Cold War's myths

Published : Jul 30, 2010 00:00 IST

On the origins, course and end of the Cold War.

THE Cold War affected India directly. It was one of its battlefronts. But Indians, self-absorbed and self-righteous, viewed it from the prism of India's stance. Jawaharlal Nehru's policies and utterances, never internally consistent, were the bible. The Left and the Right censured him politically.

There exists not a single Indian work of any weight on the origins, the course and the end of the Cold War, not surprisingly. India itself was caught in two cold wars with Pakistan and China and there exists not a single work of scholarship and objectivity on either.

Any conflict between two collective entities tends to create within each divisions between the hardliners and the rest, between the hawks and the doves. The rift is not absent in India. In the United States, it emerged at the early stages of the Cold War. Two of the foremost protagonists Paul Nitze and George Kennan waged their wars with elegance, determination and intellectual rigour hard to come by without wrecking their friendship, bitter arguments notwithstanding.

Nicholas Thompson, a journalist, is a grandson of Nitze. His book is a model of detachment and thoroughness. Nitze had been Kennan's deputy on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff set up by the legendary Secretary of State George Marshall. The two worked together on some of the most important issues the U.S. ever faced: reversal of the partition of Germany, the Marshall Plan, and the hydrogen bomb. Later, for 35 long years, they disagreed profoundly on the direction the country should take. Each believed that the other's desired policies could lead the U.S. to the ultimate catastrophe.

On February 17, 1984, at Kennan's 80th birthday celebration, Nitze said: George Kennan taught us to approach the issues of policy, not just from the narrow immediate interest of the United States, but from a longer-range viewpoint that included the cultures and interests of others, including our opponents, and a proper regard for the opinions of mankind. George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil. But the warmth of his and Annelise's friendship for Phyllis and for me has never faltered.

Another guest asked Nitze how he and Kennan had remained friends despite their vast differences on issues of national security. Nitze smiled and responded that he had never had any difference with George except over matters of substance. Can you name any two Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan who could speak in such terms of each other despite disagreements on policy?

Thompson sums up their contrasting traits beautifully. Nitze was the diligent insider, Kennan the wise outsider; Nitze the doer, Kennan the thinker. Kennan designed America's policy for the Cold War, and Nitze mastered it. With respect to America's ability to shape the world, Nitze was an idealist and Kennan a realist. In their old age, Nitze still wanted to win the Cold War, and Kennan wanted to be done with it. Their views overlapped at strange and crucial moments, but for most of their working lives, they disagreed profoundly. Nitze was the hawk. When the United States and the Soviet Union built up their terrifying weapon stockpiles soon after World War II, he argued that the best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to be prepared to win one. If you want peace, prepare for war. More than any other American, Nitze gave shape to the arms race. Kennan came up with the word containment that was used more than any other to describe America's Cold War policy. But he saw it as a political strategy for combating a political threat. Nitze defined the word the way it was really used: as a military strategy for combating a military threat.

Kennan was not an easy man to get along with. If Nitze treated wounds as scratches, Kennan felt scratches as wounds. Kennan was a dove with hidden talons. He acted as informer on persons and was vain to a degree. He helped set up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and later advised it and worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). By 1999, Nitze came to hold the view: I see no compelling reason why we should not militarily get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security.

The book is more than a study of a fascinating relationship. It encapsulates some of the real issues. Kennan predicted the end of the Cold War, how it would end, the Sino-Soviet split and much else. It would be wrong to accept his belated apologia that his plea for containment did not entail military conflict. Walter Lippmann's critique of the theory of containment hurt Kennan; it was so true.

The policy rift in the U.S. is not unique. It occurs in all adversarial situations except that these two Americans never let the debate affect friendship. Complete separation from fact and logic was Nitze's comment on an article by Kennan that criticised him, indirectly.

Kennan's Long Telegram in 1946 from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and his article in Foreign Affairs (July 1947) under the pseudonym X entitled The Sources of Soviet Conduct belong to legend. By 1949, his influence in government began to fade. His attempt to stop the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and opposition to the recognition of Israel won no friends. Nitze gained not a few for the diametrically opposite stand he took.

Competing icons'

In 1949, they began to drift apart. Eventually, Nitze became more hawkish than ever and regarded the Soviet Union as a mortal threat. By the late 1970s, Kennan and Nitze had become the diplomatic equivalents of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson: competing icons who admired each other and who would be forever linked. Kennan had become a co-chairman of the American Committee on East-West Accord, an organisation dedicated to reducing tensions between the two superpowers. Nitze, still the face of the Committee on the Present Danger, was hard at work doing the opposite. Each man appeared on talk shows and before Congress. The old sages were cited in the papers with similar frequency. The fundamental difference between Nitze and Kennan was grounded in two long-running disagreements. The first was whether the United States, or anyone, could handle nuclear weapons. Nitze had always believed the answer was yes, from the Strategic Bombing Survey, through his arguments over limited war, to today. Kennan, forever scarred by Hamburg, believed it was no. Nuclear weapons were far too dreadful to leave in any human hands.

