CHAPTER SEVEN
THE IMPOTENCE OF NUCLEAR SUPREMACY
Despite the fact that they were simple people, the Russians should not be regarded as fools, which was a mistake the West frequently made, nor were they blind and could quite well see what was going on before their eyes.
JOSEPH STALIN
Revolution is not a dinner party, nor a literary composition, nor a painting, nor a piece of pretty embroidery; it cannot be carried out “softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respect-fully, politely, plainly, and modestly.”
Our primary duty is, not to add flowers to the embroidery, but to send coal to the snowbound.
MAO TSE-TUNG
I want no freedom based upon the assumptions of the British. Such a freedom simply means exchanging a set of white masters for a set of black masters. If I’m against British rule, then I’m against the rule of her stooges.
BLACK MAN NUMBER ONE, IN White Man, Listen!
BY RICHARD WRIGHT
All day and all night they talk to us about “sound and solid development, sound and solid education.” . . . I say to hell with John Stuart Mill and John Locke. Let’s make our own philosophy, based upon our own needs.
BLACK MAN NUMBER TWO, IN White Man, Listen!
BY RICHARD WRIGHT
The North American business interests here were sending back to the United States, during the last ten years before 1959, one hundred million dollars a year more in profits than we were receiving. The little underdeveloped country was aiding the big industrialized country. . . .
FIDEL CASTRO
So long as the U.S. army of aggression still remains on our soil, our people will resolutely fight against it.
HO CHI MINH
It is not yesterday, a tradition, the past, which is the decisive, the determining force in a nation. Nations are made and go on living by having a program for the future.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
At the apex of its power, the United States found itself persistently thwarted in its efforts to inspire, lead, and reform the world. This supreme paradox of American history becomes comprehensible when viewed as a direct result of the nation’s conception of itself and the world in terms of open-door expansion. For America’s weakness in strength was the product of its ideological definition of the world. The United States not only misunderstood the revolutions in economics, politics, color, and anticolonial nationalism; it asserted that they were wrong or wrong-headed and that they should be opposed in favor of the emulation of the American example.
When this advice was not followed, the offenders were defined as conspirators in league with Russia. When it was followed, but failed to succeed, a variation of the same theme was offered in explanation. Inherently exasperating because of its less than satisfactory results, either in theory or practice, America’s definition of the world led to even deeper frustration when it was confronted by the continued vitality of the revolutions. Having mocked America’s nuclear supremacy, the revolutions sustained their development outside the ideology and the empire of the open door.
These results of America’s conception of itself and the world can be seen and understood most clearly by reviewing its explanation of the Soviet Union and other specific revolutions, and by examining the inability of the theory and the practice of the Open Door Policy to promote either the balanced improvement of poor societies or the acceptance of America as the leader of the world. For the Soviet Union did not develop according to the pattern of Nazi Germany, and the people of the underdeveloped regions of the world blamed the American system of open-door political economy for their troubles as much as, if not more than, the United States itself.
Though from time to time other estimates were offered, George F. Kennan’s 1946–1947 explanation of Soviet behavior established the framework and set the tone for all but a tiny corner of the American discussion of Russian action.* His analysis, and the more extreme interpretations derived from it, concluded that continued outside pressure could and would accelerate an inevitable process of dissolution. The thesis held that Soviet behavior resulted primarily (if not exclusively) from the necessity of Marxian revolutionaries having to resort to force to maintain the domination of an alien and evil ideology over Russian traditions and history. It asserted that the prime mover of Soviet action was a drive to maintain centralized power in the face of fundamental and persistent hostility. The weakness of the analysis is that it is a single-factor thesis which forces and limits one, in the first rather than the last resort, to a simplistic psychological interpretation of Soviet conduct. Such an approach lends superficial validity to the analogy with Nazi Germany and to the argument that Soviet Russia corresponds in reality to the sociological abstraction known as a totalitarian society.
