Читать книгу Post War America 1945-1971 - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 12
ОглавлениеWhen President Roosevelt returned to the United States from his meeting with Marshal Joseph Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Yalta in early 1945, the end of the war now in sight, he said that the Big Three Conference
… ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that had been tried for centuries—and had always failed.
It sounded good—as had Wilson’s phrases of the same sort twenty-five years earlier. But his words represent an exact measure of how the postwar world failed to curb the same modes of international behavior of which both liberal and illiberal nations had been guilty for centuries. The foreign policy of the United States after the great war is almost a precise reproduction of what Roosevelt spoke of ending: unilateral action (in Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), exclusive alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Central Treaty Organization, the Rio Pact), spheres of influence (Latin America, the Middle East, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan), balances of power (war in Korea, conflict over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis).
The idea of intervention abroad became more acceptable during World War II, primarily because it seemed so clearly justified by Hitler’s invasions in Europe and Japan’s in Asia. After the war, it became easier to broaden the concept of interventions, responding not necessarily to invasions but to internal revolutions. Counter-revolutionary intervention was not something new. Since the turn of the century, the United States had sent armed forces into various countries in the Caribbean area (Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua) to prevent political changes or the inception of economic policies opposed by the American government or American business interests. After World War II, however, the methods of intervention and the justifications for intervention became far more sophisticated. Arms were now shipped, military and police advisers were sent in as coaches, counter-revolutionaries were trained, undercover operations were conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency—all of which left overt armed intervention by United States forces a policy of last resort. The justifications for intervention were firmly supported by a whole bag of symbols related to communism: “the Red menace,” “the Soviet threat,” “the Chinese hordes,” “the world communist conspiracy,” “we ‘lost’ China,” “the danger of internal subversion,” “better dead than Red,” and more. The postwar interventions were especially palatable because, while supported by conservative Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon, most of them were carried out by the liberal Democratic administrations of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and could therefore be effortlessly fitted into the liberal tradition.
It has taken a long time for a critical view of this policy of intervention to become widespread in America, perhaps because what is wrong with modern liberal society resembles Yossarian’s jaundice:
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. If it became jaundice, they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away, they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
If evil were unmitigated and consistent, Americans might recognize it easily and unite to get rid of it. But the modern liberal state runs its course jaggedly, especially with regard to war and the justifications for war. About once in each century the United States has fought a war in such a fire of idealistic benevolence as to shroud in smoke not only that war’s own sins and ambiguities, but all other wars and foreign policies for the next several decades. The self-glorification accompanying the Revolutionary War for independence lasted long enough to blur the expansionist sentiment behind the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. The half-truth that the Civil War was a noble war to end slavery made it easier for Americans to believe that their war with Spain over Cuba, and the accompanying seizure of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii, were untainted.
Similarly, World War II gave to the United States such a powerful feeling of righteousness as a fighter for “the free world” that Americans came to think fondly of themselves for the next twenty-five years as the saviors of oppressed peoples on every continent. The American interventions in Korea in the fifties and Vietnam in the sixties were both justified by the need to “stop communism.” The slogan was similiar to that used in World War II. The names were switched, the language and uniform of yesterday’s “enemy” were modified, but “Stopping the Russians” was an easy substitute for “Stopping the Germans”; “Stopping the Chinese” readily replaced “Stopping the Japanese.” In none of these uses of substitute enemies was any attention paid to the possibility that the older, unquestionable crusade may have been at least half-questionable.
The historian Frederick Merk says that the various acts of American expansionism in the nineteenth century were “never true expressions of national spirit” but “traps into which the nation was led in 1846 and 1899, and from which it extricated itself as well as it could afterward.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has spoken similarly of the Vietnam War. Is Vietnam another act of expansion that does not express America’s normal benevolence, its real “national spirit”? Is Vietnam the momentary aberration of the modern liberal democratic capitalist state? Or are expansionism and aggression persistent characteristics of America as of other states, whether liberal or illiberal, capitalist or socialist? Is it possible that Vietnam was not a deviation but a particularly blatant manifestation of power seeking, of which the American nation is as guilty as any other nation?
