Left unresolved in the exchanges of that period were both the general structure of the relations between state and capital in the modern era, and the particular historical form these had taken in the United States. That the pattern of incentives and constraints to which the two were subject could never be identical was written into the independent origins of each. Capitalism, as a system of production without borders, emerged into a European world already territorially divided into a plurality of late feudal states pitted in rivalry against each other, each with its own means of aggression and systems of coercion. In due course, when absolutist monarchies became capitalist nation-states, economic and political power, fused in the feudal order, became structurally separated. Once direct producers were deprived of the means of subsistence, becoming dependent for their livelihoods on a labour market, extra-economic coercion was no longer required to exploit them. But their exploiters were still divided into the multiplicity of states they had inherited, along with the tensions between them. The result, as classically formulated by Robert Brenner, was twofold.1 On the one hand, such states could not contradict the interests of capital without undermining themselves, since their power depended on the prosperity of an economy governed by the requirements of profitability. On the other hand, the activities of states could not be subject to the same set of incentives and constraints as those of firms. For while the field of inter-state—like that of inter-firm—relations was also one of competition, it lacked either the institutional rules of a market or the transparency of a price mechanism for adjudicating claims of rationality or efficiency. There was no external counterpart to the internal settlement of the coordination problem. The consequence was a continual risk of miscalculations and sub-optimal—at the limit, disastrous—outcomes for all contending parties.
The aim of capital is profit. What is the comparable objective of the state? In polite parlance, ‘security’, whose arrival as the conventional definition of the ultimate purpose of the state coincided, after 1945, with the universal sublimation of Ministries of War into Ministries of Defence. Nebulous as few others, the term was—as it remains—ideally suited for all-purpose ideological use.2 Spykman had coolly noted the reality behind it: ‘The struggle for power is identical with the struggle for survival, and the improvement of the relative power position becomes the primary objective of the internal and external policy of states’, for ‘there is no real security in being just as strong as a potential enemy; there is security only in being a little stronger’.3 After 1945, even that ‘little’ would become an archaism. Leffler’s study of the Truman years can be read as a vast scholarly exfoliation of Tucker’s incisive conclusion twenty years earlier: the meaning of national security had been extended to the limits of the earth.4 Conceptually, however, Leffler’s work retained a prudent ambiguity. ‘Fear and power’, he wrote—‘not unrelenting Soviet pressure, not humanitarian impulses, not domestic political considerations, not British influence’—were ‘the key factors shaping American policies’.5 Fear and power—the need for security, the drive for primacy: were they of equal significance, or was one of greater import than the other? The title and evidence of Leffler’s book point unambiguously one way; the judicious casuistics of its ending, the other.
In postwar Washington, a ‘preponderance of power’ was not simply, however, the standard goal of any major state—the pursuit, as Spykman put it, ‘not of an equilibrium, but a generous margin’ of strength. Objectively, it had another meaning, rooted in the unique character of the US as a capitalist state not only encompassing far the largest and most self-sufficient industrial economy in the world, but sheltering behind its oceans from any credible attack by rival or enemy. On the plane of Weltpolitik there thus emerged a wide gap between the potential power of the American state and the actual extent of American interests. Entry into the Second World War narrowed the distance and transformed the structure of the relationship between them. The Depression had made it clear to policy-makers that the US economy was not insulated from shockwaves in the worldwide system of capital, and the outbreak of war that autarkic trading blocs not only threatened exclusion of US capital from large geographical zones, but risked military conflagrations that could endanger the stability of bourgeois civilization at large. Thereafter, participation in the war yielded a double bonus: the American economy grew at a phenomenal rate under the stimulus of military procurements, GNP doubling between 1938 and 1945; and all three of its main industrial rivals—Germany, Britain, Japan—emerged from the conflict shattered or weakened, leaving Washington in a position to reshape the universe of capital to its requirements.
The elites of the Great Power that acquired this capacity were closer to business and banking than those of any other state of the time. The highest levels of policy-making in the Truman administration were packed with investment bankers and corporate lawyers, leading industrialists and traders: Forrestal, Lovett, Harriman, Stettinius, Acheson, Nitze, McCloy, Clayton, Snyder, Hoffman—a stratum unlikely to overlook the interests of American capital in redesigning the postwar landscape. Free enterprise was the foundation of every other freedom. The US alone could assure its preservation and extension worldwide, and was entitled to the benefits of doing so. In the immediate aftermath of the war, when fears of a possible return to depression in the wake of demobilization were common, the opening of overseas markets to US exports—an idée fixe within the wartime State Department—was widely regarded as vital for future prosperity.