On the one hand, therefore, Kennan’s analysis spawned a vast literature which treated Stalin as no more than a psychotic and, on the other, an equally large body of comment which argued that the only effective way to deal with the Soviet Union was to apply the lessons learned from the experience with Hitler. When tested against known facts, rather than accepted on the basis of a syllogism, these interpretations and recommendations did not lack all validity. Even by their own logic, however, they pointed to ultimate failure. For, by creating in fact a real, avowed, and all-encompassing outside threat, action based upon such analysis and analogy lent substance to what Kennan originally defined as a hallucination in the minds of Soviet leaders. Having argued that they had to create imaginary foreign dangers in order to stay in power at home, Kennan concluded with a policy recommendation to create a very serious (and from the Soviet point of view, mortal) outside challenge to their authority.
Both in abstract theory and in practical fact, however, pressure of this kind on Soviet leaders served only to make them tougher at home and abroad and to spur them to redouble their efforts to match the West. The final result might indeed be the collapse of the Soviet Union, but only in the context of general nuclear war. Chester Bowles, one of the early supporters of the containment policy, ultimately recognized the consequences of that approach. “The harder the Soviet Union is pressed,” he concluded in April 1957, “the more vigorously her people will rally behind their leaders. If the Kremlin is forced to the wall it will almost certainly strike out with all its very formidable nuclear capacity.”
Bowles could point to a great deal of evidence in support of his observation, including such items as the speed of Russia’s industrial recovery and improvement after the war, its own program of economic aid to other countries, its ruthless countercontainment in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Sputniks. But neither Bowles nor the handful of other men who grasped the same point made much impression on the majority of America’s policy-making elite. By and large, those men stressed the urgency of maintaining unquestioned supremacy over Russia.
Startling as it may seem, in view of the constant emphasis on Soviet military power, the central fact confronting any past or present Russian leader is the imbalance of the economic and political development of the nation. Czarist and Soviet history is the record of a continuous, all-pervading struggle to reach a minimum level of material well-being, let alone relative prosperity or actual wealth. Russia is big, but much of its territory is inhospitable to organized society, and other large sections are at best but marginally productive agriculturally and industrially. As in the case of China, the situation may be modified in the future, but at any given moment in the past or present, no Russian leader has been able to escape the gnawing knowledge of poverty and the insistent pressure to produce enough to save enough to produce more. This essential fact of Russian history provides great insight, for example, into Lenin’s argument that revolution could come first in the weakest link of world capitalism, or into the long tradition of Gargantuan developmental plans—from Peter the Great to Joseph Stalin.
At the same time it has been necessary for Russia to maintain strong armed forces, urgently needed to defend open borders against the continuous threat and recurring actuality of foreign attack. This military investment always drained off a sizable segment of the savings which might have eased Russia’s economic and cultural needs. The same circumstance gave the Russians little opportunity to practice and develop the skills of self-government. It is not possible to maintain seriously that Russia has no valid historical or present fears of foreign attack. And to employ a metaphor from modern technology, the present actuality of nuclear bases around its borders feeds back into, and reinforces, the historical memory of the Tatars, of Napoleon, of World War I, of the intervention against the revolution itself, and of Japanese and German military attacks from the 1930s on through World War II.
Perhaps a game of “as if” would help Americans grasp the depth, scope, and meaning of this aspect of Russian experience. Imagine, for example, that instead of conquering the Indians and establishing them on reservations, Americans had been forced to concede a stalemate and accept several ethnically and culturally defined Indian states; that instead of defeating the Mexicans once and for all, America had suffered periodic and destructive counterinvasions (and a similar relationship with Canada); and that instead of having bases on the military frontiers of the Soviet Union, America was confronted by Soviet jets manned by Russian pilots deployed throughout the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of exercising one’s historical imagination in this manner is not to work up a brief for Soviet action in the cold war, but rather to grasp and understand the basic economic, political, and social consequences of living in that kind of world for generation after generation.
There are still other important facets of the interrelationship between Russia’s economic and political imbalance. For in order to close the gaps in the poverty-conditioned cycle of production, saving, and reinvestment for greater production, Russia constantly found it necessary to resort to borrowing abroad; yet that additional indebtedness further weakened the country’s international security and so again increased the burdens upon its citizens at home. This not only seems like a vicious circle; it was a vicious circle. And, as with all human experiences, the memory lingers on to influence the future.
