The Political Division of Europe
When the advancing armies of the United States and the Soviet Union met at the Elbe River in the heart of Germany on April 25, 1945, the exhilarating prospect of victory and peace momentarily overshadowed the political disagreements between their respective governments that had surfaced at the Crimea conference two and a half months earlier. Within a week word had arrived of Hitler's death by his own hand and the capitulation of the German armies in Italy and Austria. The formal surrender by German military authorities on May 7 merely confirmed what had been known for months to be a foregone conclusion: the collapse of the Nazi imperium in Europe. Though the Allied soldiers encamped along the opposite banks of the Elbe and in other liberated regions of the continent anticipated redeployment to the Far East for the final drive against the receding military forces of Japan, the end of the most destructive military contest in history was, at long last, in sight. The promise of a return to civilian pursuits and the renewal of familial attachments engendered the customary euphoria that attends the conclusion of great wars. For a brief moment, m the afterglow of triumph for what was universally felt to be a supremely worthy cause, the peoples and political leaders of the two preeminent powers in the victorious coalition could celebrate the dawn of a new era of world peace.
But the convergence of American and Russian military power at the center of the devastated continent of Europe in the spring of 1945 signified something of critical significance for the future of the world beyond the immediate reality of Germany's defeat. Amid the universal expressions of relief on "Victory in Europe" day, or VE day, as it was to be widely called, there remained a number of disturbing facts about the way in which the war against Hitler had been brought to a close that were to prevent the restoration of the peacetime conditions for which all of the belligerent populations yearned.
Foremost among these postwar realities was the disappearance of all forms of indigenous political authority and military power in Central Europe as the German state disintegrated and its war machine ground to a halt. This condition had been foreordained by the Allied leaders' decision to impose upon the vanquished enemy an unconditional surrender that would assure the instantaneous destruction of all German political and military institutions. The unprecedented brutality of the Nazi occupation of Europe had inspired in the victorious coalition the determination to rid the continent once and for all of the scourge of German power. The war against Hitler had assumed the character of a moral crusade against a monstrous evil that had to be subdued and then permanently eliminated for the benefit of humanity. In striking contrast to Wilson's discriminating policy at the end of the First World War, Roosevelt declined to distinguish between the objectionable regime of the enemy state and the civilian population that it had ruled. The Führer was regarded merely as the agent of a German people whose instinctual propensity for aggression disqualified it from playing any role whatsoever in the postwar reorganization of Europe.
This moralistic justification of the American war effort, developed for domestic consumption to justify the painful public sacrifices required for the waging of total war, camouflaged the principal reason for America's intervention in the European struggle, which was to redress the balance of power on the continent that had been disturbed by Germany's bid for hegemony. But the dissolution of the Nazi administrative and military apparatus by the Allied powers, followed by their refusal to countenance the prompt reconstitution of a German successor regime, produced the vacuum in Central Europe that Churchill had foreseen before the Yalta Conference. This vacuum was inevitably to be filled by the military power of the advancing armies that converged upon the center of the continent from west and east in the spring of 1945.
In this way the informal partition of liberated Europe into pro-Western and pro-Soviet spheres was dictated by the military situation at the moment of Germany's collapse. Each of the two zones eventually adopted political institutions, economic practices, and foreign policies that reflected the preferences and influences of its liberator. France, Belgium, Greece, and Italy, in spite of the presence of powerful Communist movements that had played a significant role in resisting the German occupation of their countries, reestablished Western-style parliamentary systems and capitalist economic structures while adapting their foreign policies to the Anglo-American vision of the postwar world. The states on the eastern half of the continent, despite the ideological hostility to Communism and nationalistic antipathy for Russia that characterized the recent history of most of them, adopted Soviet political and economic models and supported the Kremlin's foreign policy goals under the watchful eyes of the Russian occupation armies and their civilian collaborators among the indigenous population.
This ideological bifurcation of Europe did not occur overnight. In the Soviet sphere, non-Communist political parties were permitted to operate and non-Communist leaders to participate in coalition governments in all of the Eastern European states for a few years after the war; similarly, the Communist parties of France, Italy, and Belgium were not only tolerated but allowed to hold cabinet posts in the early postwar coalitions in those countries. But one salient feature of the postwar political situation in Europe eventually caused the division of that continent into two mutually antagonistic blocs of states respectively identified with the superpower whose military forces had emancipated them from German rule: This was the unwavering determination of the Soviet government to establish a ring of subservient client states in Eastern Europe along the broad invasion route stretching from the western shore of the Black Sea to the eastern shore of the Baltic that had brought marauding armies to the heart of Russia twice within the memory of most of its citizens still alive in 1945.
We have seen how Stalin's insistence on securing border rectifications at the expense of Finland, Poland, and Romania to enhance the security of Russia's western frontier had won the reluctant assent of the Western powers. But the Kremlin's subsequent attempt to promote, through political intimidation backed by the presence of the Red Army, the installation of pro-Soviet regimes in the states of Eastern Europe beyond the newly expanded frontiers was to provoke increasing opposition from Washington. In time a momentous evolution in the strategic thinking of policy-makers in the Truman administration took place. American officials began to ponder the implications of the developments unfolding on the eastern half of the European continent in light of historical precedent and geographical context. Great Britain and, belatedly, the United States had intervened in the two European wars of the twentieth century to restore the -balance of power that had been upset by Germany. The temporary elimination of German power at the end of the First World War had been preceded a year earlier by the temporary disappearance of Russian power. The simultaneous weakness of Germany and Russia in the decade of the 1 920s had enabled the small states of Eastern Europe to preserve their independence from both of their potentially powerful neighbors with the support and encouragement of France. Hitler's subsequent bid for German hegemony in Europe had also resulted in the erasure of German power, but this time Russian power had been projected into the political and military void of Eastern Europe at a time when no nation or coalition of nations on the Western half of the continent was strong enough to balance it. The tough-minded realism of geopolitics, so familiar to European strategists and statesmen, began to replace the Wilsonian reveries of Roosevelt in the minds of the foreign policy advisers of the new American president: Russia was rapidly acquiring control of the heartland of Eurasia. The military exhaustion and economic distress of the nations along the western rim of Europe exposed them to the threat of Soviet domination as well. A Russian-controlled continental empire stretching from the Sea of Japan to the Atlantic and from the Arctic to the Aegean would be better positioned to mount a drive for world dominion than Nazi Germany had been at the height of its power. What may have appeared to Stalin as a legitimate attempt to bolster the security of Russia's vulnerable western frontier by the formation of compliant buffer states beyond it was increasingly interpreted in Washington as the beginning of a Russian drive for continental hegemony on the road to mastery of the globe. The ominous prophecy of Mackinder returned to haunt those who had confidently expected that the end of the fighting would bring the peace and security earnestly sought by all: "Who rules east Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island rules the world."
The establishment of Russian hegemony over the reconstituted states of Eastern Europe from 1945 through 1948 was accomplished with impunity because the only nation capable of preventing it had disengaged militarily from the European continent. At the time of Germany's defeat the numerical strength of the armed forces of the United States exceeded 12 million. By the end of 1947 that number had fallen to 1.4 million as a consequence of the abolition of universal military conscription and a drastic reduction in the size of the professional armed services. The demobilization of America's military forces and the dismantling of its war industries transpired at a time when the Soviet Union kept over 4 million battle-seasoned veterans under arms-down from the 12 million wartime level-and retained the formidable arsenal of weaponry with which it had driven the German army from Moscow to Berlin.
The reasons for this precipitous disengagement of American military power from Europe after the Second World War are easy to appreciate, as ill advised as it may have appeared in retrospect. The American public, accustomed to small volunteer armies in peacetime, had no inclination to tolerate the retention of an American military presence in postwar Europe beyond the token forces required for occupation duty in Germany, Austria, and Italy. The United States had entered the European war for the purpose of destroying the Nazi regime and eliminating German military power from the continent. Once those two objectives had been achieved, only an American government endowed with superhuman powers of persuasion could have induced its war-weary citizens to bear the enormous costs and manifold inconveniences of maintaining large military forces across the Atlantic solely for the purpose of balancing the undiminished military might of a nation that had so recently been hailed as a trusted ally against Hitler.
The American public's inclination to "bring the boys home," reflected in expressions of Congressional sentiment and recorded in the opinion polls of the period, was entirely consistent with the Roosevelt administration's master plan for the political organization of the postwar world The American commander in chief during the Second World War shared the optimistic expectation of his predecessor during the First World War that the defeat of Germany would herald a new era in which international conciliation would supplant the operation of the balance of power as the mechanism for the preservation of world order. The United Nations Organization, conceived by American, British, and Russian representatives at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the autumn of 1944 and formally established by the delegates of fifty states meeting in San Francisco from April through June 1945, was designed to supersede the discredited League of Nations and resume its noble purpose with more effective means. Since both the United States and the Soviet Union shared, along with Great Britain, France, and China, permanent representation on the new organization's decision-making body, the Security Council, it was widely assumed that such disagreements as might arise among the great powers over the postwar political settlement could be amicably adjudicated in the United Nations without recourse to the old practices of power politics and regional alliance systems that had been so decisively discredited in the course of the previous decade.
