setting up an
autonomous federation of Communist regimes in Georgia, Armenia,
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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came into existence on Dec. 30,
1922. In the World War and Civil War, Russia had lost Poland, Finland,
the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. The Communist government had
survived, but the Revolution had failed to spread. Hence, the
Bolshevik leaders were left to construct a permanent relationship to
an outer world which they defined as implacably hostile. The Western
powers, in turn, faced the challenge of living with a Great Power that
repudiated, at least publicly, all norms of international behaviour.
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In the north, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia won
their independence from Moscow and were sheltered by the British
fleet. But an example of the difficulties in applying national
self-determination was the Polish-Lithuanian quarrel over the
disposition of Vilnius. That town (according to 1897 Russian statistics)
was 40 percent Jewish, 31 percent Polish, 24 percent Russian, and 2
percent Lithuanian. Vilnius Province, however, was 61 percent
Russian, 17 percent Lithuanian, 12 percent Jewish, and 8 percent
Polish. In December 1919 the Supreme Allied Council provisionally
awarded Vilnius to Lithuania. Poland and Czechoslovakia similarly
quarreled over the coal-rich Teschen district. Poles predominated in
the district, but historic claims lay with Bohemia. In the end the Great
Powers merely ratified the de facto partition effected by occupying
Polish and Czech troopsa solution that favoured Czechoslovakia and
left a bitterness the two states could ill afford and never overcame.
Finally, the Polish-German conflict over Upper Silesia, another
coal-rich region of mixed nationality, proved that even the League of
Nations could not make an objective judgment. The March 1921
plebiscite called for in the Treaty of Versailles (one of the few
concessions awarded the German delegation) showed German
preponderance in the region as a whole but Polish majorities in the
vital mining districts. The British delegation in the League argued that
Germany could hardly be expected to pay reparations if it lost yet
another rich source of coal, while the French sought to weaken
Germany further and bolster the Polish economy. Finally, in October
1922, Poland was granted the greater portion of the mines.
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went so far as to plead his case publicly in the French press on April
24, 1919, a violation of diplomatic etiquette that provoked the Italians
to bolt the conference. Upon their return, a compromise of sorts was
achieved: Italy received Trieste, parts of Istria and Dalmatia, and the
Upper Adige as far as the Brenner Pass with its 200,000
German-speaking Austrians. But Wilson refused to budge on Fiume, a
province whose hinterland was Yugoslav but whose port city was
Italian. On June 19 Orlando's government fell over the issue. In August
Fiume was declared a free city, and in September a band of Italian
freebooters led by the nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio declared
Fiume a free state. Such passions among Italians over their mutilated
victory helped prepare the way for the triumph in 1922 of Mussolini's
Fascists.
The Treaty of Trianon, delayed until 1920 by the Communist coup in
Hungary, partitioned that ancient kingdom among its neighbours.
Transylvania, including its minority of 1,300,000 Magyars, passed to
Romania. The Banat of Temesvr (Timioara) was divided between
Romania and Yugoslavia, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia passed to
Czechoslovakia, and Croatia to Yugoslavia. All told, Hungary's territory
shrank from 109,000 to 36,000 square miles. The armies of rump
Austria and Hungary were limited to 35,000 men.
The Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria marked yet another stage in the
old struggles over Macedonia dating back to the Balkan wars and
beyond. Bulgaria lost its western territories back to the kingdom of
Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and nearly all of Western Thrace to
Greece, cutting the Bulgarians off from the Aegean. Their armed
forces were likewise limited to 20,000 men. Austria, Hungary, and
Bulgaria also accepted war guilt and reparations obligations, but these
were later remitted in light of their economic weakness.
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A broken world
The failure of democratic consensus
But what was normal in a world broken by total war? The pillars of the
antebellum systemthe balance of power, the non-interventionist
state, the gold standard, and the free-market economylay in ruins
and in any case reflected a faith in the natural play of political and
economic forces that many Europeans had ceased to share. Wilsonians
and Leninists blamed balance-of-power diplomacy for the war and fled
from such normalcy. Technocrats, impressed by the productivity of
regulated war economies, hoped to extend them into peacetime to
promote recovery and dampen competition. Some economists and
politicians even applauded the demise of the gold standard (a
barbarous relic, said Keynes) since inflation seemed the only means
of financing jobs and veterans' pensions, thus stabilizing domestic
societies. Finally, the free-market economy that had made high
growth rates and technological dynamism seem normal from 1896 to
1914 was itself challenged by Socialists on the left and corporate
interest groups on the right. In every case governments found it easier
to try to shift the burden of reconstruction on to foreign powers,
through reparations, loans, or inflation, than to impose taxes and
austerity on quarreling social groups at home. It soon became clear
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Far from sympathizing with France's plight, the United States and
Britain quickly withdrew from the Versailles treaty. Britain found itself
in the midst of a postwar economic slump magnified by its wartime
losses in ships and markets. Lloyd George had promised the veterans a
land fit for heroes, yet unemployment reached 17 percent in 1921.
The war had accelerated the decline of the aging British industrial
plant and the economy more generally. Unemployment never dipped
much below 10 percent during the decade before the onset of the
Great Depression, and in the early 1920s the pressure was on the
British government to boost employment by reviving trade. Keynes
argued persuasively that while Europe could never recover until the
German economy took its natural place at the centre, virtually every
clause of the treaty seemed designed to prevent that particular return
to normalcy. To be sure, the British needed the reparations debt from
Germany on the books to balance against their own war debts to the
United States. But soon after the war Lloyd George came to favour
German recovery in the interest of trade. The entente with France
became strained as early as 1920 over the issues of reparations,
Turkey, and the coal shortage of that year, from which Britain
garnered windfall profits at the expense of the French.
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The paper mark reached 4,000,000 to the dollar in August, and the
Reich treasury was at the end of its tether. Business in non-occupied
Germany was choking, and social unrest was spreading. Bavarian
rightists called for war or separatism, while the Communist Party made
gains in the cities. Gustav Stresemann, the conservative,
business-oriented politician who replaced Cuno, finally ended passive
resistance in September 1923 to preserve the life of the nation and
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Fascist diplomacy
Italian diplomacy in the 1920s, therefore, was a mix of bombast and
caution. At the Lausanne Conference, Mussolini dramatically stopped
his train to oblige Poincar and Curzon to come to him. He made Italy
the first Western power to offer a trade agreement and recognition to
the Bolsheviks and was proud of Italy's role in the League (though he
considered it an academic organization) and as a guarantor of the
Locarno Pact. In the Mediterranean, Mussolini protested French rule in
Tunis and asserted for Italy a moral claim to the province. But he
satisfied his thirst for action against weaker opponents. He broke the
Regina Agreement with the Sans tribesmen of Libya, which had
limited Italian occupation to the coast, and by 1928 completed Italy's
conquest of that poor and weak country.
Italy's main sphere of activity was the Balkans. When an Italian general
surveying the border of a Greek-speaking district of Albania was killed
in August 1923, Mussolini ordered a naval squadron to bombard the
Greek isle of Corfu. The League of Nations awarded Italy an indemnity,
but not the island. In January 1924, Wilson's Free State of Fiume
disappeared when Yugoslav Premier Nikola Pai granted Italian
annexation in the Treaty of Rome. Diplomatic attempts to regularize
relations between Belgrade and Rome, however, could not overcome
Yugoslavia's suspicion of Italian ambitions in Albania. In 1924 a coup
d'tat, ostensibly backed by Belgrade, elevated the Muslim Ahmed Bey
Zogu in Tiran. Once in power, however, Ahmed Zogu looked to Italy.
The Tiran Pact (Nov. 27, 1926) provided Italian economic aid and was
followed by a military alliance in 1927 and finally a convention (July 1,
1928) declaring Albania a virtual protectorate of Italy. Ahmed Zogu
then assumed the title of King Zog I.
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commercial law, and hard currency no longer existed in Russia; one did
business, not in a market, but on terms laid down by a state monopoly.
What was more, by 1928 the whole point of trade was to allow the
Soviet economy to catch up to the West in the shortest possible time
and thus achieve complete self-sufficiency. It was, in George Kennan's
words, a trade to end all trade.
The Anglo-Russian commercial pact of March 1921 and secret contacts
with German military and civilian agents were the first Soviet openings
to the Great Powers. Both culminated the following year in the Genoa
Conference, where the Soviet representatives appeared, to the relief
of their counterparts, in striped pants and on good behaviour. Indeed,
having seized power as the minority faction of a minority party, the
Bolsheviks sought legitimacy abroad as the most adamant sticklers for
etiquette and legalism. But the Western powers insisted on an end to
Communist propaganda and recognition of the tsarist debts as
prerequisites to trade. Chicherin countered with a fanciful claim for
reparations stemming from the Allied interventions, at the same time
denying that Moscow bore any responsibility for the doings of the
Comintern. As Theodore von Laue has written, To ask the Soviet
regime . . . to refrain from making use of its revolutionary tools was as
futile as to ask the British Empire to scrap its fleet. Instead, a
German-Russian knot was tied in the Treaty of Rapallo, whereby the
U.S.S.R. was able to take advantage of Germany's bitterness over
Versailles to split the capitalist powers. Trade and recognition were
not the only consequences of Rapallo; in its wake began a decade of
clandestine German military research on Russian soil.
Upon the occupation of the Ruhr the Soviets declared solidarity with
the Berlin government. By August 1923, however, with Stresemann
seeking negotiations with France and German society disintegrating,
revolutionary opportunism again took precedence. The Politburo went
so far as to designate personnel for a German Communist government,
and Zinovyev gave German Communists the signal to stage a putsch in
Hamburg. When it proved a fiasco, the Soviets returned to their
Rapallo diplomacy with Berlin. The political victories of the leftists
MacDonald in Britain and Herriot in France then prompted recognition
of the Soviet government by Britain (Feb. 1, 1924), Italy (February 7),
France (October 28), and most other European states. Later in 1924,
however, publication during the British electoral campaign of the
infamous (and probably forged) Zinovyev letter ordering Communists
to disrupt the British army created a sensation. British police also
suspected Communists of subversive activities during the bitter
General Strike of 1926 and launched the Arcos raid on the Soviet
trade delegation in London in May 1927. Anglo-Soviet relations did not
resume until 1930.
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Stalin's diplomacy
Lenin's incapacity and death (Jan. 21, 1924) triggered a protracted
struggle for power between Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. In foreign policy
their conflict seemed one of an emphasis on aiding the European
peoples in the struggle against their oppressors (Trotsky) versus an
emphasis on building Socialism in one country (Stalin). But that was
largely a caricature meant to discredit Trotsky as an adventurer.
During the intraparty struggle, however, Soviet foreign policy drifted.
The partial stabilization of capitalism in the West through the Dawes
Plan and the Locarno treaties was a rude setback for Moscow. When
Germany later joined the League of Nations, the Soviet press warned
Germany against this false step into this wasp's nest of
international intrigue, where political sharpers and thieving
diplomatists play with marked cards, strangle weak nations, and
organize war against the U.S.S.R. But the Germans were not about to
throw away their Russian card. Negotiations to expand the Rapallo
accord produced the Treaty of Berlin (April 24, 1926) by which
Germany pledged neutrality in any conflict between the U.S.S.R. and a
third power, including the League of Nations. Germany also provided a
300,000,000-mark credit and in the late 1920s accounted for 29
percent of Soviet foreign trade.
From 1921 on, the Politburo judged Asia to be the region that offered
the best hope for Socialist expansion, although this required
collaboration with bourgeois nationalists. The Bolsheviks suppressed
their own subject nationalities at the first opportunity, yet declared
their solidarity with all peoples resisting Western imperialism. In 1920
they paid homage to the great and famous Amr Amnollh in
cementing relations with the new Afghan leader, and they were the
first to sign treaties with Nationalist Turkey. In September 1920 the
Comintern sponsored a conference of the peoples of the East at
Baku. Zinovyev and Radek presided over a contentious lot of Central
Asian delegates, whose own quarrels, of which the Armenian-Turkish
was the most vitriolic, made a mockery of any notion of regional or
political solidarity. Thereafter, Soviet Asian activity went
underground, alternately aiding Communists against nationalists like
Reza Khan and Mustafa Kemal, and aiding nationalists against the
European powers.
The centrepiece of Soviet designs in Asia could only be China, whose
liberation Lenin viewed in 1923 as an essential stage in the victory of
socialism in the world. In 1919 and 1920 the Narkomindel made much
of its revolutionary sympathy for China by renouncing the rights
acquired by tsarist Russia in its concessionary treaties. But soon the
Soviets were sending troops into Outer Mongolia, allegedly at the
request of local Communists, and concluding their own treaty with
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Peking (May 31, 1924) that granted the U.S.S.R. a virtual protectorate
over Outer Mongoliaits first satelliteand continued ownership of the
Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria.
The political disintegration of China, and their own devious tactics,
inevitably complicated Soviet policy. While pursuing superficially
correct relations with Peking, the Politburo placed its future hopes on
the Canton-based Nationalists (KMT), whose members were impressed
by the Bolsheviks' example of how to seize and master a vast
undeveloped country. In 1922 the Comintern directed Chinese
Communists to enroll in the KMT even as Adolf Yoffe renounced all
Soviet intentions of importing Marxism into China. The Communist
presence in the KMT grew rapidly until, after Sun Yat-sen's death in
March 1925, Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin became the main
strategist for the KMT. Still, the Soviets were uncertain how to
proceed. In March 1926, Trotsky counseled caution lest precipitate
attacks on foreign interests in China impel the imperialistsincluding
Japaninto anti-Soviet action. Indeed, Stalin did his best to woo
Tokyo, noting that Japanese nationalism had great anti-Western
potential.
On March 20, 1926, Chiang Kai-shek turned the tables with a coup that
elevated him within the KMT and landed many Communists in prison.
Ignoring the outrage of the Chinese Communists, Borodin remained in
Chiang's good graces, whereupon Chiang staged the northern
expedition in which he greatly expanded KMT power with the help of
Communist organizations in the countryside. But Borodin also advised
leftist KMT members to leave the south for a new base in the Wu-han
cities to escape Chiang's immediate control. This Left KMT or
Wu-han Body was to steer the KMT in a Communist direction and
eventually seize control. The Soviet Party Congress in January 1927
even declared China the second home of world revolution, and
Stalin confided to a Moscow audience that Chiang's forces were to be
utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then thrown
away. But Chiang preempted again by ordering a bloody purge of
Shanghai Communists on April 1213, 1927. Trotsky blamed Stalin's lack
of faith in revolutionary zeal for the debacle, declaring that he should
have unleashed the Communists sooner. Instead, the Left KMT eroded,
many of its former adherents going over to Chiang. With the party thus
fractured, Stalin changed his mind and ordered an armed revolt by
Communists against the KMT. This, too, ended in carnage, and by
mid-1928 only scattered bands (one under Mao Zedong) remained to
take to the hills.
Stalin's triumph at home and failure in China ended the formative era
of Soviet foreign policy. The Politburo had expelled Zinovyev, Radek,
and Trotsky by October 1926; the Party Congress condemned all
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deviation from the Stalinist line in December 1927; and Trotsky went
into exile in January 1929. Thenceforth Soviet foreign policy and the
Comintern line reflected the will of one man. Communist parties
abroad likewise purged all but Stalinists and reorganized in rigid
imitation of the U.S.S.R.'s ruthless dictatorship. The Sixth Party
Congress (summer 1928) anathematized social democracy in the
strongest terms ever and strengthened its call for subversive activities
against democratic institutions. Above all, Stalin declared after an
ephemeral war scare of 1926 that the era of peaceful coexistence with
capitalism was coming to an end and ordered vigorous measures to
prepare the U.S.S.R. for war. The New Economic Policy gave way to
the First Five-Year Plan (Oct. 1, 1928) for collectivization of
agriculture and rapid industrialization, which condemned millions of
peasants to expropriation, starvation, or exile to Siberia, but enabled
the regime to sell wheat abroad to pay for industrial goods. Stalin
imported entire factories from the United States, France, Italy, and
Germany as the basis for the Soviet steel, automotive, aviation, tire,
oil, and gas industries. In 1927 he launched the first of the show trials
of industrial wreckers who had allegedly conspired with
reactionaries and foreign agents, and in 1929 he purged all thosethe
Right Oppositionwho questioned the Five-Year Plan.
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France was the nation most concerned by the Nazi threat and most
able to take vigorous action. But fear of another war, the defeatist
mood dating from the failure of the Ruhr occupation, the passivity
engendered by the Maginot Line (due for completion in just five
years), and domestic strife exacerbated by the Depression and the
Stavisky scandal of 1933, all served to hamstring French foreign policy.
As in the Weimar Republic, Communists and monarchists or Fascist
groups like the Croix de Feu and Action Franaise battled in the
streets. In February 1934 a crowd of war veterans and rightists
stormed the parliament, and the douard Daladier Cabinet was forced
to resign to head off a coup d'tat. The new foreign minister, Louis
Barthou, had been a friend of Poincar and made a final effort to
shore up France's security system in Europe: All these League of
Nations fanciesI'd soon put an end to them if I were in power. . . . It's
alliances that count. But alliances with whom? The French Left was
adamantly opposed to cooperation with Fascist Italy, the Right
despised cooperation with the Communist Soviet Union. Britain as
always eschewed commitments, while Poland had come to terms with
Germany. Nevertheless, the moment seemed opportune; both Italy
and the U.S.S.R. now made clear their opposition to Hitler and desire
to embrace collective security.
To be sure, Mussolini was gratified by the triumph of the man he liked
to consider his younger protg, Hitler, but he also understood that
Italy fared best while playing off France and Germany, and he feared
German expansion into the Danubian basin. In September 1933 he
made Italian support for Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss
conditional on the latter's establishment of an Italian-style Fascist
regime. In June 1934 Mussolini and Hitler met for the first time, and in
their confused conversation (there was no interpreter present)
Mussolini understood the Fhrer to say that he had no desire for
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Thus, Barthou's plan for reviving the wartime alliance and arranging an
Eastern Locarno began to seem plausibleeven after Oct. 9, 1934,
when Barthou and King Alexander of Yugoslavia were shot dead in
Marseille by an agent of Croatian terrorists. The new French foreign
minister, the rightist Pierre Laval, was especially friendly to Rome.
The LavalMussolini agreements of Jan. 7, 1935, declared France's
disinterest in the fate of Abyssinia in implicit exchange for Italian
support of Austria. Mussolini took this to mean that he had French
support for his plan to conquer that independent African country. Just
six days later the strength of German nationalism was resoundingly
displayed in the Saar plebiscite. The small, coal-rich Saarland,
detached from Germany for 15 years under the Treaty of Versailles,
was populated by miners of Catholic or social democratic loyalty. They
knew what fate awaited their churches and labour unions in the Third
Reich, and yet 90 percent voted for union with Germany. Then, on
March 16, Hitler used the extension of French military service to two
years and the Franco-Soviet negotiations as pretexts for tearing up the
disarmament clauses of Versailles, restoring the military draft, and
beginning an open buildup of Germany's land, air, and sea forces.
In the wake of this series of shocks Britain, France, and Italy joined on
April 11, 1935, at a conference at Stresa to reaffirm their opposition to
German expansion. Laval and Litvinov also initialed a five-year
Franco-Soviet alliance on May 2, each pledging assistance in case of
unprovoked aggression. Two weeks later a Czech-Soviet pact
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Italian aggression
The Stresa Front collapsed as soon as Paris and London learned the
price Mussolini meant to exact for it. By 1935 Mussolini had ruled for
13 years but had made little progress toward his new Roman Empire
that was to free Italy from the prison of the Mediterranean. What
was more, Il Duce concluded that only the crucible of war could fully
undermine the monarchy and the church and consummate the Fascist
revolution at home. Having failed to pry the French out of their North
African possessions, Mussolini fixed on the independent African empire
of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Italy had failed in 1896 to conquer Abyssinia,
thus to do so now would erase a national humiliation. This spacious
land astride Italy's existing coastal colonies on the Horn of Africa
boasted fertile uplands suitable for Italy's excess rural population, and
Mussolini promised abundant raw materials as well. The conquest of
Abyssinia would also appear to open the path to the Sudan and Suez.
