The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  In Moscow, Marshall met a wall of resistance to American suggestions for the resurrection of German economic self-sufficiency. He came to Russia with no illusions that he could produce a miraculous transformation in Soviet thinking. But he had some hope that he could reduce their suspicions and begin discussions for a later agreement on Germany’s future. There was no question about who the Germans preferred as governing authorities: in 1947, Germans joked that in the respective occupation zones, “The Russians promise everything and do nothing. The Americans promise nothing and do everything. The British promise nothing and do nothing.”

  Marshall and a team of eighty-four aides spent a dreary six weeks in Moscow holding tedious daily meetings with Molotov, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, and French foreign minister Georges Bidault and their delegations. Molotov was unrelenting in his insistence that Germany pay $10 billion in reparations. Neither memories of how reparation payments had upended the German economy in the 1920s nor the extent of postwar German destitution moved Molotov to alter his demands. Marshall and the corpulent Bevin, a career labor union anti-Communist, consistently spoke in the same voice for German economic revival that could serve all Europe. Bidault, a slightly built de Gaullist who had distinguished himself in the wartime underground, repeatedly sided with Molotov lest he be accused of having supported a German restoration that could put France in renewed jeopardy. He was also the spokesman for a government that had to accommodate a powerful French Communist Party eager to support the Soviet Union.

  The differences over Germany between the Allies extended to the form of government and the extension of traditional American freedoms to all Germans. Molotov dismissed a Marshall plea for democratic rights as “generalities” that were of no interest to the Soviet government. The back-and-forth over arrangements for Germany produced nothing but acrimony. After five weeks of stalemate, Marshall asked to meet with Stalin in the Kremlin.

  The Soviet leader could hardly refuse the request of someone with Marshall’s credentials as a vital collaborator in “The Great Patriotic War.” Though more genial than Molotov, Stalin was no more forthcoming. Marshall tried to play on Soviet fears of German resurgence by warning that divisions between the former Allies might open the way for renewed German power in Europe. He also warned of the dangers to future stability and peace from the economic disarray across the continent. Stalin said he did not share Marshall’s concerns. He was confident that in time the Allies would find common ground on Germany. Marshall interpreted Stalin’s outward unconcern as a conviction that a European economic crisis would best serve Soviet interests by making countries in the West more vulnerable to Communist takeovers.

  Marshall returned to the United States determined to find the means to stabilize Western Europe and insulate it from Communist arguments that their policies were more likely to bring economic revival and political stability. Yet neither Marshall nor Truman saw a clear path to achieving these ends: reviving Europe’s economy would require billions of dollars, and the U.S. Congress, which in May 1947 had not yet agreed to fund Truman’s $400 million request for Greece and Turkey, seemed unlikely to look favorably on an administration proposal for a multibillion-dollar Europe-wide subsidy. Nor was it possible for the International Monetary Fund or the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank), both of which had been created in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire, to foster international prosperity by supplying the $17 billion Europe needed for reconstruction.

  Truman and Marshall wisely concluded that any initiative for a broad program should originate with the more credible and less politically controversial secretary of state rather than the president. Moreover, they agreed that any plan for helping Europe must include direct European participation.

  In measured words before the Harvard graduating class of 1947, where Marshall chose to give a speech in the least politically charged setting possible, he described Europe’s travails and the American stake in alleviating them: “The consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all,” he declared. Unless the world was restored to “normal economic health,” there would be “no political stability and no assured peace.” But any recovery plan could not be a unilateral American effort, but the product of “some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans.”

  The cooperative effort, Marshall pointedly told the Soviets, should be “directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos…. Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full co-operation, I am sure, on the part of the United States government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries can not expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.”

  Marshall’s words were not those of a politician or an imperialist seeking a special advantage for his country, but of a statesman who saw the economic health of all Europe as a boon not only to the United States, which anticipated selling billions of dollars of American goods in Europe, but to impoverished Europeans across the entire Continent—East and West. U.S. economic interests and international well-being, however, were not Marshall’s only motives; he and State Department colleagues understood that Soviet acceptance of the secretary’s proposal could have a destabilizing impact on Moscow’s control of its East European satellites.