Furthermore, the American monopoly on nuclear weaponry in the early postwar years reinforced the traditional sense of invulnerability to external aggression that had long nourished the national proclivity for isolationism. The United States had intervened in the two world wars on the assumption that the subjugation of Europe and the control of its resources and Atlantic bases by a single aggressive power would perforce pose an unacceptable threat to the security of the Western Hemisphere. In the first few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America's ability to devastate the principal cities of any potential aggressor without the slightest risk of retaliation against its own territory seemed to afford a greater degree of protection than even the Atlantic Ocean ever could. Such a condition of strategic omnipotence was scarcely conducive to the sentiment of national _ insecurity that would have been required to generate broad public support for the assumption of extensive military commitments abroad so soon after the end of the war. Particularly in light of Roosevelt's tacit endorsement of Soviet predominance in the half of Europe that was liberated by the Red Army, his successor was in no position to contest the Kremlin's exercise of that prerogative beyond innocuous expressions of displeasure at the inevitable violations of the rights of the populations concerned.
The Truman administration forcefully challenged the expansion of Soviet power only when it appeared to surpass the demarcation line separating the two spheres of influence that had been tacitly recognized by the Allied leaders at the wartime conferences. During the years 1946 and 1947 a series of political developments along the southern rim of Eurasia was viewed by Western leaders as evidence of a coordinated Soviet effort to attain one of the traditional objectives of Russian foreign policy: expansion southward toward the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, a region historically under the sway of British power.
The site of the first direct confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers was Iran, a country whose strategic location had rendered it the object of Russian and British rivalry as early as the end of the nineteenth century. As we have seen, these two imperial powers had jointly partitioned the country into spheres of influence in the decade prior to the First World War. The collapse of the Tsarist empire and the advent of the Bolshevik regime had temporarily resulted in a diminution of Russian influence in Iran; Great Britain proceeded to organize and supervise the exploitation of the vast reserves of petroleum that had recently been discovered there while striving to establish predominant political influence over the government in Teheran. In August 1941, as Hitler's armies advanced deep into the Soviet Union, Russian and British military forces simultaneously entered Iran and promptly replaced the increasingly pro-German regime of Reza Shah with a more compliant government headed by his teenaged son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. According to the terms of an Anglo-Russian-Iranian treaty concluded on January 29, 1942, Russian troops were stationed in northern Iran and British troops in the south to protect the vital supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Russian frontier along which British and American arms were transported to the Soviet Union. Both foreign occupation forces, as well as the American contingent that later joined the British troops in the southern zone, were to be withdrawn within six months of the end of the war. Shortly after the cessation of hostilities, the Communist-controlled Tudeh party fomented a separatist revolt in the northwestern province of Azerbaijan bordering on the Soviet Union. The Russian occupation army prevented the Iranian government from suppressing the insurgency by denying its military forces access to the rebellious province. In November a provincial assembly dominated by the Tudeh party was elected in Azerbaijan and promptly declared its autonomy, a move that was widely regarded as the first step toward the absorption of the province by the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan across the border. The Iranian prime minister received a set of demands from Moscow which included indefinite retention of Soviet troops in northern Iran, recognition of the autonomy of Azerbaijan, and the formation of a Russian-Iranian joint stock company to develop the petroleum resources of the northern provinces.
Interpreting these Soviet moves as the beginning of a campaign to obtain effective control of the entire country, including its rich petroleum reserves and its ports on the Persian Gulf, the British and American governments applied vigorous diplomatic pressure on the Kremlin to terminate its Iranian adventure. Tough speeches by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin on February 21 and American Secretary of State James Byrnes on February 28 signaled the intention of London and Washington to resist further Soviet advances in the region. When the Red Army, alone among the three wartime occupation forces, delayed its evacuation beyond the March 2, 1946, deadline, the resulting firestorm of criticism from the British and American governments prompted the Kremlin to withdraw its forces prior to the Iranian parliament's ratification of the agreement on Azerbaijan autonomy and the joint oil venture. After the Red Army completed its evacuation in May 1946, the Iranian parliament, apparently emboldened by the vigorous expressions of Anglo-American support, declined to ratify the agreement that had been concluded under duress with the Kremlin. In the meantime an American military mission had arrived in Teheran and arrangements had been made for the purchase of American military equipment by the Iranian government. The diplomatic setback suffered by the Soviet Union in the Iranian crisis of 1946 was~ a direct consequence of the Truman administration's decision to join Great Britain in protecting this historic object of Russian expansionist ambition. Washington's determination to bolster the Pahlevi regime set the stage for the establishment seven years later of an intimate security link between Washington and Teheran that was to last for a quarter of a century. In a more general sense, it heralded America's determination to resist the expansion of Soviet influence throughout the world.
Just as Soviet activities in northern Iran during 1946 were viewed in Washington as evidence of the Kremlin's renewal of traditional Russian expansionism toward the Persian Gulf, simultaneous Soviet pressures on Iran's neighbor Turkey appeared to rekindle Russian ambitions for a geopolitical offensive into the eastern Mediterranean. On March 19, 1945, Moscow had formally denounced the Turko-Soviet treaty of friendship concluded in 1925, which had established close political and economic collaboration between these two historic enemies and included reciprocal pledges of nonaggression. On June 7, 1945, Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov presented the Turkish ambassador to Moscow with a set of demands that collectively constituted a substantial infringement on Turkish sovereignty. These included the cession of territory in the Caucasus annexed by Russia in 1878 and reacquired by Turkey after the First World War, the revision of the Montreux Convention of 1936 governing the Turkish Straits so as to establish joint Russian-Turkish jurisdiction over this vital waterway, and the leasing of Soviet bases on its shores to ensure its defense.
Readers of these pages need no reminder of Russia's historic interest in obtaining
effective control of the outlet of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. As had
been the case with Soviet advances in Eastern Europe at the expense of Finland,
the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania, as well as
in Manchuria at the expense of China, Stalin's diplomatic offensive against
Turkey represented an attempt to restore territory or privileges previously
possessed by or promised to the Russian state. Not even the demand for de facto
control of the Dardenelles was new. In a modified form it had been secretly
granted to the Tsarist regime by its Anglo-French allies during the First World
War before the Bolshevik Revolution resulted in its repudiation. More recently,
Molotov had tried in vain to secure Germany's endorsement of Russian designs
on Turkey's Caucasian frontier and the Straits during the period of the Nazi-Soviet
Pact. Stalin had insistently raised the matter of the Straits with Churchill
at Moscow in October 1944, with Roosevelt at Yalta, and with Truman at Potsdam,
all without concrete result. His argument was framed in entirely defensive terms:
Turkey, which had remained neutral during the war despite British and Russian
bids for an alliance and permitted the sale of strategically important chrome
to Germany until the spring of 1944 for fear of antagonizing Hitler, was too
weak to prevent powers unfriendly to the Soviet Union from sending their warships
into the Black Sea. But to the United States, Stalin's demand represented nothing
less than the revival of the old dream of a Russian breakthrough to the Mediterranean
at Turkey's expense, and therefore had to be resisted with the same firmness
that had been displayed by Great Britain in the days when it was still capable
of playing such a role.
In short, the Truman administration's response to the Turkish crisis of 1945-46 reflected the same determination to replace Britain as the principal guarantor of Russia's confinement along the southern rim of Eurasia that had prompted its vigorous resistance to Soviet pressure on Iran. To Washington, as to London during the era when the "eastern question" had preoccupied the architects of British foreign policy, Russian control of the Straits would entail domination of the eastern Mediterranean. This in turn would signify command of the vital commercial waterway linking Europe to the Orient and afford easy access to the valuable mineral resources of North Africa and the Middle East. Accordingly, when Ankara's indignant rejection of Moscow's demands precipitated a violent campaign against Turkey in the Soviet press and the deployment of twenty-five Russian divisions on the Caucasian frontier, the Truman administration resolved to bolster the beleaguered Turkish regime. In response to a harshly worded Soviet note of August 7, 1946, reiterating the Russian claims, Washington dispatched a naval task force to the eastern Mediterranean as a demonstrative show of force and on September 30 announced that a portion of the American fleet would be permanently stationed there. In the face of this ostentatious display of American naval power, which was implicitly reinforced by the American monopoly on atomic weapons, Moscow backed down at the Turkish Straits just as it was being dislodged from northern Iran, though the extent of the Soviet retrenchment was not apparent until much later.
During the Russian-American showdown over Soviet demands on Turkey, acute domestic unrest across the Aegean in Greece was viewed in London and Washington as a third aspect of the putative Russian campaign of southward expansion already in evidence in Iran and Turkey. It will be recalled that upon the evacuation of German occupation forces in Greece in November 1944, a fierce internal struggle had erupted between the conservative faction of the Greek resistance movement loyal to the monarchy and the Communist partisan organization. The intervention of British military forces in the winter of 1944-45 resulted in a truce concluded between the two factions in February 1945 as well as an agreement stipulating a referendum on the question of the restoration of the monarchy and national elections under Allied supervision. The elections of March 1946 were boycotted by the leftist political organizations and therefore produced a comfortable majority for the royalist party that was actively supported by the British. In the summer of 1946, at the height of the Turkish crisis, thousands of Greek Communists concentrated in the north renewed their guerrilla warfare against the pro-Western government in Athens with the encouragement and material assistance of the newly established Communist states across the border, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. When the national referendum in September resulted in a large majority in favor of the restoration of the monarchy, the conflict raging on the Greek peninsula assumed the aspect of an ideological confrontation pitting the British-backed royalist regime in Athens against the Communist guerrilla movement in the north that was supplied and supported by the adjacent Communist states.