This interplay of fundamental economic and political hardship was reinforced by related problems. The necessity of sustaining a major effort to overcome poverty led to early, and ultimately successful, attempts to bind many diverse ethnic and cultural units into one centralized administrative organization. This not only intensified the existing pattern of localized coercion, but it demanded even greater investments of economic and political savings (money and brains) to sustain the central organization in the face of sporadic struggles by various subsumed units to break away on their own or attempts by outsiders to crack off one or more of the frontier provinces.
Moscow’s problem has never been the loss of just a Poland or a Hungary. To czar and commissar alike, the real issue has concerned the Baltic States, White Russia, and the Ukraine. And the same may be said of the Asian provinces, whether the illustrations are drawn from the czar’s difficulties with the Maritime Province, from the Soviet’s troubles with the Far Eastern Republic and the new industrial centers east of the Urals, or from the abortive Japanese intrusions of 1918 to 1922 and 1937 to 1939.
It is within the setting of poverty and centralized power that the Russians have grappled with the eternal dilemma of freedom and power. Their search for freedom took several paradoxical forms. Localized, nongovernmental, collective action was at once a means of fighting back against the system itself and of holding on to a sense of humanity and community in the face of such institutionalized power. At the same time, however, the czar, though he stood at the apex of the entire apparatus of coercion, also became the symbol of whatever immediate rewards and ultimate hopes survived the grinding, enervating, never-ending effort to conquer poverty and win respite from foreign enemies. The czar’s ambivalent role was strengthened by his position as the spokesman of the religious answer to the quest for freedom in the presence of poverty and power.
In addition, however, the search for meaning and freedom also turned inward in a deep and almost desperate reconnaissance of the secular self for valid insights and viable values. It is here, perhaps, that a paradoxical similarity with America is most noticeable. For the loss of identity in prosperity led Americans toward Freud, while the similar Russian experience in the context of poverty produced Dostoevski, Kuprin, and Gogol, to name but the obvious examples. The self-knighted robber baron and the anarchist-terrorist are not, after all, so far apart. Neither is the Calvinist with a calling very far removed from the secular revolutionary driven by a historical necessity. And both experiences produce their respective sense of mission toward the world. The Russian’s search for self and emphasis on community in the face of poverty and power led him to conclude that man’s essential goodness emerges as a phoenix from the pyre of degradation. Hence in his mind he is best qualified to lead a similar reconstruction of all humanity. For his part, the American concluded that his achievement of prosperity and military might elected him as trustee for the same responsibility.
This review of Russian experience suggests that the sources of Russian conduct are the drives to conquer poverty and achieve basic security in the world of nation states. From these efforts developed, on the one hand, the practices and traditions of centralized power to force saving, allocate investment, and maintain security, and, on the other, the heightened domestic tension between collective action and individual identity and the ambivalence of a foreign policy at once militantly and suspiciously defensive yet characterized by a missionary and benevolent desire to help other men save themselves.
By pouring this historical experience into a Marxian mold, the Bolshevik Revolution emphasized and highlighted these Russian traditions, offered solutions for the problems of poverty and security, and suggested a resolution between the individual and his society. Given the success of the revolution, the problem becomes one of assessing the direction and extent of the impact of a Marxian revolution on the sources of czarist Russian conduct.
At the outset, clearly enough, the Bolshevik Revolution accentuated the basic problems of poverty and security. It disrupted even more completely the war-caused derangement of the productive process while at the same time encouraging England, France, Japan, and the United States to join Germany in direct military intervention. Both individually and collectively, these powers sought far more than the mere overthrow of the revolution. Each of them, although in conflict with the others, had plans for the New Russia, plans which saw the country as an area for them to develop, each according to its own particular genius. Hence the central experiences of czarist Russia continued uninterrupted.
At the same time, moreover, the Marxian conception of the world jibed in essentials, if not in language and detail, with the prerevolutionary Russian outlook. It is all too easy, perhaps because it also is so convenient, to forget that the revolution attracted and inspired a great portion of Russian society from the end of the civil wars to the mid-1930s. It did so again, though to a lesser extent in all probability, at the end of World War II. But such forgetfulness is dangerous as well as self-indulgent, for it leads to a misunderstanding of present Soviet society.