The Cold War altered this calculus. Economic recovery of Western Europe and Japan had always been seen as a condition of the free-trade system in which American goods could flow to consumer markets restored to solvency abroad. But the Red Army’s arrival on the Elbe and the PLA’s crossing of the Yangzi imposed a different kind of urgency—and direction—on the building of a liberal international order. For the time being, the Open Door would have to be left somewhat ajar, European and Japanese markets more protected than American, or foreseen, if a totalitarian adversary of markets of any kind was to be defeated. There the preponderance of American power over American interests became for the first time fully functional, in the shape of an imperial hegemony. The US state would henceforward act, not primarily as a projection of the concerns of US capital, but as a guardian of the general interest of all capitals, sacrificing—where necessary, and for as long as needed—national gain for international advantage, in the confidence of ultimate pay-off.
It could afford to do so, because after the war, as before it, the measure of American power—now not simply economic, but military and political—was still far in excess of the reach of American banks and corporations. There was a lot of slack available for the concessions to subaltern states, and their ruling groups, essential for the construction of a hegemonic system. Their consent to the new order was not bought only with these: they had as much reason to fear the common enemy as the superordinate state that now became their shield. They too needed the armed force that is inseparable from any hegemony. A new kind of war was under way, requiring the strong nerves of a superpower. The strategic means and ends of the American empire to come were resumed by Forrestal: ‘As long as we can outproduce the world, can control the sea and can strike inland with the atomic bomb, we can assume certain risks otherwise unacceptable in an effort to restore world trade, to restore the balance of power—military power—and to eliminate some of the conditions which breed war’.6 In that agenda, restoring the balance of power belonged to the same lexicon of euphemisms as containment: as Spykman had noted, ‘states are only interested in a balance in their favour’. That was understood in Moscow as well as Washington, and in neither capital was there by then any illusion as to what it implied. Capitalism and communism were incompatible orders of society, as their rulers knew, each bent on bringing—sooner or later: sooner for the first, much later for the second—the other to an end. So long as the conflict between them lasted, the hegemony of America in the camp of capital was assured.
II
At the outset, the overriding task for Washington was to make sure that the two advanced industrial regions that lay between the US and the USSR, and had detonated the war, did not fall into the hands of Communism. Their historically high levels of economic and scientific development made Western Europe and Japan the great prizes in any calculus of postwar power. Reconstruction of them under American guidance and protection was thus the top priority of containment. Stripped of their conquests, the former Axis powers needed to be rebuilt with US aid as prosperous bulwarks of the Free World and forward emplacements of American military might; and the former Allied powers, less damaged by the war, supported in their return to normal economic life. Western Europe, the larger of the two trophies, and vulnerable to land attack by the Red Army as insular Japan was not, required most attention and assistance. This was, Acheson explained to Congress, ‘the keystone of the world’.7
In 1946–47 Britain became the proving ground for the abrupt alterations of American policy demanded by the Cold War. Financially bankrupted by its second struggle against Germany, the UK was forced in mid-1946 to submit to draconian conditions for an American loan to keep itself afloat: not only interest payments against which it protested, but the scrapping of import controls and full convertibility within a year. With American prices rising, the British import bill soared, plunging the country into a massive balance of payments crisis. The Attlee government was forced to suspend convertibility within a few weeks of introducing it.8 Hull’s free-trade maximalism had overshot its imperial objectives, and become counterproductive. There was no point in ruining a former ally if it was to become a viable protectorate. A fortiori the more precarious countries of Western Europe, above all France and Italy, yet weaker economically than Britain, and less secure politically. By 1947, the dollar gap between Europe’s imports from the US and its ability to pay for them was yawning, and a change of course indicated. The Marshall Plan funnelled some $13 billion into counterpart funds for European recovery—controlled by US corporate executives and tied to purchase of American goods—dropping insistence on immediate abolition of tariffs and exchange controls, and instead bringing pressure to bear for fiscal retrenchment and European integration.9 The corollary did not wait long. Marshall funds brought economic succour, NATO a military buckler. The Atlantic Pact was signed in the spring of 1949.