In this sense the Greek drama was reminiscent of the earlier struggle in Poland between the pro-Western and pro-Soviet factions of the resistance movement. But there were two critical differences between the Polish and Greek situations that determined their divergent outcomes. First of all, the geographical position of Greece was decisively favorable to the pro-Western government and its British protectors. Whereas Poland's common border with Russia and its forbidding distance from the Western powers foreordained the triumph of the pro-Soviet Polish faction backed by the Red Army, the proximity of the Greek peninsula to the British bases in the Mediterranean constituted a major liability for the Communist partisans in their struggle with the Athens regime. Moreover, it will be recalled that Stalin had excluded Greece from the Russian sphere of influence in his wartime bargain with Churchill and had displayed no enthusiasm for the Communist insurrection there in the winter of 1944-45. On the contrary, the Soviet leader instructed the Greek Communists to cooperate with the British-backed government in the same way that he had urged restraint upon the Communist parties of France and Italy that were participating in governing coalitions dominated by pro-Western groups. The principal foreign supporter and supplier of the Greek Communist insurgency was Yugoslavia, which, under the leadership of its charismatic strongman, Marshal Tito, was already displaying the taste for independent activity that was soon to result in a total break with Moscow.
It may be supposed, in the absence of confirmation from the appropriate files
in the Kremlin, that the motivation for this Soviet caution in the Greek civil
war was twofold. It probably reflected Stalin's disinclination to favor the
establishment by indigenous partisan forces of an independent Communist state
beyond the effective reach of Russian military power and political control.
This tendency appears to have determined his simultaneous reluctance to offer
unqualified support to the Communist forces of Tito in Yugoslavia and Mao Zedong
in China in their respective struggles for power against anti-Communist rivals.
An additional source of Soviet hesitation seems to have been the apprehension
that a Communist takeover in a country specifically allotted to the Western
sphere of influence was certain to provoke sharp reactions from Washington and
London with potentially unpleasant consequences for the Soviet Union.
As it turned out, the capacity of Great Britain to fulfill its historic function as the guardian of Greek independence had been severely impaired by the economic crisis that gripped this erstwhile world power at the end of the Second World War. The drain on British reserves of gold and foreign exchange occasioned by the requirements of financing the war against the Axis had been partially mitigated by Lend-Lease assistance from the United States. Following the termination of this wartime aid, an American emergency loan of $3.75 billion was extended to Britain in 1946 on the assumption that this would suffice to cover its short-term needs until the restoration of its export trade would produce the foreign exchange required to finance essential imports. But the proceeds of this loan were promptly spent for the consumption of food and fuel rather than invested in productive enterprises that would revive the country's export capability. The result was the rapid exhaustion of British reserves, a potentially catastrophic condition that was exacerbated by the onset of the worst weather conditions in recorded history during the winter of 1946-47. The national transportation system ground to a halt, the shortage of coal forced the closing of factories and temporary cutoffs of electricity, and the freezing of winter crops led to the rationing of food.
A nation in such dire straits was hardly in a position to furnish the military and economic assistance required by the Greek government to quell the Communist insurrection in the north. At the same time, the United Nations Organization was prevented from intervening in the Greek civil war to restore order by the Soviet veto in the Security Council. Once it had become apparent that neither Great Britain nor the United Nations was able to act in its defense, the government in Athens appealed to the United States several times in 1946 for financial aid and military equipment. The Truman administration furnished such meager economic assistance as was available under existing authority, but by the beginning of 1947 it had become evident that only large-scale assistance over a long period would avert a total collapse of the Greek economy and the probable seizure of power by the Communist guerrilla movement. But such a massive program of economic aid to a financially unstable regime seemed inconceivable in the domestic political climate of postwar America. The Republican party, which had recently won control of the Eightieth Congress, had consistently opposed all of the major foreign economic aid programs devised by Democratic presidents up to and including the British loan in 1946. The opposition party, which had rallied to the cause of internationalism during the period of America's participation in the Second World War, seemed poised to return to its prewar isolationist tradition of economic nationalism, which meant support for high tariffs and hostility to foreign loans that did not directly promote American exports.
Then, on the twenty-first of February, 1947, the British Foreign Office officially informed the American State Department of its intention to terminate all financial assistance to Greece and Turkey and to remove the forty thousand British troops from Greece as of the following March 31 on account of Britain's own economic trauma. Remarking that both of the recipient countries were desperately in need of foreign loans to stave off total economic collapse as well as to finance the reorganization and re-equipment of their armed forces to preserve their security, the British government expressed the hope that the United States would be able to assume the obligation it was about to relinquish. In this dramatic diplomatic communication the government of the greatest empire the world has ever seen conceded the beginning of its demise. The dissolution of British power along the vulnerable lifeline to that empire, from Gibraltar to Singapore, had produced a vacuum along the southern shores of Eurasia comparable in importance to the vacuum in Eastern Europe produced by the crumbling of German power there. Britain's inability to continue to bear the financial burden of maintaining its far-flung garrisons and bolstering friendly regimes along the lifeline seemed to present the United States with the choice of substituting American for British power in that region or of passively permitting Soviet power to fill the void.
The American president took up the challenge on March 12, 1947, in a historic address before a special joint session of Congress: The United States government declared its intention to supplant Great Britain as the guarantor of the economic viability and military security of Greece and Turkey. Congressional authorization was sought, and duly obtained, for the disbursement of $250 million and $150 million worth of military and economic assistance to the governments of Athens and Ankara, respectively, as well as for the dispatch of American advisers to these troubled regimes to assist in their economic stabilization and military reorganization. As noted above, the Soviet claims on Turkey simply disappeared from public discourse after the American show of force in the eastern Mediterranean. In Greece, the civil war petered out during the years 1948-49, as the Royal Greek Army, organized in close collaboration with the American military mission and lavishly supplied with American munitions, swept northward to occupy all of the rebel strongholds in the mountains and force the Communist partisans into exile in Bulgaria and Albania. The Greek Communists' chief benefactor, Tito's Yugoslavia, had sealed their fate by closing its frontier and terminating all assistance to the insurgents in July 1948 in retaliation against its exclusion from the world Communist movement the previous month.
Embedded in Truman's speech of March 12 was a single sentence that affirmed that the American government had no intention of confining its newly adopted program of foreign assistance to the narrow objective of helping the governments of Greece and Turkey to overcome their immediate difficulties: "I believe," Truman declared, "that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Implicit in this presidential declaration, which subsequently acquired the designation "Truman Doctrine," was the pledge to employ the economic resources of the United States to bolster friendly nations all along the periphery of the Soviet bloc that appeared susceptible to pressure from their powerful neighbor or to insurgency by domestic Communist movements connected by ideological affinity to the Soviet Union. The power vacuum in the Balkans and south Asia created by the collapse of the Pax Brittanica seemed in danger of being filled by Soviet power. This circumstance presented the Truman administration with an emergency that was promptly met, as we have seen, by the dispatch of American assistance to the governments of Greece, Turkey, and Iran. But the power vacuums at the two opposite ends of the Soviet empire, in Europe after the collapse of Germany and in East Asia after the defeat of Japan, represented even more serious threats to American security than did the prospect of Soviet domination of the eastern Mediterranean and southern Asia in the eyes of those highly placed officials in the Truman administration who were engaged in this fundamental reshaping of American foreign policy.
It therefore became the task of this handful of men-led by George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and William Clayton at the State Department and James Forrestal at the Pentagon-to develop a rationale for a coordinated response to Soviet expansionist pressures wherever they might occur that would persuade the Republican-controlled Congress and the American public at large of the pressing necessity to abandon the tradition of peacetime isolationism. The most articulate and influential enunciation of the case for an activist American foreign policy appeared anonymously in the July 1947 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs under the heading "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Composed by Kennan, the director of the newly created Policy Planning Staff of the State Department who had observed Soviet behavior at firsthand in his former post as deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Moscow, it summarized official government policy as distilled from the high-level discussions conducted in Washington during the recent crises in Iran, Turkey, and Greece. Its message was straightforward and simple: The Soviet Union, for reasons related more to the traditional Russian sense of insecurity than to the messianic goals of Marxist-Leninist ideology, could be expected to probe the weak points beyond its frontiers in an effort to extend the reach of Soviet power in the world. It is in the national interest of the United States to conduct a firm but patient policy of containing the expansion of Soviet power beyond the limits informally established at Yalta by strengthening the political, social, and economic institutions of those countries that had or might become subject to such expansionist pressures. Through the application of such counterpressure the Kremlin would gradually be brought to realize, over a period of ten to fifteen years, that the cost of such aggressive policies would greatly outweigh any conceivable benefits they might yield. The ultimate result, Kennan confidently predicted, would be the attenuation of the Soviet threat to the vital interests of the United States and the front-line nations which his policy of "containment" was designed to protect.
While this bold reformulation of American policy toward the Soviet Union was being put in press, a dramatic public statement by Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered at the Harvard University graduation ceremonies on June 5, 1947, directly addressed the particular problem that had preoccupied Kennan as he drafted what came to be known as the doctrine of containment: This was the vulnerability of the Western European countries to Soviet domination caused by their inability to recover from the war-induced dislocations of their economic systems. We have already had occasion to ponder, in connection with the Greco-Turkish crises of 1946-47, the catastrophic consequences of the postwar financial crisis in Great Britain for the recovery of that country's industrial productivity and the resumption of its foreign trade. Economic conditions were far worse in those nations on the continent that had served during the occupation as the victims of German economic exploitation and then as the final battleground for the war in Europe. The continued impoverishment of the countries of Western Europe seemed an open invitation to the Soviet Union to extend its political dominion over them with the connivance of the powerful Communist parties and Communist-controlled labor organizations in countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium. To meet this presumed threat the American secretary of state invited the nations of Europe, including the Soviet Union and its satellites, to prepare a plan for European economic recovery with massive American assistance on the basis of permanent economic cooperation among themselves.