The second disagreement was perhaps more important, and it came from their differing views of the United States. Nitze's goal was to make the U.S. arsenal more survivable. Kennan, by contrast, had never subscribed to Nitze's vision of American benevolence. He considered his country fully capable of starting a war, either through malice or through folly. As important, Nitze might believe that our arms build-up was merely defensive. But Moscow would not see it that way. Each weapon we added was one less city that could survive an American strike. Tensions would rise. And with everyone armed and on edge, a minor incident could initiate a massive conflict as had happened with World War I.

Two fundamentals that Kennan stressed tirelessly are of abiding relevance the militarisation of diplomacy and the dangers of a partitioned Europe. The seeds of the Cold War were sown during the Second World War. The British historian Andrew Roberts' excellent book The Storm of War rightly claims to be a new history of the Second World War (Allen Lane, Penguin; 712 pages; 25). The course of the war on all its fronts is told in careful, authenticated detail. The diplomatic implications stand, thanks to the author's arresting style. It is a work that will continue for long to be cited.

Lukacs' masterly work

It was left to John Lukacs, the Hungarian-born British historian and author of over 30 books, to spell out the diplomatic implications of that war. It is a masterly work. To this day the West minimises the Soviet Union's contribution. It lost 27 million lives. As Prof. Mark Mazower of Columbia University noted: It is a salutary image today when our abiding memory of the last great war systematically plays down Russian contributions. Hollywood glamourises the Anglo-American Normandy landings but is silent about the far vaster Operation Bagration the most lethal offensive in history that saw Russian troops charge across Europe in a fashion reminiscent of their forebears. He referred to Russia's deep involvement in European security. That lies at the root of U.S.-Russian discord even today.

Lukacs' book is not a history of the war but about its history. He writes repeatedly that in 1940 Adolf Hitler came very near to winning a total victory and seeks to answer six questions: Was the Second World War inevitable? Was the division of Europe inevitable? Was Hitler inevitable? Was the making of atomic bombs inevitable? Was America's war against Germany inevitable? Was the Cold War inevitable? We never ask such questions about India's cold wars. But then we are always right. The year 1945 marked the end of the European Age and the rise of the American empire.

This brings us to the main cause of the Cold War. [Winston] Churchill thought that sooner or later Hitler would invade Russia, rendering the latter, no matter how, an ally of Britain. Even before that event in June 1941, we may detect a consistency in Churchill and the British view about the eastern part of Europe, indeed about Europe at large. Churchill saw that the alternative to Germany ruling all of Europe was a Russian rule in much of Eastern Europe; and of course half of Europe (especially its western half) was better than none (emphasis added throughout).

On August 1, 1941, an editorial in The Times (London) read: Leadership in Eastern Europe can fall only to Germany or Russia. Neither Great Britain nor the United States can exercise, or will aspire to exercise, any predominant role in these regions.

In July 1941, Joseph Stalin begged the U.S. to enter the war. He would welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front under the complete command of the American Army. He suspected the U.S. and Britain of delaying the second front to weaken Russia and of having secret parleys with Germans.

In December 1941, as the tide began to turn and while windows in the Kremlin were still occasionally rattling from the sound waves of cannon not far way, Anthony Eden [British Foreign Secretary] arrived in Moscow with drafts of an Anglo-Russian declaration. Stalin said that he wanted an agreement, not a declaration. A declaration I regard as algebra, but an agreement as practical arithmetic.' He produced a detailed Russian draft agreement about the Soviet Union's frontiers after the war, replete with secret protocols in essence a British acceptance of the western frontiers of the Soviet Union in June 1941, most of it along the German-Russian partition line arrived at two years before. Knowing the Americans' objection to secret treaties, the British told Stalin that they could not make commitments in such terms, without stating explicitly that they would oppose them.

Stalin fell out with Hitler precisely over the USSR's interests in Eastern Europe. Hitler tore up the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939) and invaded the Soviet Union in July 1941.

Churchill did conclude a pact on Eastern Europe with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 the Percentages Agreement on a slip of paper specifying the percentage of influence that each would have in Eastern Europe. At Yalta in February 1945, the Big Three signed the Declaration of Liberated Europe. To Franklin D. Roosevelt it spelt free elections, to Stalin, a veiled endorsement of his accord with Churchill. The U.S. rejected the 1944 accord.