Germany, divided between four occupying powers, with a third of the country under Soviet control, could not be handled in quite the same way. The Western zone, covering the Ruhr, was too valuable a holding to be foregone in any unification in which Moscow would have a say. In mid-1947 Washington made it clear that Russia could expect no reparations for the vast destruction visited on it by the Third Reich, while the US had been luxuriating in its wartime boom, and that the Western zone was scheduled for separation from the Eastern zone as a new German polity within Anglo-American jurisdiction.10 But even in reduced form as the Federal Republic, Germany remained an object of fear to its neighbours as Japan did not. Rebuilding it as a bastion of freedom thus required not just American aid and armour, but its integration into a European system of mutual security, within which German industrial might could help revive neighbouring economies, and German rearmament strengthen barriers to the Red Army. Washington was thus from the start a patron of every step towards European unity. Once its most favoured version—the military project of a European Defence Community—was blocked in France in 1954, it brought West Germany into NATO. But economic integration remained a key objective, giving State and Defense no reason to quibble over the tariffs set up around the Common Market by the Treaty of Rome, despite protests from the Commerce Department. The imperatives of free trade had not been neglected as the Cold War set in—GATT was signed soon after the Marshall Plan, the Kennedy Round followed in due course—but were no longer the main front. Derogations from them had to be accepted in the interests of assuring the stability of capitalism in the major industrial centres at each end of Eurasia.
Yet more so in the other major prize of the peace. Japan, surrounded by sea, was secure against the risk of Soviet invasion. There, where the US was the sole occupying power, American political control was tighter and economic assistance less than in Europe. Postwar reforms were abruptly cancelled after a descent by Kennan had installed the Reverse Course, preserving the zaibatsu and reinstating the prewar political class with its Class A war criminals, as was not possible in Germany. The Occupation, he remarked, could ‘dispense with bromides about democratization’.11 The Dodge Plan was more a conventional stabilization programme than a replication of Marshall Aid, and the Security Treaty came a decade later than NATO. But amid a much more devastated postwar landscape, where a major labour insurgency had to be crushed, Washington made no difficulty over a model of development based on a high degree of de facto protection and state intervention, at notable variance with the liberal economic order enforced elsewhere. Dirigisme was a small price to pay for immunity to revolution.
Overall, in this advanced industrial zone, American objectives met with complete success. From the outset, these were societies with business elites that were natural allies of the US, extensive middle classes and generally (if not invariably) moderate labour movements, with a prewar past of parliamentary institutions and competitive elections. When postwar reconstruction released twenty years of fast economic growth and rising living standards, their transformation into thriving protectorates within the American ecumene was achieved with scarcely a hitch. In Japan, where the party that continues to rule the country was put together by the Occupier, significant quotients of coercion and corruption were initially needed to set up a satisfactory regime. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the amount of pressure required to lock local societies into the US security system was never great. Force determined the outcome only in the impoverished periphery of Greece, where the British had led the way for military counterrevolution.12 Elsewhere—principally Italy and France—covert American funding of parties, unions and periodicals helped the anti-communist cause. Military intervention, though on standby, was not required.13 The balance of domestic opinion in each country was favourable enough on its own. Fundamentally, the process was consensual: capitalist democracies freely accepting their place in an imperial order in which they prospered. It was not ‘empire by invitation’, in the fulsome phrase of a Norwegian admirer.14 The invitation came from, not to, the empire, and was the kind that could not be refused. Germany and Japan, defeated powers now stripped of their conquests, had little reason to do so: helped back on their feet by the US, and sheltering under its nuclear umbrella, they were freed to devote themselves single-mindedly to their economic miracles. The rulers of Britain and France, victor powers still in control of overseas possessions, would for a time have more autonomy, with its potential for friction. All four, along with lesser European states, were entitled to a measure of diplomatic tact, as auxiliaries in the battlefield of the Cold War. Command remained American.