The inclusion of the Soviet Union in this unprecedented offer of foreign economic assistance from Washington prompted the governments of France and Great Britain to solicit the Kremlin's participation in a conference in Paris at the end of June to draw up a collective response to the American initiative. On June 26 Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov arrived in the French capital accompanied by eighty-nine economic specialists, apparently prepared to give serious consideration to the American proposal. But after a few days of fruitless negotiation, Molotov and his entourage abandoned the conference while the Soviet government denounced the project and forbade the governments of its East European satellites to have anything to do with it.
The grounds for the Soviet rejection of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan were twofold. First, in order to collect the pertinent economic statistics and to ensure that the funds disbursed were spent for the purposes intended, the American government had insisted on access to, and some degree of advisory authority over, the internal budgets of the recipient states. These are conditions customarily required of impoverished countries by their prudent foreign bankers, from the era of financial imperialism before the First World War to the current tight-fisted lending policies of the International Monetary Fund. But it was too much to expect of a victorious great power, particularly one as secretive and suspicious as the Soviet Union, to open its books to the prying eyes of American financial officials and to adjust its budgetary policies to spending priorities established in Washington. This requirement was denounced in Moscow as an intolerable infringement on the national sovereignty of the participating states. The investigations of the Marshall Plan administrators would doubtless have revealed how vulnerable the postwar economy of the Soviet Union was, a circumstance that the Kremlin was desperately trying to conceal for reasons of Communist ideology as well as national pride. Moreover, the proviso that most of the Marshall aid be spent for the purchase of American exports prompted Soviet suspicions of an ulterior motive beneath the facade of humanitarian largesse. It appeared to confirm the Leninist prediction of the impending collapse of capitalism and the capitalists' frantic efforts to prevent it: American corporate monopolies, squeezed by the drastic decline in domestic demand for their products as war-related orders dried up, now strove to save themselves by obtaining markets in Europe and subjecting the shattered economies of that continent to American commercial domination. This interpretation even received some confirmation from the mouths of American officials themselves, who tried to sell the Marshall program to Congress by warning that Europe's huge trade deficit with the United States was bound to cause serious difficulties for American exporters unless the chronic "dollar shortage" across the Atlantic could be rectified through the granting of government credits.
Responding to the invitation of the foreign ministers of Britain and France, representatives of all the sixteen European nations outside the Soviet sphere except Spain assembled in Paris on July 12 to lay the groundwork for a coordinated response to the American government's offer of economic assistance. On September 22 a committee formed at this gathering submitted a plan for a four-year recovery program which specified the anticipated combined budget deficit of the sixteen participating states. On the basis of the plan, the United States congress voted by lopsided majorities on April 3, 1948, to appropriate $6 billion to cover the combined deficit for the first year and agreed to make three annual grants later. In mid-April the recipient nations established the Organization for European Economic Cooperation to supervise the allocation of the American aid and promote coordination among the nations that were to receive it. Between 1948 and 1952 the European Recovery Program (as Marshall's brainchild was officially known) supplied grants and credits totaling $13.2 billion. The largest amounts went to Great Britain and its dependencies ($3.2 billion), France ($2.7 billion), Italy ($1.5 billion), and West Germany ($1.4 billion).
The economic consequences of the Marshall Plan surpassed the most optimistic expectations of its authors. By 1952, the termination date of the American aid program, European industrial production had risen to 35 percent and agricultural production to 10 percent above the prewar level. From the depths of economic despair the recipient nations of Western Europe embarked on a period of economic expansion that was to bring a degree of prosperity to their populations unimaginable in the dark days of 1947. In the meantime, the donor nation derived great commercial benefits from its financial largesse, as the Marxist-Leninist critics had forecast; more than two-thirds of the European imports under the plan came from the United States, which meant higher profits for American firms engaged in the export trade as well as more jobs for the workers they employed. It is doubtful that the phenomenal growth of the American economy in the prosperous era of the fifties and early sixties would have occurred without the stimulus provided by orders for its goods and services from the other nations of the industrial world across the Atlantic that were rebuilding their war-torn economies. One must not exaggerate the extent of the American economy's export dependence in the early postwar years. With a huge internal market still capable of absorbing most of its industrial production and a considerable proportion of its agricultural output, the United States still exported less than 10 percent of its gross national product compared to much higher percentages for the genuinely export-dependent nations of Western Europe and Japan. Nevertheless, postwar America had begun to develop an important stake in international trade for the first time in its history. In 1946 America's total exports were almost four times the prewar average of $4 billion per year, and certain sectors of the economy had come to depend on foreign sales for a major proportion of their earnings. The dollars lent or given to the importing nations to finance this expansion of trans-Atlantic trade were repaid many times over in the form of a mutually beneficial system of commercial links between Western Europe and the United States that complemented their increasingly intimate political ties.
The postwar recovery of the industrialized countries of the Western world was facilitated by the relatively efficient operation of the new international monetary system that had been established at a meeting of forty-four allied nations at the Bretton Woods resort in the White Mountains of New Hampshire during July 1944. Recognizing that the low level of international trade and investment represented a serious impediment to postwar economic growth in all countries, the financial representatives of the states at war with the Axis devised at Bretton Woods a number of measures to promote the resumption of world trade and capital movements. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created to restore the network of multilateral international payments that had broken down in the early thirties as countries left the gold standard and adopted temporary expedients such as exchange controls and devaluations that disrupted world trade. The IMF consisted of a pool of currencies contributed by member states upon which any member could draw in order to correct temporary balance-of-payments difficulties without having to resort to exchange controls or devaluation. The chronic problem of exchange instability was addressed through the reestablishment of a modified system of fixed exchange rates: The dollar became the world's principal reserve currency and was rendered freely convertible into gold at a fixed price. The exchange rates in operation at the opening of the Bretton Woods conference were recognized as the par values for the new system, and any subsequent adjustment of the exchange value of a member country's currency required the prior approval of the governing board of IMF. The West European economies were not strong enough to accept convertibility of their fixed-rate currencies until 1958, and there were occasional exchange problems for Britain and France. Nonetheless, Bretton Woods ushered in a quarter century of relative exchange stability, which enabled exporters, importers, lenders, and borrowers to transact their foreign business with much less concern about the relationship between the world's currencies.
An additional stimulus to the postwar recovery of world trade was the creation of a multinational institution empowered to establish rules for the international exchange of goods and services to replace the beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism of the thirties. America's increasing involvement in world trade after the war had led the Truman administration to importune other nations, particularly those wartime allies who were deeply in debt to the Treasury Department and therefore particularly susceptible to Washington's pressure, to dismantle the trade barriers inherited from the Depression years that blocked American access to foreign markets. The major trading nations of the world were finally induced by the United States to adhere in the summer of 1947 to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In subsequent years GATE served as a forum for periodic negotiations between trading partners aimed at reducing the bewildering array of trade restrictions that had accumulated over the years. The stipulation that all agreements concluded under GATT's auspices include the most-favored nation clause ensured that trade concessions negotiated bilaterally would automatically be extended to all members. The reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers during GATT bargaining sessions nourished and sustained an unprecedented increase in the international exchange of goods and services. World trade grew at an annual rate of almost 7 percent in real terms between 1948 and 1970 after almost two decades of stagnation, while many of the prewar trade restrictions were scrapped.
The principal disappointment of the Marshall Plan was its failure to promote the economic integration of Western Europe along the lines originally envisaged by its architects. Though one-sixth of Marshall aid was employed to finance trade within Western Europe itself, and trade among the recipient countries did in fact increase by 70 percent, few efforts were made to remove impediments to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor across national frontiers for the duration of the program. The creative initiatives in the direction of economic integration were later to spring from disappointed European administrators of Marshall aid, such as France's Jean Monnet and Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak. But their integrationist campaign was to be undertaken independent of, and in a certain measure at the expense of, the American benefactor of 1948-52.
The political consequences of the Marshall Plan were to prove as far-reaching as the economic ones for the future of Europe. The Soviet bloc's repudiation of the program not only foreclosed the possibility of restoring prewar economic, and therefore political, relations between Eastern and Western Europe; it also accelerated the ideological polarization within each European state. The deterioration of political relations between Communist and non-Communist parties in all countries of the continent had already begun by the time of Secretary Marshall's offer of economic assistance. In the spring of 1947, the Communist ministers in the coalition governments of France, Italy, and Belgium were either excluded from or chose to leave office because of mounting ideological differences with the dominant pro-American parties. In the meantime, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe were systematically eliminating all non-Communist organizations from positions of power. The advent of the American-sponsored European Recovery Program hastened this trend toward the ideological bifurcation of the continent. In the eyes of the Soviet leadership, a formal organization of European Communist parties to ensure their subservience to Moscow in the face of the American economic penetration of Europe was called for; thus was created on September 22, 1947, the Communist Information Bureau (or Cominform), the successor to the Communist International (or Comintern) that had been dissolved by Stalin in 1943 to allay the ideological fears of his capitalist allies in the war against Hitler. Though successful in liquidating all non-Communist political forces in Eastern Europe that might prove susceptible to American influence, the Cominform failed to generate effective opposition to the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. Strikes and disorders fomented by the Communist-controlled labor organizations of France and Italy in the autumn of 1947 failed miserably. The governing coalitions in those two countries, from which the respective Communist parties had been expelled the previous spring, resumed their eager solicitation of American economic assistance and tendered active support for the new anti-Soviet foreign policy adopted in Washington.