The U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes revealed this accord ( The New York Times; October 18, 1947) in a comment on a denial by the British Foreign Office spokesman that Britain and the USSR had agreed on spheres.

He asserted: Evidently the Foreign Office spokesman is not informed. My statement was based on a message from Prime Minister Churchill to President Roosevelt, dated 8 March 1945, in the first paragraph of which, after deploring Soviet actions in Romania, Mr Churchill said: We have been hampered in our protests against these developments by the fact that, in order to have the freedom to save Greece, Eden and I at Moscow in October recognised that Russia should have a largely preponderant voice in Romania and Bulgaria while we took the lead in Greece. Stalin adhered very strictly to this understanding during the thirty days' fighting against the communists and ELAS [a guerilla group] in the city of Athens, in spite of the fact that all this was most disagreeable to him and those around him.'

Roosevelt's opposition killed the 1944 accord. The tragedy was the division of Europe and the coming of a cold war. Stalin kept his word. He refused to help Greek communists one bit. If the accord had been kept, Stalin might have made some concessions on the independence of the states in Eastern Europe. Rebuffed, he used brutal methods to control them. The Americans viewed it, wrongly, as the march of communism'. Lukacs comes to the core of the matter. Stalin should have been confronted with precise and practical questions about the actual limits of his post-war sphere of interest before the war ended. The result would have been the 1944 accord in a tripartite form, with guarantees of freedom to the states concerned.

One of the results of the Cold War was the American national and popular obsession with the evils of communism that became the principal element in American politics with long-lasting effects. What may belong here is at least a suggestion that the Cold War between America and Russia might also have been at least in one important way due to a reciprocal misunderstanding. Americans believed, and feared, that, having established communism in Eastern Europe, Stalin was now ready to promote and, wherever possible, impose communism in Western Europe, which was not really the case. Stalin, who knew and understood the weak appeal of communism beyond the Soviet Union, and who was anxious about America's overwhelming power in and after 1945, thought that the Americans were becoming ready to challenge and upset his rule over Eastern Europe, which also was not the case.

After 1956, in Europe the enmity of the two superpowers was gradually winding down, until the political division of Europe and of Germany ended with the withdrawal of the Russian empire in 1989 and the end of the Cold War meant also the end of an entire historical century, of the twentieth, dominated by the effects and the results of two world wars.

Politics of insecurity

Professors Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall trace the course of the cold war thus unleashed. The United States during much of the Cold War was objectively safe from external attack, as safe as any nation could realistically hope to be. Its security was seldom directly imperilled, a reality that shaped U.S. foreign policy in the ways that worried Kennan. The politicians and operators in Washington who exploited America's Cold War perceived an even deeper reality that their fundamental interest lay in denying that the United States was secure, no matter what was happening overseas. Talking up the threat, perpetuating the politics of insecurity, became the mission. What unfolded, therefore, especially in the final decade of the Cold War, was a bizarre scene. Even as the Soviet Union declined rotting internally and alienated from its allies and even from its own citizens scaremongers in the United States spoke of imminent Soviet superiority, of clear and present dangers.

They turned on Afghanistan and Iraq. This book is a brilliant survey of events from 1945 to 1989, when the Cold War is supposed to have ended, interspersed with insightful comment. It covers the U.S.' detente with China as well.

Americans are now in a triumphal mood. But at what cost was the Cold War waged. A triumphalist, largely self-congratulatory account might end right here. America contained communism and won the superpower struggle without blowing up the world and without obliterating freedom at home. End of story. But that will not do, because any historical account must reckon not only with benefits but also costs, and whether those costs were necessary. Even a cursory look at the balance sheet shows the cost of America's Cold War to have been enormously high, and, in terms of lives and limbs lost, paid primarily not by Americans but by others.

Next to the U.S. casualty figures in Korea and Vietnam must be placed the tremendously greater losses suffered by Korean and Vietnamese citizens (along with Cambodians and Laotians). Elsewhere in the world, successive U.S. administrations backed repressive anti-communist regimes in dozens of nations, many of them employing ruthless security services and death squads, some of them waging protracted counter-insurgencies supplied with American arms. Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but certainly U.S. policies in the Third World after 1945 led to the death or maiming of several million civilians who had never raised a hand against the United States. If the vast majority of Americans emerged from the Cold War unharmed, the same cannot be said for a great many others in a great many places.

The entire intellectual and moral climate changed. Acceptable political discourse narrowed substantially, particularly during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Mainstream media outlets avoided challenging official justifications for the war, for fear of appearing insufficiently patriotic. Few were the print or television journalists who questioned administration claims regarding Saddam Hussein's intentions and capabilities; for the most part, editorial writers seconded White House talking points. By 2006, Pentagon spending topped $500 billion, or roughly $60 million per hour. America spent more on its military than the rest of the world combined, and ten times more than its closet competitor, China. The addiction continued. U.S. military personnel remained on duty in dozens of foreign countries.