The liberal tradition educates us to think well of the modern liberal state, to think that this new phenomenon in world history emerging out of the British, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its widespread educational opportunities, its technical proficiency, its parliamentary government and constitutional rights, its long history of “reform,” would be free of that accusation Plutarch made of ancient societies: “The poor go to war to fight and to die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.” But why should the modern liberal state be different? Is not war in good part the result of a fragmented, chaotic world, in which constellations of nations vie, jostle, and kill for territory, wealth, and power? The rise of nation-states in the world, to replace city-states and feudal kingdoms, did not change this fact. Indeed, international chaos has heightened considerably through the centuries, because the newer constellations became larger, more fearsome, more aggressive, and commanded greater and greater resources than the older ones. Liberalism and nationalism both came into the world at roughly the same time in the modern epoch; and nationalism creates both the right geographical boundaries and the right spirit for barbarous warfare.
A simple economic explanation for wars need not be accepted, but it is hard to deny that the quest for profit—even in so flamboyantly religious a military venture as the Crusades—has played a considerable part in international warfare. The advent of capitalism—which, like nationalism, accompanied the birth of liberalism, and paid for the delivery—only added the fierce libido of profit seeking to other factors and thereby increased the probability of war. This is not to absolve noncapitalist countries of aggressive nationalism, but to point to the special impetus of business profit. And if liberalism is accompanied by the machine age, should it not be expected that wars would be more destructive than ever before through man’s sheer technical competence for mass murder?
Also, if liberalism is accompanied by mass education and mass communication, should it not be expected that the age-old method of getting people to war by enticing slogans and symbols would be improved enormously in the modern era? The beauty of Helen of Troy seemed a sufficient symbol to justify the ten-year war between Greece and Troy. By 1914, a world war costing ten million lives required a bigger public-relations budget and a more grandiose symbol: Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world “safe for democracy.” Only an insistent probing beneath the symbols might lead to the conclusion of Demokos, in Jean Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates, that “war has two faces”—that of Helen, but also “the bottom of a baboon: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig.”
That the modern liberal state means voting and representative government, and bills of rights and constitutions—that it grants certain formal rights to its citizens—has obscured the nature of its deportment abroad. The history of Western civilization is clear on this point: it was the liberal democratic nations of the West, with their bills of rights and voting procedures, that enslaved and exploited Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to a degree unparalleled in world history; it was these Western liberal nations that made the imperialism of Greece and Rome seem piddling and kindly by comparison.
The democracy of liberal states, embodied in their constitutions, bills of rights, and representative assemblies, is reserved for certain constituencies at home, not for peoples abroad. For the United States this restriction is recognized explicitly in its constitutional arrangement, which denies any voice to those abroad affected by its foreign policy. Furthermore, its constitutional arrangement denies a voice to those at home on external matters. De Tocqueville saw this fact back in the 1840s when he wrote:
We have seen that the Federal Constitution entrusts the permanent direction of the external interests of the nation to the President and the Senate, which tends in some degree to detach the general foreign policy of the Union from the control of the people. It cannot therefore be asserted with truth that the external affairs of State are conducted by the democracy.
In the 1930s, the distinction between democracy as applied to domestic affairs and democracy as applied to foreign affairs was underscored by the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled in the Curtiss-Wright case that whereas in domestic policy the powers of government were limited by the Constitution, in foreign policy it was different:
The broad statement that the federal government can exercise no powers except those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and such implied powers as are necessary and proper to carry into effect the enumerated powers, is categorically true only in respect of our internal affairs. …
The modern liberal capitalist state, by its essential economic and political characteristics, tends to intensify and expand aggressive warfare. It justifies its actions with its own appealing rhetoric, finding successive, specific epithets for “the enemy,” and decorating its objectives with talk of liberty, democracy, and, above all, peace.