Thus, by the beginning of 1948 the European continent had been reorganized into two political and economic blocs, the one dependent on the United States, the other subservient to the Soviet Union. This was soon to be followed by the division of the continent into two military blocs joined in a commitment to common defense against the other and backed by the overwhelming armed might of their respective patrons. Since the end of the war, Western and Soviet representatives had engaged in regular if not cordial communication in successive conferences at the foreign minister level, in the Allied Control Council for Germany and in the United Nations, in an effort to settle by diplomatic negotiation the outstanding matters in dispute. But the February 1948 Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, which symbolically and literally blocked the last major avenue in Europe linking East and West, precipitated a final rupture in relations between the two victorious powers that had been building since the end of the war. Thereafter, the economic reconstruction of Western Europe that was about to get under way seemed futile unless the nations of that region could adequately protect themselves against what had come to be viewed, in the aftermath of the Communist-inspired unrest in France and Italy and the Prague coup, as Moscow's imminent bid to project its power westward beyond the sphere of interest informally allocated to it at the end of the war.
On March 17, 1948, two events occurred on opposite sides of the Atlantic that together signified the determination of the Western nations to supplement their emerging trans-Atlantic economic partnership with a commitment to collective self-defense. The first of these was the signing of the Brussels Pact and the formation of the Brussels Pact Organization, a military alliance of fifty years' duration, binding Great Britain, France, and the three small countries now collectively designated as Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) in a joint pledge to repel "an armed attack" against any one of the signatories. The second was President Truman's special message to the United States Congress requesting authorization to reinstate conscription and universal military training, which had been allowed to expire after the war in keeping with the traditional American preference for a small volunteer army during peacetime. These two simultaneous actions were obviously not unrelated. The Brussels Pact was designed to demonstrate the West European nations' willingness to cooperate in their own defense and therefore facilitate Truman's task of securing Congressional approval of American participation in that effort.
These first tentative steps toward American rearmament and West European collective defense were to provoke a Soviet response of such belligerence as to confirm the worst fears of the Western leaders and therefore to accelerate the trend toward military preparedness and trans-Atlantic cooperation in security matters. The site of the first direct confrontation between Western and Soviet power was, appropriately, the region of Europe where it collided head-on: occupied Germany. The partition of Germany, Austria, and their respective capitals into four military occupation zones under American, British, French, and Soviet jurisdiction had been intended as a temporary expedient pending the emergence of indigenous political elites untainted by Nazi connections that would be prepared to undertake the governance of their reunified sovereign state. In the meantime Germany (like Austria) was to be administered as a single political and economic unit by the Allied Control Commission sitting in its capital, Berlin, which itself, though divided into four occupation sectors, was to be governed as a single municipal unit.
But a number of developments during the three years after the end of the war had converged to sabotage the Potsdam plan for eventual German unification. All of these were related to the determination of the Soviet Union to profit from its military control of the eastern part of Germany to procure by force the reparations that had been allocated to it in principle at Yalta but remained uncollected. The Soviet occupation authorities peremptorily requisitioned German machinery, power plants, railway track and rolling stock, as well as substantial quantities of coal and other raw materials for delivery to Russia. They also repudiated their pledge to furnish agricultural products from their own zone to the three Western zones in exchange for the industrial equipment they had already received from them. These unilateral measures, as understandable as they may have been in light of the desperate economic condition of the Soviet Union that had been caused by the German invasion, elicited sharp criticism from the American government and its representative on the Control Commission in Berlin. The Truman administration had no intention of permitting the Russians to strip their zone of all of its portable economic assets and continue to receive reparation deliveries from the Western zones while the United States was footing the bill for the sustenance of the impoverished populations of postwar Germany. Convinced that Germany's economic recovery was vital to the economic recovery of Europe as a whole, the United States pressed the Soviet Union in vain to treat the matter of reparations as part of a comprehensive plan for the orderly management of the entire economy of the country. When the Russians resumed their unilateral requisitions, the United States terminated the transfer of reparations to the Soviet zone in May 1946. In the meantime, the Russians had introduced measures of economic reform in their own zone-such as the confiscation without compensation and the redistribution of all large landholdings-which not only contradicted American principles of free enterprise but also further undermined the agreed-upon policy of treating all of Germany as a single economic entity.
Then, in an abrupt shift in strategy, the Kremlin abandoned its vindictive policy toward Germany in favor of a conciliatory approach. At the Paris meeting of Allied foreign ministers in July, Molotov violently accused the United States of reintroducing in disguised form the long-since repudiated Morgenthau Plan for the de-industrialization of the Reich by imposing restrictions on Germany's coal and steel production. The Soviet Foreign Commissar proposed the establishment of a single German government and denounced the French plan for the separation of the Ruhr from Germany. Molotov's remarks apparently signified a Soviet bid to curry favor with the starving and suffering German masses by portraying the Western occupying powers as their tormentors and the Russians as their friends. Did this startling departure portend a return to the policy of Russo-German collaboration at the expense of the West? Did the same Soviet premier and foreign minister who had concluded the pact with Hitler in 1939 have in mind a scheme to turn the German people against the Americans, British, and French and convert them to the cause of friendship with Russia?
Not to be outbid in the "struggle for Germany," American Secretary of State James Byrnes responded to Molotov's ploy in a speech before an audience of 1,400 German dignitaries in Stuttgart on September 5 that signified a critical turning point in American policy toward the occupied country. He announced his government's intention to promote the economic rehabilitation of Germany in order to enable it to contribute to the economic recovery of Europe as a whole. He rejected the idea of splitting off the Ruhr from the rest of the country. He called for the prompt formation of a provisional government with authority to administer the entire country so that Germans could once again manage their own affairs. Most important of all, from the standpoint of German public attitudes toward the Soviet Union, Byrnes specifically refused to recognize the Oder-Neisse frontier between Germany and Poland. That boundary, which deprived Germany of a considerable portion of its prewar territory, had been unilaterally established by the Russians in 1945 in order to compensate Poland for the seventy thousand square miles of its own territory that it had been forced to cede to the Soviet Union. By throwing American Support behind the German people's demand for the restoration c that lost land, Byrnes had shrewdly smoked out the Kremlin, forcing it to choose between its client state in Poland and its prospective friends ii Germany. Stalin sided with Poland, and by doing so irretrievably lost whatever opportunity may have existed for wooing the Germans away from the West.
The Truman administration proceeded to make good on the commitments to the German people that had been sketched by Byrnes in his Stuttgart speech. It promoted greater coordination of the occupation policies in the three western zones and granted a greater measure of economic and political authority to the pro-Western German elites that were emerging there. On January 1, 1947, the Americans and the British formally merged their two zones into a single economic unit, and in the following May established an economic advisory committee consisting of fifty-two delegates from the regional (Land) assemblies that the two occupying powers had permitted to be elected in their zones. In July the United States decided to extend Marshall Plan aid to the three Western occupation zones. The French, who had at first steadfastly opposed all measures favoring German political or economic integration (for obvious historical reasons), acceded to Anglo-American pressure in the summer of 1947 and began to participate in a common economic policy for the three Western zones. Soon the rudiments of a West German administration appeared in the form of a Supreme Economic Council, which adopted a bold plan for industrial recovery that was to pave the way for the West German economic miracle" of the fifties. On March 1, 1948, a central bank serving all three western zones came into being; on June 18 France finally agreed to fuse its zone with the Anglo-American zone ("Bizonia") to create a "Trizonia"; and on June 20 an all-West German currency, the deutsche mark, was established to cure inflation, curb black market activities, and restore faith in paper money after three years of quasi-barter in which cigarettes had been the hardest currency. These reforms signified the allies' acknowledgment that Western European prosperity depended on Germany's economic recovery, that the reunification of the entire country was impossible under current circumstances, and that the most suitable alternative was to amalgamate the three German zones under American, British, and French control and to integrate the new entity into a Western European community linked to the United States.
This process of economic integration in western Germany-the removal of all restrictions on the circulation of labor, capital, and products within the three zones, the formation of German-controlled trizonal economic bodies with broad decision-making powers, and the establishment of a trizonal central bank and currency backed by American financial power under the Marshall Plan-can only have been interpreted by Moscow as what indeed it proved to be: a prelude to the political integration of the three western zones in the form of a West German state dependent on and loyal to the United States. Since the newly consolidated western occupation zones of Germany contained three quarters of that country's population as well as the most productive industrial region of prewar Europe (the Ruhr-Rhineland-Westphalia complex), the prospect of a politically unified, economically advanced west German state associated with the United States produced predictable uneasiness in the Kremlin: It might exert a magnetic attraction on German nationals within the eastern zone, which was being drained of its resources and compelled to endure acute economic privation by its Soviet occupiers; it might serve as a center of Western intrigue against the East European satellites; worst of all, in light of the simultaneous request by Truman for the restoration of conscription in the United States and the formation of a West European military alliance, the emerging West German state might become a launching pad for aggression by America and her West European clients in the Brussels Pact against the Soviet motherland.
