WORLD WAR II
I wrote at the start of this chapter that World War I did not have to happen. It was, to borrow from the historian Barbara Tuchman, an act of folly. World War II could not have been more different. Germany and Japan embraced values and objectives that could not be accommodated within the existing order. Both had become hostages to political systems that essentially eliminated any checks and balances on those wielding power. They were free to overreach, and they did. They invested heavily in instruments of war and demonstrated no reluctance in putting those instruments to work.
This is not to say that World War II was always inevitable but rather that somewhere along the way it became so. John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist who was part of the British delegation to the peace conference that formally ended World War I, wrote a scathing book in 1919 about the collective shortsightedness of the victors. Keynes made the case that the origins of a second world war could be found in the Treaty of Versailles that ended the first, above all in its punitive peace that penalized Germany rather than helping it to recover in a managed fashion.
Germans resented not only the terms of the treaty but also the clause that placed the responsibility for World War I on its shoulders. It was seen as an affront to the German people that needed to be rectified, and this resentment, born out of the requirement that Germany pay harsh reparations, forfeit territory it judged to be its own, and accept stringent limits on rearmament, fueled nationalist sentiment. Adolf Hitler fed off this excessive nationalism in his rise to power.
Still, there were ample opportunities to prevent what became World War II. The United States deserves a share of the responsibility. The Senate’s rejection of the new League of Nations presaged a retreat into isolationism, which gained traction in America during the two decades between the two world wars. Making matters worse was a simultaneous embrace of protectionism that weakened economies and democracies around the world along with a decline in U.S. military readiness. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. president from 1933 to nearly the end of World War II in 1945, encountered political resistance when he attempted to provide help to the Allies facing Germany, because a good many Americans feared doing so would get the United States dragged into European fighting. (The isolationist movement went by the name of America First. One of its principal representatives was Charles Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic had made him a public hero.) The opposition to Roosevelt signaled to German and Japanese leaders that they could invade others with a degree of impunity. A balance of power requires both military capability and the political will to use it, and during the 1930s the United States possessed neither. The public and many of its elected representatives failed to appreciate how American economic and physical security was tied to events in Europe and Asia.
The European Allies also share some of the blame. As is often the case in history, it was not what the major European countries did as much as what they chose not to do. The lack of military preparation, the embrace of symbolic but toothless international pacts, the appeasement of German acts of aggression throughout the 1930s—all set the stage for World War II.
In the end, it took the Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, to bring the United States into the war. Given the alliance among Japan, Germany, and Italy, the U.S. declaration of war on Japan quickly translated into mutual declarations of war. By then, Germany was in control of most of continental Europe. It would take more than three years, but ultimately the full participation of the United States, by then a great economic and military power—alongside Britain, Russia, and others in Europe—proved decisive. Victory in Europe came in the spring of 1945.
The United States took the lead in rolling back Japan’s conquests in Asia. By the summer of 1945, most of Asia had been liberated, but Japan had not been defeated. The choice was judged to be either an invasion of the Japanese home islands—something that promised to be extraordinarily difficult and costly—or using a terrible new weapon that would likely convince the Japanese that further resistance was futile. The United States, then led by Harry Truman, who had become president following Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, opted for the latter, and dropped atomic weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within days Japan surrendered, and the Pacific war (and with it World War II) was over. The nuclear age, however, had just begun.
The cost of World War II was, like its predecessor, extraordinarily high. More than 15 million soldiers died in the fighting; a far larger number of civilians also perished, including 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, the signature genocide of this or any era. France, the United Kingdom, and Italy each lost approximately half a million people, mostly soldiers. Germany lost around 7 million people, Japan almost 3 million. The Soviet Union lost as many as 24 million people, while China lost 15 million, most of whom were civilians. The costs to the United States were on the order of 400,000 soldiers killed.
If there was a saving grace, it is that (in contrast to World War I) World War II can be said to have ended with a clarity of outcome and vision. Germany and Japan were soundly defeated and knew it. But they were treated with a degree of respect. Both were transformed into robust democracies through occupations that can best be described as farsighted and benign. Both were integrated into regional and global economic, political, and security arrangements.
We can debate how much of this was because of lessons learned and how much was because of the need to enlist them as partners into what would become the Cold War. But what can be said with confidence is that the seeds of the Cold War were not sown during World War II in the way that World War II can be traced back to World War I. The Cold War was the result of its own dynamic, one that grew out of the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union with their fundamentally different political and economic systems, opposing ideologies, and no less different global interests and ambitions.