  Stalin and the Soviets refused to accept the U.S. initiative as anything but another demonstration of capitalist determination to destroy Communist regimes everywhere. At least that was the ultimate response in July 1947 after Molotov had conferred with Bevin and Bidault in Paris for five days.

  The fact that Molotov had agreed at all to discuss the possibility of Soviet participation in the U.S.-proposed European Recovery Plan (ERP) signaled initial Kremlin indecision about a response to Marshall’s offer. If they agreed to join in, the Soviets could imagine that the U.S. Congress would balk at helping Moscow with a share of the billions the Americans would be providing. It would be a way to kill the program and leave Europe vulnerable to the Communist parties seeking power in the West. On the other hand, if the program went forward, it would compel Moscow to reveal all sorts of economic data that would demonstrate its weakness and long-term inability to compete with the West. Moreover, participation in ERP would mean the renewal of Soviet and East European exposure to Western influences that Stalin feared could topple Communist control.

  The irony is that Marshall’s largely constructive proposal, which might have raised living standards in Soviet-bloc countries and muted some of the East-West tensions, became the occasion for a Soviet campaign of vilification against the capitalists that made the Cold War irreversible. As the Kremlin now saw it, Marshall’s plan was nothing less than a declaration of war on the “anti-imperialist and democratic camp” by what was described as the last “remnants of fascism” reaching for worldwide control. Not surprisingly, the Kremlin now projected onto opponents their most steadfast intentions. It was the ultimate solipsism: they flattered themselves by thinking that everyone was just like them.

  8

  WAR BY OTHER MEANS

  A great empire and little minds go ill together.

  —Edmund Burke

  How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  By the middle of 1947, an East-West struggle for what each saw as the survival of their respective economic, political, and social systems was in full motion. Both sides described themselv
es as defending against the other’s aggression. The Soviets were convinced that the United States was determined to destroy communism, but not necessarily by military action, and certainly not in the short term. To be sure, they viewed America as preparing for a possible armed conflict that could include the use of atomic bombs, but they strongly believed that Washington hoped to win a cold war by economic means: the hidden aims of the Truman Doctrine and the proposed Marshall Plan were to make all of Europe dependent on the United States for its survival.

  “Whereas the Truman Doctrine was to terrorize and intimidate these [pro-Soviet] countries,” Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s Politburo spokesman on foreign affairs, said, “the ‘Marshall Plan’ was designed to test their economic staunchness, to lure them into a trap and then shackle them in the fetters of dollars ‘assistance.’” Had the Soviet Union and the Eastern European “democracies” signed on to the American proposal, he added, they would have found themselves subjugated to Washington.

  The Americans might ultimately feel compelled to resort to military aggression against the “anti-imperialist” East. But according to Soviet thinking, the militarists in the West understood that left-leaning parties in America, Britain, and France, which were currently opposed to another war, especially against a Soviet Union for which they continued to have high regard, were too strong to be ignored. The “fascists” hoped to silence these sympathetic elements and prepare their general populations for warfare “by slanderously accusing the Soviet Union and the new democracies of aggressive intentions.” These propagandists, Zhdanov declared, “fully realize that long ideological preparation is necessary before they can get their soldiers to fight the Soviet Union.”

  In seeing the Truman administration as intent on bringing down Communist regimes, the Soviets seemed to be mesmerized by their own rhetoric. They had enough insight to understand that persuading a majority of Americans to attack Russia was not realistic in 1947, or for as long as the Communists did not provoke a military confrontation by aggression against the West. The Soviets believed, however, that if economic imperialism failed to force Communist countries into Washington’s orbit, the United States would provoke a war. In the meantime, it was important to educate Soviet citizens about American intentions. This served not only to foster support for defense outlays but also to unify the country behind Stalin and put pressure on East European satellites to comply with Moscow’s demands. As Plato explained in The Republic, “When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest … then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”

  Indisputably, some Americans and West Europeans, especially in Germany, where hopes of liberating their eastern provinces from Russia were a constant in postwar affairs, supported any actions needed to destroy Communist governments. These devout anti-Communists shared a conviction that Moscow was intent on imperial expansion and that the East and the West were irreconcilable foes. Yet these war hawks were a distinct minority, though they were vocal enough to intensify Soviet paranoia. Nevertheless, it reveals more about the Soviet state of mind than about the realities of Western intentions that Moscow would now consistently denounce the United States and its allies as a menace to world peace. Having imposed their rule on the Baltic and Balkan countries, the Soviets could readily imagine U.S. reliance on its greater power to overturn these Communist governments.

