American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Truman’s assumption of power brought a shift in the tone of American diplomacy. Truman had a tactical decisiveness but strategic confusion that reflected his personality and his insecurity about foreign affairs, coming as he did from a near total lack of experience in dealing with them. More bluntly anticommunist than Roosevelt, Truman put more faith in those advisers he inherited from FDR who wanted to take a tough anti-Soviet stance than in those who wanted to be more accommodating. He held some strange ideas about the Soviet Union, speaking favorably of Stalin as resembling his own political mentor, Kansas City Democratic boss Tom Pendergast, and fretting that other Soviet leaders might block Stalin from working out mutually acceptable arrangements with the United States, a profound misreading of Soviet power. Uncertain in his early years in office, Truman veered between confronting the Soviet Union and trying to accommodate it, before settling into a hard-line position.

  In July 1945, Truman, Stalin, Churchill, and Clement Attlee (who replaced Churchill as prime minister when a British election brought the Labour Party to power), meeting at Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, worked out what was meant to be a temporary agreement on German reparations. The Soviets, seeking to rebuild their shattered economy, got the right to all reparations from their occupation zone, which they immediately began stripping of industrial equipment. The industrial heartland of Germany, though, lay in the western zones, where the Soviets were to get a quarter of the reparations, to be partially offset by food sent west from the Soviet zone. The conference also agreed to a new border that gave Poland a great deal of German territory.

  Truman felt bolstered in his bargaining at Potsdam when he learned of the successful first test of the atomic bomb. He casually mentioned the new weapon to Stalin (who through spies already knew of its development), but the issue of atomic control did not come up. Nonetheless, for both sides the beginning of the atomic age had profound implications. For the United States, it led to a toughening of its bargaining positions, including its determination to keep the Soviet Union from playing any significant role in the occupation of Japan. For the Soviet Union, it led to a crash program to develop its own atomic weapons.

  With long-term arrangements for Germany, Eastern Europe, and atomic weapons remaining to be worked out, new conflicts arose between the United States and the Soviets, this time over the Near East, specifically Iran and Turkey. Early in the war, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union had agreed to jointly occupy Iran to keep it from coming under German control. After the war, the Soviets tried to win concessions from Iran by stalling on an agreed-to troop withdrawal and encouraging separatist movements in the northern part of the country.

  Oil lay at the heart of the dispute. Iran was a major oil producer, with Britain being the greatest beneficiary of its wealth; the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which the British government held a majority interest, enjoyed a monopoly on Iranian oil production. Both the United States and the Soviet Union sought oil concessions of their own, with the Soviets tying their troop withdrawal to such an agreement. Iran also had strategic importance because of its proximity to other oil producers, most notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where major oil discoveries had been made in the late 1930s.

  During World War II, the United States had supplied nearly 90 percent of the oil used by the Allies. The highly mechanized war convinced American policymakers like Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal of the strategic importance of petroleum, already critical to the domestic economy. Government leaders, believing, wrongly as it turned out, that domestic oil reserves were running out, looked abroad for new supplies, especially to the Middle East. To this end, Roosevelt authorized Lend-Lease aid (defense-related material the United States sent to allies) for Saudi Arabia and on his way home from Yalta met with King Ibn Saud. Keeping the Middle East in the Anglo-American orbit became an increasingly important American strategic priority in the postwar years.

  Partially for this reason, Truman responded to the Soviet actions in Iran with a firm stand, insisting that they leave the country. Equally important, he believed that future good relations with the Soviet Union depended on forcing it to live up to all its agreements. Like many U.S. policymakers, Truman thought that the outbreak of World War II had proven the futility of trying to appease expansionist dictatorships. Believing that the Soviet Union had territorial designs on Iran, Truman felt that standing up to it there would discourage similar pushes elsewhere. After much maneuvering, the Iranian and Soviet governments resolved the crisis by agreeing to a withdrawal of Soviet troops in return for the establishment of a joint oil company (which the Iranian parliament later refused to establish). The Soviet retreat convinced Truman of the efficacy of a hard-line stance.

  An overlapping confrontation involving Turkey proved even more volatile. Prior to Potsdam, the Soviet Union had demanded that Turkey lease it bases on the Dardanelles strait, a strategic pathway to its southern flank, and cede it territory once part of Georgia. At Potsdam, Truman agreed in principle to a revision of the 1936 Montreux Treaty that gave Turkey sole control over the strait. However, the Soviets rejected Truman’s proposal for an internationalization of the waterway. As U.S. relations with the Soviet Union chilled, and the Soviets put pressure on Turkey by holding periodic army maneuvers in neighboring Bulgaria, Truman came to believe that the Soviets were planning to use force to take control of the Dardanelles and bordering Turkish territory. As in the case of Iran, he decided to stand firm.

