THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  For some years before Hitler invaded Poland—a parliamentary state also created by Versailles11—triggering the declarations of war on September 3, 1939, by Britain and France, the world had experienced increasing armed conflict. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Though both states, fascist Germany and communist Russia, anticipated the conflict between them that ultimately came in 1941, they were united in their contempt for the international system of the parliamentary states. It seems clear that what was not established at Versailles was a peace, and therefore it seems reasonable to conclude that war had not really finally ended there.

  There were of course other states in which these three competing paradigms struggled for supremacy—notably Japan and China—that entered the conflict at this stage, even though they had not been parties at its inception in 1914. Japanese fascism was driven by its own inner/outer struggle—the Eurocentric settlement that caused the war to pause in 1919 could not have prevented the rise of Japanese militarism, whatever the provisions agreed upon at Versailles. It is characteristic of epochal wars that parties change sides—as did Italy and Japan during the Long War, Austria during the Wars of the French Revolution, France during the Thirty Years' War—and that new parties join the conflict, while exhausted parties retire. It is interesting, however, to point out two facts about the rise of Japanese fascism that bear, even if tangentially, on the thesis of the Long War.

  As we will see in Part II, the history of states reflects a complex interaction between profound constitutional change and strategic innovation. “The Long War” is a name that can be given to the strategic consequences of the constitutional development of the nation-state that began in the late nineteenth century, as this constitutional order replaced the imperial state-nations of the previous century and searched, restlessly, for the axiomatic legitimacy the old regimes had long enjoyed. Each of the three models of the nation-state—the parliamentary, the communist, and the fascist—strove for constitutional legitimacy in the domestic arena, and for a validation of that legitimacy in the international sphere. Japan also followed this course.

  It was the bewildered response of the Tokugawa regime to the external pressures from Britain, France, and Holland for trading rights, and the threat posed by Russia to Japan's northern territories, that cast doubt on the vitality and internal legitimacy of that regime. The strategic crisis came in 1853 when a United States naval vessel appeared in Uraga Bay, armed beyond anything the Japanese could launch, and delivered an ultimatum demanding an opening of the Japanese trading market. China's sovereignty had already collapsed under the pressure of Western military technology after the Opium Wars of 1842, and now fears in Japan of a similar event precipitated a constitutional revolution of the kind that had occurred earlier in Europe. The Tokugawa regime could only offer continued isolation—which the West had shown it could penetrate—or appeasement, which had so notably failed to preserve sovereignty in the Chinese context.* The Meiji Restoration of 1868 thus began as a defensive response to Western threats. Although it was considered impractical to confront the Western powers in light of Japan's inferior military apparatus, a program of national defense was begun under the slogan “A strong economy: a strong army,” with the goal of expelling the Western interlopers once economic self-sufficiency was achieved. Constitutional change, precipitated by strategic challenges, in turn brought forth its own strategic innovations. Conscription was introduced in 1873, which tended to encourage nationalist attitudes; with the forces thus raised, an internal rebellion in the 1870s was crushed, strengthening the allegiance of the nation to the State.12 Gradually the objective of self-defense and renewed seclusion was replaced by the desire to become a great power on the European model. In 1890 the constitution of this transformed Japanese state was adopted. Significantly, it was modeled on the Prussian constitution.13 It instituted a weak legislature without effective control over the budget. As a result, the political parties of the Diet were never able to claim to speak for the nation—that was reserved for the Emperor—and more and more they became perceived as corrupt, divisive forces. The Diet's efforts to control military spending by holding up the budget process were contrasted with the military's victories over China in 1894 and Russia in 1905, legitimating the role of the military as the voice of the nation, and showing the politicians up as petty and partisan.14

  Thus, although the principal parliamentary parties “provided Japanese premiers in the 1920s, they failed to establish the mantle of legitimacy for parliamentary democracy.”15 Moreover, although the socialist parties within Japan were ruthlessly suppressed,16 the example of Russian Bolshevism, and especially the rising specter of Chinese communism, increased the desire of the Japanese military to go on the offensive in East Asia. This group was able to discredit the parliamentary system by seizing the initiative in foreign policy: the invasion of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet regime of Manchukuo both were undertaken without political authorization.17 When junior officers organized an abortive coup d‘état in Japan itself, a wave of violence followed, including the assassination of the premier. The views of these insurrectionaries are reflected in this reminiscence:

  [F]rom 1919 until the time of the Manchurian Incident in 1931, Japan fell into the abyss of spiritual darkness… individualism, liberalism, and democratic thought flowed freely through the muddied waters of materialism, utilitarianism, and the worship of the almighty yen. Socialism, communism and anarchistic thought spread like contagious diseases.18

  These two facts—the role of the protofascist Prussian constitution and the alarm at socialism—are often overlooked in the debates about the relationship of Japanese to European fascism. For our purposes they provide some context to the expansion of the Long War into Asia, and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States immediately following Pearl Harbor. The defeat of the Japanese and the success of the American occupation destroyed fascism in Japan, even though the ethnic source of state legitimacy on which fascism depends had deeper roots in Japan than perhaps anywhere else. Fascism in Europe was also destroyed, not simply because it was defeated, but because the nature of the defeat, its totality and remorselessness, discredited it. Can we say then that the Long War ended in 1945?