The Cold War (1945–1989)
The Cold War refers to the four-decade-long competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two great powers (or superpowers, as they were often called) of the post‒World War II era. What makes their competition unprecedented is that it stayed “cold” and did not descend into a violent conflict fought directly between them. This stands in stark contrast to the great-power competitions that had twice led to conflict on a horrendous scale in the first half of the twentieth century.
The United States and the Soviet Union were allies in the all-out struggle against Germany and Japan in World War II. In just a matter of years, though, they were locked in their own fight for global primacy. If such an outcome was not inevitable, it was highly likely given their opposing ideologies. The United States was a democracy that in principle—if not always in practice—respected individual rights, favored a large role for free markets, and encouraged private accumulation of wealth; the U.S.S.R. was built on a large state role in the economy, collective ownership, and a dominant role for the government (rather than the individual) in political life. It was a revolutionary power that sought to export Communism to other countries around the world.
The two also differed when it came to their objectives in the world. In liberated and newly independent countries, Soviet leaders opposed both democracy and capitalism and sought fealty to their dictates. Their goal was to directly dominate all of Europe and to install pro-Soviet governments elsewhere. The United States worked to resist Soviet ambitions, promoting anti-Soviet, anti-Communist, and, where possible, pro-capitalist democracies.
Efforts to avoid such friction in the post–World War II period began while the war was still being waged. There were a series of conferences and summits, the most important of which was held at Yalta, a resort town on the Crimean Peninsula, in early 1945, and involved the leaders of the United States (Franklin Roosevelt), Great Britain (Winston Churchill), and the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin). Roosevelt was interested in getting Stalin to commit to join t
he soon-to-be-launched United Nations. Even more, he wanted the Soviets to enter the war versus Japan, which would spare American lives and open up a second front against Japan. He achieved both goals, but the latter at least was meaningless, because Russia entered the Pacific war just days before Japan’s surrender. Stalin made multiple commitments to respect the independence and democratic rights of countries to be liberated from Nazi rule, but his commitments turned out to be cynical because the Soviet Union sought to dominate Poland and all of Eastern Europe. The powers agreed to demilitarize Germany and divide it into zones of occupation. What was initially envisioned as a transitional arrangement turned out to be anything but as Germany remained divided for the entire duration of the Cold War. Yalta proved to be a textbook case of the propensity of American presidents to believe that on the strength of their personal relationship with a foreign leader a resolution to intractable problems could be reached, even if that leader was dictatorial and showed an unwavering devotion to what he judged to be his own national interests. Dissatisfaction with what ultimately transpired despite what was agreed to added to the momentum that brought about the Cold War.
Resistance to Soviet ambitions took many forms. The United States extended billions of dollars in economic and military assistance to countries believed to be vulnerable to external pressure from the Soviet Union or internal pressure from Soviet-backed local Communists. This was made possible in no small part because the United States emerged from World War II as an economic and military superpower. In many ways, it was the war effort that finally enabled the United States to put the Great Depression behind it.
The Truman Doctrine articulated a willingness to provide economic and military aid to Western European countries under pressure; Greece and Turkey were early recipients. The Marshall Plan, named for President Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall and announced at Harvard in June 1947, in what is arguably the most significant commencement speech ever delivered, provided $13.2 billion of aid over a period of four years—equivalent to roughly $150 billion in today’s dollars—to facilitate the reconstruction of European allies. As a percentage of American output, the Marshall Plan was equivalent to providing $800 billion of aid today. This initiative reflected a rejection of isolationism and an effort to keep the United States actively involved in the world’s affairs on an open-ended basis. Covert help in one form or another was also provided when open assistance was judged counterproductive. In Western Europe (under the NATO umbrella) and in Asia, the United States stationed troops and provided security guarantees to its allies.
The American approach to waging the Cold War was developed in no small part by George Kennan, a State Department official and Soviet expert. In early 1946, Kennan called for the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” The doctrine became known as containment. Implicit in what Kennan argued was that the United States and its allies would favor defense over offense because the latter promised to be highly risky and quite likely bound to fail. This is in fact what they did, although Kennan speculated (and, forty years later, was proven prescient) that a system committed to global domination (as was the Soviets’) could not deal with repeated frustration and sooner or later would come to change its nature and ways.