Here it is essential to realize that Marx was four men, so to speak, and that each of them contributed a share to the final product known as Marxism. The four aspects of Marx may be described as follows: (1) Marx the romantic, who emphasized the freedom and the primacy of the individual; (2) Marx the brilliant, tough-minded economist, who not only analyzed capitalism but, even more importantly in the Russian context, also suggested the basis for policies that would effect the rapid and continuing production of wealth; (3) Marx the politician, who outlined strategy and tactics for a successful revolution; and (4) Marx the prophet, who came back from his researches in the British Museum and from his battles against poverty and carbuncles with the vision of a society in which men would live in comradely community blessed with plenty.
Each of these four aspects of Marxism paralleled and reinforced its counterpart in the existing Russian tradition. The romantic Marx offered inspiration to those Russians who emphasized the individual’s central place in society. Yet he also made sense to those who stressed collective discipline and action for great domestic and international achievements. Most significantly of all, he offered theoretical and practical suggestions for solving the central problems of poverty and security. And his vision of a planned socialist society infused the Russian tradition of centralized, coercive power with meaning and promise. Whether by national accomplishment or by international revolution (or both), therefore, Marxism seemed to promise an end to Russia’s perpetual struggle against poverty and insecurity, a resolution of the conflict between freedom and power, and a place in the vanguard of humanity.
For these reasons, it is dangerously misleading to stress the monolithic character and heritage of Marxism. It is in fact a most pluralistic tradition which can be described as totalitarian only by falsely isolating and dramatizing one of its particular facets. The most dangerous consequence of misconstruing Marxism in that fashion lies in the resulting conclusion that all Russian communists also follow such a single, narrow interpretation. For as the record reveals, the Russian communists have always been divided into the four groups which correspond to the four aspects of Marx. They also draw upon, identify with, and emphasize the corresponding Russian traditions. Thus Trotsky’s commitment to international salvation through revolution. Thus Gorky’s stubborn individualism. Thus Bukharin’s emphasis on decentralization and consumer goods. Thus Stalin’s single-minded concern with centralized, coercive power for saving and investment and for security. Thus Lenin’s truly epic struggle to keep the Russo-Marxian traditions in dynamic balance so that the means would neither subvert the ends nor forestall forward movement toward the desired goal. And thus, too, the less poetic efforts of later Soviet leaders to redress the Stalinist imbalance and sustain the evolution.
By their very success in establishing an industrial system, moreover, Soviet leaders reinforced and extended such competing forces within Russian society. Based as it is upon an extensive and complex division of function, responsibility, and labor, an industrial society develops within it different attitudes and ideas about what can be done, what should be done, and how to do whatever is finally agreed upon. There is, to be sure, a strong pressure exerted by the system itself in the direction of a general consensus on certain basic issues; but even on these questions there are various ideas as, for example, about how to increase the production and distribution of consumer goods while it is still necessary to increase capital investment. Just such questions were raised in Russia after the battle of Stalingrad (as they had been earlier), and they are still being debated at the present time.
Differences of function also lead to competing ideas and programs. At the broadest level, there is a conflict between those who produce and those who plan and direct the process itself. Similar disagreements arise within each of those groups. Such conflicts can never be resolved once and for all, and each time they are compromised the result is a change in the previous state of affairs. Given its traditions, it is very unlikely that such conflicts in the Soviet Union would ever lead to the development of Western-style democracy. But it is quite probable, given an era of peace, that they would promote the progressive loosening up of Russian political and intellectual life.
To miss or deny the existence of these competing traditions and groups, or to interpret the struggle between them as mere vulgar wrestling for power, is to substitute a creaky mechanistic model for the reality. And that, in turn, pyramids the probability that a policy based upon such an interpretation will fail of its objective. For the problems are poverty and security, not power per se. Stalin was not Hitler. Neither is the present leadership simply a conspiracy. Policy based on such analogies, however sophisticated their logic and presentation, is doomed to failure. The reason is clear. The composite Russo-Marxian tradition has arrived at the beginning of the end of poverty and has proved its ability to match foreign technology and military power.