  Can we say, that is, that Yalta succeeded where Versailles had failed? It is by now a commonplace among some historians and politicians to observe that the illness of President Roosevelt, combined perhaps with his naive faith in his ability to manipulate Stalin, was responsible for the division of Europe—or at least the cession of the states of Eastern and Middle Europe to the Communist empire.19 I am inclined to believe that this precise division was entirely a matter of the condition and location of armies in Europe, and that the date of the Normandy invasion—as to which the Americans actually had less leeway than any of the negotiating parties believed—determined the line of advance of Western forces of any magnitude. But whether or not I am correct in this conjecture, Yalta did not resolve the systemic issue: whether the order among nations, or within the conquered states, would be a rule of parliamentary law or of communism. The wartime Grand Alliance of nation-states—actually called the “United Nations”*—that prosecuted the war against Germany was a three-sided relationship dominated by fear of fascism but in no sense one coalesced around parliamentary values.†

  Bearing this in mind, is not the answer to the tedious controversy over who is responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, that “responsibility” lay in simply continuing to assert the claims of legitimacy that preceded the Second World War? These claims conflicted because they were asserted beyond the sovereignties of the democracies and the socialist states, over divided states—like Germany, Korea, and Viet Nam—and over emerging new states—chiefly in the Third World, where the legitimacy of the constitutional order was in play.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Struggle Ended: 1945 – 1990

  THE LONG WAR now continued because it had not truly been ended. In the closing months of World War II
the Red Army advanced over 1,500 miles west from Stalingrad to Berlin and beyond. Agreements reached at the Yalta Conference provided that the states thus overrun by the Soviet Army would be permitted to organize themselves according to free elections. The Soviet Union, however, relying on local communist parties in these states, set about creating regimes that would be exclusively communist in character, and that did not depend on—indeed, would not permit—the legitimacy conferred by an open electoral process. This was most dramatically demonstrated in Poland where, in January of 1945, Stalin recognized the communist-dominated Lublin Committee as the rightful government of Poland and then promised at Yalta the following February to include representatives of the government-in-exile in London in the new Polish government. Stalin continued to work for a purely communist constitutional arrangement on the basis of which, rather than through parliamentary elections, the legitimacy of the state was to be assured.

  At the time of the Potsdam Conference in August, the Allies made two decisions that, though not explicitly connected, interacted so as to ensure that the Long War would not be ended at this stage. First, detailed arrangements were made for the temporary occupation of Germany according to four zones of authority, corresponding to the four great powers of the United Nations alliance (the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and the USSR). Berlin lay deep within the eastern zone that was to be governed by the Soviet Union but the city itself was also divided into four zones, each allocated to one of the Allied powers. All parties agreed that a peace settlement would follow, uniting Germany as a whole; in the interim, Germany was to be treated as a single economic unit.

  Second, the British, French, and American powers agreed to a substantial extension of Polish borders westward into what had been Germany, on condition that the Soviet Union renew its pledge to provide a role for noncommunist groups in the new interim Polish government, and to permit free elections, universal suffrage, and secret ballots for the selection of the permanent government. These elections were never held, and the noncommunist elements in Poland were liquidated. In February 1946, Stalin gave a widely publicized address saying that the Soviet Union had to remain prepared for war with the capitalist nations. The intentions behind this speech are still a matter of dispute, but its effect was to send shock waves through Washington. The next month, Churchill delivered his celebrated Fulton, Missouri, speech declaring that

  Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern states of Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers, and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy… An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of occupied Germany…1

  By 1947, communist governments had indeed been set up, under strict control by the Soviet Union, in Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and in the Soviet zone in Germany, and where noncommunist parties had been included in the governing coalitions of these states, they were removed. The next year a murderous coup d'état brought communists to power in Czechoslovakia. In none of these states thereafter were parliamentary-style elections ever conducted. State terror, state-controlled media of expression, and single-party politics became the pattern for each of these states. In reaction the Western allies refused to proceed toward the unification of Germany and instead set up parliamentary constitutional institutions in the western zones of Germany, virtually creating a new German state.