American intervention in Greece was the first important postwar instance in which rhetoric was used by the United States to defend large-scale interference in another nation’s internal affairs. It was accomplished without dispatching troops. It was accompanied by economic aid, and it was justified as anti-communism. Greece exemplified the working creed of liberal America’s postwar policy: the drive to extend the national power of the United States into other parts of the world, the compulsion to make the capitalist dollar profitable and secure everywhere, the insistence that Americans know what is best for other people, and the willingness to use mass violence to accomplish these purposes. Technically, American military intervention in Greece was successful; ultimately, it was disastrous not only for democracy in Greece but for any faith in the proposition that American foreign policy was truly devoted to its own stated ideals. In many ways, Greece was the model of the later American intervention in Vietnam.
Before World War II, Greece had been a right-wing monarchy and dictatorship. Its wartime occupation by Hitler stimulated several resistance movements, the strongest of which was the left-wing EAM (National Liberation Front), a coalition dominated by Communists. With the Germans gone, civil war broke out in 1944 between the EAM and the reassembled monarchist Greek army. By the end of that year, the EAM had liberated and controlled two-thirds of Greece. It was popular, with a membership of two million in a population of seven million, and it probably would have won—if the British army had not moved in with 75,000 men. (British political analyst Hugh Seton-Watson said afterward that “without British action, Greece would have had the same regime as Yugoslavia.”) Two British divisions were flown in by American planes piloted by Americans. An American observer, newsman Howard K. Smith, wrote later:
One would prefer to be generous to the British and say that they attempted to bolster what middle-way and democratic forces there were in order to create compromise and a basis for democracy. Unfortunately, there seems little evidence to support this, and one is forced to conclude that the British were determined to break EAM and install in power the discredited monarchy and its blindly vengeful rightist supporters.
Churchill’s instructions to General Ronald Scobie, head of the British forces in Greece, were: “Do not … hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.”
The EAM was defeated in a few months. Elections were held in early 1946, which were boycotted by the left, and, to no one’s surprise, the monarchists won. Smith said he was told by peasants in a village outside Athens shortly after the election that they were threatened with having the village burned down if the monarchists did not get a majority. During this early postwar period of British control, a right-wing dictatorship came to power in Athens. The elected leadership of the trade unions was replaced by government-appointed rightists; dissident university professors and government officials were fired; opposition leaders were put in jail; and corruption spread as the war-ravaged nation became desperate for food. Under the government of Constantine Tsaldaris, half the expenditures were for the army and the police; only 6 per cent for reconstruction.
In the face of imminent arrest, many former leaders of the ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army, the military arm of the EAM) went into the hills and began arming small guerrilla groups. By the fall of 1946, it had 6,000 men under arms, and was carrying on hit-and-run raids in northern Greece. With international criticism becoming increasingly sharp, the British asked Premier Tsaldaris to liberalize his oppressive regime; instead, he eliminated all opposition parties from the cabinet. The civil war intensified. The ELAS rebels received small arms from Yugoslavia, used Albanian and Yugoslavian territory as sanctuaries, stepped up their raids, and executed hostages. As the jailing and murder of the opposition by the government increased, the rebel forces rose to 17,000 fighters, 50,000 active supporters, and perhaps 250,000 sympathizers.
At this point, with the rebels gaining more and more support and the government having more and more difficulty in putting them down, the British informed the United States State Department that they could no longer continue either economic or military aid to the Greek government. One State Department career man, Joseph Jones of the policy planning staff, later commented that “Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership, with all its burdens and all its glory, to the United States.”
It was the administration of Harry Truman, heir to New Deal liberalism, that now acted to save the rightist Tsaldaris government of Greece from revolution. The State Department career officers were eager to take over from Britain, and the high-ranking military men agreed that the Greek rebels must be put down. Truman’s popularity was at a record low in the country, and his Democratic party had just lost the 1946 congressional elections to an overwhelming Republican majority. It has been argued that the domestic political situation was a factor in Truman’s decision to move. Whether or not it was, he called congressional leaders to the White House to sound them out on the idea of military and economic aid to Greece, and it was Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson who supplied the most persuasive argument: stopping world communism. Jones recorded Acheson’s argument as follows:
Only two great powers remained in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth. … It was clear that the Soviet Union was aggressive and expanding. For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion was to protect the security of the United States.