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The war dragged on through 1937 and 1938 and claimed some 500,000
lives before the Nationalists finally captured Barcelona in January 1939
and Madrid in March. During the final push to victory, France and
Britain recognized Franco's government. By then, however, the
fulcrum of diplomacy had long since shifted to central Europe. The
Nationalist victory did not, in the end, redound to the detriment of
France, for Franco politely sent the Germans and Italians home and
observed neutrality in the coming war, whereas a pro-Communist
Spain might have posed a genuine threat to France during the era of
the NaziSoviet pact.
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The United States did take steps in the 1930s, however, to mobilize
the Western Hemisphere for the purposes of fighting the Depression
and resisting European, especially German, encroachments. Roosevelt
gave this initiative a name in his first inaugural address: the Good
Neighbor Policy. Building on steps taken by Hoover, Roosevelt pledged
nonintervention in Latin domestic affairs at the Montevideo
Pan-American Conference of 1933, signed a treaty with the new Cuban
government (May 29, 1934) abrogating the Platt Amendment, mediated
a truce in the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1934 (with a
peace treaty following in July 1938), and negotiated commercial
treaties with Latin-American states. As war approached overseas,
Washington also promoted pan-American unity on the basis of
nonintervention, condemnation of aggression, no forcible collection of
debts, equality of states, respect for treaties, and continental
solidarity. The Declaration of Lima (1938) provided for pan-American
consultation in case of a threat to the peace, security, or territorial
integrity of any state.
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By the end of 1936, Hitler and the Nazis were total masters of
Germany with the exceptions of the army and the foreign office, and
even the latter had to tolerate the activities of a special party
apparatus under the Nazi expert on foreign policy, Joachim von
Ribbentrop. Nazi prestige, bolstered by such theatrics as the Berlin
Olympics, the German pavilion at the Paris Exhibition, and the
enormous Nrnberg party rallies, was reaching its zenith. In September
1936, Hitler imitated Stalin again in his proclamation of a Four-Year
Plan to prepare the German economy for war under the leadership of
Hermann Gring. With the Rhineland secured, Hitler grew anxious to
begin his drive to the east, if possible with British acquiescence. To
this end he appointed Ribbentrop ambassador to London in October
1936 with the plea, Bring me back the British alliance. Intermittent
talks lasted a year, their main topic being the return of the German
colonies lost at Versailles. But agreement was impossible, since Hitler's
real goal was a free hand on the Continent, while the British hoped, in
return for specific concessions, to secure arms control and respect for
the status quo.
Meanwhile, Stanley Baldwin, having seen the abdication crisis through
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were unready, while France's scarcely existed, and the strength of the
Luftwaffe, so recently discounted by the British Cabinet, was now
exaggerated. The French and Czech armies still outnumbered the
German, but French intelligence also magnified German strength,
while the army had no plans for invading Germany in support of the
Czechs. The Munich powers were criticized for ignoring the U.S.S.R.,
which had claimed readiness to honour its alliance with Prague. The
U.S.S.R., however, would hardly confront Germany unless the Western
powers were already engaged, and the ways open to them were few
without transit rights across Poland. The West discounted Soviet
military effectiveness in light of Stalin's 1937 purge of his entire officer
corps down to battalion level. The Soviets were also distracted by
division-scale fighting that broke out with Japanese forces on the
Manchurian border in JulyAugust 1938. At best, a few squadrons of
Soviet planes might have been sent to Prague.
Of course, the moral cause of liberating the Sudeten Germans was
ludicrous in view of the nature of the Nazi regime and was far
outweighed by the moral lapse of deserting the doughty Czechs.
(French ambassador Andr Franois-Poncet, upon reading the Munich
accord, choked, Thus does France treat her only allies who had
remained faithful to her.) That betrayal, in turn, seemed more than
outweighed by the moral cause of preventing another war. In the end,
the war was delayed only a year, and whatever the military realities of
1938 versus 1939, the appeasement policy was an exercise in
self-delusion. Chamberlain and his ilk did not begin their reasoning
with an analysis of Hitlerism and then work forward to a policy.
Rather, they began with a policy based on abstract analysis of the
causes of war, then worked backward to an image of Hitler that suited
the needs of that policy. As a result, they gave Hitler far more than
they ever gave the democratic statesmen of Weimar and, in the end,
the freedom to launch the very war they slaved to prevent.
Hitler had no intention of honouring Munich. In October the Nazis
encouraged the Slovak and Ruthene minorities in Czechoslovakia to set
up autonomous governments and then in November awarded Hungary
the 4,600 square miles north of the Danube taken from it in 1919. On
March 13, 1939, Gestapo officers carried the Slovak leader Monsignor
Jozef Tiso off to Berlin and deposited him in the presence of the
Fhrer, who demanded that the Slovaks declare their independence at
once. Tiso returned to Bratislava to inform the Slovak Diet that the
only alternative to becoming a Nazi protectorate was invasion. They
complied. All that remained to the new president in Prague, Emil
Hcha, was the core region of Bohemia and Moravia. It was time, said
Hcha with heavy sarcasm, to consult our friends in Germany. There
Hitler subjected the elderly, broken-spirited man to a tirade that
brought tears, a fainting spell, and finally a signature on a request
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that Bohemia and Moravia be incorporated into the Reich. The next
day, March 16, German units occupied Prague, and Czechoslovakia
ceased to exist.
The central problem posed for all defense establishments was how to
respond to the lessons of the 191418 stalemate. The British simply
determined not to send an army to the Continent again, the French to
turn their border into an impregnable fortress, and the Germans to
perfect and synthesize the tactics and technologies of the last war into
a dynamic new style of warfare: the Blitzkrieg (lightning war).
Blitzkrieg was especially suited to a country whose geostrategic
position made likely a war on two fronts and dictated an offensive
posture: a Schlieffen solution made plausible by the
internal-combustion engine. Whether or not Hitler actually planned for
the type of war with which the general staff was experimenting is
debatable. Perhaps he only made a virtue of necessity, for the Nazis
had by no means created a full war economy in the 1930s. Since
Blitzkrieg attacks by tank columns, motorized infantry, and aircraft
permitted the defeat of enemies one by one with lightning speed, it
required only armament in width, not armament in depth. This in
turn allowed Hitler to mollify the German people with a guns and
butter economy, with each new conquest providing the resources for
the next. Blitzkrieg also allowed Hitler to conclude that he might
successfully defy other Great Powers whose combined resources
dwarfed those of Germany. After Munich, German rearmament
accelerated. Hitler may have been right to launch his war as soon as
possible, on the calculation that only by seizing the resources of the
entire continent could the Reich prevail against the British Empire or
the Soviet Union.
After Versailles the British government had established the Ten-Year
Rule as a rationale for holding down military spending: Each year it
was determined that virtually no chance existed of war breaking out
over the next decade. In 1931 expenditures were cut to the bone in
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possible the union of the two dictators, as historian Adam Ulam has
shown, was not Munich but the British guarantee of Poland. Before
that act Stalin faced the prospect of an unopposed German march into
Poland, whereupon the U.S.S.R. would be in mortal danger. After that
act, Hitler could seize Poland only at the cost of war with the West,
whereupon Hitler would need the U.S.S.R. as an ally. The British
guarantee thus made Stalin the arbiter of Europe.
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War once again broke out over nationality conflicts in east-central Europe,
provoked in part by a German drive for continental hegemony, and it
expanded, once again, into a global conflict whose battle zones touched
the waters or heartlands of almost every continent. The total nature of
World War II surpassed that of 191418 in that civilian populations not only
contributed to the war effort but also became direct targets of aerial
attack. Moreover, in 1941 the Nazi regime unleashed a war of
extermination against Slavs, Jews, and other elements deemed inferior by
Hitler's ideology, while Stalinist Russia extended its campaign of terror
against the Ukrainians to the conquered Poles. The Japanese-American war
in the Pacific also assumed at times the brutal aspect of a war between
races. This ultimate democratization of warfare eliminated the age-old
distinction between combatants and non-combatants and ensured that
total casualties in World War II would greatly exceed those of World War I
and that civilian casualties would exceed the military.
Once again the European war devolved into a contest between a
German-occupied Mitteleuropa and a peripheral Allied coalition. But this
time Italy abandoned neutrality for the German side, and the Soviet Union
held out in the east, while France collapsed in the west. Hence Soviet
dictator Joseph Stalin took France's place in meetings of the Big Three,
together with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The Japanese
chose to remain neutral vis--vis the U.S.S.R., while the Grand Alliance of
anti-Fascist states simmered with conflicts over strategy and war aims.
World War II, therefore, comprised several parallel or overlapping wars,
while the war in Europe became a kind of three-way struggle among the
forces of democracy, Nazism, and Communism. As soon as German and
Japanese power were effaced, the conflicts among the victors burst into
the open and gave birth to the Cold War. World War II completed the
destruction of the old Great Power system, prepared the disintegration of
Europe's overseas empires, and submerged Europe itself into a world arena
dominated by the Soviet Union and the United States.
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In a protocol of May 15, 1939, the French had promised to take the
offensive two weeks after mobilization. Instead, General Maurice
Gamelin contented himself with a brief sortie into the Saar, after
which the French withdrew to the Maginot Line. The regime most
upset by the German walkover in Poland was Hitler's new ally, the
Soviets. On September 10, Stalin ordered partial mobilization and
loudly boasted of the Red Army's three million men. Since a callup of
reserve troops was scarcely needed merely to occupy Moscow's share
of Poland under the German-Soviet pact, this maneuver must have
reflected Stalin's fear that the Germans might not stop at the
prearranged line. Stalin told the German ambassador on September
25: In the final settlement of the Polish question anything that in the
future might create friction between Germany and the Soviet Union
must be avoided. Three days later Molotov signed a new agreement
granting Germany a somewhat larger share of Poland as well as
extensive Soviet trade in return for a free hand in Lithuania. Only
after this second German-Soviet pact did Communist parties in the
West fully embrace their new Nazi ally and oppose Western military
resistance to Hitler. Henceforth, Stalin was a fearful and solicitous
neighbour of the Nazi empire, and he moved quickly to absorb the
regions accorded him. By October 10, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia
had been forced to accept Soviet occupation. When Finland resisted
Soviet demands for border rectifications and bases, Stalin ordered the
Red Army to attack on November 30. He expected a lightning victory
of his own that would impress Hitler and increase Soviet security in the
Baltic. Instead, the Finns resisted fiercely in this Winter War,
holding the fortified Mannerheim Line in the south and cutting off the
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road-bound Soviet columns in the north with their mobile ski troops.
The disorganized Red Army, by contrast, showed the effect of the
recent military purges. In some cases only the machine guns of NKVD
(political police) units kept the soldiers at the front. Soviet military
prestige suffered a devastating blow.
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Democratic Republic during the war, under the Comintern agent Otto
Kuusinen, but he settled for a treaty with Helsinki on March 12, 1940,
in which Finland ceded the Karelian isthmus and leased a naval base to
the U.S.S.R. on the Hang peninsula.
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disrupt the enemy rear, and split Allied forces in two. The
concomitant risk was that Allied counterattacks might pinch off and
destroy the armoured spearheads at a blow.
The German offensive struck with devastating effect on May 10. Within
days the Dutch surrendered. Gring's Luftwaffe did not get the
message and proceeded to devastate the central city of Rotterdam,
killing numerous civilians and sending a signal to the city of London.
Meanwhile, General Gerd von Rundstedt's panzer army picked its way
through the Ardennes and emerged in force at Sedan. By May 20,
German tanks reached the coast at Abbeville and cut the Allied armies
in two. On the 28th, King Leopold III instructed the Belgian army to
surrender, while the British government ordered Lord Gort,
commanding the British Expeditionary Force, to make for Dunkirk and
prepare for evacuation by sea.
As the Blitzkrieg in Poland had shocked Stalin, so the German victory
in France shocked Mussolini. For 17 years he had preached the
necessity and beauty of war, believing that a neutral Italy would cease
to be regarded as a Great Power and that he needed war in order to
fulfill his expansionist fantasies and permit the full triumph of Fascism
at home. Yet in August 1939 he demanded from Germany 6,000,000
tons of coal, 2,000,000 tons of steel, and 7,000,000 tons of oil before
he could honour the Pact of Steel. In fact, war preparations under the
corrupt and incompetent Fascists remained feeble, and during these
months of nonbelligerence, Mussolini himself took sick and at times
even considered joining the Allies. On March 18 he met Hitler at the
Brenner Pass and was told that the Germans did not need him to win
the war but that he would be allowed to participate and thus escape
second-rate status in the Mediterranean. Still Mussolini tried to have it
both ways, telling his military chiefs that Italy would not fight Hitler's
war, but a parallel war to forge a new Roman Empire. In reality,
he would enter the war only when it seemed clear the Allies were
finished and his regime would not be put to the test.
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The Romanian coup provoked Mussolini's next rash act. Hitler always
faces me with faits accomplis, he raged. This time I will pay him
back in his own coin. On October 13, Mussolini ordered Marshal
Badoglio to prepare the long-desired attack on Greece for two weeks
hence. He would declare his independence from Hitler and
consummate his parallel war. On Oct. 28, 1940, seven Italian
divisions crossed the Albanian border into Greece, provoking Hitler's
adjutant to record: Fhrer enraged . . . this is revenge for Norway
and France. In fact, Mussolini's impetuous attack, combined with the
reversals in Africa, would only ensure his humiliation and utter
dependence on his northern ally. For the Greek campaign was
predictably disastrous, given Italy's bare numerical superiority and lack
of planning and equipment, the rough terrain, and the determination
of the Greeks. On November 8, General Alexandros Papagos
counterattacked, and within a month the Greeks had turned the
tables, occupying one-third of Albania. Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas
refused to let the British into Greece for fear of provoking the
Germans; indeed, he hoped to drive Italy out of the Balkans before
German help might arrive, and to induce Yugoslavia and Turkey to
make common cause with Greece against the Fascists.
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This latest timetable, however, fell victim to Mussolini's folly and the
need to secure Germany's flank in the Balkans. German troops entered
Romania on Jan. 7, 1941, and Bulgaria on February 27. But Italy's
disasters brought into question the very survival of the Fascist regime.
Mussolini made Badoglio a scapegoat and in November 1940 issued the
first of his pitiful appeals to Hitler to bail him out. At their Berghof
meeting on Jan. 20, 1941, Hitler informed Mussolini of his plans to
invade Greece. The death of Metaxas in the following days, in turn,
led the Greeks to accept a British expeditionary force. Accordingly,
Hitler pressured Yugoslavia to permit the passage of German troops,
but air force officers in Belgrade staged a coup on March 27 and signed
a treaty with Moscow. Furious over such defiance, Hitler ordered a
Blitzkrieg for April 6 that broke Yugoslav resistance in five days and
overran Greece by the 22nd. Crete then succumbed to a spectacular
German airborne assault (May 2031). Hitler set up puppet regimes in
Serbia and Greater Croatia and partitioned the rest of Yugoslavia
among his client states.
The Balkan campaign postponed Barbarossa for six weeks. This did
not overly perturb Hitler, who promised his generals victory within a
month and denied the need to prepare for cold-weather warfare in
Russia. But some generals were skeptical of Blitzkrieg in the vastness
of Russia, while others debated whether to force narrow spearheads
deep into Russia, emulating the campaign in France, or fight classic
battles of envelopment close to the frontier. Hitler's infallible
intuition dictated the latter, lest his armies, like Napoleon's, be
sucked too deep into Russia before enemy forces were destroyed. In
the spring of 1941 the Wehrmacht assembled 4,000,000 menthe
greatest invasion force in historyincluding 50 Finnish and Romanian
and 207 German divisions armed with 3,300 tanks. They faced a Red
Army of some 4,500,000 men and perhaps 15,000 tanks. German
success depended heavily on surprise, but preparations of such
magnitude could scarcely be hidden. Stalin seemed alive to the danger
when he signed a neutrality pact with Japan on April 13 (knowing of
Japan's preference for a southern strategy from the espionage of
Richard Sorge in Tokyo), then pleaded with Foreign Minister Matsuoka
Yosuke: We must remain friends and you must now do everything to
that end. Yet Stalin also redoubled his efforts to assure Hitler of his
good intentions and discounted British warnings of a German attack
(they had been making such predictions since June 1940, and even the
British thought a German strike against Turkey or England more likely).
Stalin may also have dismissed the warnings as attempts to poison his
relations with Germany. In any case, the Germans achieved complete
tactical surprise, while the Soviets' forward deployments exposed them
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for another. Still, the President made clear to Churchill (with whom
he struck up close relations by correspondence) his desire to aid
Britain in every way consonant with the American mood. Only once did
Roosevelt make a feint at mediation: In March 1940 he sent
Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to Europe on a fact-finding
mission that revealed scant immediate prospect of peace. When
Hitler's Western offensive followed, even that dubious prospect
disappeared, and Churchill assured his House of Commons that Britain
would fight on until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its
power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.
In January 1940, Roosevelt asked for a mere $2,000,000,000 in defense
spending, a slight increase over the year before. But the fall of France
pushed the pace of U.S. rearmament up to $10,500,000,000 by
September. Opinion polls showed the American public heavily
favouring a policy of all aid short of war to Britain. On May 15,
Churchill sought to capitalize on the shifting sentiment with an
emergency request for 40 or 50 overage destroyers with which to
counter German U-boats. Roosevelt hesitated because of the legal
complications, while continuing his efforts to shape opinion by
encouraging William Allen White's Committee to Defend America to
foster the idea that Between Us and Hitler Stands the British Fleet!
On September 2 the United States transferred 50 warships to Britain in
return for long-term leases on British naval bases in the Western
Hemisphere. Despite Roosevelt's public relations, isolationist
sentiment remained strong. On September 4 the America First
Committee arose to challenge Roosevelt's deceptive campaign for
intervention, and Wendell Willkie charged during the presidential
campaign that Roosevelt's reelection would surely mean war. The
president responded that your boys are not going to be sent into any
foreign wars, gliding over the fact that if the United States were
attacked, it would no longer be a foreign war.
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Japan's challenge
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When war broke out in Europe, the Japanese occupation of China was
nearing its greatest extent, and there was no sign of Chinese
capitulation. Japan was understandably incensed when its ally in the
Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany, joined with Moscow at a time when
the Japanese were fighting the Soviets in Manchuria and Mongolia. On
the other hand, the German victories of 1940 made orphans of the
French and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, including mineral-rich
Indochina and oil-rich Indonesia. These sources of vital raw materials
were all the more tempting after the United States protested Japan's
invasion of China by allowing its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan to
expire in January 1940. Thereafter trade continued on a day-to-day
basis while U.S. diplomacy sought peaceful ways to contain or roll back
Japanese power. But the territorial and trade hegemony that Japan
would come to term the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in
1941 increasingly appeared to be a cover for brutal imperialism and
exclusionist trade policies. In June 1940, as France was crumbling,
Japan insisted that the new Vichy regime cut off the flow of supplies
to China over Indochinese railways. The beleaguered British, fearful of
simultaneous war in Asia and Europe, also agreed to close down the
Burma Road to China for three months, isolating Chiang Kai-shek.
Japanese militarists then arranged a new government in Tokyo under
the weak Konoe Fumimaro, expecting that Foreign Minister Matsuoka
and War Minister Tj Hideki would dominate. On July 27 the Cabinet
decided to ally with the Axis and strike into Southeast Asia even as it
sought to resume normal trade with the United States.
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The latest U.S. trade restrictions sparked the final peace initiative of
the moderate faction composed of Konoe and leading Japanese
industrialists. Two American Catholic missionaries served as
intermediaries for an alleged Japanese offer to evacuate China and
break the Tripartite Pact in return for normal trade with the United
States. This was exactly what Roosevelt wanted, and he urged that the
offer be placed in writing. A new Japanese ambassador, Nomura
Kichisaburo, then arrived in Washington and met privately with Hull 40
times after March 1941. On April 9 the Catholic missionaries delivered
a written offer, but it contained no promise of troop withdrawals and
instead asked the United States to cut off aid to China. Hull clearly
informed Nomura that any accord must be founded on four principles:
respect for territorial integrity, noninterference in the internal affairs
of other countries, commercial equality, and respect for the status
quo in the Pacific. Nomura unfortunately failed to understand and
reported that the United States had accepted the April 9 proposal. The
Tokyo Cabinet then drafted an even tougher note as a basis for
negotiation, prompting Hull to conclude that the Japanese were
incorrigible.