Moscow chose to counteract the American decision to establish a west German political and economic entity by applying pressure at the point of greatest Western vulnerability: the western sector of Berlin, situated 110 miles inside the Russian zone and tenuously linked to the western zone by a highway and a railroad. On June 24, 1948, the Soviet authorities in Germany halted all surface traffic crossing from the Western zone through the Soviet zone to West Berlin, whose 2.4 million inhabitants thereupon faced the prospect of starvation, having food stocks for only thirty-six days. Though ostensibly undertaken in retaliation against the establishment of a strong currency in the western zone (which was bound to destroy the weak German currency in the Soviet zone), the evident purpose of the Berlin blockade was to expel the Western occupation forces from the city. If the formation of a west German state could not be forestalled, at least the last open hole in the "iron curtain" that Churchill had decried in his famous address in March 1946 could be plugged. But the American and British governments responded to this direct challenge to their occupation authority in Berlin by organizing an airlift which supplied the beleaguered citizens of the city with the food, fuel, and other basic commodities they required. On May 12, 1949, Stalin acknowledged the failure of the blockade and terminated it with a face-saving gesture that fooled no one. (The Kremlin announced that the roads and railroads, which had been closed "for repairs" for a year, would be reopened to traffic from the West.) The Soviet Union's failure to remove this anomalous island of Western influence within a region firmly under its control and subject to its overwhelming military superiority was due to a single overriding fact: The United States possessed nuclear weapons that could be dropped on Russian cities by the sixty B-29 bombers that had been transferred (though without their bombs) to British bases at the height of the crisis.
The Berlin blockade accelerated the progressive involvement of the United States in the defense of Western Europe that had begun on the rhetorical level with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine and the adoption of the containment policy during the Greek and Turkish crises in 1947. On April 23, 1948, a few weeks after President Truman's request to the United States Congress for the reintroduction of conscription and universal military training and the simultaneous formation of the Brussels Pact in Europe, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of Britain had sounded out the State Department about the possibility of forming a North Atlantic security system linking the United States, Canada, and the five signatories of the Brussels Pact. The imposition of the Berlin blockade in June strengthened the position of those officials within the Truman administration who: had reached the conclusion that the United States had to make a clean break with its isolationist heritage and supplement its support for European economic recovery with some kind of concrete commitment to European defense.
The two measures that were required for the United States to assume such an unprecedented foreign commitment were both in the hands of the legislative branch of the government, as had been the case thirty years before, when a Democratic president's plans for America's global responsibilities were dashed on Capitol Hill. American participation in European defense required a sufficiently powerful military force to assure the credibility of the pledge as well as legislative authorization to adhere to whatever system of regional defense that Bevin and his European colleagues had in mind. As it turned out, Congressional Republicans who had been converted to the cause of "internationalism" outnumbered the remaining guardians of the isolationist heritage by a wide margin. On June 24, 1948, the Congress repudiated the tradition of a small volunteer peacetime army by enacting the euphemistically named Selective Service Act. This legislation laid the basis for a sharp increase in American military manpower by subjecting all able-bodied males from nineteen to thirty-five years of age to compulsory military service of twenty-one months. Like their counter parts in the Brussels Pact nations, which had also reinstituted conscription after the war, millions of American young men would be trained m the martial arts not to fight a war in Europe but to deter the Soviet Union from starting one there.
The concept of extending American military protection to the European signatories of the Brussels Pact that came under active consideration in Washington during 1948 seemed to contradict the essential purpose of the United Nations Organization, which was to provide a global network of collective security that would render such regional defense arrangements superfluous. Whereas the British wartime government had pressed for the -decentralization of the projected world body in the form of regional associations, it had been overruled by an adamant Roosevelt who had insisted on the Wilsonian concept of a single universal organization without regional subdivisions. But shortly after Roosevelt's death, as delegates from fifty countries assembled in San Francisco to draw up a charter for the United Nations Organization, American officials concerned with Latin American affairs expressed the fear that the projected global system of collective security might endanger the United States' special relationship with its clients south of the border. Just as the Wilson administration had insisted on exempting the region covered by the Monroe Doctrine from the purview of the League of Nations Covenant, the Truman administration arranged for the insertion of Article 51 in the United Nations Charter, which preserved the right of member states to establish regional security organizations outside the United Nations. The first such regional agreement to be concluded was the Rio Pact of September 2, 1947, which established the principle of collective self-defense for the Western Hemisphere by defining an attack against one of the American republics as an attack on them all, and providing for a joint response to aggression. The aforementioned Brussels Pact for Western Europe's joint defense was also based on the provisions of Article 51. Armed with the precedent of the Rio and Brussels pacts, Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg (a former isolationist turned internationalist who had helped to formulate Article 51 and had subsequently become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) introduced a resolution in the United States Senate that was designed to circumvent the Soviet veto in the United Nations Security Council on matters relating to European security without violating the United Nations Charter. The Vandenberg resolution in effect repudiated the Monroe Doctrine and its guiding principle of hemispheric exclusivity by affirming Washington's willingness to join the Western European regional security system that was in the process of formation.
Acting under the authority of the Vandenberg resolution, which passed the Senate with only four dissenting votes, the State Department opened discussions with representatives of the Brussels Pact countries on July 5; by the end of the year Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, and Canada had joined the talks. After months of intensive negotiations, delegates of these twelve nations signed on April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty, a regional security arrangement modeled on the Rio Pact which obligated each signatory to render assistance to any of the others that sustained an armed attack. The Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty by the lopsided margin of 82 to 13 and President Truman signed it on July 25. On the same day he requested Congressional approval of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, a one-year military aid package of $1.5 billion earmarked for America's new allies in Europe that represented the financial underpinning of the military commitment.
It was in this way, and for these reasons, that the mythical concept of a North Atlantic Community was born. It was a myth because it included countries such as Italy (not to speak of Greece and Turkey, which adhered to the pact in 1952) whose shores were far removed from the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a myth because it did not include geographically eligible states such as Spain (on account of its abhorrent form of government and its past associations with the Axis powers) and Sweden and Ireland (which insisted on retaining their traditional neutrality). Nor could it be represented as a coalition sharing a cooperative spirit of long standing, since it was to comprise two states, Italy and later West Germany (which joined in1955), with which most of the other members had recently been at war. The new myth of Atlanticism superseded, at least in the minds of the American proponents of the alliance, the older myth of hemispheric solidarity that had governed American diplomatic behavior from the promulgation of Monroe's Doctrine to the pursuit of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. The Atlantic Ocean ceased to be regarded as an aquatic buffer between two distinctly separate if not mutually incompatible civilizations, the old world and the new, which protected the latter from the nefarious influences of the former. Instead the sea was seen as uniting the peoples of European heritage, those whose forbears had traversed it and those who had remained at home, in a community of shared principles and values. In fact the Atlantic alliance, as we have seen, was forged not by a common devotion to shared beliefs but rather by the sentiment of danger: What united the signatories of this pact was the fear of Russian aggression, which had been exacerbated by the Berlin blockade, and the determination to deter or resist it with the assistance of the American guarantee bolstered by the atomic bomb.
Another important consequence of the Berlin blockade was the formal partition of Germany into two separate political entities, each intimately linked to one of the two superpowers. Shortly after the formation of the North Atlantic alliance and during the final week of the blockade, in May 1949, the three Western occupation powers permitted the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany with its capital in the Rhenish city of Bonn. The first postwar elections conducted on August 14, 1949, throughout the three Western zones resulted in a plurality for the conservative, pro-Western Christian Democratic Party, whose leader, Konrad Adenauer, became chancellor of the new Federal Republic, a position he was to occupy continuously for the first fourteen years of its existence. Resolutely anti-Communist, profoundly suspicious of Soviet intentions, and firmly committed to the free market policies pursued by his minister of economics, Ludwig Erhard, this shrewd Catholic politician from the Rhineland was ideally suited to guide his fledgling state toward closer cooperation with the United States and support I or its policy of containment and economic recovery in the non-Communist half of Europe. Though still formally an occupied country with a number of restrictions on its political sovereignty, the Federal Republic, from the very day of its birth, in fact ceased to be treated as a former enemy. It came to be regarded instead as a bulwark against the Communist bloc and as a potentially valuable contributor to the economic reconstruction of Western Europe as a whole. Thus restrictions on Germany's economic sovereignty were relaxed and Marshall Plan assistance to Bonn was increased. Erhard's policy of promoting savings, investment, and the revival of industrial production and foreign trade generated a phenomenal economic boom in this war-ravaged country. By November 1949 the prewar level of production was attained, and by the beginning of the 1950s West Germany entered a period of sustained economic growth that was to restore it to the front rank of the world's industrial powers by the end of the decade.
As the three western occupation zones of Germany united to form the Federal Republic, the eastern zone was transformed by its Soviet occupiers into the nominally independent state of the German Democratic Republic in October 1949 without the formalities of an election. In this way the eastern and western parts of Germany achieved separate statehood by the end of the 1940s, each adopting the political and economic systems of its respective protector. Hitler had set out to unify all of Europe under German auspices. Instead, his policies resulted in the division of Europe, the division of Germany, and the division of the city where he had directed his armies and finally met his own end.