It would be a serious error, therefore, to misinterpret the present resurgence of the individualistic, local, and utopian traditions of Russo-Marxism as evidence of impending Soviet collapse. Their vigor is a sign of maturity and positive evolution, not an indication of decay and death. With such maturity comes an unshakable determination on the part of the people who brought it about to maintain the hard-won identity and to continue the process toward ever greater accomplishments. Such men will fight before they surrender. And they are armed with hydrogen bombs.
But America need not abandon all efforts to influence events because they cannot be controlled perfectly, or because one theory seems, in practice, to produce unfortunate results. By adopting the more modest aim of encouraging the positive forces, and undertaking the effort in line with a more subtle analysis, it would seem realistic to hope for a moderate degree of success. The key problems faced by Russia are those of poverty and security and the basic traditions are those of centralized power resisted by localized collective action and individual integrity. Hence the most fruitful approach would seem to be action designed to relieve the problems of poverty and security on the grounds that achievement in these areas would encourage the decline of centralized power—both by choice and necessity.
The effort of the United States to force more drastic changes in Russian affairs not only failed of direct success, but it subverted other phases of American policy. For unlike America, the rest of the world was not primarily interested in waging a cold war with Russia. Perhaps the majority, often criticized by American leaders as “neutralists,” tried to ignore both Russia and America as much as they could in order to concentrate on developing their own societies in their own way. A sizable number of people, for example, were positively attracted to Marxism. Either they judged it relevant to their own problems, or they were impressed—despite the brutal and undemocratic aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution and the era of Stalin’s terrorism—with the tremendous advances made by Russia in less than their own lifetime. Others throughout the world supported the Soviet Union, or at least did not side actively with the United States, as a check on the unrestrained expansion of America. And another group sought or accepted aid from Russia either because it was offered on good terms or because it was not available from other sources.
For their part, many Chinese were attracted by the Bolshevik Revolution and the accomplishments of the Soviet Union. Lenin’s theory of imperialism provided them with an explanation of their weaknesses and backwardness which tallied with their own experience and flattered their capabilities: Western powers were to blame. The revolution in Russia renewed their confidence that the Chinese, too, could change their unhappy lot. This reaction was sustained by the help and advice provided by the Soviets, who did not seem to care very much about the color of a man’s skin or his cultural and social eccentricities. It was further strengthened by the fact that the Chinese, like Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung, who turned to Marxism and the Soviet Union were more inspiring and appeared to be more effective leaders than the men like Chiang Kai-shek who followed Western—even American—ideas and advice. The Chinese communists not only had a program, they were willing and able to make it work.
These were the fundamental explanations of why the communists triumphed in China. They also were the basic reasons behind communist strength elsewhere in the world. The communists were harsh and ruthless, and during their agitation and revolutionary action against the old order they neglected or ignored many, if not most, of the more liberal traditions of Marxism as well as many of the more humane values of their own cultures. But as indicated by developments after 1952 in Russia, and by the events of 1956 in Poland and Hungary, communists began to return to, and reassert and act upon, those values.
It is crucially important to realize, and actually to integrate into one’s thinking, that those changes were initiated by communists. For this means not only that they were demonstrating the pluralism of the Marxian tradition, and exhibiting great personal dedication and courage in doing so, but also that the communists were the most likely source of such improvements in communist countries short of war.† There is inherent in the American policy of containment, after all, a deep callousness and indifference to the very Western values that it asserts and proclaims as absolutes. Its logic rests on the proposition that the act of forcing hardships on people through outside pressure will ultimately provoke them to action in behalf of those Western values. It may or may not do so, and the evidence is that the communists hold those values as part of their own Marxism (which is, after all, a philosophical heresy born in the West), but in any event the means employed by the policy of containment can hardly be defended as being appropriate to the ends.
These considerations are also pragmatically significant because they are understood, and their implications appreciated, by men and women throughout the rest of the world. They realized that the communists worked hard, and progressively more effectively, to improve conditions in their own societies. To many, many people, who had known little beyond survival, cruelty, and ridicule, this dedication and the increasing successes of the communists seemed more important than their failure to operate according to the highest Western standards of democracy. Indeed, the character and consequences of two centuries of Western predominance and leadership had little impressed those men and women.