Meanwhile, the Japanese military debated the merits of a northern
advance against the Soviet Union's maritime provinces or a southern
advance against the French, Dutch, and British colonies. The
Russo-Japanese neutrality pact of April 1941 indicated a southern
advance, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union indicated a
northern one. The course of the warand the survival of the
U.S.S.R.hung in the balance. Heretofore, Hitler had been at pains to
keep Japan out of his Soviet sphere of influence, but at the height of
German success in the Soviet Union, Hitler suggested to Ambassador
Oshima Hiroshi that the two join forces to liquidate the Soviet empire,
a plan endorsed by Matsuoka. If Hitler meant it, he was too late, for
the Cabinet in Tokyo decided again after the invasion of the Soviet
Union (June 22) to exploit German victories rather than take part in
them. The Japanese army and navy would move south and establish
the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Emperor endorsed the
plan on July 2, and the Americans, having broken the Japanese code
with the MAGIC process, knew of the decision at once. On July 26,
Japan occupied all of French Indochina, and the United States
impounded Japanese assets. On September 5, Hull sanctioned a
complete embargo on petroleum.
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Japan now faced a choice of abandoning all the conquests made since
1931 or seizing the necessary war matriel to defend its empire. Konoe
tried desperately to reverse the tide and requested a summit meeting
with Roosevelt. But Roosevelt, on Hull's advice, insisted on prior
Japanese acceptance of the four principles. Konoe was obliged on
September 7 to make a deal with his militarists: He could try once
more for an agreement, but if the United States did not relent by early
October, Konoe would then support the military solution. When the
deadlock was confirmed Konoe in fact resigned on October 16, and
Tj became prime minister. The veteran diplomat Kurusu Saburo then
flew to Washington with two final options, Plan A and Plan B. The
latter held out some hope, since in it Japan at least promised to make
no military moves to the south. But MAGIC deciphered a cable
revealing the secret deadline of November 29, while the British,
Dutch, and Chinese vetoed any modus vivendi that left Japan a free
hand in China. On November 27, American warnings of war were
dispatched to the Pacific, and on December 1 a Japanese Imperial
conference ratified Tj's conclusion that Japan has no other way
than to wage war . . . to secure its existence and self-defense.
The final diplomatic exchanges were superfluous, but they included a
10-part American note of November 26 and Roosevelt's personal appeal
to the Emperor on December 6. That same day a 13-part Japanese
reply arrived in Washington, which MAGIC deciphered even before the
Japanese embassy did. That war was imminent was clear; where the
first blow would fall was not. On Sunday, December 7, a 14th part
arrived, which the Japanese embassy was slow in translating and
typing. By the time the diplomats arrived at Hull's office at 2:00 PM,
news of the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had already
arrived. Hull delivered his opinion of Japanese diplomacy in vitriolic
terms and told the ambassadors to get out. The following day
Roosevelt named it a day which will live in infamy and asked
Congress for a declaration of war.
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Within a year after American entry into the war Axis power crested and
began to ebb, for critical battles were fought in 1942 in every major
theatre. The year also saw the forging of a Grand Alliance among the
United States, Britain, and the U.S.S.R. and the first sign of disagreement
on strategy and war aims.
After Pearl Harbor, Churchill requested an immediate conference with
Roosevelt. The two met for three weeks at the Arcadia Conference in
Washington after Dec. 22, 1941. They reaffirmed the Europe first
strategy and conceived Gymnast, a plan for Anglo-American landings in
North Africa. They also created a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee
and issued, on Jan. 1, 1942, the United Nations Declaration in the spirit
of the Atlantic Charter. But Sir Anthony Eden had traveled to Moscow in
late December and returned with troubling news: Stalin demanded
retention of all the territory gained under the GermanSoviet
Nonaggression Pact and grumbled that the Atlantic Charter was
apparently directed against him, not Hitler. The Soviets also first made
what was to become their incessant demand that the Allies open a
second front in France to take the pressure off the Red Army. Roosevelt
sent Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to London to argue for a
cross-Channel invasion by April 1943, but the British deemed it
impossible. London reassured Molotov by concluding an Anglo-Soviet
alliance (May 26, 1942) to last for 20 years. In late June, Churchill and
Roosevelt met again in Washington, D.C., and confirmed plans for a joint
operation in Africa despite the misgivings of American generals, who
suspected the British of being more concerned for the defense of their
empire than the rapid defeat of Hitler. In the end the British won, and on
July 25 the Allies approved the renamed operation Torcha combined
invasion of North Africa planned for the autumn. Churchill then traveled
to Moscow in August 1942, where Stalin berated him for postponing the
second front and suspending Arctic convoys because of German naval
action. Despite his suspicions and fears, Stalin could take grim
satisfaction from the events of 1942, for by December of that year the
German advance into the Soviet Union had been stopped, though at
enormous cost.
The Allied landings in North Africa, where British forces had finally turned
back General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps at el-Alamein, were targeted
for Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. (Hence, the first American initiative in
the war was to be an unprovoked and undeclared attack against neutral
territory.) Vichy France promptly severed diplomatic relations with
Washington and ordered French forces in North Africa to resist. Brief but
serious fighting resulted at Oran and Casablanca. The allies had been
seeking a French leader with the prestige and willingness to rally French
Africa against the Axis, but the nominal commander was Admiral Franois
Darlan, an ardent collaborationist in the Vichy Cabinet. The Allies
preferred General Henri Giraud, a heroic escapee from a prison camp,
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In the Pacific, the naval Battle of Midway in June, the landing of U.S.
forces on Guadalcanal in August, and the creation of an island-hopping
strategy against Japan's sudden and far-flung empire similarly blunted the
string of the Axis' early victories. Meanwhile, General Douglas MacArthur
rallied Allied forces in Australia in anticipation of fulfilling his departing
promise to the Filipinos: I shall return. A Japanese invasion force
landed near Gona at the southeastern end of New Guinea in July 1942
and drove Australian troops back to within 32 miles of Port Moresby. But
MacArthur executed a series of landings behind the Japanese and secured
the entire Papuan coast by late January 1943. Thenceforth Japan, too,
went on the strategic defensive.
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Seen only in cold economic terms, Nazi genocide against Jews and
other groups, racially or ideologically or otherwise defined, was the
height of irrationality. As early as January 1939 Hitler gave vent to his
pathological hatred and fear of the Jews before the Reichstag: If the
international Jewish financiers . . . succeed in plunging the nations
once more into a world war the result will be the obliteration of the
Jewish race in Europe. The war gave Hitler the opportunity to seek a
final solution. In 193940 the Nazis considered using Poland or
Madagascar as dumping grounds for Jews. But the invasion of the
U.S.S.R. emboldened Hitler, Gring, and SS leaders Heinrich Himmler
and Reinhard Heydrich to decide instead on mass extermination in
camps at Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Large
numbers of SS troops, as well as railroads and rolling stock, were
absorbed in capturing, transporting, and putting to death as many as
12,000 Jews per day. The total by war's end would reach 6,000,000,
almost half from Poland, and some 2,000,000 others including Gypsies,
clergy, Communists, and other resisters. SS troops accompanied the
regular army into the Soviet Union in 1941 and made racial war on the
Slavs as well in order to prepare the farmlands of the Ukraine for
German settlement.
News of the Holocaust reached the West slowly but surely, although
Auschwitz was able to keep its monstrous secret for more than two
years after the first gassings in May 1942. Richard Lichtheim of the
Jewish Agency in Geneva served as a conduit for information about
what was occurring in Nazi Europe, but his and others' efforts to
promote action on the part of the Allies broke against political and
practical barriers. The British, worried by the prospect of Arab revolt,
limited Jewish emigration to Palestine, while quotas elsewhere in the
world meant that even those Jews who managed to escape Europe
sometimes had nowhere to go. Reports appearing in Western
newspapers inspired the Allies to make a declaration on Dec. 17, 1942,
condemning this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination, and
on Jan. 22, 1944, Roosevelt established a War Refugee Board to
forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews and other
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minorities. But the Allies were unable to take direct action of any
sort until the capture of Italy brought Allied bombers within range of
the camps. Jewish leaders were then misled by hints that the Germans
might negotiate about the Jews. Finally, after June 1944, when
escapees confirmed the existence and nature of Auschwitz, the World
Jewish Congress requested bombing of the gas chambers. But the
Allied Bomber Command judged that its efforts should be directed only
at military targets and that the best way of helping the Jews was to
hasten the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Strategic bombing
Allied strategic bombing was the most deadly form of economic
warfare ever devised and showed another side of the
indiscriminateness of industrial war. But in mid-1941 the British Chiefs
of Staff soberly concluded that morale, not industry, was Germany's
most vulnerable point and ordered Sir Arthur Harris of the RAF Bomber
Command to concentrate on area bombing of cities. Churchill's
scientific adviser Professor L.A. Lindemann of Oxford (later Lord
Cherwell) concurred in April 1942 that one-third of all Germans could
be rendered homeless in 15 months by strategic bombing of cities. The
Royal Air Force accordingly assigned its new Lancaster four-engine
bombers to a total war on German civilians. After attacks on Lbeck
and the Ruhr, Harris sent a thousand planes against Cologne on May
3031 in an attack that battered one-third of the city. In 1943, after an
interlude of bombing German submarine pens, the Lancasters launched
the Battle of the Ruhr totaling 18,506 sorties and the Battle of
Hamburg numbering 17,021. The fire raids in Hamburg killed 40,000
people and left a million homeless. The Royal Air Force then hit Berlin
(November 1943 to March 1944) with 20,224 sorties, avenging many
times over all the damage done by the Luftwaffe to London.
By early 1943 the U.S. 8th Air Force joined in the air campaign but
eschewed terror bombing. Its B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24
Liberators conducted daylight precision bombing of industrial targets.
As a result, they suffered heavy losses that climaxed in October 1943
over the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants, when the United States lost
148 bombers in a week. The Army Air Forces suspended daylight sorties
for months until the arrival of a long-range fighter, the P-51 Mustang.
Bombing then resumed and concentrated on the German oil industry,
creating a serious shortage that virtually grounded the Luftwaffe by
the time of the D-Day invasion. The effectiveness of strategic bombing
is a subject of great debate, since German war production actually
increased over the years 194244. German engineers became masters
at shielding equipment, restoring it to operation in a matter of days,
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or even moving plants underground. Nor did the German people crack
under British devastation of their towns and homes. But the air
offensive did force the Germans to divert as many as 1,500,000
workers to the constant task of rebuilding and established the Allied
mastery of the air that permitted the success of the Normandy
landings.
The American war effort was also achieved without the rigid
centralized control of Britain. In January 1942 the War Production
Board emerged, staffed with dollar-a-year volunteers from business,
while the Office of War Mobilization (May 1943) under James F. Byrnes
served less as a dictator than an umpire in matters involving labour,
business, and the military.
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The Soviet Union also made a stupendous economic effort in the war
despite conditions as difficult as the American ones were favourable.
Within a few months in 1941 the U.S.S.R. lost to the enemy over half
its industrial capacity and richest farmland and countless skilled
workers. Yet the Soviets rebounded quickly, relocating over 1,300
factories to the Urals region in an effort that involved perhaps
10,000,000 people. Coal, oil, electricity, and food never regained
prewar levels, but arms production boomed. The Soviets managed to
turn out 136,800 aircraft and 102,500 tanks by 1945, surpassing the
Germans in both. The centrally directed Gosplan and party apparatus,
of course, had initiated a ruthless command economy as early as 1928,
and Soviet appeals to patriotism (as opposed to Marxism), the network
of forced-labour camps, and severe austerity made the effort possible.
Despite punishing taxation and subsistence wages (40 percent of the
1940 level) state income covered only half the budget over 194145,
laying the basis for the inflation that would lead to postwar
devaluation. The Soviet war economy, however, like that of the United
States, prepared the country for postwar superpower status.
Japan's strategy was similar to Germany's Blitzkrieg in that the swift
conquest of isolated territories was designed to create a self-sufficient
empire capable of withstanding any blow from without. Once again,
precise operational planning permitted Japan to increase weapons
production steadily from the inception of a full war economy in 1942
to early 1945, when U.S. bombing intensified. By 1944, naval ordnance
production was more than five times that of 1941 and aviation more
than four and a half times. The Japanese, like the Nazis, exploited
their conquered peoples and even more than the Nazis subjected
prisoners of war to slavery or death. But the fact that attacking Pearl
Harbor would awaken a sleeping giant was lost on Japanese
planners. By 1944 military expenditures absorbed 50 percent of the
Japanese GNP, a degree of concentration second only to that of the
Soviet Union. Yet the United States, with half its effort diverted to
Europe, still overwhelmed the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
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entire war.
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Nuclear physics had advanced to the point by 1938 that the German
physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were able to demonstrate
nuclear fission. Scientists in Britain, France, Germany, the U.S.S.R.,
and the United States all speculated on the possibility of building an
atomic explosive device, and in 1939 Albert Einstein wrote to
President Roosevelt personally, urging a crash program to perfect such
a bomb before the Nazis. The resulting Manhattan Project absorbed
$2,000,000,000 of the $3,850,000,000 spent by the United States on R
and D in World War II. Churchill, too, approved a nuclear program,
code-named the Directorate of Tube Alloys, in Britain's dark days of
1941. But by 1943 the Americans had built up a sizeable lead and
agreed at the Quebec Conference to share results with the British.
German atomic research depended on heavy water from Norway, but
British commandos and the Norwegian underground sabotaged the
plant in 1943. The scientists also failed to press for top priority, which
went instead to the missile program. Soviet atomic research kept
abreast of the West until the invasion, and in June 1942, Stalin
authorized a crash program that by war's end had begun to produce
fissionable uranium in quantity. In no country was much official
thought apparently given to the moral and long-range consequences of
this potentially devastating invention.
A final, though lesser known, scientific breakthrough of World War II
was the application of methods from the physical and social sciences
to problems of production, logistics, and combat. Known as
operational research, this application of science to practical
problems was a major step in the process by which military men in the
20th century lost primacy in their profession to civilian specialists.
Whether in the scientific study of various antisubmarine tactics, the
selection of targets for strategic bombing, or the optimal size and
pattern for naval convoys, operational research completed the
mobilization by governments of the world's intellectual community.
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The final defeat of Rommel's Afrika Korps opened the way for the
invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The Allies' rapid success there gradually
undermined Mussolini's eroding Fascist regime. Badoglio, Ciano, and
Grandi had all denounced Mussolini's leadership and had been sacked
by February 1943. Other Fascist leaders insisted on convening the
Grand Council in July and after violent debate voted 19 to 8 in favour
of restoring the prerogatives of the King and parliament. Mussolini
resigned the next day, and Badoglio took power in the face of a
complex dilemma. Italy wanted peace, but to break the alliance with
Hitler might provoke a German attack and condemn Italy to prolonged
fighting. Thus, while feigning continued loyalty to Germany, Badoglio
made secret contact with Eisenhower in the hope of synchronizing an
armistice and an Allied occupation. But the Americans insisted on
August 11 that Italy give an unconditional surrender and would not
promise to land as far north as Rome. With tension and German
suspicions mountingand two British corps crossing the Straits of
MessinaBadoglio agreed secretly to invite Allied occupation on
September 3. The armistice was announced on the 8th, and Allied
landings followed that night in the Bay of Salerno south of Naples. Four
days later Hitler sent a crack team of commandos under Otto Skorzeny
to rescue Mussolini and set him up as a puppet dictator in the north of
Italy.
The new Italian government, far from exiting the war, was obliged to
do a volte-face and declare war on Germany on October 13. The Allies
did not take Naples until October 1 and made no dent in the Germans'
reinforced Gustav Line until 1944.
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(October 1930), where they assured Stalin of the date for a second
front. They also won his approval of the arrangements made for Italy,
according to which the interallied commission requested by Stalin
would merely advise the Anglo-American commanders on the spot
rather than govern on its own. When Soviet armies later entered
eastern European states, Stalin would point to the Italian precedent to
justify unilateral Soviet military control.
At the Cairo Conference (November 2226), Roosevelt, Churchill, and
Chiang discussed the Burma theatre and made the Cairo Declaration,
which prescribed as terms for ending the Pacific War the Japanese
surrender of Manchuria, Formosa, Korea, the Pescadores, and Pacific
islands acquired since 1914. It also established Chiang as one of the
Great Power allies, a point that did not please Churchill.
The first Big Three summit meeting followed in Tehrn from Nov. 28 to
Dec. 1, 1943. From the Soviet point of view, the results could only
have been satisfactory, for Stalin saw with his own eyes the conflicts
that Communist theory predicted must erupt between the
imperialist powers. In fact, Roosevelt and Churchill displayed the
inevitable divergences between a moralizing democracy recently
forced out of isolation and a world empire committed for 250 years to
preserving the balance of power. What was more, Churchill had no
illusions about the Soviet dictator, whereas Roosevelt preferred to
believe that he could reason with Uncle Joe if only he could allay
Soviet suspicions. Roosevelt made a point of chiding Churchill in
Stalin's presence and advocating an end to European colonialism after
the war. For his part, Stalin again demanded his 1941 frontiers, and
the Baltic coast of East Prussia as well, and the others acquiesced in
the restoration of the Curzon Line frontier, provided Poland was
compensated with territories taken from Germany in the west. As to
Germany itself, the Western powers had discussed breaking up the
country and turning the Danubian regions of Austria, Hungary, and
Bavaria into a peaceful, cowlike confederation, while Churchill
spoke of similar federations for eastern Europe. Stalin viewed such
notions with suspicion, since they were reminiscent of the cordon
sanitaire idea of 1918 and in any case would interfere with the
piecemeal communization of the small states. His plan was to
Balkanize eastern Europe, punish France for her surrender and strip
her of her colonies, and keep Poland and Italy weak. As U.S. diplomat
Charles E. Bohlen recorded at Tehrn: The result would be that the
Soviet Union would be the only important military power and political
force on the continent of Europe. Roosevelt did win an agreement in
principle on formation of a postwar international organization to be
led by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China.
Whether unity among them would survive victory was a question
Churchill and others brooded on in silence.
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At the Yalta Conference, Big Three unity seemed intact, but only
because the participants resorted to vagueness or postponements on
the most explosive issues. A joint European Advisory Commission, it
was decided, would divide Germany into occupation zones, with the
Soviet zone extending to the Elbe and a French zone carved out of the
Anglo-American spheres. Berlin would likewise be placed under
four-power control. The Western Allies repudiated the extreme plans
broached at Quebec for the pastoralization of Germany and favoured
German industrial recovery under international control. But the
Soviets insisted on the right to strip Germany of $20,000,000,000 worth
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Stalin did prove conciliatory on the United Nations, which had already
been discussed at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference between Aug. 21
and Oct. 7, 1944. The Soviets had demanded that all 16 constituent
republics of the U.S.S.R. be represented (ostensibly to balance the
British Empire nations that would vote with London) and that
permanent members of the Security Council retain a veto on all issues,
not just those involving sanctions or threats to peace. At Yalta, Stalin
settled for three seats in the General Assembly and a limited veto.
Like Wilson at Versailles, Roosevelt put great stock in international
organization and was prompted to remark, The Russians have given in
so much at the conference that I don't think we should let them
down. Finally, Stalin promised to declare war on Japan within 90 days
of the German surrender in return for southern Sakhalin and the Kuril
Islands, retention of Outer Mongolia, and a promise of U.S. support for
Soviet rights at Dairen (L-ta) and Port Arthur (L-shun)all the old
objects of Russian imperialism in east Asia. Within a month news from
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The Allied advance from the west was stalled for six weeks by the
Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last offensive, but by February 1945
German resistance was near its end. Some Soviet and Western leaders
were openly describing the last campaigns as a land-grab directed as
much against their distrustful allies as against the Germans. But the
commanders in the West still took steps to prove that they were
supporting the Soviet advance. The worst product of this policy was
the Allied bombing of Dresden on Feb. 1314, 1945, allegedly to
destroy a key communications centre for Germans facing the Red
Army. The two-day incendiary raid created a firestorm, however, that
consumed the medieval city and killed up to 25,000 civilians, to
virtually no military purpose.
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Japanese lives would be lost. Yet the Joint Chiefs had no choice but to
prepare for this eventuality, and by May 25 they had instructed
MacArthur to plan Operation Olympic, an invasion of Kyushu, for
November 1. The second means, inducement, was clearly preferable,
and on May 8, the day after the German surrender, President Harry S.