The Korean War and Western Rearmament
It would be premature to designate the Berlin blockade and the formation of NATO as the decisive events that produced the rearmament, remobilization, and remilitarization of the United States and its allies in Western Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty represented merely a statement of intention, and a rather vague one at that. Though obliging each signatory to take up arms "immediately" in the event of an armed attack on any of them, it left each member to decide for itself if an armed attack had in fact occurred, whether it threatened the security of the region covered by the treaty, and what appropriate responses (if any) were called for. In light of the overwhelming conventional military superiority in Europe that the Soviet Union and its clients were thought to enjoy at the time-75 divisions compared with 14 divisions for the Western powers-it was unclear how the promised American protection would be extended to the transatlantic allies in the event of a Soviet attack. It was originally assumed that by throwing a "nuclear cloak" over Western Europe, the United States could dissuade Moscow from interfering with the economic recovery and political stabilization of the countries receiving Marshall Plan assistance. The grossly outnumbered armed forces of the European members of NATO would serve as the "shield" of the Western alliance that would slow up a conventional Soviet assault until the "sword" represented by the American nuclear arsenal could be unsheathed and plunged into the heart of Russia. But the deterrent power of America's ultimate weapon was compromised before the ink on the North Atlantic Treaty was dry. On July 14, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, signaling the end of the American nuclear monopoly on which the "shield and sword" strategy of the alliance was based and which American intelligence experts had expected to last for several years.
Shocked by the Soviet nuclear test and apprehensive about its implications for the future of Western defense, President Truman ordered the National Security Council to undertake a comprehensive reevaluation of American policy toward the Communist bloc. The product of this high -level investigation was a top secret document known as NSC-68, which was submitted to the president in April 1950. It portrayed the Soviet Union as an inherently aggressive power, fired by a messianic faith that was antithetical to the American way of life, whose unquenchable thirst for expansion had led to the subjugation of Eastern Europe and China and threatened to engulf the remainder of the Eurasian land mass. Moscow's acquisition of atomic weapons would enable it to browbeat its non-nuclear neighbors into submission unless the United States took immediate steps to remedy this potentially catastrophic imbalance of power in the world. A continuation of the containment policy adopted in 1947 would no longer be sufficient. The economic reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan and the stockpiling of American atomic weapons thousands of miles from the flashpoints of East-West confrontation had failed to stem the inexorable advance of Communism in the world. What was called for instead was a global offensive against the Soviet bloc that would restore the initiative to the non-Communist world.
The specific recommendations of NSC-68 included the prompt development of the thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb, the expansion of American and West European conventional forces, the mobilization of America's economic resources to sustain this military buildup, and the tightening of the bonds between the member states of the Western alliance system in order to meet the Communist threat. Three proposals designed to strengthen NATO and give more concrete form to the American military commitment to Western Europe had been under active consideration ever since the explosion of the Soviet bomb. The first of these was the stationing of large numbers of American ground forces in Europe (beyond the two divisions in West Germany) to supplement Allied manpower as well as to enhance the credibility of America's pledge to participate in the defense of the western half of the continent. The second was the installation of air bases on the continent to accommodate the bombers that carried the American nuclear deterrent. The third was the closer integration of the national armies of the alliance and the development of procedures for joint military planning in order to remove the logistical inefficiencies that are endemic to a loosely organized coalition of sovereign states. The general proposals included in NSC-68, together with its specific prescriptions for the buildup and projection of American military power abroad, implied nothing less than a revolutionary transformation of the manner in which the United States had managed its national defense in peacetime. These proposed innovations predictably engendered a fierce internal debate within the foreign policy establishment of the Truman administration, with Secretary of State Dean Acheson emerging as the staunchest proponent of the new approach. The prospect of sharp increases in taxation to finance this massive rearmament program alarmed a number of officials, including even Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, who opposed the recommendations of NSC-68 on the grounds that they would undermine the economic health of the country. The State Department's two senior specialists on Soviet affairs, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, argued that the project was based on a simplistic view of Soviet foreign policy goals and would run the risk of imposing an excessively rigid form on American policy toward the Communist bloc.
While Acheson strove to overcome mounting internal opposition to the new departure in American military policy implied by NSC-68, the Kremlin launched a propaganda campaign in Western Europe that threatened to dampen Allied enthusiasm for the massive program of rearmament under consideration. In early 1950 a "peace offensive" organized by the West European Communist parties and endorsed by notable public figures of various political persuasions denounced the Atlantic alliance as an unwarranted, American-inspired plot to intimidate the Soviet Union, a plot likely to result in the nuclear devastation of the very region that the alliance had supposedly been formed to protect. For the first time since the advent of the Cold War, spokesmen for the non-Communist Left in France, Italy, and West Germany began to hail the advantages of neutrality for Western Europe in the global contest between the two superpowers. Neutrality was advertised as a way not only of avoiding total nuclear destruction but also of preserving for Western Europe a margin of choice between the two antithetical political ideologies that competed for Europe's favor.
What prevented the West Europeans from indulging in the luxury of such a choice was the unexpected outbreak of hostilities between Communist and anti-Communist armies thousands of miles from Europe in the summer of 1950. Though the peninsula of Korea was terra incognita to most Europeans, enough was known about its political situation to cause widespread uneasiness about its similarities to the postwar position of Germany. Formerly a part of the Axis coalition, Korea had been partitioned in 1945 between the United States and the Soviet Union. After three years of fruitless Soviet-American efforts to agree on measures of reunification, each occupying power had established in its own zone a government that claimed authority over the entire country. Now, the Communist half, armed and presumably encouraged by the Soviet Union, had attacked the non-Communist half. Like South Korea, West Germany confronted an adversary who enjoyed decisive military superiority. The Soviet command in East Germany had recruited over fifty thousand "military police" from its occupation zone and had reorganized these paramilitary units into a powerful fighting force that could be hurled against the disarmed Federal Republic. Consequently, the diffuse feeling of anxiety about the theoretical possibility of nuclear annihilation aroused by the Soviet atomic test in the summer of 1949 was instantaneously replaced by a more precisely focused apprehension about the prospect of a Korea-type conventional assault across the north German plain that could radically transform the balance of power on the continent.
Whether the Kremlin ever seriously entertained the notion of making such an aggressive move in Europe-and no evidence has ever surfaced to indicate that it did-is beside the point. What mattered is that the governing elites of the NATO powers at the time made the mental connection between Korea and Germany at the height of the Korean emergency in the summer and fall of 1950. Moreover, the Truman administration's prompt and effective response to the North Korean invasion removed any lingering doubts in Europe about the capacity and determination of the United States to honor its commitments abroad: A nation that did not hesitate to fight a war in an obscure country that had been excluded from its defense perimeter in the western Pacific could scarcely be suspected of reluctance to defend the European members of the Western alliance system to which the United States had enthusiastically adhered.
The long-range geopolitical implications of the war in Korea were felt less on that strife-torn peninsula-where a permanent military stalemate developed in the summer of 1951 roughly along the original political demarcation line separating north from south-than in the United States and Western Europe. The transformation of the Cold War into a shooting war in Asia led to the militarization of the containment policy in Europe. The Truman administration seized upon the alarm caused by the aggression in Korea to push forward the ambitious program of military spending as well as the extension of unprecedented American security pledges to Western Europe that had been contemplated during the high level discussions of the NSC-68 memorandum. The provisions of the North Atlantic Treaty, as we have seen, represented little more than a vaguely worded commitment to common defense, implicitly fortified by the existence of the American atomic arsenal and the large pool of American military manpower produced by the introduction of peacetime conscription But the concrete American contribution to European defense was initially to be confined to the provision of munitions and materiel, and even those were in short supply because of the reduction in American military spending in the years after the Second World War. The Korean War abruptly changed all of this. In September 1950, the council of NATO foreign ministers assembled in New York and unanimously adopted a "forward-looking strategy" for the defense of Western Europe, which was to be facilitated by the formation of an integrated military force under a unified command. In the same month President Truman dispatched four divisions of American combat troops to Europe and announced plans to augment even further the size of the American military contingent on the continent. On December 19 the NATO foreign ministers announced the creation of an integrated defense system under the supreme command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. When the United States Senate endorsed the principle of an integrated command and approved Eisenhower's nomination on April 4, 1951-two years to the day after the signing of the NATO Treaty-it endorsed the transfer of the four divisions of American ground troops to Europe.
In the meantime the Truman administration had undertaken a massive military buildup designed to increase America's nuclear and conventional capability as well as to furnish the European allies with the military equipment that they required. At the beginning of 1951 the President submitted a $50 billion defense budget, compared to the $13.5 billion budget of six months before, and increased the size of the standing army by half to 3.5 million men. In the last year of the Truman presidency, the institutional structure of the Western alliance system was rationalized: the Lisbon conference of the Atlantic Council in February 1952 created a NATO secretariat under a secretary general and centralized all alliance activities in headquarters located in and around Paris. Plans were drawn up to increase the number of divisions from 14 to 50, the combat readiness of existing forces was improved, and concrete steps were taken to centralize the command structure and integrate the national armies of the alliance. Negotiations were begun, and a number of agreements concluded, with various European states for the establishment of bases for American ground, air, and naval forces.
It is impossible to exaggerate the precedent-shattering significance of the new American defense policy that gradually unfolded from the formulation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the establishment of a full-fledged American military presence in Europe by 1952. By assuming the supreme command of NATO, by furnishing armaments to its allies, and by stationing its own ground forces on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States had undertaken the task of preserving the postwar political status quo in Europe. The original emphasis on containing Russia's westward expansion by promoting the economic recovery and political stability of the nations of Western Europe was superseded by the commitment to project American military power to the very heart of the continent in an effort to achieve the same objective.