Most American leaders failed to grasp the importance of these considerations. Instead, they continued to think and act according to their traditional assumption and belief that Marxism, the Soviet Union, and communists in general were wholly evil and incapable of maturing into something more humane. In one form or another, therefore, Americans operated on the premise that most of the difficulties in the world were caused by the Soviet Union or agents, fellow travelers, and dupes of the Kremlin. This initial attitude was reinforced and given emotional intensity by the victories of the communists in China, southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. Perhaps it was understandable, under these conditions, that Americans overlooked or neglected the important role of other ideas and developments in producing such changes. They also failed to consider whether or not their own Open Door Policy had anything to do with the difficulties they encountered. It was difficult to decide which of these consequences was the most damaging, for they interacted upon each other in a way that compounded the crisis.
By concentrating on the communists so much, for example, Americans underestimated or discounted such realities as world poverty, the fantastic increase in world population, Western society’s persistent discrimination against other races and ideas, and the continued vigor of man’s ancient urge toward self-definition and creative activity. In a similar way, America’s stress on the communists amounted to a rather arrogant slap in the face to the millions of people who were not communists but who wanted and acted for a better life in the here-and-now. Giving the communists most of the credit for such agitation had two unfortunate results. First, it encouraged others to accept that misrepresentation of the facts. Second, it implicitly said that nobody else was capable of doing that kind of work. This result of the American attitude was only heightened when the United States went on to assert—or imply—that at least nobody else but Americans could do it.
Many people throughout the world might have forgotten that insult, or at least not let it rankle in their hearts and minds, if American diplomacy actually produced such highly favorable results. The trouble was that it did not. After fifty years of the Open Door Policy, twenty-five years of the Good Neighbor Policy, and more than a decade of a crusade against communism, conditions throughout most of the free world did not verify either the assumptions, arguments, or promises of the policy of the open door.‡
It is vital at this point to differentiate between the motives, the specific results, and the over-all consequences of American policy. The question is whether or not America has in fact translated its ideas and ideals into programs and policies which serve to realize its objectives. America’s motives are not evil. Neither are all of its actions wrong or fruitless. Indeed, many of them have literally made the difference between life and death to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. The Marshall Plan in Europe and other assistance to less developed nations clearly benefited many human beings in those areas.
The difficulty arises from the general view of America and the world in which these specific policies are formulated and put into operation. America has defined assistance to other people far too much in terms of anti-Russian and counter-revolutionary objectives, and as a necessity for the continued functioning of the existing system in the United States. In the realm of ethics and politics this point of view has led America to define legitimate behavior almost solely as anti-Russian conduct. In practical affairs the result has been to define as acceptable only those means which do not seriously challenge the American economic empire of raw materials and markets.
But neither of these definitions is valid. A nation can act in many ways and yet become neither a satellite nor a dupe of the Soviet Union. Nor would the United States stagnate or go bankrupt, for example, if Venezuela nationalized its oil reserves and then sold petroleum to American corporations in an open market. The tragedy of American diplomacy is not that it is evil, but that it denies and subverts American ideas and ideals. The result is a most realistic failure, as well as an ideological and a moral one; for in being unable to make the American system function satisfactorily without recourse to open-door expansion (and by no means perfectly, even then), American diplomacy suffers by comparison with its own claims and ideals, as well as with other approaches.
In this vital respect, at any rate, America’s high standard of living is only part of the story. On the one hand, the United States relies, in its own thinking as well as in practice, upon a great imbalance in its economic relations with poorer and weaker countries to achieve that standard of living. Even then, moreover, there are great extremes of wealth and power within American society.§ And, on the other hand, American foreign policy has not produced either the kind or the degree of military security that policy-makers have asserted to be desirable and necessary. The basic question raised by these failures is not, as so often is asserted, one of how to implement the existing policy more efficiently, but is instead whether or not the policy can—because of its inherent nature—ever produce its avowed objectives. The evidence indicates that it cannot.