Truman tried it. Unconditional surrender, he said, would mean the
termination of the influence of the military leaders who have brought
Japan to the present brink of disaster, but did not mean the
extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people, who would be
free to return to their families, their farms, their jobs.
Unfortunately, Truman did not include (as the State Department
advised) a promise that the Japanese might retain their emperor, the
god-king of their Shint state religion. On the other hand, the
Japanese government foolishly dismissed Truman's appeal as
propaganda and began to mobilize the home front to resist an
invasion.
The first atomic test near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945, yielded
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victors only grew year by year into what the U.S. presidential adviser
Bernard Baruch and the pundit Walter Lippmann termed a Cold War.
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wrecked bridges, and choked waterways. Amid it all were the gaunt
survivors, perhaps 45,000,000 of them homeless, including 25,000,000
in those landsPoland, the Ukraine, and Russiathat had been overrun
and scorched two or three times. European communications and
transportation reverted to 19th-century levels: 90 percent of French
trucks and 82 percent of French locomotives were out of commission,
as were over half the rolling stock in Germany and two-thirds of the
Balkan railroads. European coal production was at 40 percent of
prewar levels, and more than half the continent's merchant marine no
longer existed. Some 23 percent of Europe's farmland was out of
production by war's end. Of course, people could be fed with American
aid while the rubble was cleared away and utilities restored, but World
War II cost Europe more in monetary terms than all its previous wars
put together. The war also set in train the greatest
Vlkerwanderungmovement of peoplessince the barbarian
incursions of the late Roman Empire. During the Nazi onslaught some
27,000,000 people fled or were forced out by war and persecution, and
4,500,000 more were seized for slave labour. When the Red Army
advanced westward, millions more fled before it to escape reprisals or
Communism. All told, about 60,000,000 people of 55 ethnic groups
from 27 countries were uprooted. Finally, 7,000,000 Axis prisoners of
war were in Allied hands, along with 8,000,000 Allied prisoners of war
liberated from the Axis and 670,000 survivors of Nazi death camps.
The landscape in much of Japan was just as barren, its cities flattened
by bombing, its industry and shipping destroyed. Large parts of China
had been under foreign occupation for up to 14 years andlike Russia
after World War Istill faced several years of destructive civil war.
Indeed, World War II had laid waste every major industrial region of
the globe except North America. The result was that in 194546 the
United States accounted for almost half the gross world product of
goods and services and enjoyed a technological lead symbolized by,
but by no means limited to, its atomic monopoly. On the other hand,
Americans as always wanted to demobilize rapidly and return to the
private lives and careers interrupted by Pearl Harbor. The Soviet
Union, by contrast, was in ruin, but its mighty armies occupied half a
dozen states in the heart of Europe, while local Communist parties
agitated in Italy and France. The United States and the Soviet Union
thus appeared to pose asymmetrical threats to each other.
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1943 the United States sponsored the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration to distribute food and medicine to the
stricken peoples in the war zones. At the Bretton Woods Conference
(summer of 1944) the United States presided over the creation of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The dollar was
returned to gold convertibility at $35 per ounce and would serve as the
world's reserve currency, while the pound, the franc, and other
currencies were pegged to the dollar. Such stability would permit the
recovery of world trade, while a General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (ratified in 1948) would ensure low tariffs and prevent a return
to policies of economic nationalism. Treasury Secretary Henry
Morgenthau tried to entice the Soviets to join the Bretton Woods
system, but the U.S.S.R. opted out of the new economic order.
The American universalist program seemingly had more luck in the
political realm. Roosevelt was convinced that the League of Nations
had been doomed by the absence of the United States and the Soviet
Union and thus was anxious to win Soviet participation in the
compromises at Yalta. The Big Four powers accordingly drafted the
Charter of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference in April
1945. Roosevelt wisely appointed several leading Republicans to the
U.S. delegation, avoiding Wilson's fatal error and securing the Senate
ratification of the UN Charter on July 28, 1945, by a vote of 892. Like
Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman hoped that future quarrels could be
settled peacefully in the international body.
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Truman's last attempt to win the Soviets to his universalist vision was
the Byrnes mission to Moscow in December 1945. There the Soviets
promptly accepted an Anglo-American plan for a UN Atomic Energy
Agency meant to control the development and use of nuclear power.
Stalin also conceded that it might prove possible to make some
changes in the Romanian and Bulgarian parliaments, though conceding
nothing that might weaken his hold on the satellites. George F. Kennan
of the U.S. embassy in Moscow called the concessions fig leaves of
democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship,
while Truman's own dissatisfaction with the results at Moscow and
growing domestic criticism of his coddling of the Russians were
pushing him toward a drastic reformulation of policy.
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The year 1946 saw many meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers,
which ultimately produced treaties of peace with Italy, Hungary,
Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria, signed on Feb. 10, 1947. Border
questions after World War II were comparatively minora somewhat
ironic fact, given the interwar attacks on Versailles by all parties.
Romania ceded northern Bukovina and Bessarabia back to the U.S.S.R.,
which also claimed Petsamo and the Karelian Isthmus from Finland and
the Carpatho-Ukraine region from Czechoslovakia. Hungary returned
northern Transylvania to Romania. Italy ceded the Dodecanese islands
to Greece and surrendered its overseas colonies, although a Soviet
demand for a trusteeship over Libya was denied. Trieste was contested
by Italy and Yugoslavia and remained under Western occupation until
1954. The major change affected Poland, which was figuratively
picked up and moved some 150 miles to the west. This meant that
large portions of eastern Germany came under Polish administration,
while the U.S.S.R. absorbed the entire Baltic coast as far as the
venerable German port of Knigsberg (Kaliningrad). The U.S.S.R. was
the only power to make significant territorial gains from the war.
Four-power cooperation in Germany continued to deteriorate. The
Americans had agreed at Potsdam to reparations-in-kind but opposed
extreme efforts by the Soviets and the French to pauperize the
Germans lest the burden of feeding them fall entirely on the American
taxpayer. What was more, the Soviets would be unwilling (in Kennan's
view) to countenance centralized German institutions unless they were
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Atomic energy
The superpowers also failed to join hands on atomic energy. Despite
resistance from powerful circles in the press, Congress, and the
military against any giveaway of atomic secrets, Byrnes appointed a
committee in January 1946 to draft proposals for international control
of atomic energy. The resulting (Dean) Acheson(David) Lilienthal
Report called for a UN authority to survey and control all uranium
deposits and ensure that atomic research was conducted for peaceful
purposes only. Once controls were in place, the United States would
relinquish its arsenal and scientific information to the world
community. Truman entrusted the diplomatic task to Baruch, who
insisted that nations not be allowed to employ their Security Council
veto in atomic matters. He then appealed to the UN on June 14, 1946:
We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. The
Soviet plan, presented by Andrey Gromyko, called instead for
immediate prohibition of all manufacture and use of atomic weapons.
Measures to ensure compliance would follow, but there could be no
tampering with the Security Council veto. Western delegates pointed
out that the Soviets were asking the United States to give up its
monopoly and make public all its data in return for a paper promise of
compliance. Gromyko countered that the United States was asking all
other countries to reveal the state of their own research before it gave
up its own arsenal. At the final vote in December, the U.S.S.R. and
Poland vetoed the Baruch Plan, and international control of atomic
energy ceased to be a possibility. While the United States was not as
forthcoming as it might have been, the Soviet refusal to allow on-site
inspection would frustrate disarmament for the next 40 years.
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The Marshall Plan was born in the State Department in response to the
fact that western Europe was making little progress toward prosperity
and stability. Britain was exhausted and committed to the Labour
government's extensive welfare programs. In France, Charles de
Gaulle's postwar government quickly gave way to a Fourth Republic
paralyzed by quarreling factions that included a large, disciplined
Communist party. In Italy, too, Communists threatened to gain power
by parliamentary means. All suffered from underproduction, a
shortage of capital, and energy shortages exacerbated by the severe
winter of 194647. Marshall therefore put forward a plan for cash
grants to a joint European economic council to assist in the return of
normal economic health, without which there can be no political
stability and no assured peace.
The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, spoke for western Europe
when he told Parliament, When the Marshall proposals were
announced, I grabbed them with both hands. At Kennan's insistence,
Marshall aid was offered to all of Europe, including the Soviet bloc, but
Stalin denounced the plan as a capitalist plot. The one eastern
European state not yet communized, Czechoslovakia, attempted to
join the Marshall Plan, but Communist pressure forced it to back out.
In February 1948, less than 10 years after Munich, the Czech
Communist party subverted the republic and Czech democracy again
fell to totalitarian rule, a tragedy punctuated by the suicideor
murderof Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. Stalin reinforced his attack
on the Marshall Plan by reviving the Communist International, now
called the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), in October
1947 and by escalating ideological warfare against the West.
The new hope kindled in western Europe by the Marshall Plan helped
secure the defeat of the Communists in the 1948 Italian election (the
$1,000,000 of CIA funds for the Christian Democrats was hardly
decisive) and stabilize politics elsewhere in western Europe. Under the
Marshall Plan, the United States then transferred $13,600,000,000 to
the stricken economies of western Europe in addition to
$9,500,000,000 in earlier loans and $500,000,000 in private charity.
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tendencies. But Tito held firm: Yugoslavia would choose its own path
to Socialism, seek economic ties with the West, and indirectly place
itself under Western protection. Tito also ceased to support the Greek
Communists, and the civil war there soon ended in a victory for the
royal government (October 1949).
The second assumption of the early Cold War was shattered in August
1949 when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. Its
development might have been hastened by espionage, but Soviets had
been among the leaders in nuclear physics before the war, and
knowledgeable observers had known that a Soviet atomic bomb was
only a matter of time.
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launched its attack, but the desperate Jewish defense prevailed on all
five fronts. The UN called for a cease-fire on May 20 and appointed
Folke, Count Bernadotte, as mediator, but his new partition plan was
unacceptable to both sides. A 10-day Israeli offensive in July destroyed
the Arab armies as an offensive force, at the cost of 838 Israeli lives.
Members of the Stern Group assassinated Bernadotte on September 17.
A final offensive in October carried the Israelis to the Lebanese border
and the edge of the Golan Heights in the north and to the Gulf of
Aqaba and into the Sinai in the south. Armistice talks resumed on
Rhodes on Jan. 13, 1949, with the American Ralph Bunche mediating,
and a truce followed in March. No Arab state recognized Israel's
legitimacy, however. More than a half-million Palestinian refugees
were scattered around the Arab world. Between 1948 and 1957 some
567,000 Jews were expelled from Arab states, nearly all of whom
resettled in Israel. The 1948 war thus marked only the beginning of
trouble in the region.
South Asia
The British faced a similar problem on a much larger scale in India,
whose population included 250,000,000 Hindus, 90,000,000 Muslims,
and 60,000,000 distributed among various ethnic and religious
minorities. Between the wars Mohandas Gandhi's passive-resistance
campaigns had crystallized Indian nationalism, which was nurtured in
part by the relative leniency of British rule. Parliament set in motion
the process leading to home rule in 1935, and the Attlee Cabinet
rewarded India for its wartime loyalty by instructing Lord Mountbatten
on Feb. 20, 1947, to prepare India for independence by June 1948. He
did so, too hastily, in only six months, and the partition of the
subcontinent into a mainly Hindu India and a mainly Muslim but
divided Pakistan (including part of Bengal in the east) at midnight on
Aug. 1415, 1947, was accompanied by panicky flight and riots
between Hindus and Muslims that claimed between 200,000 and
600,000 lives. Perhaps a bloodbath was inevitable whatever
Mountbatten did or however long he took to do it. Nothing, however,
tarnished Britain's colonial record in India so much as its termination.
The Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru then took firm control and
governed the Dominion (after 1950 the Republic) of India in
parliamentary style and made India one of the first decolonized states
to adopt a posture of nonalignment among the great powers. Disputes
with Pakistan, especially over the contested province of Jammu and
Kashmir, however, ensured continued strife on the subcontinent.
Elsewhere in South Asia the colonial powers expelled the Japanese
only to confront indigenous nationalist forces. The British fought a
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Chiang's forces advanced on all fronts until they captured Yen-an itself
in March 1947, but the rapid occupation of North China and Manchuria,
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Communist and shrug that it would wait for the dust to settle
(Acheson's phrase).
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for the United States to write off western Europe and to make the
Western Hemisphere the Gibraltar of Western Civilization. The
Truman administration, backed by eastern Republicans and Eisenhower
himself, persuaded Congress to commit four additional divisions to
Europe. The Korean War also hastened implementation of NSC-68, a
document drafted by Paul Nitze that called for a vigorous program of
atomic and conventional rearmament to meet America's global
commitments.
As American and allied publics grew increasingly impatient with the
bloody deadlock in Korea, Truman determined to seek a negotiated
peace. MacArthur tried to undermine this policy, issuing his own
ultimatum to Peking and writing Congress that there is no substitute
for victory, whereupon in April 1951 Truman fired him for
insubordination. The popular warrior and proconsul went home to a
hero's welcome, and the Senate held hearings on the propriety of the
limited war strategy. Marshall defended the President, arguing that
a wider war in Asia would expose Europe to attack, while General
Omar Bradley insisted that MacArthur's plans would involve us in the
wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong
enemy. MacArthur retorted that limited war was a form of
appeasement.
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While war raged in Korea, the French were battling the nationalist and
Communist Viet Minh in Indochina. When a French army became
surrounded at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Paris appealed to the United
States for air support. American leaders viewed the insurgency as part
of the worldwide Communist campaign and at first propounded the
theory that if Indochina went Communist other Southeast Asian
countries would also fall like dominoes. Eisenhower, however, was
reluctant to send U.S. troops to Asian jungles, to arrogate war-making
powers to the executive, or to sully the anti-imperialist reputation of
the United States, which he considered an asset in the Cold War. In
any case both he and the American people wanted no more Koreas.
Hence the United States supported partition of Indochina as the best
means of containing the Viet Minh, and after French Premier Pierre
Mends-France came to power promising peace, partition was effected
at the Geneva Conference of 1954. Laos and Cambodia won
independence, while two Vietnams emerged on either side of the 17th
parallel: a tough Communist regime under Ho Chi Minh in the north, an
unstable republic in the south. National elections intended to reunite
Vietnam under a single government were scheduled for 1956 but never
took place, and, when the United States assumed France's former role
as South Vietnam's sponsor, another potential Korea was created.
The Korean War and the new administration brought significant
changes in U.S. strategy. Eisenhower believed that the Cold War would
be a protracted struggle and that the greatest danger for the United
States would be the temptation to spend itself to death. If the United
States were obliged to respond to endless Communist-instigated
brushfire wars, it would soon lose the capacity and will to defend
the free world. Hence Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles determined to solve the great equation, balancing a healthy
economy with only what was essential by way of military force. Their
answer was a defense policy whereby the United States would deter
future aggression with its airborne nuclear threat. As Dulles put it, the
United States reserved the right to reply to aggression with massive
retaliatory power at places of its own choosing. In implementing this
policy, Eisenhower cut overall defense spending by 30 percent over
four years but beefed up the Strategic Air Command. The diplomatic
side of this new policy was a series of regional pacts that linked the
United States to countries ringing the entire Soviet bloc. Truman had
already founded the NATO alliance, the ANZUS pact with Australia and
New Zealand (1951), the Pact of Rio with Latin-American nations
(1947), and the defense treaty with Japan (1951). Now Dulles
completed an alliance system linking the 1954 Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO), stretching from Australia to Pakistan, to the
1955 Baghdad Pact Organization (later the Central Treaty Organization
[CENTO]), stretching from Pakistan to Turkey, to NATO, stretching
from Turkey (after 1952) to Iceland.
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Dulles viewed the postwar world in the same bipolar terms as had
Truman and, for that matter, Stalin. Asian independence, however,
not only expanded the arena of the Cold War but also spawned the
third path of nonalignment. In April 1955 delegates from 29 nations
attended the Bandung (Indonesia) Afro-Asian Conference, which was
dominated by Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and
Sukarno of Indonesia. In theory the delegates met to celebrate
neutrality and an end to the old age of the white man; in fact they
castigated the imperialist West and praised, or tolerated, the U.S.S.R.
Although most of the Bandung leaders were sloganeering despots in
their own countries, the movement captivated the imagination of
many guilt-ridden Western intellectuals.
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Israel had used the years since 1948 to good effect, developing the
arid country and training a reserve force of 200,000 men and women
armed primarily with French weapons. Ben-Gurion believed that the
Arabs would never accept the existence of Israel except by force. U.S.
policy was to play down the ArabIsraeli dispute and alert all parties to
the danger of Communist penetration. To this end, Eisenhower
dispatched a futile mission in January 1956 in hopes of reconciling
Cairo and Tel Aviv. In addition, the United States agreed to contribute
$56,000,000, and $200,000,000 through the World Bank, to Egypt's
project for a new dam on the Nile at Aswn. Nasser's flirtations with
Moscow, however, alienated Dulles. Then, on July 26, 1956, Nasser
nationalized the Suez Canal.
The conservative Cabinet in London, the French, and the Israelis
resolved to thwart Nasser. They could cite as precedent a CIA-backed
coup d'tat in Iran (August 1953) that overthrew the ascetic nationalist
Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had expropriated foreign oil interests and
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also looked for support to the U.S.S.R. In any case, British, French, and
Israeli planners met to work out a joint strike at the Sinai and Suez
that might permit a far-reaching realignment in the Middle East.
Eisenhower got wind of Israeli military preparations but believed that
the blow would fall on Syria. He especially opposed hostilities before
the U.S. election lest he lose Jewish votes by having to scold Israel.
Moshe Dayan, however, quietly mobilized all of Israel's mobile
brigades, which struck on October 29 and took the Egyptiansand the
Americansby surprise. Israeli war aims included the elimination of
the Egyptian army as an offensive threat, neutralization of Palestinian
bases in Gaza, and capture of the Strait of Trn. The Anglo-French
goals were to secure the Suez Canal and possibly to topple Nasser and
thus strike a blow at Arab radicalism.
An Israeli airborne assault secured the Mitla Pass in the Sinai while
armoured columns penetrated the peninsula. The Anglo-French then
issued an ultimatum to Cairo and proceeded to bomb Egyptian bases.
The Egyptian army evacuated the Sinai. Eisenhower, preoccupied with
Hungary and the election, was furious at this act of insubordination on
the part of his allies and sponsored a UN resolution for a cease-fire on
November 1. Egypt frustrated the Anglo-French plan by the simple
expedient of scuttling ships in the canal, but the Anglo-French went
ahead with a landing at Port Said. The superpowers then forced an
evacuation and the insertion of UN peacekeeping forces in the Sinai
and Gaza Strip. There matters stood for 10 years.
The only one who gained in the Suez muddle was the U.S.S.R. With the
West in disarray and involved in a campaign that looked very much like
old-fashioned imperialism, Soviet tanks returned to Budapest on
November 4, crushed the Hungarians fighting with their homemade
weapons, and liquidated their leaders. In 1957 the Soviets declared a
new policy of centralism for the satellites and denounced both
dogmatism (a code word for Stalinism) and revisionism (a code
word for liberty).
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The first contest in that race was for the superbomb, a hydrogen, or
fusion, bomb a thousand times more destructive than the atomic
fission variety. Many scientists opposed this escalation. The dispute
polarized the political and scientific communities. On the one hand it
seemed as if the Cold War had created a climate of fear that no longer
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How could the arms race be headed off before the world became
locked into what Churchill called the balance of terror? The UN
Disarmament Commission became a tedious platform for the posturings
of the superpowers, the Americans insisting on on-site inspection, the
Soviets demanding general and complete disarmament and the
elimination of foreign bases. Eisenhower hoped that Stalin's death
might help to break this deadlock. Churchill had been urging a summit
conference ever since 1945, and once de-Stalinization and the Austrian
State Treaty gave hints of Soviet flexibility, even Dulles acquiesced in
a summit, which convened at Geneva in July 1955. The Soviets again
called for a unified, neutral Germany, while the West insisted that it
could come about only through free elections. On arms control,
Eisenhower stunned the Soviets with his open skies proposal. The
United States and the Soviet Union, he said, should exchange
blueprints of all military installations and each allow the other side to
conduct unhindered aerial reconnaissance. After some hesitation,
Khrushchev denounced the plan as a capitalist espionage device. The
Geneva summit marginally reduced tensions but led to no substantive
agreements.