The argument carried, and the decision was made to give aid to Greece. As was to become a common pattern in such situations, a request for such aid was drafted in Washington by the State Department and suggested to the Greek government, which then made a formal request.
The Truman Doctrine was the name later attached to the speech Truman made before Congress, March 12, 1947, in which he asked for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey:
The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the Government’s authority. … Meanwhile, the Greek Government is unable to cope with the situation. …
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. …
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. …
If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. …
There were at least three questionable elements in Truman’s speech. First, his description of the “second way of life … terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms,” while it might conceivably fit some imagined future left-wing regime in Greece, at that time most accurately described the right-wing government for which Truman was asking support. Second, the connection between the Greek rebellion and the “outside pressures” of world communism ran counter to one basic fact: although the Greek rebels were getting some useful aid from Yugoslavia, their manpower was Greek; internal conditions and indigenous support made it a Greek affair. The “outside pressures” were largely British; they were about to become American.
Back in the fall of 1944, in Moscow, Churchill and Stalin had agreed on the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence; Rumania, Poland, and Bulgaria would be in the Soviet sphere, and Greece in the British. When the British were suppressing the ELAS rebellion in 1945, the Russians sat by. They studiously refrained from giving aid to the insurgents. Churchill wrote later that Stalin had “adhered strictly and faithfully” to their agreement to give the British a free hand in Greece. Historian and biographer Isaac Deutscher has pointed out that in 1948 the Soviet Union expelled Yugoslavia from the Comintern and President Tito closed the border to the Greek rebels. Tito’s aide, Milovan Djilas, reported that in early 1948 Stalin told the Yugoslavs that “the uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible,” that it did not have a chance of succeeding. The “international communism” excuse for American intervention ignored the fact that Soviet communism was as nationalistic as American communism, and that like the United States, the Soviet Union preferred revolutions it could control.
The third questionable element hidden by the moralistic language of the Truman Doctrine was that the traditional interests of political power and economic profit were involved in the American decision to keep a rightist government in power in Greece. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford had suggested that Truman’s speech to Congress should also say that “continued chaos in other countries and pressure exerted upon them from without would mean the end of free enterprise and democracy in those countries and that the disappearance of free enterprise in other nations would threaten our economy and our democracy.” But Acheson decided this language, with its disguised reference to saving capitalism, might embarrass the new Labor government of Britain. Also kept out of the message was another Clifford suggestion that Truman refer to “the great natural resources of the Middle East.” What Clifford had in mind here, of course, was oil. When Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery of Britain, in the fall of 1946, asked the U.S. Chiefs of Staff how important Middle East oil was to them, “their immediate and unanimous answer was—vital.” In his book Greece and the Great Powers, Stephen Xydis concludes that at least one motive in the Greek intervention was to “contribute to the preservation of American oil concessions” in the Middle East.
It did not take long, once Congress rubber-stamped the Truman Doctrine, for American military equipment to begin pouring into Greece: 74,000 tons was sent in during the last five months of 1947, including artillery, dive bombers, and stocks of napalm. Other factors also worked against the rebels. The Tito-Soviet split of 1948 led to factionalism among the Greek Communists, poor military tactics, and ugly, desperate measures against villagers whose support they needed. A group of 250 U.S. Army officers, headed by General James Van Fleet, advised the Greek army in the field; Van Fleet also initiated a policy of removing thousands of people from their homes in the countryside to try to isolate the guerrillas. The final blow to the rebel cause came when Yugoslavia closed its border in the summer of 1949. A few months later they gave up—two years after the first American guns had arrived. What was won for Greece by American intervention? Richard Barnet summed it up in his book Intervention and Revolution:
For the next twenty years the Greeks struggled to solve the staggering economic and social problems that had led to the bloody civil war. Despite massive U.S. economic and military aid the Greek government has remained unable to feed its own population. … Despite improvement in the economy, the same basic conditions of the forties—widespread poverty, illiteracy, shortage of foreign exchange, repressive and ineffective government—remained in the sixties, leading to a series of constitutional crises and, most recently, to a particularly brutal and backward military dictatorship. …
From 1944 to 1964 the United States gave Greece almost four billion dollars, of which a little over two billion dollars was in military aid. … Although private U.S. capital had flowed into Greece from such U.S. companies as Esso, Reynolds Metal, Dow Chemical, and Chrysler, and large sections of the economy are effectively controlled by U.S. capital, the financial health of the country remains precarious.