  Tensions peaked in August 1946 when the Soviets presented Turkey with a proposal for joint Turkish-Soviet responsibility for defending the strait. The United States, Britain, and Turkey all rejected the proposal. Fearing a Soviet attack on Turkey (though little evidence pointed in that direction), the Truman administration decided to resist any incursion even at the risk of war. To demonstrate its commitment, it sent a carrier-led naval task force to the eastern Mediterranean, beginning a U.S. military presence in the region maintained continuously thereafter. The Soviet Union kept pressing for a role in defending the strait, but less insistently, while withdrawing its forces from Bulgaria. Once again, Truman concluded, standing firm paid off.

  The Iron Curtain

  In the winter of 1945–46, with tensions high over Eastern Europe, Iran, and Turkey, a series of messages and speeches in the United States and the Soviet Union crystallized the notion that the world was dividing into two great antagonistic blocs, this time not the Allied and Axis powers but communist and capitalist groupings. Very rapidly, ideas and rhetorical tropes that would shape discourse and policy for decades to come became established.

  On the American side, the hardening of lines began with a long telegram to the State Department sent by George Kennan, the number two man at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Kennan wrote in response to an inquiry about what lay behind a Soviet decision not to participate in the IMF and World Bank. Together with a subsequent Soviet rejection of a U.S. loan offer, made only after repeated efforts by the USSR to get reconstruction assistance and then burdened with conditions bound to be found objectionable, the decision not to participate in the new organizations signaled that the Soviet leadership had decided that the benefits of integrating their country’s economy with the emerging U.S.-dominated bloc were too small and the risks (including providing the IMF with extensive economic data) too great. Instead, it would go it alone. Kennan, however, all but ignored the specific issue he was asked to address. Instead, he wrote a long analysis of the outlook of the Soviet leadership that dismissed the possibility of working amicably with it. Kennan described Soviet leaders as “committed fanatically to the belief that with the US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that [for them] it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.” Soviet power, Kennan continued, was “impervious to logic of reason,” being only “sensitive to logic o
f force.”

  Kennan’s dark view of the Soviet Union won quick favor among Washington policymakers. Forrestal, one of the most militant anticommunists in the administration, widely circulated Kennan’s missive within the government. Within a week both Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg, a key Republican voice on foreign policy, and Secretary of State Byrnes, until then a believer in the efficacy of high-level talks with Soviet leaders, gave speeches laying out a tougher policy toward the Soviet Union. Just a week after that, with Truman at his side, Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, called for an ongoing Anglo-American alliance to prevent war, while characterizing the Soviet Union as having placed an “iron curtain” across Europe. Like Kennan, Churchill portrayed the Soviet Union as constantly pressing to expand its power. Even before Churchill’s speech, public trust of the Soviet Union had been diminishing. His vivid image of a divided world further reduced belief among opinion makers and the public in the possibilities for Soviet-American cooperation.

  In the Soviet Union, too, public rhetoric took a turn away from the wartime language of big power cooperation. In a February 1946 speech, Stalin reiterated the Leninist belief that the dynamics of capitalism and imperialist rivalry led to war, calling for a new program of industrial development to ensure Soviet security in the face of any eventuality. After Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, Stalin attacked the former prime minister as a warmonger. The Soviet leader, however, avoided associating the United States with Churchill’s views, continuing to believe in the likelihood of future economic and political rivalry between the United States and Britain, which he thought would present favorable opportunities for the Soviet Union.

  Over the course of 1946, the emerging sense of rival, even antagonistic blocs manifested itself in the failure to resolve a number of key issues. After a fierce debate within the Truman administration about whether or not to share information about atomic energy with the Soviet Union, in March 1946 the United States presented a plan for the control of atomic weapons. Developed by a state department consulting board headed by Tennessee Valley Authority chairman David E. Lilienthal, under the supervision of Dean Acheson, it called for the creation of an international agency that would have exclusive control over nuclear weapons, material, and development. However, until the new structure took charge, the United States would retain its atomic weapons monopoly while other countries would be subject to international inspections. Unlikely to win Soviet support in any case, the plan became even less so after modified by Bernard Baruch, appointed by Truman as the U.S. delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Baruch’s plan stipulated that no country could use its Security Council veto to block either inspections or sanctions connected to nuclear weapons control. After long, fruitless discussions, the Soviet Union introduced its own plan that called for, first, the destruction of all existing atomic bombs and an international agreement not to develop or use them, and only then discussion of international controls. In the end, no agreement emerged, and both countries proceeded with large-scale atomic weapons programs.