  This familiar chronology accounts for there being no peace treaty ending World War II among all the Allies: the Western states did not wish to ratify the subjugation and deformation of the states of Central and Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union was unwilling to risk independent states in the region, a real possibility any time free elections might have been held to constitute a government. Yet these two steps were linked: unless the USSR held free elections, the West would never recognize the governments that held power in these states. Therefore there was no formula for compromise on a unified German state. The Second World War had stopped with an invitation to contend further.

  That a Cold War followed therefore poses two questions: Even if there was to be no peace, was there really war? In other words, how can war be cold? And if there was war, why was it cold, that is, why wasn't it fought across the plains of Europe with the million-man armies that had contested two prior episodes? In my opinion, decisions taken by the United States are responsible for both these outcomes, ensuring that the Long War would be continued and that it would be “cold.” First, on March 12, 1947, President Truman stated in a speech to Congress:

  At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one… it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures… [W]e must assist free peoples to work out their own destiny in their own way.2

  The immediately precipitating event for this statement was communist assistance to guerilla movements in Greece and Turkey and the continued Russian occupation of northern Iran. The immediate consequence of the Truman Doctrine, as it came shortly to be called, was a grant of about $400 million (or the equivalent of $2 billion in current dollars) to the governments of Greece and Turkey.

  Three months later, in another act of resistance, the American secretary of state, George Marshall, announced a plan for European recovery. Altogether about $12.5 billion (or roughly $60 billion in current dollars) was sent on Western countries over the next three years.

  Nor were the Russians deceived as to the import of these steps: it was war. At the refounding conference of the Comintern in September, Malenkov—who would later briefly succeed Stalin—replied:

  The ruling clique of the American imperialists… has chosen the path of hatching new war plans against the Soviet Union and the new democracies… The clearest and most specific expression of the policy… is provided by the Truman-Marshall plans.3

  In Chapter 5, I will venture some guesses as to why the United States decided to contest the issue of what system—parliamentary and capitalist or communist and socialist—would prevail in Europe. In Germany, the contest had begun as a domestic one; it couldn't be avoided in 1914 or in 1933. The same was true of other states—Russia, Spain, Italy—that were drawn into the Long War. But the United States was not threatened with a change in its own system, as were the states that chose to resist in the various campaigns of the Long War—France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. For the moment, let us take as given that the United States did decide to resist, and that this converted the mere absence of peace into war.

  The second issue is why this war remained “cold.” Like the decision to contest the unconsummated outcome of the Second World War, the decision to refrain from an armed conflict in Europe also required the commitment of two parties. On the American side, war meant (i) extending nuclear deterrence to Europe and Japan; (2) restoring conventional force levels in Western Europe to credible size so that this extension of nuclear deterrence could function; (3) refraining from initiating the use of force in Europe; and (4) accepting the challenge in “hot” campaigns outside Europe. If the war remained “cold,” the United States believed it stood a good chance to win it because the issues, moral and political and economic, that kept the Long War going were thought to favor the West. Because the Long War was essentially constitutional in nature, only a profound change in the Russian polity was certain to resolve it. The leadership of the United States believed such a change would ultimately come about (just as their adversaries not implausibly believed the reverse).

  This attitude on the part of the Americans is clearly reflected in NSC 68, the strategic planning document that was drafted to govern U.S. policy from 1950 onward:

  Resort to war is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot defin
itively end the fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas… Military victory alone would only partially and perhaps only temporarily affect the fundamental conflict.4

  In Germany and Japan total defeat had allowed such a remaking of the basis of constitutional norms. After the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, however, that sort of victory was never an option because a total defeat requires a total war. The United States could not afford to risk such a conflict with a nuclear power capable of striking the U.S. homeland and destroying it. What was needed was a change of heart on the part of the persons enabling the Communist system to continue.

  For the Soviet Union the commitment to contend with the West in the face of enormous hostile force (including nuclear weapons) meant: (1) developing a nuclear threat against the U.S. homeland; (2) maintaining force levels sufficient to prevent successful uprisings in the Eastern European client states and to deter any Western assistance to such uprisings; (3) refraining from any threat to the U.S. of sufficient imminence to overcome the American commitment to containment and risk the actual outbreak of hostilities in a central theatre; and (4) pressing the West wherever possible in Third World theatres.

  The necessity of these particular elements of the Cold War strategies of the United States and the USSR may not be obvious, and so a little time can be spent on briefly explaining them. The important point, however, is that they can be seen to operate in each of the major crises of the Cold War, crises that took the place of battles in the various campaigns in this phase of the Long War.