Twenty years after the first American guns arrived to fight against “the suppression of personal freedoms” in Greece, a military dictatorship, this time under the leadership of Colonel George Papadopoulos, took over the country. Roy C. Macridis, a political scientist and specialist in European politics, wrote shortly after the 1967 coup:
Last Sunday, May 28, free elections were scheduled for Greece. Instead, a military junta is in power, thousands of political prisoners are in jail, the newspapers are under control, and local representative institutions are set aside. …
Two years later, an American journalist interviewed two hundred persons, some still in Athens, others who had escaped, who told sickening stories of torture in Greek prisons. Special military courts sentenced hundreds of Greeks to years in jail for being guilty of distributing leaflets stamped LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY.
On September 19, 1970, the New York Times reported that the United States, which was supposed to have diminished its aid to the Papadopoulos regime in the midst of the horror stories that came out of Greece, was now resuming full-scale military aid. In return, Greece was to institute a “liberalization” program, ending the special military courts. The military junta, however, would maintain the state of siege in order that security cases could still be referred to military courts. Two weeks after the Times report appeared, the release of formerly secret testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by State and Defense department officials disclosed that the United States had sent $168 million worth of military aid to Greece during those three years in which the government had publicly announced a selective arms embargo against that country’s military rulers. The committee transcript includes the following exchange between Robert J. Pranger, deputy assistant secretary of defense, and Senator J. William Fulbright, committee chairman:
FULBRIGHT: Do we supply the Greeks with ammunition?
PRANGER: Yes, sir. …
FULBRIGHT: You have no practical way to prevent the Greek forces from using your ammunition for internal security purposes, have you?
PRANGER: Sir, as far as the ammunition which we are supplying today, no.
FULBRIGHT: In other words, we can supply the bullets which they used to kill their own citizens, can they not? I mean, we do.
PRANGER: Well, sir, that is not our intention.
The statement “that is not our intention” tells the story of modern civilization, which has so institutionalized cruelty that it takes place without “intention.” It also tells the story of American foreign policy after World War II. Behind a liberal language so persuasive it often gulled its users lay the working creed of the United States: the drive to extend its power—national, economic, and political—into other parts of the world, and the use of “such means” as it deemed “fit” to do it successfully. For the public, American aggressiveness was rhetorically disguised as “stopping communism” or “saving the free world.”
What this verbal device concealed was that Americans came to use the word “communism” to represent a wide variety of situations: actual Communist invasions, such as those by Soviet Russia in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; civil wars between Communist and non-Communist areas, as in Korea; popular Communist uprisings, as in China and Vietnam; and left-liberal movements, as in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Americans have used the phrase “the free world” in connection with a few western democracies, but they have also applied it to dozens of military dictatorships in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
This same contradictory relationship between promise and performance was to characterize American foreign policy in the twenty years following intervention in Greece. And this was true—with slight variations in language, or in tactics—whether the administration in Washington was Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal. The parallel between American intervention in Greece and American intervention twenty years later in Vietnam is striking. Although the Greek intervention was on a much smaller scale, it had begun with a small group of “advisers” and military aid to prop up an unpopular, corrupt, dictatorial government. In Greece the United States took over the imperial burden from the British, in Vietnam from the French. In both cases, the justification was based on the need to suppress a Communist-led rebellion, one reason being that if Red uprisings succeeded in one country, they would trigger revolts in others.
The policy of the United States toward China is another example of the breach between the promises of its rhetoric and the results of its working creed. In his memoirs just after the war, Secretary of State Byrnes said:
If we regard Europe as the tinderbox of possible world conflagration, we must look upon Asia as a great smoldering fire. There, civilization faces the task of bringing a huge mass of humanity, the majority of the people on this earth, from the Middle Ages into the era of atomic energy.