The war was cold, but still a war. The USSR was not just a state whose rulers were committed to the political overthrow of capitalism. That the Soviet Union had been since the October Revolution. It was a formidable military power which had broken Hitler’s armies at a time when America was little more than a spectator in Europe, and now enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in conventional force ratios on the continent. The threat posed by the Red Army had to be deterred with a superior arsenal of destruction. With the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington appeared to possess that: a warning to Moscow even before the Pacific War had ended, which Truman hoped would cut off Russian entry into it.15 For four years, the US had a monopoly of the atom bomb. Then in 1949, much earlier than American intelligence expected, came the first Soviet test of one. But the Pentagon had not been idle, and by 1952 had tested a hydrogen bomb. This time, the Soviet riposte was even quicker, with a rudimentary explosion in 1953. But the US was still far ahead—the device it exploded over Bikini the following year would be thirty times more destructive than the Soviet counterpart of 1955.
Nuclear weapons had to be not just developed, but delivered. There too, America maintained for twenty years a continuous lead, punctuated by repeated claims that it was falling behind. In the mid-fifties, the legend of a ‘bomber gap’ led to the construction of over two thousand strategic bombers at a time when Russia had no more than twenty. The launching of a Sputnik satellite by the USSR, quickly overtaken by more powerful US rockets in the space race, spurred a large expansion of military spending on the back of claims that Moscow had opened up a ‘missile gap’ in American defences, when there were just four Soviet prototype ICBMs, and the stockpile of American warheads was nearly ten times that of the USSR. Soon thereafter, Pentagon development of MIRV technology put the US ahead again. By the early seventies, when Russia had finally caught up with America in nuclear megatonnage and number, if not quality, of launchers, and was claiming strategic parity, US warheads were still treble its own.
Nor, of course, was the overall strategic balance ever simply a question of rockets. America was a maritime power in command of the world’s oceans: its fleets patrolling waterways from the East China Sea to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, aircraft carriers cresting the waves, nuclear submarines—five times more than Russia—gliding below them. On land and in the sky, before the war had even ended in 1945 the Joint Chiefs of Staff were planning for a global network of bases and military transit rights covering Latin America, North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East, and by 1946 already had 170 active airfields in operation at overseas locations.16 By the mid-sixties, the United States controlled some 375 major bases and 3,000 lesser military facilities around the globe, encircling the Soviet bloc on all sides including even the impassable Arctic.17 A much poorer and more backward society, the USSR was by comparison a regional power, connected to a set of oppositional movements beyond its borders by a common ideology, where the US was a global power with client regimes in every continent. In the unequal rivalry between them, the vastly greater extent of its strategic empire could be borne at far lower cost by America, as a proportion of its wealth, than its much smaller version could be by Russia. The economic effort required to compete against such odds was enormous.
‘Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of “containment”—which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion—is no more than a policy of bluff’, declared the authoritative statement of US strategy in the high Cold War, drafted largely by Nitze in the spring of 1950, and calling for a tripling of the defence budget. But more was required than simply amassing military strength. The battle against the USSR was indivisibly political and ideological as well, in an existential struggle between ‘the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance and the lawfulness of the free society’ and ‘the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin’. At stake was nothing less than ‘the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic, but of civilization itself’.18 Politically, the priority was to ‘place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power and particularly on the relationships between Moscow and the satellite countries’, by waging ‘overt psychological warfare to encourage mass defections from Soviet allegiance’, and deploying ‘covert means of economic warfare and political and psychological warfare with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected strategic satellite countries’. Covert operations against Russia had a pre-history under Wilson, who preferred clandestine to overt means of overthrowing Bolshevik power, and made ample use of them, bequeathing both methods and personnel to their renewal thirty years later.19 Set in place two years before NSC–68 by Kennan,20 such operations escalated through the fifties, in due course becoming the public objective of a strategy of rollback, depicted by Dulles as a tougher response to Moscow than containment. By then, the slogan was bluster. When revolts did break out in Eastern Europe—in East Germany and Hungary; later Czechoslovakia—they were left to their fate by Washington. Military encirclement of the Soviet bloc was practicable, political intervention was not. That left ideological warfare. The United States was defending not capitalism—the term was carefully avoided, as vocabulary of the enemy—but a Free World against the totalitarian slavery of communism. Radio stations, cultural organizations, print media of every kind, were mobilized to broadcast the contrast.21 In the advanced industrial societies of Western Europe and Japan, where the Cold War could be readily projected as a straightforward conflict between democracy and dictatorship, the battle of ideas was won without difficulty. But what of the world beyond them that was also declared free? What did freedom signify there?