The Open Door Policy has failed because, while it has built an American empire, it has not initiated and sustained the balanced and equitable development of the areas into which America expanded. When it increased the gross national product of an area, for example, it did so under conditions which immediately removed much of the added wealth of the United States. Little of what remained was invested in the development of the political economy, let alone distributed among the population. Finally, the basic change that occurred over the period of American penetration was an intensification of the tensions and conflicts within the other society. What the Catholic Archbishop of Caracas said of Venezuela on May 1, 1947, applied elsewhere with but minor modifications: “Nobody will dare affirm that wealth is distributed in a manner that reaches all the Venezuelans, since an immense mass of our people are living in conditions that cannot be qualified as human.” Even in countries where conditions were better, the Open Door Policy did not produce balanced and dynamic economic development. Neither did it contribute much to investing life in such areas with a sense of purpose. American action and intervention failed to initiate and sustain either kind of improvement on a broad and fundamental basis.¶
Soviet and other communist leaders could be criticized far more severely. Their revolutions extracted a terrible price in terror and hardship. Many of their subsequent policies—Russian intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for example—warrant harsh judgments. But to concentrate exclusively on these points is to neglect others of considerable importance. Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that life in the communist countries has improved. The picture is one of brutality and betterment, not simply one or the other. And it was that consideration which exercised a persuasive influence on men and women who had known little improvement under the American Open Door Policy or the imperialism of America’s European allies. Pain and poverty they knew, but never as the price of progress in their own lifetime. Hence the communists, as examples and leaders of such development, gained stature and influence throughout much of the world.
A great deal has been said in America about the “revolution of rising expectations” under way in the underdeveloped areas of the world, but it has often been overlooked that such a revolution is powered by a willingness to pay a high price for the realization of those aspirations. By appearing to be a nation which refused to let other peoples pay a price they thought justified, as well as a nation which did not extend itself to reduce that cost, the United States did more than merely forfeit leadership to radical (or even conservative) nationalists. Such action made it seem as though the United States was the major obstacle to the revolution of rising expectations. To many throughout the world, therefore, the Open Door Policy appeared to confront them with a door closed to their own progress.
As a result, America found itself impaled on the traditional dilemma of empire. It could resort to war or it could disengage, safeguarding its strategic position by formulating a new outlook which accepted the reality of a world in revolution and devising new policies calculated to assist those revolutions to move immediately and visibly toward their goal of a better human life.
* For a different view see, beyond the works cited in earlier chapters, G. A. Morgan, “Stalin on Revolution,” Foreign Affairs (1949); J. Maynard, Russia In Flux (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1948).
† One of the best, short introductory surveys of the Polish and Hungarian revolutions is in Fleming, The Cold War, Vol. II. In addition to the materials he cites for further reading, no serious student can afford to neglect R. L. Garthoff, “The Tragedy of Hungary,” Problems of Communism (Jan.-Feb., 1957). It is in many, many ways the single most important study.
‡ Illuminating are J. Levinson and J. de Onis, The Alliance That Lost Its Way (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); D. Green, The Containment of Latin America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); and E. Friedman and M. Selden (Eds.), America’s Asia (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
§ On this point, begin with M. Harrington, The Other America. Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1962); and H. P. Miller, Rich Man, Poor Man (New York: Crowell, 1971).
¶ The literature on the nature and problems of underdeveloped countries, and their relations with the advanced nations, is so vast that any short list of recommended reading is almost certain to seem either biased or superficial. The following provide an introduction to the subject, and all have bibliographies. R. E. Asher, Grants, Loans, and Local Currencies. Their Role in Foreign Aid (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1961); P. A. Baran, “On the Political Economy of Backwardness,” Manchester School Economic and Social Studies (1952); B. F. Hoselitz, Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1960); B. F. Hoselitz, et. al., Theories of Economic Growth (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1960); J. L. Levin, The Export Economies. Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); W. A. Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955); D. A. Morse, Report of the Director-General, Seventh Conference of American States Members of the International Labour Office. Economic Growth and Social Policy (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1961: in many ways the best single introduction for the general reader); and two volumes by G. Myrdai: An International Economy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956), and Rich Lands and Poor (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957). My Contours of American History is an effort to reconstruct the way that early American leaders dealt with these problems.