  The United States and the Soviet Union came to loggerheads over Germany as well. The Potsdam provisions for Germany began unraveling in mid-1946. In May, General Lucius Clay, the head of military forces in the U.S. occupation zone, worried about deteriorating economic conditions, halted the dismantling of industrial plants to be sent to the French and Soviets as reparations. To spark an economic recovery, Clay proposed an administrative and economic merger of the four occupation zones. Secretary of State Byrnes then suggested a treaty guaranteeing German disarmament for twenty-five years, which he hoped would address Soviet and French security concerns and open the way toward reunifying Germany. The Soviets, however, rejected the proposal. Stalin hoped, in the long run, for a unified, demilitarized Germany friendly to the Soviet Union. In the short run, though, the Soviet Union wanted to retain control over its occupation zone to keep taking reparations from it. Once the USSR rebuffed Byrnes’s initiative, the United States began moving toward unifying the western occupation zones without Soviet involvement.

  In spite of their confrontational language and multiplying disputes, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had any serious fear of military conflict with one another in the foreseeable future. Both countries continued to demobilize, with the Soviet army shrinking from over eleven million troops during the last year of the war to less than three million in 1948. Both countries sought to avoid an irrevocable breakdown of relations, while positioning themselves to be in an advantageous position if one occurred.

  Within the United States, though, those still holding forth for Soviet-American cooperation became increasingly marginalized. In September 1946, Truman fired the last important advocate within his administration of a conciliatory stance toward the Soviet Union, Henry Wallace, who had become commerce secretary after leaving the vice presidency. Wallace, the only remaining New Dealer in the cabinet, had been privately critical of Byrnes’s “get tough” policy toward the Soviet Union and the Baruch Plan for atomic control. Nonetheless, Truman kept on the former vice president, a popular figure among liberals and leftists, in part with an eye toward the upcoming congressional elections. But once Wallace went public with his criticism, a crisis ensued. In a speech that he had cleared with the president, Wallace told a New York political rally that the Soviet Union had legitimate security fears, given its history of invasions from the west. It needed to be reassured, he argued, that “our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire,” a dig at Churchill’s proposed Anglo-American alliance, “nor purchasing oil in the Near East with the lives of American soldiers.” The United States “should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.” Wallace’s support for at least a temporary Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe created a public uproar and infuriated Byrnes, who at the very moment was attending a big power foreign ministers meeting in Paris. Arguing that Wallace’s statements undercut his position, Byrnes in effect told the president that either he or Wallace had to go, leading Truman to ask Wallace for his resignation.

  Creating Two Blocs

  When an irrevocable breakdown in Soviet-American relations came, it arose out of economic and political crises in Western and Southern Europe, not in Soviet-controlled territory. Western Europe proved far slower in reviving economically than United States officials had anticipated. In 1947, its industrial output still had not come close to prewar levels and, disconcertingly, was falling rather than rising. Labor strife and a depletion of gold and dollar reserves needed to import raw materials, food, and manufactured goods hampered recovery. So did an exceptionally severe winter in 1946–47. As transportation ground to a halt, shortages of food and coal developed and unemployment soared. The resulting misery, from the American point of view, added to the political danger associated with the strong position of the European left. In country after country, communists had led wartime resistance movements, winning enormous moral credibility. When the war ended, in many nations they emerged as the largest single political force, joining coalition governments, including in Italy and France. Social democrats, agrarian parties, labor unions, and antifascist committees joined with the communists in complex patterns of coalition and contest in pressing for economic democratization, a redistribution of political power, and some socialization of national resources, challenging the American vision of a capitalist world order.

  The economic enfeeblement of Europe converged with the left’s thrust for power in Greece, with profound consequences. Great Britain had long viewed Greece as a vital link to its colonial interests in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. When, after confronting a strong communist-led resistance movement, German occupiers, facing the possibility of being cut off by the advancing Soviet army, retreated, British troops moved in, working with the Greek king to establish a conservative gov
ernment and contain left-wing influence. A 1944 government order to the resistance movement to disarm led to a bitter armed conflict between left- and right-wing forces that continued on and off for half a decade.

  With its wartime losses and postwar difficulties, Britain’s imperial posture outstretched its economic capacity. The cost of maintaining troops in Syria, Egypt, India, and Greece; providing financial aid to Greece and Turkey; and paying occupation costs in Germany were draining the nation’s economic resources, especially its dollar reserves. In February 1947, Britain informed the State Department that it would have to terminate its aid to Greece and Turkey, asking the United States to take over its role.

  The Truman administration immediately agreed to do so. Administration officials believed that the Greek communists, in leading a guerrilla movement in northern Greece against the right-wing government, were acting at the behest of the Soviet Union, part of a broad communist push toward the Middle East and its oil riches. In reality, Stalin was scrupulously sticking to an agreement with Churchill to stay out of Greece. What outside support the Greek guerrillas did get came, over Soviet objections, from Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, and Albanian communists. Not understanding the complex tensions within the communist world, high-ranking officials like Acheson, Clayton, Kennan, and Forrestal, in their fear of what they had come to believe was inherent Soviet expansionism and of the cumulative effect of European countries adopting socialist policies on American trade and prosperity, decided that the United States had a vital strategic interest in making sure that the left did not come to power in Greece.