Open skies reflected the American fear of surprise attack. In 1954 a
high-level Surprise Attack Study chaired by the scientist James
Killian assured the President of a growing American superiority in
nuclear weapons that would hold until the 195860 period but warned
that the U.S.S.R. was ahead in long-range rocketry and would soon
achieve its own secure nuclear deterrent. The panel recommended
rapid development of ICBMs, construction of a distant early warning
(DEW) radar line in the Canadian Arctic, strengthened air defenses,
and measures to increase intelligence-gathering capabilities, both to
verify arms control treaties and to avoid overreaction to Soviet
advances. The Killian report gave birth to the U-2 spy plane, which
began crisscrossing the U.S.S.R. above the range of Soviet air defense
in 1956, and to a research program to develop reconnaissance
satellites to observe the U.S.S.R. from outer space.
In 1955 both the United States and the Soviet Union announced
programs to launch artificial Earth satellites during the upcoming
International Geophysical Year (IGY). The Eisenhower administration,
concerned that the satellite program not interfere with military
missile programs or prejudice the legality of spy satellites to come,
entrusted its IGY proposal to the small, nonmilitary Vanguard rocket.
While Vanguard development crept ahead, the Soviet program won the
first space race with Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4, 1957. The Soviet
achievement shocked the Western world, challenged the strategic
assumptions of every power, and thus inaugurated a new phase in the
continuing Cold War.
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The Soviet successes in outer space just 40 years after the Bolshevik
Revolution were powerful evidence for Khrushchev's claims that the
U.S.S.R. had achieved strategic equality and that Communism was the
best system for overcoming backwardness. Sputnik restored Soviet
prestige after the 1956 embarrassment in Hungary, shook European
confidence in the U.S. nuclear deterrent, magnified the militancy of
Maoist China, and provoked an orgy of self-doubt in the United States
itself. The two Sputnik satellites of 1957 were themselves of little
military significance, and the test missile that launched them was too
primitive for military deployment, but Khrushchev claimed that
long-range missiles were rolling off the assembly line like sausages, a
bluff that allowed President Eisenhower's opponentsand nervous
Europeansto perceive a missile gap. Khrushchev in turn tried to
capitalize on the apparent gap in a series of crises, but his
adventurous policy only provoked perverse reactions in China, the
United States, and Europe that undermined his own political support
at home.
Eisenhower was apprised in advance of Soviet missile progress thanks
in part to overflights of the U-2 spy plane. By the time of Sputnik the
Pentagon already had several parallel programs for ballistic missiles of
various types, including the advanced, solid-fueled Polaris and
Minuteman. The great fleet of B-47 and B-52 intercontinental bombers
already deployed also assured continued American strategic superiority
through the early 1960s. The frugal Eisenhower thus tried to play down
the importance of Sputnik and to discourage a race for arms or
prestige, but he was frustrated by a coalition of Democrats,
journalists, academics, and hawks of both parties who insisted that the
United States not only leapfrog the Soviets in space and missiles but
also increase federal support to education, extend more military and
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economic aid to the Third World, and expand social programs at home
intended in part to polish the American image abroadin short, pursue
the Cold War more vigorously. Eisenhower conceded to this mood in
1958 by sponsoring creation of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration and passage of the National Defense Education Act,
accelerating weapons programs, and deploying intermediate-range
missiles in England, Italy, and Turkey. He also acknowledged the
expanded Soviet threat in his State of the Union address in 1958:
Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science,
education, the whole world of ideasall are harnessed to this same
chariot of expansion. The Soviets are, in short, waging total cold war.
A similarly total American response to this challenge, requiring
virtually wartime levels of national mobilization to outdo a totalitarian
system in whatever field of endeavour it chose to emphasize, would,
in Eisenhower's mind, however, have undermined the free market and
fiscal soundness that were the foundation of American strength in the
first place. Liberal economists argued in response that a sharply
expanded role for the federal government was a matter of survival in
the space age and would even stimulate economic growth, military
prowess, and social progress.
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The Sino-Soviet split shattered the strict bipolarity of the Cold War
world (though the United States would not take advantage of that fact
for more than a decade) and turned the U.S.S.R. and China into bitter
rivals for leadership in the Communist and Third worlds. The
fundamental causes of the split must be traced to contradictions in the
Soviet role as both the leader of the Communist movement and a great
power with its own national interests. Before 1949 the U.S.S.R. had
been able to subordinate the interests of foreign Communists to its
own, but the Communist triumph in China, paradoxically, was a
potential disaster for the U.S.S.R., for Mao and the Chinese would
inevitably refuse to play the role of pupil. Once the Korean War was
over and Stalin dead, the Chinese asserted themselves, learned the
limits of Socialist internationalism, and angrily began to plot their
own course. While the ideological rift served, in the short run, to
invigorate both Communist rivals as they competed for prestige and
influence among the world's revolutionaries, it destroyed the myth
that Communism transcended nationalism and power politics. This
meant that the U.S.S.R. was delicately situated between the
nuclear-armed NATO powers and the fanatical (and numerous)
Chinese, and to appease either meant to alienate the other.
Accordingly, Khrushchev played a risky double game from 1958 to
1962, alternately holding out hope for arms control to the NATO
powers and leveling demands backed by rocket-rattling. The historian
Adam Ulam has seen in this a grand design by which Khrushchev
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offshore islets of Quemoy and Matsu. Peking may have hoped to force
Moscow to support its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, while Chiang
may have hoped to drag the United States into supporting an invasion
of the mainland. Neither superpower, however, was willing to risk war.
The U.S. 7th Fleet resupplied Chiang's forces, while the Soviets
pledged to defend mainland China, but both discouraged offensive
action.
By September 1959, when Khrushchev arrived in the United States,
Dulles had died, and Eisenhower was intent to use personal diplomacy
in an attempt to put a cap on the arms race. The tour itselffrom New
York City to Iowa to Hollywoodwas a sensation, though Khrushchev
professed distaste for American consumerism and predicted your
grandchildren will live under Communism. His talks with Eisenhower
produced an ephemeral spirit of Camp David and the scheduling of a
follow-up summit conference for May 1960 in Paris. Meanwhile,
Khrushchev's last-ditch efforts to mend relations with Peking exploded
in the spring of 1960. Mao himself reportedly authored an article
cryptically condemning Khrushchev's dtente policy as vile revisionism
and reiterating Chinese willingness to confront nuclear war. The
Chinese observer at a Warsaw Pact meeting in February 1960 declared
in advance that any arms agreements reached at the U.S.Soviet
summit would not be binding on Peking. On the eve of the Paris
summit an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the U.S.S.R.
When Eisenhower refused to apologize for the incident and assumed
personal responsibility, Khrushchev had little choice but to walk out.
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World aid because the former had been a case of helping industrial
populations rebuild their societies, while the latter was a case of
sparking industrial or even merely agricultural development in
primitive economies. Foreign aid did not necessarily serve U.S.
interests, since many Third World rulers chose neutralism or Socialism,
nor did it promote economic growth, since most new nations lacked
the necessary social and physical infrastructure for a modern economy.
Proponents of aid replied that U.S. capital and technology were
needed precisely to build infrastructure, to assist nation building,
and to fortify recipients against Communists and others who might
subvert the development process in its early stages. In the late 1950s,
U.S. economic aid averaged about $1,600,000,000 per year, compared
with about $2,100,000,000 in military aid to friendly regimes. The
Soviet line, by contrast, held that new nations would not be truly
independent until they freed themselves from economic dependence
on their former masters, but the Soviets invariably expected a political
return for their own assistance. The claim of the People's Republic of
China to be the natural leader of Third World revolt also obliged
Khrushchev to make bolder endorsements of wars of national
liberation. By 1960 it was already clear, however, that local politics
and culture made every Third World situation unique.
The Middle East had reached an unstable deadlock based precariously
on the UN-administered cease-fire of 1956. The eclipse of British and
French influence after the Suez debacle made the United States
fearful of growing Soviet influence in the region, symbolized by the
Soviet offer to take over construction of the Aswn High Dam in Egypt.
In January 1957 the U.S. Congress authorized the President to deploy
U.S. troops in the region if necessary and to dispense $500,000,000 in
aid to friendly states. This Eisenhower Doctrine appeared to polarize
the region, with Middle East Treaty Organization members in support
and Egypt, Syria, and Yemen in opposition. When, in July 1958,
nationalist generals backed by a variety of factions, prominent among
which were Communists, overthrew the pro-Western Hshimite
monarchy in Iraq, and unrest spread to Jordan and Lebanon,
Eisenhower responded at once. The 14,000 U.S. troops that landed in
Beirut allowed the Lebanese president to restore order on the basis of
a delicate compromise among radical, Muslim, and Christian factions.
Khrushchev denounced the intervention, demanded that the U.S.S.R.
be consulted, and tried without success to convene an international
conference on the Middle East. His extension of an invitation to India,
but not China, needlessly alienated Peking and signaled a new Soviet
interest in relations with New Delhi.
The climactic year of African decolonization was 1960, and the first
Cold War crisis on that continent occurred when, in that year, Belgium
hastily pulled out of the vast Belgian Congo (now Congo [Kinshasa]).
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Jarres. Having secured the Laotian territory needed for infiltration and
assault on South Vietnam, North Vietnam persuaded China and the
U.S.S.R. in December 1960 to approve Ho's plan for a nonpeaceful
transition to socialism in Vietnam.
Latin-American problems
Finally, Cold War rivalry and Third World problems intersected
devastatingly in America's own backyard. Before the era of Roosevelt's
Good Neighbor Policy, the United States had frequently been accused
of meddling too much in the affairs of other states in the hemisphere.
By the 1950s the contradictory charge was leveled that the United
States was not involving itself enough, as evidenced by the fact that
the United States spent $12,600,000,000 on aid to Asia and the Middle
East in the period 195357 compared with $1,900,000,000 on Latin
America. Resentment over the CIA's role in toppling an allegedly
Communist-backed government in Guatemala in 1954 and violent
protests against Vice President Richard M. Nixon during his trip to
Caracas and Lima in 1958 alerted Washington to the dangers inherent
in neglecting the genuine needs of the region. The United States
agreed to fund an Inter-American Development Bank, while the State
Department sought to avoid too close an association with unpopular,
authoritarian regimes. Whatever the overall merits of such a policy, it
had immediate and disastrous effects in Cuba.
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The new attitude toward the Third World was perhaps the clearest
break in American diplomacy. Basing its policy on W.W. Rostow's
non-Communist manifesto describing stages of economic
development, the Kennedy administration increased foreign aid for
Third World nations whether or not they were politically aligned with
the United States. The Alliance for Progress, created in March 1961,
especially targeted Latin America. By 1965 U.S. foreign aid reached
$4,100,000,000 as compared with $2,300,000,000 contributed by all
other developed countries. The validity of Rostow's investment model
for economic takeoff was debated for two decades, but perhaps the
greatest weakness in U.S. aid programs was the assumption that local
rulers could be persuaded to put their own people's welfare first.
Instead, aid money often fed corruption, bolstered power-hungry
leaders or Socialist bureaucracies, or helped to finance local conflicts.
What was more, the Soviets had some natural advantages in dealing
with such leaders, since they offered no moralistic advice about
democracy and human rights, while their own police-state methods
served the needs of local despots. On the other hand, sustained world
economic growth and measures to stabilize commodity prices helped
the developing countries to achieve an average annual growth rate of
5 percent during the 1960s (compared with 5.1 percent for industrial
countries). But the crushing rate of Third World population growth (2.6
percent annually) meant that even in the best of times foreign aid only
just offset the effects of Third World fertility.
Kennedy's first crisis stemmed from his endorsement of the CIA plan to
unseat Castro. The CIA had trained Cuban exiles in Guatemala and
flown them to Florida, whence they were to stage an invasion of Cuba
in expectation of a popular revolt there. Instead, the landing at the
Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, was a fiasco. No coordination had been
achieved with dissidents inside Cuba, while the failure to provide U.S.
air cover (perhaps for fear of retaliation in Berlin) doomed the
invasion. Castro's army killed or captured most of the 1,500-man force
in two days. The U.S.S.R. reaped a propaganda harvest and pledged to
defend Cuba in the future. Kennedy had to content himself with a
promise to resist any efforts by Castro and the guerrilla leader Che
Guevara to export revolution elsewhere in Latin America.
Kennedy and Khrushchev held a summit meeting in Vienna in June
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1961. With Berlin and the Third World uppermost in his mind, Kennedy
proposed that neither superpower attempt to upset the existing
balance of power in any region where the other was already involved.
Khrushchev evidently considered the young president to be weak and
on the defensive and tried to intimidate him with a new ultimatum,
threatening to turn over control of Western access to West Berlin to
the East German government. (Khrushchev was being pressured by the
East German leader Walter Ulbricht to stem the tide of thousands of
skilled workers who were fleeing across the zonal boundary into West
Berlin.) Kennedy responded by pledging to defend West Berlin and
calling up 250,000 reservists. On Aug. 13, 1961, Soviet and East
German troops closed down interallied checkpoints and proceeded to
build the Berlin Wall, sealing off the western city. Just as in 1948, the
U.S. leadership debated whether to respond with force to this
violation of the Potsdam Accords, but the hesitancy of the NATO allies
and the timidityor prudenceof Kennedy limited the West to a
reassertion of access rights to West Berlin.
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On the other hand, the Cuban missile crisis marked the final
frustration of Khrushchev's efforts to force a German peace treaty and
prevent the deployment of nuclear weapons on German or Chinese
soil. Peking, of course, had supported the Soviets' bid to place missiles
in Cuba and had taken the opportunity to attack India (see below
China, India, and Pakistan), and the precipitous Soviet retreat
prompted Chinese charges of capitulationism. The Chinese nuclear
program proceeded apace, with the People's Republic exploding its
first atomic device in 1964. Never again would the Soviet leadership
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illusory superiority would only destabilize the balance and tempt one
or the other into launching a first strike. Whether the Soviets ever
shared this doctrine of deterrence is dubious. Marshal Sokolovsky's
volumes on military strategy in the 1960s, while granting that nuclear
war would be an unprecedented disaster for all, still committed the
U.S.S.R. to a war-winning capability.
Since World War II, Britain had tried to maintain the appearance of a
global power, developing its own nuclear weapons, deploying
conventional forces around the world, and keeping hold of its African
colonies. Churchill, returned to office in the early 1950s, had vowed
never to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Likewise,
the British held aloof from the continental experiments with
integration and saw their role rather as the vertex of three great world
systems: the English-speaking peoples, the British Commonwealth, and
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the old European Great Powers. All this came to a sudden end when a
combination of factorssluggish economic performance by the world's
oldest industrial power, growing pressure to decolonize, demands for
greater social expenditures at home, and the superpowers' leap into
the missile ageconvinced London that it could no longer afford to
keep up appearances in foreign policy. A defense White Paper of 1957
signalled a shift away from conventional armed forces toward reliance
on a cheap, national nuclear deterrent. Sputnik then convinced the
British government to cancel its own ballistic-missile program and rely
on its special relationship with the United States to procure modern
weapons. Eisenhower agreed to sell the Skybolt air-launched missile to
Britain by way of healing the wounds inflicted by Suez and shoring up
NATO after Sputnik. When McNamara subsequently cut the Skybolt
program in his campaign to streamline the Pentagon, the British
government was acutely embarrassed. Kennedy met with Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan at Nassau in December 1962 and offered
Polaris submarines instead. It was hoped at the time that the British
deterrent would be subsumed in a multilateral NATO force. The
Conservative government also made the hard decision in 1963 to seek
admission to the Common Market, only to be vetoed by the French.
Not until 1973 was Britain's application, together with those of Ireland
and Denmark, approved and the European Communities broadened.
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Most new African states had little more to support their pretensions to
nationhood than a paper constitution, a flag, and a London-backed
currency. The leaderships blamed African underdevelopment on past
exploitation rather than on objective conditions, thus rejecting the
American and European development theories that saw political
stability as possible only within the context of economic growth.
Nkrumah lectured to his Pan-African Congress in 1963 that the social
and economic development of Africa will come only within the
political kingdom, not the other way around. Indeed, Africa's
politicians invariably styled themselves as charismatic leaders whose
political and even spiritual guidance was the prerequisite for progress.
Nkrumah himself seized all power in Ghana and made himself a
quasi-divine figure until the army overthrew him in 1966. Togo's
government fell to a military coup in 1963, and mutinies broke out in
Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. In the latter country, Julius Nyerere,
much admired in Europe and the United States, declared a one-party
dictatorship based on his ideology of ujamaa (familyhood) and courted
aid from Communist China. Other leaders contrived similar ideologies
to justify personal rule. By 1967 black Africa had suffered 64
attempted coups d'tat, many born of tribal hatreds, and most
Africans had fewer political rights than under colonial rule.
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Third World, France was invigorated. The weak Fourth Republic had
suffered defeat in Indochina and was embroiled in a civil war between
French settlers and native Muslims in Algeria. When de Gaulle was
called back to power eight months after Sputnik 1, he set about to
forestall a threatened coup d'tat by the French army, stabilize French
politics, end the Algerian debacle (independence was granted in 1962
in the Treaty of vian), and restore French power and prestige in the
world. His constitution for a Fifth Republic established presidential
leadership and restored France's political stability, itself an
achievement of great value to the West. De Gaulle's vision of France,
however, involved neither la plus grande France of the colonial empire
nor the Atlanticist France of NATO nor the European France of the
Common Market (EEC). Rather, de Gaulle proclaimed that a France
without grandeur was not France at all and set out to reestablish
French military, technological, and diplomatic independence.
France's decolonization proceeded as rapidly as Britain's, culminating
in 1960 with the partition and independence of French West Africa. De
Gaulle, however, refused to exhibit any guilt or doubt about France's
mission civilisatrice and offered the populations a choice between
going it alone or joining a linguistic, monetary, and development
community with the former metropole. Only Guinea elected to follow
a Marxist leader who sought ties with the U.S.S.R.
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and passed Resolution 242, calling for a withdrawal from all occupied
regions. The Israelis were willing to view their conquests (except
Jerusalem) as bargaining chips but insisted on Arab recognition of the
right of Israel to exist and firm guarantees against future attack. The
so-called frontline Arab states were neither able (for domestic
reasons) nor willing to give such guarantees and instead courted Soviet
and Third World support against U.S.Israeli imperialism. Hence
Israel remained both greatly enlarged and possessed of shorter, more
defensible borders, although it did acquire the problem of
administering more than a million Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank.
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The war of attrition on the ground, like the bombing in the North, was
designed less to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war than to
demonstrate to the enemy that he could not win and to bring him to
the bargaining table. But stalemate suited Hanoi, which could afford
to wait, while it was anathema to the Americans. Johnson's popularity
fell steadily. Most Americans favoured more vigorous prosecution to
end the war, but a growing number advocated withdrawal. Antiwar
dissent grew and spread and overlapped with sweeping and violent
demands for social change. The American foreign policy consensus that
had sustained containment since the 1940s was shattered by Vietnam.
In retrospect, Johnson's attempt to prevent the war from disturbing his
own domestic program was vain, and his strategic conception was
grounded in folly and hubris. He and his advisers had no clear notion of
what the application of American force was supposed to achieve. It
was merely assumed to be invincible.
Hanoi understood that the classic Maoist strategy of isolating cities by
revolutionizing the countryside was inapplicable to Vietnam because
the cities could still hold out with foreign support. Accordingly, in
mid-1967 the North Vietnamese Politburo approved a plan for urban
attacks throughout South Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap insisted,
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For more than 25 years after 1941 the United States had maintained an
unprecedented depth of involvement in world affairs. In 1968 Vietnam
finally forced Americans to face the limits of their resources and will.
Whoever succeeded Johnson would have little choice but to find a way
to escape from Vietnam and reduce American global responsibilities.
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bloc.
Arms-limitation negotiations
The centrepiece of a bilateral U.S.Soviet dtente, however, had to be
the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which began in 1969. After
a decade of determined research and deployment the Soviet Union had
pulled ahead of the United States in long-range missiles and was
catching up in submarine-launched missiles and in long-range bombers.