Through the rhetoric of a secretary of state, America is here citing the usual task of Western imperialism in its more paternalistic mood: to “civilize” backward peoples, in this case Asians. No doubt the secretary missed—as the survivors of Hiroshima would not—the tragic irony of mentioning the need to bring Asia “into the era of atomic energy,” but his statement exemplifies the kind of official justification used to support the tyrannical regime of Chiang Kai-shek while “stopping communism” at the same time.
China after World War II endured four years of civil war between the Nationalist government of the Kuomintang party, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist forces spread out from the north central province of Shensi, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. At the end of 1945, Truman sent General Marshall to China to negotiate peace between the Communists and the Kuomintang, and to try to establish a coalition government under Chiang Kai-shek. The mission did not succeed; distrust between the two forces was too deep. Moreover, as Kenneth Latourette, an authority on Far Eastern history, put it in explaining the subsequent victory of the Communists: “A major reason for the Nationalist defeat was that the Kuomintang, the national government run by it, and Chiang Kai-shek had completely lost the confidence of the Chinese people.”
The State Department White Paper on China, issued at the time of the Communist victory in 1949, declared:
The historic policy of the United States of friendship and aid toward the people of China was, however, maintained in both peace and war. Since V-J Day, the United States Government has authorized aid to Nationalist China in the form of grants and credits totaling approximately 2 billion dollars. … In addition … the United States Government has sold the Chinese Government large quantities of military and civilian war surplus property with a total procurement cost of over a billion dollars. …
Further along, the White Paper also describes the Nationalist government as “a Government which had lost the confidence of its own troops and its own people.” Thus, American “friendship and aid toward the people of China” was translated into several billion dollars for the Nationalist government of China, which, according to official documentation, was not supported by the people of China. The reason for the nonsupport was that the Kuomintang was brutal, corrupt, inefficient, and dictatorial. It was dominated by the rich and the reactionary, and it was subservient to Western power—all those factors that the Chinese Nationalists themselves had hoped to eradicate after the 1911 revolution.
The “historic policy” of the United States had not been one of “friendship and aid to the people of China,” as the White Paper asserted. Long before the Communists came to power, American policy was based not only on strategic interests but on commercial interests, as the treaty arrangements following the Opium War and the “Open Door” policy testify. What was abhorrent to the United States about the Communists running China was not that intellectual and political freedom were limited—this was certainly true under Chiang—but that a powerful independent China, which the Communists were creating, would lend itself neither to the West’s traditional commercial dealings with the huge China market nor to political and military control.
After Mao’s victory, United States policy toward China remained consistent through five administrations. Its principal elements were: maintenance of a military base on Taiwan, to which Chiang had fled and where he now planted a dictatorship over the eight million Taiwanese; pressure on smaller states in the United Nations to keep Chiang in China’s seat on the Security Council and to keep Communist China out of it; refusal to give diplomatic recognition or economic aid to Peking; construction of a ring of military bases around China, with American troops, planes, and weapons, in Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and Thailand.
America’s China policy was not conducted in a vacuum. All major episodes of American foreign policy in the postwar period show the same fanatical anti-communism. This obsession was due less to ideological-moral disagreement than to the fact that Communist nations posed an especially tough obstacle to the normal drives of liberal nationalism: for expansion, for paternalism, for maximum profit. These nationalist ambitions have always been presented to the public in the guise of protecting national security or promoting peace or defending other nations against aggression or helping backward nations to modernize—justifiable objectives that have lent moral passion to the most ferocious technology of death ever devised. In the actual practice of American policy, this combination of moralism and technology has supported a willingness to use massive violence, to break the peace, to exhaust the national resources, and, finally, to threaten the internal cohesion of the United States itself—in other words, to have effects totally different from those promised.
The remainder of this chapter summarizes some of the major aspects of American foreign policy in the postwar period. They are discussed under the general headings of Intervention, Economic Penetration, Militarization, Vietnam. All are discussed in the light of the discrepancy between liberal rhetoric and liberal nationalism in action.