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1Robert Brenner, ‘What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism?’, Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4, 2006, pp. 79–95, esp. pp. 83–5.
2For a contemporary adept of the locution, Joseph Nye—chairman of the National Intelligence Council under Clinton—‘security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice until you lose it’: ‘East Asian Security—The Case for Deep Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, July–August 1995, p. 91. As Lloyd Gardner remarked of Gaddis’s ubiquitous use of the term, ‘it hangs before us like an abstraction or, with apologies to T. S. Eliot, “shape without form, shade without colour”’: ‘Responses to John Lewis Gaddis’, Diplomatic History, July 1983, p. 191. For Gaddis’s elaboration, two decades later, that American security has always meant expansion, see note 52 above.
3Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 18, 20.
4Tucker’s critique of this inflation was the more radical: ‘By interpreting security as a function not only of a balance between states but of the internal order maintained by states, the Truman Doctrine equated America’s security with interests that evidently went well beyond conventional security requirements. This conception cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric, designed at the time only to mobilize public opinion in support of limited policy actions, though rhetoric taken seriously by succeeding administrations. Instead, it accurately expressed the magnitude of America’s conception of its role and interests in the world from the very inception of the Cold War’: The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, p. 107.
5Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 51.
6Letter to Chandler Gurney, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 8 December 1947: Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, p. 336. For Forrestal, the struggle with the Soviet Union was best described, more bluntly, as ‘semi-war’, rather than Cold War.
7Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 277.
8‘Truman’s signing of the British loan legislation on July 15, 1946 launched the pound sterling on an agonizing yearlong death march’, remarks Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods, p. 309—apt phrasing for the ruthlessness of the American diktat.
9Also, of course, congenial electoral outcomes: ‘The Marshall Plan sent a strong message to European voters that American largesse depended on their electing governments willing to accept the accompanying rules of multilateral trade and fiscal conservatism’, while at the same time sparing them drastic wage repression that might otherwise have caused social unrest: McCormick, America’s Half-Century, pp. 78–9; Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 242. That the actual economic effect of Marshall aid on European recovery, well underway by the time it arrived, was less than advertised, has been shown by Alan Milward: ‘Was the Marshall Plan Necessary?’, Diplomatic History, April 1989, pp. 231–52. What was critical was its ideological, more than its material, impact.
10See the definitive account in Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949, Cambridge 1996, passim. The case that US reneging on the reparations promised the USSR at Yalta—not only eminently justifiable, but perfectly feasible—was the decisive act in launching the Cold War, is made by Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy pp. 127–32. In his view, the US refusal after mid-1947 to engage in normal diplomacy was the defining element of the Cold War, and must be seen as a ‘development of the concept of “unconditional surrender”, taken directly from the Civil War’, and proclaimed by Roosevelt at Casablanca: see ‘Liberty or Death: The Cold War as American Ideology’, in Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War, p. 83. More powerfully and clearly than any other writer, Stephanson has argued that ‘the Cold War was from the outset not only a US term but a US project’. For this, see his ‘Cold War Degree Zero’, in Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds, Uncertain Empire, Oxford 2012, pp. 19–49.
11Confident that he had ‘turned our whole occupation policy’, Kennan regarded his role in Japan as ‘the most significant constructive contribution I was ever able to make in government’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, pp. 299–303. Miscamble—an admirer—comments: ‘Kennan evinced no real concern for developments in Japan on their own terms. He appeared not only quite uninterested in and unperturbed by the fact that the Zaibatsu had proved willing partners of the Japanese militarists but also unconcerned that their preservation would limit the genuine openness of the Japanese economy. He possessed no reforming zeal or inclination’: George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, Princeton 1992, p. 255. The PPS paper Kennan delivered on his return from Tokyo called for the purge of wartime officials to be curtailed.
12From the outset, Roosevelt had backed Churchill’s dispatch of British troops in 1944 to crush the main body of the Greek resistance. Under Truman the country became the Very light for American advance to the Cold War, Acheson telling Congressmen that failure to maintain a friendly government in place might ‘open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would affect Iran and all to the East’. Nothing less than the fate of ‘two thirds of the area of the world’ was at stake. Marshall was soon instructing the American embassy ‘not to interfere with the administration of Greek justice’, as mass execution of political prisoners proceeded. Twenty years later, with a junta in power in Athens, Acheson instructed locals that there was ‘no realistic alternative to your colonels’, since Greece was ‘not ready for democracy’: Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949, New York 1982, pp. 12–3, 71, 145; Gigantes, I Should Have Died, pp. 122–4.