Indeed, it had been American policy since the mid-1960s to permit the
Soviets to achieve parity in order to stabilize the regime of mutual
deterrence. Stability was threatened, however, from the technological
quarter with the development of multiple independently targeted
reentry vehicles (MIRVs), by which several warheads, each aimed at a
different target, could be carried on one missile, and antiballistic
missiles (ABMs), which might allow one side to strike first while
shielding itself from retaliation. In the arcane province of strategic
theory, therefore, offense (long-range missiles) became defense, and
defense (ABM) offense. Johnson had favoured a thin ABM system to
protect the United States from a Chinese attack, and in 1969 Nixon
won Senate approval of ABM deployment by a single vote. He
intended, however, to use the program as a bargaining chip. The
Soviets had actually deployed a rudimentary ABM system but were
anxious to halt the U.S. program before superior American technology
left theirs behind. The public SALT talks stalled, but back-channel
negotiations between Kissinger and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin
produced agreement in principle in May 1971 to limit long-range
missiles and ABM deployment. The American opening to China made
the Soviets increasingly eager for a prompt agreement and summit
meeting, while the Americans hoped that Moscow would encourage
North Vietnam to be forthcoming in the peace talks.
Since 1968 North Vietnamese negotiators had demanded satisfaction of
Premier Pham Van Dong's four points of 1965, including cessation of
all U.S. military activity in Indochina, termination of foreign military
alliances with Saigon, a coalition government in the South that
included the NLF, and reunification of Vietnam. The United States
demanded withdrawal of all foreign troops from the South, including
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the PAVN. This deadlock, plus Hanoi's anxiety over the possible effects
of dtente, prompted another North Vietnamese bid for victory on the
battlefield. In March 1972 they committed 10 of their 13 divisions to a
massive offensive. Nixon responded by ordering the resumption of
bombing of the North for the first time since 1969 and the mining of
the harbour at Haiphong, North Vietnam's major port. The offensive
stalled.
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that this was a concession, since they declined to count the 90 British
and French missiles aimed at them, the Soviets' giant SS-18s, able to
deliver up to 10 MIRVs, ensured the U.S.S.R. an advantage in ICBM
warheads. The repeated failure to restrain the growth of Soviet
offensive systems soon sparked fears that the United States might
become vulnerable to preemptive attack.
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with dtente. The North Vietnamese had never viewed the 1973 peace
accords as anything other than an interlude permitting the final
withdrawal of American forces. In the year following they built up
their strength in South Vietnam to more than 150,000 regulars armed
with Soviet tanks, artillery, and antiaircraft weapons. The ARVN was
poorly trained, suffered from low morale after the Americans were
gone, and faced an enemy able to attack at times and places of its
own choosing. The American withdrawal also removed at a blow some
300,000 jobs from the local economy, and President Thieu made
matters worse by trying to establish one-party bureaucratic rule
without the charisma or prestige to sustain it. By October 1974 the
Politburo in Hanoi concluded that the Saigon regime was ripe for
collapse. Large-scale probes of ARVN defenses in January 1975
confirmed their optimism. By the end of the month 12 provinces and
8,000,000 people had fallen to the Communists. On April 10, unable to
obtain congressional approval of $422,000,000 in further military aid,
President Ford declared that the Vietnam War was over as far as
America is concerned. The final North Vietnamese offensive reached
Saigon on April 30, 1975, as the last remaining Americans fled to
helicopters atop the U.S. embassy. Hanoi triumphantly reunified
Vietnam politically in July 1976 and confined thousands of South
Vietnamese to reeducation camps, while thousands of boat people
risked death in the South China Sea to escape reprisals and
Communism.
The end in Cambodia had already occurred. The Communist Khmer
Rouge cut off the capital, Phnom Penh, in January 1975. When the
U.S. Congress denied further aid to Cambodia, Lon Nol fled, and in
mid-April the Khmer Rouge took control. Its leader, Pol Pot, was a
French-educated disciple of Maoist total revolution to whom
everything traditional was anathema. The Khmer Rouge reign of terror
became one of the worst holocausts of the 20th century. All urban
dwellers, including hospital patients, were forced into the countryside
in order to build a new society of rural communes. Sexual intercourse
was forbidden and the family abolished. More than 100,000
Cambodians, including all bourgeois, or educated people, were
killed outright, and 400,000 succumbed in the death marches; in all,
1,200,000 people (a fifth of the Cambodian nation) perished. The
Khmer Rouge, however, were not allied with Hanoi, and in 1979 PAVN
forces invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge and install a puppet
regime. This action completed the conquest of Indochina by North
Vietnam, for Laos, too, became Communist after the fall of Saigon.
Thus the domino theory was at last put to the test and to a large
extent borne out.
Events in Africa as well seemed to bear out the Soviet expectation that
progressive forces would gain ground rapidly during the new era of
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American uncertainty
In winning the presidential election of 1976, Jimmy Carter capitalized
on the American people's disgust with Vietnam and Watergate by
promising little more than an open and honest administration. Though
intelligent and earnest, he lacked the experience and acumen
necessary to provide strong leadership in foreign policy. This
deficiency was especially unfortunate since his major advisers had
sharply divergent views on the proper American posture toward the
Soviet Union.
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Carter was to gain one stunning success during his term, a peace
treaty between Egypt and Israel (see also Palestinian terrorism and
diplomacy), but he was unable to stem the growth of Soviet influence
in Africa. Somalia, on the strategic Horn of Africa astride the Red Sea
and Indian Ocean shipping lanes, had been friendly to Moscow since
1969. In September 1974 a pro-Marxist military junta overthrew the
government of neighbouring Ethiopia, had Emperor Haile Selassie
confined in his palace (where he was later suffocated in his bed), and
invited Soviet and Cuban advisers into the country. The Somalis then
took advantage of the turmoilperversely, from Moscow's point of
viewto reassert old claims to the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and to
invade, while Eritrean rebels also took up arms against Addis Ababa.
The Soviets and Cubans stepped up support for Ethiopia, while Castro
vainly urged all parties to form a Marxist federation. Carter at first
cut off aid to Ethiopia on the ground of human-rights abuses and
promised weapons for the Somalis. By August he realized that the arms
would only be used in the Ogaden campaign and reversed himself,
making the United States appear ignorant and indecisive. Somalia
broke with the U.S.S.R. anyway, but 17,000 Cuban troops and
$1,000,000,000 in Soviet aid allowed Ethiopia to clear the Ogaden of
invaders and in 1978 to suppress the Eritrean revolt. Ethiopia signed its
own treaty of friendship and cooperation with the U.S.S.R. in
November. The failure of the Carter administration either to consult
with the Soviets or to resist SovietCuban military intervention set a
bad precedent and weakened both dtente and U.S. prestige in the
Third World.
The events in the Horn of Africa, which Brzezinski interpreted as part
of a Soviet strategy to outflank the oil-rich Persian Gulf so vital to
Western economies, encouraged the United States to seek help in
balancing Soviet power in the world. The obvious means of doing so
was to complete the rapprochement with China begun under Nixon.
Some advisers opposed playing the China card for fear that the
Soviets would retaliate by calling off the continuing SALT negotiations,
but Brzezinski persuaded the President that closer ties between the
United States and China would oblige the U.S.S.R. to court the United
States, as had occurred in 1972. Brzezinski went to Peking in May 1978
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Postmortem
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Was dtente a failure because the Soviets refused to play by the rules,
because the United States was unwilling to accord the U.S.S.R.
genuine equality, or because dtente was never really tried at all? Or
did the differing U.S. and Soviet conceptions of dtente ensure that,
sooner or later, American patience would wear thin? The last
explanation is, in foreshortened perspective, at least, the most
convincing. From the Soviet point of view the United States had been a
hegemonic power from 1945 to 1972, secure in its nuclear dominance
and free to undertake military and political intervention around the
world. The correlation of forces had gradually shifted, however, to the
point where the U.S.S.R. could rightly claim global equality and
respect for peaceful coexistence. Under dtente, therefore, the
United States was obliged to recognize Soviet interests in all regions of
the world and to understand that the U.S.S.R. was now as free as the
United States to defend those interests with diplomacy and arms.
Those interests included, above all, fraternal aid for progressive
movements in the Third World. Dtente certainly could never mean
the freezing of the status quo or the trends of history as understood in
Marxist theory. Instead, in the Soviet view, the United States
continued to resent Soviet equality in armaments, to shut the U.S.S.R.
out of regional diplomacy (as in the Middle East), to interfere in Soviet
domestic policy, to support counterrevolutionary movements, and, in
violation of the spirit of dtente, to attempt to organize the
encirclement of the U.S.S.R. in league with NATO and China.
From the American perspective, Soviet policy from 1945 to 1972 was
characterized by a Marxist-Leninist drive to export revolution and
achieve world dominion by dividing and bullying the West and
exploiting the struggles of Third World nations. At the same time the
growing maturity of the U.S.S.R. itself, the split in world Communism,
and the realization that the Western world was not about to collapse
(from either the contradictions of capitalism or Soviet subversion)
had made Cold War obsolete. Under dtente, therefore, the U.S.S.R.
was obliged to accept the responsibilities as well as the benefits of
membership in the comity of civilized states, to reduce its exorbitant
military spending and subversive activity, and to cease trying to turn
the domestic problems of other countries to unilateral benefit.
Instead, in the American view, the U.S.S.R. continued to exploit
Western restraint, to build up its nuclear and conventional forces far
beyond the needs of deterrence, and to exploit Communist proxy
forces to take over developing nations.
Each view had a basis in reality, and, given the differing assumptions
of the two governments, each was persuasive. The burden of
compromise or dissolution of the relationship fell inevitably on the
democratic, status quo power, however, and in time American opinion
would cease to tolerate Soviet advances made under the guise of
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dtente. The notion of dtente was flawed from the start in two
crucial points. First, with the exception of preventing nuclear war, the
United States and the U.S.S.R. still shared no major interests in the
world; and second, the specific agreements on respect for spheres of
influence included Europe and isolated regions elsewhere but not the
bulk of the Third World. Americans inevitably viewed any Soviet
assertiveness in such undefined regions as evidence of the same old
Soviet drive for world domination, while the Soviets inevitably viewed
any American protestations as evidence of the same old American
strategy of containment. Within a decade, the hopes raised by Nixon
and Brezhnev stood exposed as illusory.
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The Egyptian army moved across the Suez Canal in force and engaged
the Bar-Lev line. For the first time it made substantial progress and
inflicted a level of casualties especially damaging for the outnumbered
Israelis. Syrian forces also stormed the Golan Heights. The United
States and the Soviet Union reacted with subtle attempts to fine-tune
the outcome by alternately withholding or providing arms to the
belligerents and by urging or discouraging a UN cease-fire. Nixon
denied Israel an airlift of arms until October 13, preventing Israel from
launching a prompt counterattack and thereby signaling Sdt of
American sympathy. Once assured of U.S. aid, however, the Israelis
struck on both fronts, regained the Golan Heights, and crossed the
Suez Canal. Kissinger, alarmed that the Israeli victory might be so
complete as to hinder a lasting settlement, quickly agreed to call, with
the Soviet Union, for a UN cease-fire. The cease-fire broke down at
once, and Israeli forces encircled a 20,000-man Egyptian army corps.
Brezhnev curtly warned Nixon of possible Soviet military intervention,
which the United States moved to deter, perhaps recklessly, with a
worldwide alert of its military forces. Finally, Kissinger threatened a
cutoff of arms deliveries unless Israel halted its offensive, and peace
was restored.
The 1973 war saved Egyptian honour and solidified Sdt's prestige to
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The limited rapprochement that emerged from the 1973 war was
purchased at great economic cost, for the Arab OPEC nations, led by
Saudi Arabia, seized the opportunity to enact a five-month embargo of
oil exports to all nations aiding Israel. More telling still was the price
revolution that preceded and followed. OPEC had already engineered a
doubling of the posted price of oil to $3.07 per barrel by the eve of the
war. In January 1974 it nearly quadrupled the price again, to $11.56
per barrel. The importance of this sudden rise cannot be exaggerated.
The resulting shortages and exorbitant costs accelerated the growing
inflation in the Western world, exposed the energy-dependency of the
industrial nations, created a vast balance-of-payments deficit in many
industrial states, wiped out the hard-won economic progress of many
developing nations, and placed massive sums of petrodollars in the
hands of a few underpopulated Middle Eastern states. The political
upshot was that the United States and Europe would have to pay close
attention to the desires of those Arab states in foreign policy as long as
OPEC unity survived.
In November 1977, Sdt shocked the Arab world by announcing his
willingness to go to Jerusalem personally to seek peace. When his talks
with the new Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, broke down,
President Carter invited them both to Camp David in September 1978.
During 11 days of intensive discussion, Carter succeeded in bringing
the rivals together. The Camp David Accords provided for complete
Israeli evacuation of the Sinai, gradual progress toward self-rule for
West Bank Palestinians over a five-year period, and a peace treaty
signed by Begin and Sdt at the White House in March 1979. This
historic settlement dismayed other Arab states and split the PLO
asunder, the so-called rejectionists refusing to recognize the
settlement. Qaddafi purchased huge amounts of Soviet arms and
expanded Libya's training and supply of terrorists. In December 1979,
300 Muslim fundamentalists seized the holiest of all Islmic shrines in
Mecca. Sdt himself was assassinated by Arab extremists in 1981.
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Regional crises
U.S.Soviet competition in the Third World also continued through the
1980s as the Soviets sought to benefit from indigenous sources of
unrest. The campaign of the Communist-led African National Congress
(ANC) against apartheid in South Africa, for instance, might serve
Soviet strategic aims, but the black rebellion against white rule was
surely indigenous. White-supremacist governments in southern Africa
might argue, correctly, that the standard of living and everyday
security of blacks were better in their countries than in most
black-ruled African states, but the fact remained that African blacks,
like all human beings, preferred to be ruled by their own tyrant rather
than one of some other nationality or race. What was more, the
respect shown by African governments for international boundaries
began to break down after 1970. Spain's departure from the Spanish
(Western) Sahara was the signal for a guerrilla struggle among
Moroccan and Mauritanian claimants and the Polisario movement
backed by Algeria. The Somali invasion of the Ogaden, Libyan
intrusions into Chad and Sudan, and Uganda's 1978 invasion of Tanzania
exemplified a new volatility. Uganda had fallen under a brutal regime
headed by Idi Amin, whom most African leaders tolerated (even
electing him president of the Organization of African Unity) until Julius
Nyerere spoke out, following Uganda's invasion of his country, about
the African tendency to reserve condemnation for white regimes only.
The black revolt against white rule in southern Africa was a timely
consequence of the decolonization of Angola and Mozambique and of
the Lancaster House accord under which white Southern Rhodesians
accepted majority rule, resulting in 1980 in the full independence of
Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, who in 1984 declared his intention to
create a one-party Marxist state. South Africa tried to deflect global
disgust with its apartheid system by setting up autonomous tribal
homelands for blacks, but no other government recognized them.
United States diplomacy sought quietly to promote a comprehensive
settlement of South Africa's problems by pressuring Pretoria to release
South West Africa (Namibia) and gradually dismantle apartheid in
return for a Cuban evacuation of Angola and Mozambique. This policy
of constructive engagement, by which the U.S. State Department
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Latin-American upheavals
Marxism and the Cuban role
After a tour of Latin America in 1950, the American diplomat George
Kennan wrote a memo despairing that the region would ever achieve a
modest degree of economic dynamism, social mobility, or liberal
politics. The culture itself was, in his view, inhospitable to
middle-class values. As late as 1945 almost all the Latin-American
republics were governed by landowning oligarchies allied with the
church and army, while illiterate, apolitical masses produced the
mineral and agricultural goods to be exported in exchange for
manufactures from Europe and North America. To Castro and other
radical intellectuals, a stagnant Latin America without strong middle
classes was precisely suited for a Marxist, not a democratic,
revolution. Before 1958 the United Statesthe colossus to the
northhad used its influence to quell revolutionary disturbances,
whether out of fear of Communism, to preserve economic interests, or
to shelter strategic assets such as the Panama Canal. After Castro's
triumph of 1959, however, the United States undertook to improve its
own image through the Alliance for Progress and to distance itself from
especially obnoxious authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless,
Latin-American development programs largely failed to keep pace with
population growth and inflation, and frequently they were brought to
naught by overly ambitious schemes or official corruption. By the
1980s the wealthiest and largest states like Brazil and Mexico faced a
crushing burden of foreign debt. Neo-Marxist economists of the 1960s
and '70s argued that even the more enlightened policies of the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations kept Latin America in a
condition of stifling dependence on American capital and markets and
on world commodity prices. Some endorsed the demands of the Third
World bloc in the UN for a new world economic order, involving a
massive shift of resources from the rich countries to the poor or the
empowerment of the developing countries to control the terms of
trade along the lines of OPEC. Others advocated social revolution to
transform Latin states from within. At the same time the example of
Cuba's slide into the status of a Communist satellite fully dependent on
the U.S.S.R. revived the fear and suspicion with which Americans
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Even after the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, Cuba
retained a certain autonomy in foreign policy, while the Soviets
exhibited caution about employing their Cuban clients. Castro
preferred to place himself among the ranks of Third World
revolutionaries like Nasser, Nyerere, or Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah
rather than follow slavishly the Moscow party line. He also elevated
himself to leadership of the nonaligned nations. When relations
between Havana and Moscow cooled temporarily in 196768, Brezhnev
applied pressure, holding back on oil shipments and delaying a new
trade agreement. Castro tried to resist the pressure by exhorting and
mobilizing his countrymen to produce a record 10,000,000-ton sugar
harvest in 1970. When the effort failed, Castro moved Cuba fully into
the Soviet camp. The U.S.S.R. agreed to purchase 3,000,000 to
4,000,000 tons of sugar per year at four times the world price, provide
cheap oil, and otherwise subsidize the island's economy at a rate of
some $3,000,000,000 per year; thenceforward, 60 percent of Cuba's
trade was with countries in the Soviet bloc. Brezhnev himself visited
Cuba in 1974 and declared the country a strong constituent part of
the world system of Socialism. Castro, in turn, voiced the Soviet line
on world issues, played host to Latin-American Communist party
conventions, used the forum of the nonaligned nations movement to
promote his distinctly aligned program, and made tens of thousands of
Cuban troops available to support pro-Soviet regimes in Africa.
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The poor image of the United States in Latin America was of special
concern to Jimmy Carter because of his dedication to the promotion of
human rights. During his first year in office Carter sought to counter
the traditional notion of Yankee imperialism by meeting the
demands of the Panamanian leader, General Omar Torrijos Herrera,
for a transfer of sovereignty over the Panama Canal. The U.S. Senate
ratified the treaty (which called for a staged transfer, to be completed
in 1999) by a bare majority, but most Americans opposed transfer of
the canal. Conservatives also held Carter's human rights concerns to be
naive, because the linking of U.S. government loans, for instance, to a
regime's performance on human rights damaged American relations
with otherwise friendly states while exercising no influence on human
rights practices in Communist states. Supporters of Carter retorted
that the pattern of U.S. support for cruel oligarchies on the excuse of
anti-Communism was what drove oppressed Latins toward Communism
in the first place.
The first hemispheric explosion in the 1980s, however, occurred in the
southern cone of South America when the Argentine military ruler,
Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieriapparently to distract attention
from the abuses of his dictatorship and an ailing economy at
homebroke off talks concerning sovereignty over the Falkland Islands
(Islas Malvinas) and invaded the remote archipelago in April 1982. The
British government of Margaret Thatcher was taken by surprise but
began at once to mobilize supplies, ships, and men to reconquer the
islands some 8,000 miles from home. The United States was torn
between loyalty to its NATO ally (and political friend of President
Reagan) and the fear of antagonizing South Americans by siding with
the imperialists. When U.S. diplomacy failed to resolve the dispute,
however, the United States supplied Britain with intelligence data
from American reconnaissance satellites. The Royal Navy and ground
forces began operations in May, and the last Argentine defenders
surrendered on June 14. In the wake of the defeat, the military junta
in Buenos Aires gave way to democratization.
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interests abroad that soon become a drain on its domestic economy. Over
time, new economic competitors unburdened by imperial responsibilities
rise to challenge and eventually replace the old hegemonic power. It
certainly seemed that the United States was such a power in decline: Its
share of gross world production had fallen from almost 50 percent in the
late 1940s to less than 25 percent, while Japan and West Germany had
completed their postwar economic miracles and were still growing at a
faster rate than the United States, even during the Reagan prosperity.