But the assumption of such unprecedented global responsibilities was not without cost. The American economy, notwithstanding its spectacular rate of growth in the early fifties, could not have been expected to sustain unlimited demands on its productive capacity. Particularly during the Korean War, when the American public was required to endure austerity measures such as wage and price controls and various restrictions on consumption, it was not surprising that the Truman administration began to press the European allies for greater contributions to their own defense. In July 1950 the five signatories of the Brussels Pact consented to increases in arms spending and the prolongation of military service. But there were limits to what they could do. Their economic recovery was not yet complete. Moreover, France, Britain, Belgium, and Holland were still obliged to maintain large military forces abroad to preserve order in the remnants of their colonial empires, while tiny Luxembourg's contribution was insignificant. Europe's greatest reserve of potential military strength was West Germany, with its large pool of manpower and its latent economic capacity. It was unrealistic to expect the United States, which had assumed the major obligation to defend the Federal Republic, to continue its military buildup in that country without requiring the Germans themselves to contribute to their own protection, especially since any conceivable Soviet military advance in Europe would of necessity take place on German territory.
At the height of the Korean emergency American officials began to prod the West European governments to confront the issue that they had previously preferred to postpone: the rearmament of West Germany and its adhesion to the Atlantic alliance. On September 12, 1950, Secretary of State Acheson formally proposed to his British and French counterparts that German divisions be added to NATO. Though explicitly forbidden by the Potsdam agreement and resolutely opposed by the governments of those nations, such as France, that had recently endured the painful consequences of German military power, German participation in Western European defense had been informally discussed since the formation of the alliance. "Germany's rearmament is contained in the Atlantic Pact as the embryo is in the egg," warned the Parisian newspaper Le Monde on the very day the NATO treaty was signed. French officials remained resistant to the idea of resurrecting German military forces, even with the assurance that their guns would be pointed east this time. "Germany has no army and cannot have one," declared French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman during the parliamentary debates on the ratification of the pact. "It has no armaments and it will not have any." But the increased pressure from Washington had its effect on Germany's apprehensive neighbors in the West. Particularly in France, public opinion began to accommodate itself to the idea of Germany's reintegration into the Western European system. Many French people had ceased to regard Germany as the hereditary enemy as they began to view Russia as the principal threat to national security. Moreover, that portion of Germany under Western influence, which contained over three quarters of the country's industrial plant, came to be regarded as a valuable economic asset to Western Europe as a whole: The enormous productive potential of the Federal Republic, if permitted to develop to its full capacity, could serve as the engine of economic recovery for the entire western half of the continent. All that remained was to devise some means of assuring that West Germany's economic recovery would be managed without endangering the security of its non-Communist neighbors.
Even before the stimulus provided by the Korean War, the French government had launched a bold initiative that was eventually to provide such assurance. On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman formally proposed that the coal and steel production of France and West Germany be combined and supervised by a supranational authority, which would be open to the participation of the other countries of Western Europe. Great Britain declined the invitation to join in discussions of this proposal because of its reluctance to compromise its privileged relationship with North America and the Commonwealth. But representatives of West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux nations joined French officials in negotiations that produced in 1951 an agreement to form a European Coal and Steel Community. When the Schuman Plan officially went into effect in the summer of 1952, the new supranational entity had been endowed with a political organization to complement its economic apparatus: an executive body, a parliamentary assembly, and a court of justice. Moreover, the specified objective of gradually abolishing all politically imposed obstacles to trade within the community (such as tariffs, quantitative restrictions, and import quotas) in coal and steel products implicitly established a precedent that could (and would) be extended to other and eventually all sectors of the economy. Thus the Schuman Plan contained the seeds of European economic integration that would later germinate during the second half of the fifties.
But the Schuman Plan was pregnant with strategic implications as well: it seemed to offer a masterly solution to the question of German rearmament that had been insistently raised by the United States since the beginning of the Korean War. Schuman's proposal, like the abortive scheme for European union advanced by another French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, a generation earlier, had been prompted by the hope of enmeshing Germany in a web of European economic integration that would forever remove both the incentive and the opportunity to make war on its partners in such a cooperative enterprise. It was inevitable that a proposal to domesticate Germany's industrial power by integrating it into a European economic community would give rise to the idea that Germany's war-making potential could similarly be harnessed to the cause of joint European defense. Schuman's original hope was that an economically integrated, politically unified Europe, led by France and its junior partner across the Rhine, could emerge as a "third force" capable of managing its own defense without depending on either of the two superpowers or becoming embroiled in their global struggle for hegemony. But the outbreak of the Korean War five days after representatives of the six interested states had assembled in Paris to consider the French proposal abruptly transformed the nature of the discussion. The concept of Franco-German partnership within a Europe disengaged from the two superpowers vanished amid the prospect of all-out war with the Communist bloc. On October 24, 1950, as the governments of Western Europe groped for a constructive response to Acheson's proposal for the addition of West German divisions to NATO, French Premier René Pleven unveiled a plan that was carefully crafted to satisfy the American demand for German rearmament while allaying the fears that such an event was bound to engender in Germany's West European neighbors. The Pleven Plan provided for the formation of an integrated European military force, equipped and financed by the member states, with the integration of national contingents at the lowest possible level. The virtue of the scheme was that it would mobilize French, German, Italian, and Benelux forces without actually creating a German army or a German high command. Instead, German soldiers would be thinly diffused through the ranks of a genuinely European army, under the jurisdiction of a European defense minister who would be responsible to a European parliament.
The American government initially hesitated to endorse the French proposal for a unified European military force for fear that it was merely a diversionary maneuver to delay or forestall German entry in NATO. But Washington was gradually won over to the Pleven Plan as the most suitable formula for including Germany in the common European defense effort without inspiring apprehension in the other allied countries. At a time when the conflict in Korea was widely regarded as a prelude to a general war, the governments of Western Europe displayed an uncharacteristic willingness to accept the restrictions on their national sovereignty implied by the Pleven Plan. On May 27, 1952, after long and arduous negotiations, representatives of the six nations concerned signed the treaty establishing the European Defense Community (EDC). Thus was born the concept, if not yet the reality, of a supranational military organization under the supreme command of NATO, with common armed forces wearing a common European uniform, a common defense budget, and common political institutions including a Council of Ministers, an Assembly, and a Court of Justice The EDC treaty diverged from the original Pleven Plan in one important respect: Instead of providing for the dispersion of national forces in small units throughout the military organization, it established national contingents on a divisional scale (ostensibly for reasons of efficiency). This meant that German divisions would contribute to the defense of Western Europe after all, belonging to a multinational force and taking orders from "European" commanders. In recognition of West Germany's proposed adherence to the military alliance directed against Russia, the three Western occupying powers took the requisite steps to remove the anomalous reminders of its status as a vanquished enemy. A day before the signing of the EDC pact in Paris, the American, British, and French governments concluded an agreement with the Adenauer regime in Bonn providing for the termination of the military occupation and the restoration of political sovereignty to the Federal Republic upon the entry into force of the treaty.
As the parliaments of the six member states of the EDC ratified or began debate on the ratification of the treaty to create a European army, two momentous political transformations occurred almost simultaneously in Washington and Moscow. In January 1953, the Democratic administration of Harry S Truman, which had inaugurated the policy of containing the Soviet Union and brought America into the Atlantic alliance, turned over the reins of power to the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. On March 6, less than two months after the new American president took office, the Kremlin announced that Joseph Stalin had died the previous day. It soon became evident that the Soviet dictator would be replaced by a cadre of political and military personalities who would rule Russia on the basis of collective leadership and that the upper echelons of the Soviet government and Communist party had undergone the most sweeping reorganization since the purges of the late thirties. The simultaneous disappearance of the two governing elites that had between them presided over the destinies of the entire globe since the end of the Second World War engendered a universal sense of uncertainty in the world. This sense of uncertainty increased once it became evident that the new American administration would resemble its new Russian counterpart in the degree to which power and responsibility would be delegated and diffused rather than centralized at the top. No one could predict with confidence whether the foreign policies conducted by the two decisive leaders of the superpowers would be perpetuated by their unfamiliar and untested successors.
What was certain, however, was that Truman had left an impressive legacy of solid achievements in the realm of foreign policy. The underlying objective of that policy, the containment of Soviet expansion beyond the regions that had come under Russian military domination at the end of the war, had been met everywhere. In Iran, Turkey, Greece, West Berlin, South Korea--wherever the Soviet Union probed or was alleged to have probed Western intentions--American diplomatic, economic, or military power had been exercised in such a way as to preserve the non-Communist character and pro-Western inclinations of those disputed regions. The countries of Western Europe, on the brink of economic collapse and reputedly vulnerable to Soviet military aggression in 1947, had made spectacular strides toward economic recovery and collective defense under American inspiration. And American economic assistance to Yugoslavia after its defection from the Soviet bloc in 1948 facilitated Marshal Tito's campaign against Moscow's primacy in the Communist world.
In view of the success of this containment policy it must be regarded as ironic that the Republican party's victory in the presidential election of 1952 was in large part due to its success in portraying the Truman administration as "soft on communism." The strength of this paradoxical assertion rested on the supposed advance of Soviet power in Asia rather than in Europe. China, the most populous country on earth, had apparently been absorbed into the Soviet empire. The Korean War dragged on inconclusively while American soldiers died and their commanders were shackled. The Communist insurgents in Indochina threatened to dislodge America's French allies and open all of Southeast Asia to the domination of the Kremlin and its puppets in the region. Added to this perception of Soviet gains across the Pacific was the widespread suspicion, incited by legislative demagogues such as Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, that Communist agents had infiltrated American political, diplomatic, and even military institutions and were promoting Soviet interests there. The new American administration promised in certain ill-defined ways to remedy these defects in American policy toward the Soviet bloc and to halt what was viewed by the Republicans as the trend toward retrenchment and retreat.