13See, for such contingencies, Kennan’s cable to Acheson, 15 March 1948: ‘Italy is obviously key point. If Communists were to win election there our whole position in Mediterranean, and possibly Western Europe as well, would be undermined. I am persuaded that the Communists could not win without strong factor of intimidation on their side, and it would clearly be better that elections not take place at all than that the Communists win in these circumstances. For these reasons I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war, which would give us grounds for reoccupation of Foggia fields and any other facilities we might wish. This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to a deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas’: Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, p. 99.
14Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945, Oxford 2003, pp. 2–3, passim.
15There was never any question that America would use its atomic weapons on Japan, regardless of either military requirements or moral considerations: ‘The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945’. Two months before they were used, Stimson recorded a typical exchange with Truman: ‘I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength’. To this, the president ‘laughed [sic] and said he understood’. Kolko, The Politics of War, pp. 539–40. Jubilant at what Stimson called the ‘royal straight flush’ behind his hand at Potsdam, Truman sailed home on the battleship Augusta. ‘As the Augusta approached the New Jersey coast on August 6, Map Room watch officer Captain Frank Graham brought first word that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Ten minutes later a cable from Stimson reported that the bombing had been even more “conspicuous” than in New Mexico. “This is the greatest thing in history”, Truman exclaimed to Graham, and then raced about the ship to spread the news, insisting that he had never made a happier announcement. “We have won the gamble”, he told the assembled and cheering crew. The President’s behaviour lacked remorse, compassion or humility in the wake of nearly incomprehensible destruction—about 80,000 dead at once, and tens of thousands dying of radiation’: Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 92, who adds that the number of American deaths supposedly averted by the nuclear attacks on Japan, the standard rationale for them, would have been nowhere near Truman’s subsequent claim of 500,000 GI lives saved, or Stimson’s 1,000,000—perhaps 20,000: p. 97.
16Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 56–9, 135, 171. The planners of 1945 had, of course, not only the USSR in mind. ‘In designating bases in the Pacific, for example, Army and Navy officers underscored their utility for quelling prospective unrest in Northeast and Southeast Asia and for maintaining access to critical raw materials’: p. 56.
17C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, Oxford 2000, p. 9.
18‘Our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere’. NSC–68 was initially rejected by Nitze’s superiors as overwrought, then ratified by Truman in the autumn, after the Cold War had finally exploded into fighting in the Far East. The document was top secret, an arcanum imperii only declassified a quarter of a century later.
19Allen Dulles, one of the products of this experience, would later say: ‘I sometimes wonder why Wilson was not the originator of the Central Intelligence Agency’. His brother was equally keen on the dispatch of operatives to subvert Bolshevism. See Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism, pp. 126–9, who provides full coverage of Wilson’s projects, ‘shrouded by a misty combination of self-deception and expedient fictions’: p. 295. Leffler’s exonerations of Wilson’s role in the Russian Civil War—‘he viewed the Bolsheviks with contempt. But he did not fear their power’—appeared before the publication of Fogelsong’s book, which makes short work of the conventional apologies for Wilson in the literature. Leffler’s version of these can be found in The Spectre of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1917–1953, New York 1994, pp. 8–9 ff.
20For Kennan’s role in introducing the term and practice of clandestine ‘political warfare’, and launching the paramilitary expeditions of Operation Valuable into Albania, see Corke, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy, pp. 45–6, 54–5, 61–2, 84; and Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 110–1: ‘Kennan approached covert operations with enthusiasm in 1948 and does not appear to have made apparent any sentiment on his part that covert operations would be limited in extent. Nor did he display any reservations concerning the extralegal character of much of what the OPC would undertake’. For the recruitment of ex-Nazis to its work, see Christopher Simpson, Blowback, New York 1988, pp. 112–4. Kennan’s connexions to the underworld of American intelligence, foreign and domestic, went back to his time in Portugal during the war, and would extend over the next three decades, to the time of the Vietnam War.
21The front organizations set up by the CIA for cultural penetration at home and abroad—the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the like—were another initiative of Kennan, an enthusiast for this kind of work: see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, Cambridge, MA 2008, pp. 25–8.