Kennan asked the U.S. leaders to remember that in the effort to prevent Soviet expansion American liberties must not be sacrificed that the United States should never, in the course of its global struggle, sacrifice what it was purporting to protect. Over time his concern grew, as political demagoguery found an audience and as both foreign policy and national life became more and more intertwined with military affairs. This great militarisation of our view of the Cold War, he declared in 1984, is not only an external danger for the country but an internal one as well, promoting pernicious habits to which great parts of our society become almost hopelessly committed. This is the Bharatiya Janata Party line on national security, which our hawks also peddle on television and in print.

The situation was complicated by the very strategy that the U.S.-led NATO forged. Divided Germany and divided Berlin reflected the division of Europe. Rather than ease, if not erase it, NATO perpetuated it by bolstering West Germany under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, who was sworn to perpetuate the status quo.

Gerald Hughes' work is more than a study of Anglo-German relations. It is a brilliant analysis of the dilemmas the West faced in Europe. It needed a detente with Russia as well as Adenauer's support. He was dead against a detente. This book is the 17th in the Cold War history series published by Routledge. The lead in the pursuit of detente was taken by Britain at considerable risk. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, perceptions of aggressive Soviet intentions led Britain and the United States to engineer the creation of a (West) German state, politically and militarily aligned with the West.

At that time a consensus within the policy establishment believed that dealing with the USSR on terms acceptable to Britain was impossible. This provided West Germany, under Konrad Adenauer, with the opportunity to construct a hard-line Eastern policy (Ostpolitik) that was endorsed by its allies.

Recent scholarship has suggested that the Soviet Union was genuine in its desire for a rapprochement, while the West was uninterested. However, Soviet terms for any such detente were unacceptable as they were designed to undermine West Germany. Thus, opposition to Soviet attempts at detente characterised the policies of the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) after 1949. This was not the case with Britain and serious efforts at detente began in earnest after Stalin's death in 1953. Indeed, the British were accused by Bonn, Washington and Paris as being still enamoured of appeasement', and the term English disease' was employed to describe London's desire for an East-West accommodation. In 1953, both Eden and Harold Macmillan opposed Churchill's moves for a settlement. History proved them wrong.

Hughes' thesis is documented with a thoroughness that compels admiration. Few works can boast of such a mastery of archival material; each reference is properly sourced. The references alone cover 57 pages. The author has, besides, drawn on interviews with important diplomats. West Germany rejected the new frontier with Poland, the Oder-Neisse line, which the Big Three had agreed upon in 1945. Britain played a significant role in achieving West German membership of NATO by 1955 but failed to anticipate two developments: first, the will and capacity of Bonn to create a hard-line Eastern policy, and second, the Franco-German rapprochement that would provide the impetus for West European integration. By the time the Paris Summit collapsed in May 1960, Britain found itself at odds with the Dwight Eisenhower administration over East-West relations and frozen out of Western Europe by the Adenauer-Charles de Gaulle axis.

The book has some interesting revelations. Take, for instance, a secret British assurance to Poland that its frontier with Germany would not be disturbed. It was inspired by Sir George Clutton, Britain's Ambassador to Poland. In April 1962, Clutton assured Jozef Winiewicz, Deputy Polish Foreign Minister, that in any negotiations that we might have on the subject of Germany or Berlin he could be quite certain that Her Majesty's government did not regard Poland's western frontier as a subject of barter.

On June 17, 1967, the Day of German Unity, Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger said: Germany, a reunified Germany, has a critical sizetoo big to play no role in the balance of power and too small to keep its surrounding powers in balance.... For this reason the growing together of the divided parts of Germany can only be seen as embedded in the process of overcoming the East/West conflict in Europe.

Bonn was abandoning its insistence that reunification must precede a European settlement. German unity was evolving from the demand of the 1950s into the long-term goal of the 1970s and 1980s. This opened the way for detente in Europe, something British policymakers had been advocating since the 1950s. Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik was institutionalised in the Final Act by the Helsinki process in 1975.

In reality, this process confirmed what Britain had accepted during the Second World War: the USSR would dominate Eastern Europe. Might such an arrangement have been achieved earlier if Britain had possessed more influence?

In 1944, E.H. Carr had argued, in effect, for a pan-European framework to ensure peace: There can be no security in Western Europe unless there is also security in Eastern Europe, and security in Eastern Europe is unattainable unless it is buttressed by the military power of Russia. A case so clear and cogent for close cooperation between Russia and Britain after the war cannot fail to carry conviction to any open and impartial mind. If Britain's frontier is on the Rhine, it might just as pertinently be said that Russia's frontier is on the Oder.

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