  Countering affinity among some in the West for military action against the Soviet Union was an understanding in the highest reaches of the U.S. government that Moscow was in no condition to start a war in Europe or Asia that provoked a fight with the United States. “None but mad men … would undertake war against us,” Ferdinand Eberstadt, the wartime director of the U.S. Munitions Board, told secretary of the navy James Forrestal in November 1946. After British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery visited the Soviet Union at the end of the year, he told Eisenhower that “devastation in Russia is appalling and the country is in no fit state to go to war.”

  Yet even the officials who had the strongest doubts about Soviet war making capacity did not rule out the possibility and even the likelihood of eventual aggression. In July 1947, assistant secretary of war Howard C. Petersen concluded that “the time element permits emphasis on strengthening the economic dikes against Soviet communism rather than upon preparing for a possible eventual, but not yet inevitable war.” Confident that Moscow would develop the bomb, the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer began to think of the United States and Russia, as “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

  The danger of so much talk about war was that neither side could see the other as on the defensive. What one country saw as protective measures registered on the other as aggressive actions. Professions of good intentions could not generate the sort of trust friendly nations feel toward each other. Both sides felt embattled. To cast aside suspicions seemed like the worst kind of folly—a betrayal of the nation’s fundamental interests.

  The object now for each nation was to contain the other, or restrain it from imperial overreach that could prompt a military conflict. In July 1947 Kennan published an article in Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym “X.” As the head of the State Department’s policy planning staff, his anonymity was meant to discourage conclusions that the article represented an official statement of policy. But this is exactly what it was; indeed, it had originated as a paper written for Navy Secretary James Forrestal, and the State Department’s committee on unofficial publication had approved its appearance in Foreign Affairs. Few could doubt that the author’s concealed identity signaled that he was a high official stating government policy.

  Kennan described Soviet rule as the product of an unrestrained drive for worldwide control. Moscow’s stress on external dangers was “founded not in the realities of foreign antagonism,” Kennan asserted, “but in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial authority at home…. The semi-myth of implacable foreign hostility” fostered a “state of siege” mentality. Undergirding this was the conviction that “the aims of the capitalist world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime.” While manifestations of this outlook may occasionally be muted, it is a fixture of Soviet ideology, Kennan said. Moscow had no terminal date for the defeat of capitalist adversaries, but it was an imperishable goal that Western leaders should not ignore or lose sight of.

  “In these circumstances,” Kennan declared, “it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies…. It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime. It must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival,” an adversary that should be “contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”

  Ironically, Kennan, who pictured Soviet Russia as a messianic society intent on defeating capitalism, ended his article with a messianic note of his own: “The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society,” he counseled. “He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence that, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”

  When the article produced widespread public attention, Kennan felt “like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below.” Not the least of his concerns was the interpretation of containment as the reliance on “military means” to inhibit a “military threat” rather than “political containment of a political threat.” He
also subsequently lamented the conclusion that his urging of the “application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” meant worldwide, rather than in the five select regions—“the United States, the United Kingdom, the Rhine Valley with adjacent industrial areas, the Soviet Union, and Japan”—that he considered most vital to America’s national security.

  Within days of the article’s publication, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock identified Kennan as the author, instantly underscoring the official nature of Kennan’s assertions and intensifying feelings in Russia and the United States that Moscow and Washington were moving toward a military confrontation.

  In response, America’s most influential syndicated columnist, Walter Lippmann, published a series of articles that shortly appeared as a book, The Cold War: A Study in U. S. Foreign Policy. Lippmann took strong exception to Kennan’s proposed indiscriminate military containment of the Soviets around the world as a reckless policy that could provoke a catastrophic war. Soviet actions in Eastern Europe were not the product of a messianic drive for worldwide control, he argued, but the result of victory in World War II. They were also the consequence of a long-standing Russian fear of invasion from the West, which Hitler’s devastation of the Russian homeland had amply justified as not paranoid but a reality that no Russian government could exclude from its calculations.