New light industries, such as microelectronics, and even old heavy
industries like steel and automobiles had spread to countries with skilled
but relatively low-paid labour, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Singapore. Financial power had fled to new global banking centres in
Europe and East Asia. In the 1960s, 9 of the 10 biggest banks in the world
were American; by 1987 none were American, and most were Japanese.
These trends were in part natural, as other industrial regions recovered
from their devastation in World War II and new ones arose. Whether
natural or not, however, they seemed to indicate that the United States
could no longer afford to uphold either the liberal trade environment it
had founded after World War II or the worldwide responsibilities that
devolved upon the leader of the free world.
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Why did Europe resume the long-stalled drive for a more perfect union
only in the mid-1980s? Some of the reasons are surely internal, having to
do with the activities of the Eurocrats and the proclivities of the member
governments. External factors also must have been important, including
the debate over whether to base American missiles in Europe; the whole
question of arms control, which affected Europe most directly but over
which it had limited influence; widespread disaffection in Europe with
Carter and (for different reasons) Reagan and hence a desire for a
stronger European voice in world politics; and, last but not least, the
Europeans' concern over the influx of Japanese manufactures. The world
appeared by the late 1980s to be moving away from the ideals of national
sovereignty and universal free trade and toward a contradictory reality in
which international dependence increased at the same time that regional
and increasingly competitive economic blocs coalesced.
To many analysts it seemed that the Cold War was simply becoming
obsolete, that military power was giving way to economic power in world
politics, and that the bipolar system was fast becoming a multipolar one
including Japan, a united Europe, and China. Indeed, China, though
starting from a low base, demonstrated the most rapid economic growth
of all in the 1980s under the market-oriented reforms of the chairman
Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng. Paul Kennedy and many other
analysts concluded that the United States could simply no longer afford
the Cold War and would have to end it just to maintain itself against the
commercial and technological competition of its own allies. For the
U.S.S.R., the Cold War had to end if it was to maintain itself as a Great
Power at all.
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energy, between 1947 and 1953, when the strategy of containment and
policies to implement it emerged: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan,
NATO, the Korean War, and the buildup in conventional and nuclear arms.
Then the Americans tired; Eisenhower accepted a stalemate in Korea, cut
defense spending, and opened a dialogue with Moscow in hopes of putting
a lid on the arms race. Khrushchev then launched a new Soviet offensive in
1957, hoping to transform Soviet triumphs in space and missile technology
into gains in Berlin and the Third World. The United States again
responded, from 1961 to 1968 under Kennedy and Johnson, with another
energetic campaign that ranged from the Apollo Moon program and nuclear
buildup to the Peace Corps and counterinsurgency operations culminating
in the Vietnam War. The war bogged down, however, and brought on
economic distress and social disorder at home. After 1969 Presidents Nixon
and Ford scaled back American commitments, withdrew from Vietnam,
pursued arms control treaties, and fostered dtente with the U.S.S.R.,
while President Carter, in the wake of Watergate, went even further in
renouncing Cold War attitudes and expenditures. It was thus that the
correlation of forces again shifted in favour of the Soviet bloc, tempting
Brezhnev in the 1970s to extend Soviet influence and power to its greatest
extent and allowing the U.S.S.R. to equal or surpass the preoccupied
United States in nuclear weapons. After 1980, under Reagan, the United
States completed the cycle with a final, self-confident assertion of
willand this time, the Soviets appeared to break. In May 1981, at Notre
Dame University, the recently inaugurated Reagan predicted that the years
ahead would be great ones for the cause of freedom and that Communism
was a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even
now being written. At the time few took his words for more than a
morale-boosting exhortation, but in fact the Soviet economy and polity
were under terrific stress in the last Brezhnev years, though the Soviets did
their best to hide the fact. They were running hidden budget deficits of 7
or 8 percent of GNP, suffering from extreme inflation that took the form
(because of price controls) of chronic shortages of consumer goods, and
falling farther behind the West in computers and other technologies vital
to civilian and military performance. The Reagan administration
recognized and sought to exploit this Soviet economic vulnerability.
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his aide Richard Perle
tightened controls on the export of strategic technologies to the Soviet
bloc. CIA Director William Casey persuaded Saudi Arabia to drive down the
price of oil, thereby denying the U.S.S.R. billions of dollars it expected to
glean from its own petroleum exports. The United States also pressured its
European allies to cancel or delay the massive pipeline project for the
importation of natural gas from Siberia, thereby denying the Soviets
another large source of hard currency.
Such economic warfare, waged at a time when the Soviet budget was
already strained by the Afghan war and a renewed strategic arms race,
pushed the Soviet economy to the brink of collapse. Demoralization took
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Throughout his first four years in power Gorbachev inspired and presided
over an extraordinary outpouring of new ideas and new options. Western
skeptics wondered whether he meant to dismantle Communism and the
Soviet empire and, if he did, whether he could possibly avoid being
overthrown by party hard-liners, the KGB, or the army. He had
maneuvered brilliantly in internal politics, always claiming the middle
ground and positioning himself as the last best hope for peaceful reform.
His prestige and popularity in the West were also assets of no small value.
In June 1988 he persuaded the Communist party conference to
restructure the entire Soviet government along the lines of a partially
representative legislature with a powerful presidenthimself. Was the
Gorbachev phenomenon merely an updated version of earlier, limited
Russian and Soviet reforms designed to bolster the old order? Or would
Gorbachev use his expanding power to liquidate the empire and
Communism?
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in the first relatively free elections ever held in the Soviet Union, for
1,500 of the 2,250 seats in the new Congress of People's Deputies,
various non-Communists and ethnic representatives emerged
triumphant over Communist party candidates. Three days later
Gorbachev told the Hungarian premier that he opposed foreign
intervention in the internal affairs of Warsaw Pact statesa loud hint
that he did not intend to enforce the Brezhnev Doctrine.
In late spring Bush spoke out on his hopes for EastWest relations in a
series of speeches and quietly approved the subsidized sale of
1,500,000 tons of wheat to the Soviets. In a Moscow meeting with
Secretary Baker, Gorbachev not only endorsed the resumption of
START, with the goal of deep cuts in strategic arsenals, but also stated
that he would unilaterally withdraw 500 warheads from eastern Europe
and accept NATO's request for asymmetrical reductions in conventional
armaments. In response, Bush announced that the time had come to
move beyond containment and to seek the integration of the Soviet
Union into the community of nations. Western European leaders were
even more eager: Chancellor Kohl and Gorbachev agreed in June to
support self-determination and arms reductions and to build a
common European home.
For Gorbachev the policies of glasnost, free elections, and warm
relations with Western leaders were a calculated risk born of the
Soviet Union's severe economic crisis and need for Western help. For
other Communist regimes, however, Moscow's new thinking was an
unalloyed disaster. The governments of eastern Europe owed their
existence to the myth of the world proletarian revolution and their
survival to police-state controls backed by the threat of Soviet military
power. Now, however, the Soviet leader himself had renounced the
right of intervention, and he urged eastern European Communist
parties to imitate perestroika and glasnost. Eastern European bosses
like Erich Honecker of East Germany and Milo Jake of Czechoslovakia
quietly made common cause with hard-liners in Moscow.
Chinese leaders were in a different position. Ever since the late 1950s
the Chinese Communist party had regularly and officially denounced
the Soviets as revisionistsMarxist hereticsand Gorbachev's deeds and
words only proved their rectitude. Even so, since the death of Mao
Zedong the Chinese leadership had itself adopted limited reforms
under the banner of the Four Modernizations and had permitted a
modicum of highly successful free enterprise while retaining a
monopoly of political power. When Hu Yaobang, a former leader, died
on April 15, 1989, however, tens of thousands of students and other
protesters began to gather in Chinese cities to demand democratic
reforms. Within a week 100,000 people filled Tiananmen Square in
Peking and refused to disperse despite strong warnings. The 70th
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spread to nationalities within the U.S.S.R. itself; and third, that the
NATO powers might try to exploit eastern European unrest to its own
strategic advantage. The first fear quickly came true, and as 1989
came to an end, Gorbachev's foreign and domestic policies were
increasingly directed toward forestalling the second and third dangers.
Concerning possible Western exploitation of the retreat of
Communism, Shevardnadze expressed as early as October the Soviet
Union's desire to pursue the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and NATO
military alliances. (Of course, the Warsaw Pact was in the course of
dissolving from within.) Then, in November, Gorbachev warned against
Western attempts to export capitalism. Western European leaders
were anxious to reassure him, as was President Bush at the December
23 Malta summit. Only a few days before, however, Chancellor Kohl
had alerted the Soviets and the world that he intended to press
forward at once on the most difficult problem of all arising from the
liberation of eastern Europe: the reunification of Germany. That
prospect, and the conditions under which it might occur, would
dominate Great Power diplomacy in 1990.
Gorbachev had every reason to fear that his second nightmare would
come true: the spillover of popular revolt into the Soviet Union itself.
The first of the subject nationalities of the U.S.S.R. to demand
self-determination were the Lithuanians, whose Communist Party
Congress voted by a huge majority to declare its independence from
the party's leadership in Moscow and to move toward an independent,
democratic state. Gorbachev denounced the move at once and warned
of bloodshed if the Lithuanians persisted. In January 1990 his personal
visit to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to calm the waters provoked a
rally of 250,000 people demanding the abrogation of the Soviets'
illegal 1940 annexation. When in that same month Soviet troops
entered the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, and killed more than 50
Azerbaijani nationalists, fears arose that the Baltic states might suffer
the same fate. Gorbachev let it be known that, the liberation of
eastern Europe notwithstanding, he would not preside over the
dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
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The Kohl plan was more than an emergency response, however; it was
also the culmination of a West German policy dating back to the
founding of the two Germanies in 1949. Reunification was provided for
in the West German Basic Law (constitution) and had remained the
primary goal, no matter how distant, of its foreign policy. Even Willy
Brandt's Ostpolitik in 1969 had differed only in regard to means,
looking to increased contacts and aid to educate East Germans about
the freedom and prosperity prevailing in the West, and so gradually
and peacefully to undermine the legitimacy of the East German
regime.
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In fact, the overwhelming will of the German people and the press of
events brought negotiations quickly to a head. First, the East German
elections on March 18 revealed a strong majority in favour of
immediate unification. Second, the East German economy underwent
sudden collapse after the disappearance of Communist discipline and
the flight of hundreds of thousands of people. Third, the East German
infrastructure was now revealed as decrepit and backward, the
environment grossly polluted, and the currency worthless. Talks began
at once on an emergency unification of the two Germanies' economies,
and in April, after much hand-wringing, Kohl and the Deutsche
Bundesbank accepted a plan to replace the East German currency with
deutsche marks on a one-to-one basis. The two plus four talks
moved to the foreign ministerial level in May, and within two weeks
East and West Germany published their terms for their imminent
merger. Moreover, it would not be achieved by the laborious crafting
of a new constitution but by the quicker provisions of Article 23 of the
West German Basic Law, whereby new provinces could adhere to the
existing constitution by a simple majority vote. The Bundestag
approved these terms on June 21, and West and East Germany were
unified economically on July 1.
Assurances were required to the effect that a united Germany, far
from making NATO more threatening, would in fact be constrained by
its membership in the U.S.-led alliance; that German military power
would be limited by treaty and that Soviet troops might remain in East
Germany for a time as a guarantee; that SovietGerman relations
would improve after unification and yield vital economic assistance for
the Soviet Union; and that the new Germany would recognize and
respect existing international boundaries. Bush moved to satisfy the
first and second of these desiderata at the NATO summit in July; its
declaration defined NATO and the Warsaw Pact as no longer enemies,
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Five days later the second CSCE summit convened in Paris to proclaim
the end of the Cold War. In the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty,
the NATO and Soviet sides each pledged to limit themselves to 20,000
battle tanks and 20,000 artillery tubes, 6,800 combat aircraft, 30,000
other armoured combat vehicles, and 2,000 attack helicopters. The
CSCE member states signed the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, in
which the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans both east and west
announced to the world that Europe was henceforth united, that all
blocsmilitary and economichad ceased to exist, and that all
member states stood for democracy, freedom, and human rights.
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empire they had swallowed and would have to disgorge it. In the
meantime, the West had to contain Soviet influence, neither
retreating into isolationism nor overreacting militarily, and above all
remaining confident about its basic human values. He was right. The
most fundamental, long-range reason for the end of the Cold War was
that Communism was based on profound contradictions and a
misreading of human nature. So long as other nations refused to
surrender to their fear, the Soviet system could never prevail. Perhaps
the exhortations and policies of Reagan and Thatcher did determine
the timing of the Soviet collapse, but the collapse was bound to come
sooner or later.
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of the empire. Gorbachev did not foresee how far his policy of limited
free expression would get out of hand, and by the time he did it was
too late. He then gave up trying to hold eastern Europe and
concentrated instead on trying to hold the U.S.S.R. together. It
remained to be seen whether he, or his successor, could achieve even
that.
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of the Shah, only to see him replaced by the Ayatollah), Reagan sent a
personal envoy to Manila to engineer Marcos' departure in favour of
free elections and the accession to power of Corazon Aquino, the
widow of a popular opposition leader who had been murdered. The
United States had evidently managed to remove an embarrassing
dictator without doing serious harm to its strategic position in East
Asia.
Closer to home, the United States continued to face not only the
aggressively hostile Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and the leftist
rebellion in El Salvador (backed, the White House said, by Nicaragua,
Cuba, and the Soviet Union) but also a growing rift with the
Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega. For decades Noriega had
collaborated with U.S. intelligence agencies, serving as an informant
on events in Cuba and a supporter of the Contras in Central America. It
came to light, however, that in addition to grabbing all power in
Panama he had amassed a personal fortune by smuggling illegal drugs
into the United States, and in 1988 a U.S. grand jury indicted Noriega
on drug-trafficking charges. The Reagan administration offered to drop
the charges if Noriega would agree to step down and leave Panama,
but he refused.
In May 1989, Panama staged elections monitored by an international
team that included former U.S. President Carter. Although the
opposition civilian candidate, Guillermo Endara, appeared to win by a
3-to-1 margin, Noriega annulled the vote, declared his own puppet
candidate the victor, and had Endara and other opponents beaten in
the streets. President Bush dispatched 2,000 additional soldiers to U.S.
bases in the Panama Canal Zone, and the Organization of American
States (OAS) called for a peaceful transfer of power to an elected
government in Panama. In December 1989, Noriega bade the
Panamanian National Assembly to name him maximum leader and
declare a virtual state of war with the United States. Within days a
U.S. soldier was ambushed and killed in Panama, an incident followed
by the shooting of a Panamanian soldier by U.S. military guards.
President Bush now considered that he had a pretext to act. A
Panamanian judge taking refuge in the Canal Zone swore in Endara as
president, and 24,000 U.S. troops (including 11,000 airlifted from the
United States) seized control of Panama City. Noriega eluded the
invaders for four days, then took refuge with the papal nuncio. On
January 3, 1990, he surrendered himself to U.S. custody and was
transported to Miami to stand trial. The OAS voted 20 to 1 to condemn
what seemed to many Latin Americans an unwarranted Yanqui
intervention.
The U.S. conflict with the Nicaraguan revolutionary regime of Daniel
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The elections were held on February 25, 1990, and, to the surprise of
almost everyone on both sides of the struggle, the Nicaraguan people
favoured National Opposition Union leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro
by 55 to 40 percent. Ortega acknowledged his defeat and pledged to
respect and obey the popular mandate. The United States
immediately suspended the aid to the Contras, lifted the economic
sanctions against Nicaragua, and proposed to advance economic
assistance to the new regime.
Afghanistan
The resolution of regional conflicts at the end of the 1980s extended
to Asia as well. In Afghanistan the Soviet Union had committed some
115,000 troops in support of the KGB-installed regime of President
Mohammad Najibullah but had failed to eliminate the resistance of the
mujahideen. The war became a costly drain on the Soviet budget and
a blow to Soviet military prestige. In the atmosphere of glasnost even
an antiwar movement of sorts arose in the Soviet Union. A turning
point came in mid-1986, when the United States began to supply the
Afghan rebels with surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which forced Soviet
aircraft and helicopters to suspend their low-level raids on rebel
villages and strongholds. In January 1987 Najibullah announced a
cease-fire, but the rebels refused his terms and the war continued.
In February 1988 Gorbachev conceded the need to extract Soviet
forces from the stalemated conflict. In April, Afghan, Pakistani, and
Soviet representatives in Geneva agreed to a disengagement plan
based on Soviet withdrawal by February 1989 and noninvolvement in
each other's internal affairs. The Soviets completed the evacuation on
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The IranIraq War entered its final phases in February 1988, when
Hussein ordered the bombing of an oil refinery near Tehrn. The
Iranians retaliated by launching missiles into Baghdad, and this war of
the cities continued for months. In March, with the front stalemated
along the Sha al-Arab waterway, dissident Kurdish populations in the
north of Iraq took advantage of the war to agitate for autonomy.
Hussein struck back at the Kurds in genocidal fashion, bombing their
villages with chemical weapons and poison gas. In May 1988 Iraq
launched a massive surprise attack that drove the Iranians out of the
small wedge of Iraqi territory they had occupied 16 months earlier,
and after eight years of warfare the two sides were back where they
started. Although Khomeini called the decision more deadly than
taking poison, he instructed his government to accept UN Resolution
598 calling for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal to prewar
boundaries. Iraq refused, and Hussein ordered a final air and ground
offensive with extensive use of poison gas. The Iraqis advanced 40
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In fact, the situation had hardened in the late 1980s for a variety of
reasons. First, the Arabs themselves were seriously divided. Egypt, the
most populous Arab state, had no desire to disturb its peace with Israel
dating from the Camp David Accords. Saudi Arabia and the other
wealthy oil states were preoccupied with the Persian Gulf crisis and
nervous about the presence in their countries of thousands of
Palestinian guest workers. Syria's president, afiz al-Assad, a bitter
rival of Saddam Hussein, was busy absorbing a large chunk of Lebanon.
King Hussein of Jordan was caught between Syria and Iraq, a prisoner
of his large Palestinian refugee population, and yet in no condition to
challenge Israel militarily. Meanwhile, the liberalization of emigration
policy in the U.S.S.R. and the pervasive anti-Semitism there led to the
influx of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, whom the Israelis began to
settle on the West Bank. Finally, the fading of the Cold War did little
to enhance the ability of the superpowers to impose or broker a
settlement in the region. Gorbachev hoped to improve relations with
Israel while maintaining the Soviets' traditional ties to the radical Arab
states and at the same time doing nothing to damage his dtente with
the United States. The Americans wanted to maintain their alliance
with Israel but could not afford to alienateor compromisethe
moderate Arab governments so important to the stability of the
oil-rich gulf.
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Hussein had risen to the position of leader of the Bath socialist party and
military dictator of Iraq in a postcolonial environment of intrigue,
paranoia, and genuine political threats. Iraq, situated in the Fertile
Crescent of the ancient Babylonian emperors, was a populous and
wealthy country torn by ethnic and religious divisions. Iraq's boundaries,
like those of all other states in the region, had been drawn up by British
and French colonialists and either were arbitrary or conformed to their
own interests rather than to the ethnic and economic needs of the
region. In fact, the trackless deserts of the Middle East had never known
stable national states, and Kuwait in particular struck Iraqis as an
artificial state carved out of Iraq's natural coastlineperhaps for the
very purpose of preventing the Persian Gulf's oil fields from falling under
a single strong Arab state. In addition to coveting Kuwait's wealth,
Hussein hated its monarchical regime even as he accepted its billions in
aid to support his own military establishment and war with Iran. Hussein
rationalized his hatred for the gulf monarchies, the Iranian Shites, and
the Israelis in Arab nationalist terms. A disciple of Egypt's Nasser, he saw
himself as the revolutionary and military genius who would someday unify
the Arabs and enable them to defy the West.