The first signs that the Cold War was under way came in Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Union interfered (often covertly) so that Communist, pro-Soviet governments gained power. As the Cold War took shape, the Soviet Union formed two empires. One was an external empire, in Eastern Europe, in which countries were nominally independent but where, in fact, Soviet officials closely controlled both their domestic and their foreign policies. Seven countries—Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—found themselves in what was tantamount to a Soviet sphere of influence. There was also an internal empire, in which officials in the capital, Moscow, ruled the Soviet Union and its fourteen other republics, which included Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
MAJOR TESTS: BERLIN, KOREA, AND CUBA
Winston Churchill, speaking as a private citizen in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, described the Soviet Union as creating an “iron curtain” between the countries it was dominating in Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe. Matters came to a head in Germany in the summer of 1948, when the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, which was surrounded on all sides by Soviet-occupied East Germany. (Under the post–World War II settlement, Berlin was initially divided into four zones, overseen respectively by the United States, France, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. The three western zones, all part of the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, were later merged.) The U.S. and Western answer was the Berlin airlift, which provided enough food, fuel, and other basic supplies to enable the city and its residents to survive until the Soviets backed down and lifted the blockade in the spring of 1949.
Competition quickly moved beyond Europe, where the United States often opposed colonialism out of concern it would provide openings for Soviet influence. Many new countries were formed and gained independence. Japan was forced to give up its positions in Korea and parts of China and Southeast Asia, an exhausted Britain let go of India and Palestine, and the United States relinquished the Philippines. In the fifteen years following World War II, as a wave of decolonization swept through the world, three dozen new countries emerged in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Cold War competition grew considerably more intense in June 1950, when Soviet-supported troops from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea, crossed the border that largely followed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea (technically the Republic of Korea) in an effort to end the division of the peninsula. North Korea’s motives were nationalist, but following the Communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949 the Soviets might have wanted to score another Cold War win in Asia and bring about a unified Korean Peninsula that could offset the potential emergence of a reconstituted Japan in the American strategic orbit. It is possible, too, that Stalin believed North Korean aggression would not be directly countered on account of an inadvertent comment made by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in early 1950 that South Korea fell outside the U.S. defense perimeter. Whatever the calculations, it took a large, sustained, American-led military intervention carried out under UN auspices to frustrate Soviet and North Korean designs. The U.S. effort was successful in saving South Korea’s independence and restoring the 38th parallel as the effective border, but only at an enormous human and economic cost, which was exacerbated by an ill-fated U.S. attempt to reunify the entire peninsula by force. This undertaking led China to send in its own troops and extended the fighting for two more years.
A third major Cold War venue was Southeast Asia, in particular Vietnam. Following the epic military defeat of France near the village of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a diplomatic conference was convened to dismantle French Indochina (which became Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). Vietnam was divided into a Communist north and a non-Communist south, with an election scheduled for 1956 to decide the country’s fate. National elections never took place as the governments of both North and South Vietnam consolidated power and prepared for war. The United States poured in money, arms, advisers, and, when all else failed, millions of troops to shore up a regime in South Vietnam that was challenged by an insurgency supported by North Vietnam and by North Vietnam itself, which was receiving material assistance from both the Soviet Union and China. Successive U.S. presidents hoped not just to preserve South Vietnam but to prevent Communists from taking over all of Southeast Asia. The U.S. effort ultimately failed in South Vietnam, which fell to the North in 1975, and sowed the seeds for the ensuing civil war and genocide in Cambodia. But some argue that the years of effort also bought time for several of Vietnam’s neighbors to develop politically, economically, and militarily and thereby better resist Communist encroachment.
Perhaps the most dangerous episode of the Cold War came
in October 1962 when the United States discovered that Soviet personnel sent to Cuba were installing missiles armed with nuclear warheads that could reach the United States in just a few minutes. This move was inconsistent with showing restraint in areas close to the other power; it was also seen by some as undermining nuclear deterrence. Nuclear war was widely viewed as a real possibility. I recall participating in duck drills at the time, literally hiding under my wooden desk in my elementary school classroom with the belief that doing so would shield me from nuclear fallout. I also remember my friend Arnie telling us with great authority that we had only ten days before the war started and our lives would end.
Fortunately, the duck drills proved unnecessary and Arnie was proved wrong. Over the thirteen days of the crisis, the United States was firm in its demand that all Soviet missiles be removed but flexible both in how it went about pressing its case (choosing a naval “quarantine” or blockade in all but name over an attack) and in quietly agreeing to remove from Turkey its own medium-range missiles that could reach the Soviet Union. The Kennedy administration also gave a public pledge not to invade Cuba, thereby giving the Soviets a face-saving way to back down. What could easily have become a nuclear war was narrowly averted.
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