Hussein made the first in a series of fatal miscalculations, however, when
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he judged that his fellow Arabs would tolerate his seizure and
despoliation of Kuwait rather than call upon outsiders for help. Instead,
the government of Kuwait, now in exile, and the fearful King Fahd of
Saudi Arabia looked at once to Washington and the United Nations for
support. President Bush condemned Hussein's act, as did the British and
Soviet governments, and the UN Security Council immediately demanded
that Iraq withdraw. Bush echoed the Carter Doctrine by declaring that
the integrity of Saudi Arabia, now exposed to Iraqi invasion, was a vital
American interest, and two-thirds of the 21 member states of the Arab
League likewise condemned Iraq's aggression. Within days the United
States, the European Community, the Soviet Union, and Japan all
imposed an embargo on Iraq, and the Security Council voted strict
economic sanctions on Iraq (with Cuba and Yemen abstaining).
The same day King Fahd requested American military protection for his
country. President Bush at once declared Operation Desert Shield and
deployed the first of 200,000 American troops to the northern deserts of
Saudi Arabia, augmented by British, French, and Saudi units and backed
by naval and air forces. It was the largest American overseas operation
since the Vietnam War, but its stated purpose was not to liberate Kuwait
but to deter Iraq from attacking Saudi Arabia and seizing control of
one-third of the world's oil reserves. In President Bush's words, the Allies
had drawn a line in the sand.
Thus began the first post-Cold War world crisis. It can be described as
such not only because it occurred after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in
Europe and the dramatic moves toward EastWest dtente but also
because of the characteristics of the crisis itself. The stakes in the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait did not place Soviet and Western interests in direct
conflict. Rather than falling into competition over how to handle the
crisis, the United States and Soviet Union appeared in full agreement as
the votes at the UN indicated. To be sure, a cutoff of oil exports from the
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Middle East would harm the Western states and perhaps even help the
U.S.S.R. as the world's largest oil producer, but Gorbachev was counting
on large-scale economic aid from the West. If he opposed President
Bush's efforts to deal with the crisis, both the economic damage done to
the West and the political hostility his opposition would arouse might end
Gorbachev's hopes for economic assistance. Bush, in turn, openly
described the Persian Gulf crisis as a test case for the new world order
he hoped to inaugurate in the wake of the Cold War: a test of the United
Nations as a genuine force for peace and justice, and thus of
SovietWestern cooperation.
As the crisis deepened, American observers applauded Bush for his skill
in building the coalition, but critics also began to question his
strategy. Would economic sanctions suffice to pry the Iraqis out of
Kuwait? If so, would the coalition hold together long enough for that to
occur, or would military threats be necessary to convince Hussein that
he must retreat? Would Bush's insistence on working through the UN
backfire? It seemed unlikely that all the world could be brought to
endorse so bold and controversial an action. Not since the Korean War
had the UN authorized offensive military action, and then only
because the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council. However, by
working gradually and calmly and in constant consultation with the
Allies, Bush succeeded in convincing the Security Council to give him
the authorizations he requested. On August 25 it voted to permit Allied
ships in the Persian Gulf to use force to enforce the embargo against
Iraq. On September 9, Bush and Gorbachev met in Helsinki and issued
a joint declaration calling for Iraq to withdraw unconditionally from
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Kuwait.
What was U.S. policy at this time? Most observers believed that Bush
would not or could not go to war on behalf of Kuwait and would sooner
or later employ the multiple UN resolutions as bargaining
chipssacrificing some in return for an Iraqi withdrawal. Even the new
military buildup did not imply an imminent war, since it could be
justified by the argument that Hussein would not negotiate seriously
unless faced with a threat of force. No sign of compromise emanated
from the White House, however. Instead, Bush and his advisers
repeated their insistence that Iraq comply with the UN resolutions
unconditionally. Moreover, Middle East analysts and intelligence
agencies began to question whether a mere Iraqi withdrawal from
Kuwait would suffice to pacify the region. After all, Hussein had
proved twice that he considered aggressive war an acceptable tool of
policy. He had built up a huge army and spent 10 years' worth of oil
revenues on the most sophisticated weapons he could obtain, including
chemical and biological agents and nuclear weapons facilities that
were within a year or two of producing warheads. In other words, to
oblige the Iraqis simply to withdraw from Kuwait would not prevent
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While the world's attention remained tuned to the war in the Persian
Gulf, important changes occurred in the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev faced
increasing, and increasingly bold, internal opposition from all sides.
His economic reforms had failed utterly, and the Soviet GNP continued
to fall through the years 198990. Shortages grew worse, and even the
old Soviet command structure broke down as the constituent
republics, one by one, set up their own economic systems and voted to
subordinate the laws of the Soviet Union to local laws. Boris Yeltsin,
the Russian leader, resigned from the Communist party and became
the acknowledged leader of democratic forces throughout the U.S.S.R.
Separatism spread among the republics, with the Baltic states taking
the lead in hopes of winning complete independence. At the same
time, hard-liners in the KGB, the army, and the Communist party
gradually regrouped after the buffetings of previous years and
criticized Gorbachev for being too soft on dissent. The middle ground
of moderate reformism was disappearing from beneath Gorbachev's
feet. Late in 1990 he began to issue sterner warnings to Yeltsin to
cease and desist, and he insisted that the Baltics and other republics
submit to his newly drafted union treaty regulating the relationship
between them and the Soviet central government. He also won still
greater emergency powers for himself as president from the Congress
of People's Deputies.
Westerners were awakened to the likelihood of a crackdown in the
U.S.S.R. in December 1990, when Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's reformist
friend and a main architect of dtente with the West, suddenly
resigned as foreign minister and warned of imminent dictatorship in
the U.S.S.R. Indeed, no sooner had the Western powers opened the
war against Iraq in January 1991 than Soviet security forces entered
Vilnius and forcibly evicted Lithuanian patriots from public buildings,
at the cost of several lives. Just as in Hungary in 1956, when the
Western powers were distracted by the Suez crisis, and in
Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the United States was bogged down in
Vietnam, the Kremlin took advantage of the Persian Gulf War to order
a crackdown on challenges to its empire.
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The dissolution of the Soviet Union completed the liquidation of the Cold
War by extinguishing Leninism in its homeland. Happily, the chaos feared
by the Bush administration did not erupt, but the emergence of 15
independent states from the wreckage posed a plethora of new problems.
All the states were in economic distress as they began to make the
transition from centrally planned to market economies. All contained
significant national minorities; none had secure, legitimate boundaries;
and Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan possessed sizable stocks of nuclear
weapons. Thus, the world might be less scary in the short run, but it did
not promise to be more stable.
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South Africa
The end of the Cold War also promoted progress in the long-standing
South African conflict. To be sure, Western and Soviet-bloc states had
ritually condemned apartheid and imposed economic sanctions against
the white government. So long as South Africa could point to the
Communist backing received by the African National Congress (ANC)
and neighbouring states like Angola and Mozambique, however, it had
a certain leverage with which to resist black demands for majority
rule. It was the disappearance of the Communist threat and the
example of brave eastern Europeans throwing off their chains that
finally allowed President F.W. de Klerk to persuade even the ardent
Afrikaaners of his National Party to accept reform. So, too, did the
ANC, which affirmed its readiness, in January 1990, to engage the
South African government in peaceful negotiations. The following
month de Klerk released the ANC leader Nelson Mandela from prison.
Talks began on May 2, complicated by intramural violence among
competing black factions, especially the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom
Party (IFP) of the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. De Klerk pressed
on, however, and in June 1991 Parliament repealed its requirement
that citizens be categorized by race. The following month Bush, citing
the progress made, lifted American sanctions against South Africa.
The final act began in December 1991 when de Klerk and Mandela sat
down to design an interim constitutional arrangement for the transfer
of power. Mandela insisted on one man, one vote at once, while
whites, fearing retribution from an all-black government, insisted on a
guaranteed voice in the new regime. The stalemate was broken in
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Three tests
The crises awaiting Clinton quickly revealed the pitfalls on the road to
a new world order. The most abiding was the civil war in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, but the most immediate impact came in Somalia. That
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caution, while China, North Korea's only possible ally in the dispute,
refused to say whether or not it would support sanctions or help to
resolve the dispute. The United States alternated between brandishing
carrots and sticks, to which North Korea replied with a bewildering mix
of signals that culminated in a June 1994 threat to unleash war against
the South.
At the moment of greatest tension, when Clinton was engaging in a
military buildup in East Asia and lobbying the UN for sanctions, he
suddenly seemed to lose control of policy altogether. On June 15,
former President Carter travelled to P'yngyang and engaged Kim in
negotiations that resulted, four days later, in a tentative agreement.
North Korea would gradually submit to international inspections in
return for a basket of benefits. At times Clinton seemed unaware of
Carter's activities and at one point even denied that the former
president's words reflected American policy. Negotiations were then
delayed by the death of Kim and the accession to power of his son Kim
Jong Il. On August 13, however, a nuclear framework accord was
signed under which North Korea would remain within the NPT and
cease to operate the reactors from which it extracted weapons-grade
plutonium. In exchange, the United States would provide North Korea
with two light-water reactors, to be paid for by Japan and South
Korea, and guarantee North Korea against nuclear attack. The United
States would also supply oil to the North to compensate for the energy
production lost during the transition and would work toward full
diplomatic and economic relations. Because it appeared to reward
nuclear blackmail and did not preclude possible future cheating, the
pact was criticized in Congress. For the moment, however, Carter's
intervention relieved the crisis.
Almost the same course of events followed in Haiti, only this time with
Clinton's approval. Through September 1994 the Haitian military junta
continued its harsh rule in defiance of sanctions and American threats.
Clinton's credibility would suffer further if he failed to act, and he was
also under pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus to help Haiti
and was anxious to stem the flow of refugees. After receiving UN
approval for an invasion, Clinton issued an ultimatum on September
15, advising General Cdras that Your time is up. Leave now or we
will force you from power. Republicans, however, warned of more
bloodshed like that in Somalia if the United States sent in Marines, and
so Clinton searched for a way to oust the junta without having
Americans fight their way in. On the 17th, even as military units
converged on Haiti, he sent Carter and a blue-ribbon delegation to
Port-au-Prince. After 36 hours of intense discussions, Cdras agreed to
leave the country and order his soldiers not to resist a U.S.
occupation, in return for amnesty. The first contingents of Operation
Uphold Democracy arrived on the 19th, and President Aristide returned
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home on October 15. U.S. forces remained until March 1995 and were
then replaced by a UN force.
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In the 1980s the dynamic Jacques Delors had revived the momentum of
European integration by promoting the Single European Act, under which
EC members were to establish full economic and monetary union, with
substantial coordination of foreign and social policies, by 1992. Most of
Delors's provisions were embodied in the Maastricht Treaty approved by
the 12 EC member states (Spain and Portugal had been admitted in 1986)
in December 1991. This unprecedented surrender of national sovereignty
worried governments and voters, however. A national referendum in
France barely approved the treaty, the Danes rejected it the first time
around, and the government of John Major, Thatcher's successor as
British prime minister, nearly fell from power before persuading
Parliament to ratify Maastricht in July 1993. The treaty went into effect
on November 1. In order to create an ever closer union among the
peoples of Europe, Maastricht replaced the old EC with a new European
Union (EU), enhanced the powers of the European Parliament at
Strasbourg, promised monetary union by 1999, promoted common policies
on crime, immigration, social welfare, and the environment, and called
for joint action in foreign and security policy. The EU promptly voted
to broaden as well as deepen its membership by approving the
applications on March 29 of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Austria
(although Norwegian voters later rejected joining).
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The Balkans
There was a growing disarray within NATO and the EU in the post-Cold
War world, a fact evident in their ineffective and vacillating policies
toward the former Yugoslavia. From its inception in 1918, Yugoslavia
had been subject to strong centrifugal tendencies as its many
constituent ethnic groups harboured ancient and current grievances
against each other. World War II resistance leader Josip Broz Tito
restored Yugoslav unity but only through the imposition of Communist
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During the Cold War the United States patronized Yugoslavia because
of its independence from the Soviet bloc. The Bush administration,
preoccupied elsewhere, regarded the Yugoslav breakup as a European
problem. The EC, in turn, did not want to wade into a civil war and
could not agree on a common posture until Germany abruptly
recognized Slovenia and Croatia. In late 1991 and early 1992
Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, the EC
and the United States imposed sanctions on Yugoslavia, a UN
delegation sought Serbian support for a cease-fire and peacekeeping
forces, and the Security Council approved the dispatch of 14,400 UN
peacekeepers (mostly British and French). A UN plan, which would
have divided Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia into a crazy quilt of
cantons based on local ethnic majorities, pleased no one, and fighting
escalated throughout 1992 amid atrocities and evidence of ethnic
cleansing by the Serbs. UN sanctions, imposed in May, had little
effect, and the UN peacekeeping forces had no peace to keep and no
power to impose one.
During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Clinton criticized Bush for
his ineffectual Balkans' policy. After Christopher toured European
capitals in early 1993, however, it became clear that the NATO powers
were unwilling to discipline the Serbs unless the United States
contributed ground troops. The bombing of a crowded market in
Sarajevo in February 1994 forced Clinton to threaten Serbia with air
strikes. Russia then argued in support of Serbia and promoted its own
plan for a partition of Bosnia. Clinton vetoed any plan that rewarded
Serbian aggression, yet he also refused to lift the arms embargo on
the beleaguered Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks).
By mid-1994 the confused battle lines had somewhat clarified
themselves. Slovenia was independent and at peace. Macedonia was
admitted to the UN under the curious name (in deference to Greek
sensibilities) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and a small
international force, including Americans, protected it. Croatia
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With Oslo's deadline of May 4, 1999, looming for the resolution of all
outstanding issues, fears arose that the Palestinians might independently
declare statehooda move that would escalate tensions with Israel. In
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After 155 years of British rule, Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997
under the political formula of one country, two systems, which
preserved much of Hong Kong's economic autonomy. In the run-up to
Taiwan's first direct presidential election in 1996, China held military
exercises and fired missiles off Taiwan's coast to discourage moves
toward independence. Relations between China and Taiwan further
deteriorated in 1999 when Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui announced
his opposition to the one China policy, a move that was interpreted as
a declaration of independence. In March 2000 Ch'en Shui-bian, who had
earlier supported Taiwan's independence, was elected president. Chen
sought to placate China by foregoing independence as long as China did
not threaten Taiwan. However, China spurned Chen's offer and demanded
that he endorse their version of the one China policy.
In a 1998 attack allegedly organized by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born
leader of an international terrorist network, U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania were bombed, killing nearly 300 people and injuring more than
5,000. The United States responded by bombing suspected
terrorist-training bases in Sudan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the
Taliban (Persian: Students), an extremist Islamic group, consolidated
its rule, though largely because of the regime's repressive
methodsincluding public floggings and stoning to enforce rigid social
restrictions and prohibitions on many activities by women (e.g.,
attending school, working, or appearing in public unaccompanied by a
male relative)it was not recognized by most countries. Reports
estimated that more than one million people died as a result of the
constant warring in Afghanistan and that there were more than three
million refugees. Despite international protests, in 2001 the Taliban
destroyed much of the country's pre-Islamic past, including two large
Buddha statues (standing 175 feet [53 metres] and 125 feet [38 metres]
high, respectively) that had been carved in the mountains at Bamiyan
more than 1,500 years earlier.
In 1998 India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests despite the
opposition of world leaders; Iraq ended its cooperation with UN arms
inspectors; and, after widespread antigovernment protests and rioting,
Indonesian President Suharto resigned under pressure after 32 years. In
1999, his successor, B.J. Habibie, ordered a referendum on independence
in East Timor. After nearly 80 percent voted in favour of independence,
paramilitariesaided in some cases by Indonesian soldiers and
policeburned and looted major towns and villages and forced tens of
thousands of refugees to flee to Australia and neighbouring islands. After
intense international pressure, Habibie allowed UN peacekeeping forces
to secure the territory.
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The new century brought hope to the Korean peninsula. In 2000 South
Korean President Kim Dae-Jung visited the North Korean leader, Kim Jong
Il, thereby becoming the first South Korean leader to visit North Korea. A
summit followed, and in August, 100 North Koreans traveled to Seoul for
a reunion with family members, while 100 South Koreans arrived in
Pyongyang. In September, 63 North Koreans held in South Korean prisons
as spies and political prisonerssome for more than 40 yearswere
allowed to return to North Korea. North Korea also reestablished
relations with Italy and Australia and opened a consulate in Hong Kong.
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with other countries to prevent conflict and to meet the many challenges
facing the globe. At the very least, the leaders of the 21st century might
derive hope from the fact that humanity survived the 20th century and
acquire wisdom from its turbulent history.
Additional Reading
General works
World War I
Works on the origins of World War I include LUIGI ALBERTINI, The Origins of
the War of 1914, 3 vol. (195257, reprinted 1980; originally published in
Italian, 194243); LAURENCE LAFORE, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the
Origins of World War I (1965, reprinted 1981); DWIGHT E. LEE, The Outbreak
of the First World War: Causes and Responsibilities, 4th ed. (1975); V.R.
BERGHAHN, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (1973); ZARA S. STEINER,
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Britain and the Origins of the First World War (1977); and JAMES JOLL, The
Origins of the First World War (1984). Diplomacy of the war years is
explored in GERD HARDACH, The First World War, 19141918 (1977; originally
published in German, 1973); BERNADOTTE E. SCHMITT and HAROLD C. VEDELER, The
World in the Crucible, 19141919 (1984); Z.A.B. ZEMAN, The Gentlemen
Negotiators (also published as A Diplomatic History of the First World
War, 1971); and ARNO J. MAYER, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy,
19171918 (1959, reissued 1970; also published as Wilson vs. Lenin, 1959,
reissued 1967).
Peacemaking 1919
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A.J.P. TAYLOR, The Origins of the Second World War (1961, reissued with a
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WALTER LAQUEUR, The Rebirth of Europe (1970); and RICHARD MAYNE, The
The following are works of scholarship on the Cold War by authors who
clearly regarded themselves as left-revisionist: WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2nd rev. ed. (1972); GABRIEL KOLKO,
The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose
(1969); GAR ALPEROVITZ, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use
of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power,
rev. ed. (1985); and DAVID HOROWITZ, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of
American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, rev. ed. (1971). However, ROBERT
J. MADDOX, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (1973), critiques
their logic and use of evidence.
The Soviet side is discussed in VOJTECH MASTNY, Russia's Road to the Cold
War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 19411945
(1979); ADAM B. ULAM, The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II
(1971, reprinted 1983); DAVID HOLLOWAY, The Soviet Union and the Arms
Race (1983); and THOMAS W. WOLFE, Soviet Power and Europe, 19451970
(1970). MARSHALL D. SHULMAN, Stalin's Foreign Policy Reappraised (1963,
reissued 1985); and WILLIAM TAUBMAN, Stalin's American Policy: From Entente
to Detente to Cold War (1982), are sympathetic accounts. On the wise
men surrounding Truman during the late 1940s, the critique by LLOYD C.
GARDNER, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy,
19411949 (1970), is useful; as is a later, more sympathetic work, WALTER
ISAACSON and EVAN THOMAS, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They
Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (1986). The
standard earlier work on atomic policy is A History of the United States
Atomic Energy Commission, vol. 1 by RICHARD G. HEWLETT and OSCAR E.
ANDERSON, The New World, 1939/46 (1962), and vol. 2 by RICHARD G. HEWLETT
and FRANCIS DUNCAN, Atomic Shield, 1947/1952 (1969). A later work by GREGG
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HERKEN, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War,
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OF
Soviet Military Policy Since World War II (1986). Divergent views on the
future of nuclear weapons are found in KEITH B. PAYNE, Strategic Defense:
Star Wars in Perspective (1986); CRAIG SNYDER (ed.), The Strategic
Defense Debate: Can Star Wars Make Us Safe? (1986); JAMES H. WYLLIE,
European Security in the Nuclear Age (1986); DONALD M. SNOW, The
Necessary Peace: Nuclear Weapons and Superpower Relations (1987);
ANGELO CODEVILLA, While Others Build: A Commonsense Approach to the
Strategic Defense Initiative (1988); and especially FREEMAN DYSON, Weapons
and Hope (1984). ROBERT M. LAWRENCE, Strategic Defense Initiative (1987), is
a bibliography.
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America's Military Revolution: Strategy and Structure After the Cold War
(1993). JONATHAN CLARKE and JAMES CLAD, After the Crusade: American Foreign
Policy for the Post-Superpower Age (1995), is also of interest.
Walter A. McDougall
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