Securing the industrialized flanks of Eurasia against communism, and building a superior strike-capacity and set of strategic revetments against the Soviet Union, were the most urgent tasks for postwar planners in Washington, dominating their immediate attention. Each was achieved in short order. Though successive false alarms would punctuate the arms race, and shadowboxing continue over Berlin, the lines of conflict drawn in 1947–1948 were soon essentially static, an indefinite war of position setting in. From the start, however, American strategists were conscious that the overall battlefield was wider. Another landscape confronted them across vast territories in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These possessed no centres of major industry, had low levels of literacy, and were far more backward in social structure. At the same time, they were a treasury of the natural resources needed to run advanced economies and develop powerful military technologies—petroleum in the Middle East, tin and rubber in Southeast Asia, uranium and cobalt in Central Africa, copper and bauxite in South America, and much more. They also contained the great majority of the world’s population. It was obviously critical to hold them.
That posed a more complicated set of problems than reviving Western Europe and Japan, or upgrading a nuclear arsenal. Looking out from the parapets of Washington as the Cold War set in, the panorama of what would later become the Third World was composed of four principal zones. In Asia, European colonial empires that had been shaken or overrun by Japan during the Second World War confronted nationalist movements—some predating the war, others galvanized by it—demanding independence. In the Middle East, weak semi-colonial states—sovereign but tied to former mandatory or supervisory powers—predominated. In Africa, European imperial authority had been little affected by the war, and nationalist movements were still modest. In Latin America, independent republics older than most European states were long-term US clients. Nowhere was there anything approaching the stable representative systems of what would become the First World.
Across this variegated scenery, it was the colonial empires of Britain and France—much the largest—that raised the trickiest issues for Washington. Both countries had been greatly weakened by the war, and were reminded without ceremony of their reduced economic circumstances by the US, which made it plain it would brook no return to their traditional pretensions. Within the Atlantic community over which America would henceforward preside, mustering the capitalist states of the West against the Soviet Union, they could find a place as favoured subordinates. But what was to happen to their imperial booty in the tropics? The US, though late in the day it had acquired colonies of its own in the Pacific and Caribbean, defined itself ideologically as an anti-colonial power, the ‘first new nation’ to gain independence from the Old World, and had no intention of allowing prewar spheres of influence or control of raw materials to be restored. Its mastery of the Western hemisphere, where Latin America had long been a satellite zone of the United States, showed the way forward, in principle: formal independence of onetime colonies, informal reduction of them to US clients.
A political century later, however, that might not prove so easy. For now anti-colonialism, no doubt acceptable enough in itself, was all too often contaminated by confused ideas of anti-capitalism, leaving struggles for national liberation prey to communist infiltration. The task for American grand strategy was thus a delicate one. The European colonial powers were loyal auxiliaries of the US in the Cold War, which could not be brushed aside or humiliated too brutally. Moreover, where the nationalist movements they confronted were indeed led by communists, colonial counterinsurgency deserved the full backing of the US. On the other hand, where this threat had not yet crystallized, European imperialism risked, in clinging onto its possessions, provoking just what had to be averted, the radicalization of an eclectic nationalism into an insurrectionary socialism. To stem this danger, the colonial empires would have to pass away, and their legacies be developed under new management. That, inevitably, would require a great deal of intervention—economic, political and military—by the United States, to assure safe passage from European domination to American protection, and with it the common interests of the West.
In the process, the US would have to find effective agents of its design where it could. There was no point in being finicky about these. Oligarchs and dictators of one kind or another, many exceptionally ruthless, had long been staples of its Good Neighbour system in Latin America. Now colonial governors and viceroys, where still in place, might for a time have to be helped. Monarchs, police chiefs, generals, sheikhs, gangsters, latifundists: all were better than communists.1 Democracy was certainly the ideal political system. Where it was firmly established, in the advanced industrial countries, markets were deepest and business was safest. But where it was not, in less developed societies, matters were otherwise. There, if elections were not proof against attempts on private property, they were dispensable. The Free World was compatible with dictatorship: the freedom that defined it was not the liberty of citizens, but of capital—the one common denominator of its rich and poor, independent and colonial, temperate and tropical regions alike. What was incompatible with it was not absence of parliaments or rights of assembly, but abrogation of private ownership of the means of production. But of the dangers of that there were plenty. In backward societies, not only was the spectre of communism abroad. In the bid to overcome underdevelopment, nationalism itself was subject to statist temptations—arbitrary confiscations and the like, destroying the confidence of foreign investors—against which guard had also to be maintained.
For operations on this uncertain terrain, the US developed a toolbox of policies and instruments specific to the colonial world and its sequels. Conventional land wars, precluded in the First World, lay at one end of the spectrum; purchase of leaders and suborning of opinion—helpful at the outset in the First World, too—at the other.2 In between full mechanized violence and selective corruption, a wide range of other methods for enforcing its will would come to be employed: aerial bombardment, military coup, economic sanction, missile attack, naval blockade, honeycomb espionage, torture delegated or direct, assassination. Common to all these forms, across the spectrum, was resort in one way or another to coercion, in a war of movement shifting rapidly from one geographical theatre to the next. The widespread consent on which American imperial power could rely in the First World was missing in the Third. There, it would mostly have to be extorted or counterfeited. The US would not be without genuine friends and loyal relays among regional elites. There would be many of those. But where popular forces came into play, force and fraud were never far away.
The first challenge came in the Far East. There, the impact of the Japanese empire that had conquered Asia from Seoul to Mandalay—supplanting Western colonialism across Southeast Asia, and battering the GMD regime in China close to destruction—had by the end of the Pacific War created a unique situation. Over the larger part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the most effective form of nationalism had become communism, mustered in resistance movements on the Allied side against Tokyo. Of these forces the most formidable, with the longest history and widest mass organization, was the CCP. Aware of the danger it posed to the GMD regime that Roosevelt had seen as a reliable support of the US, when the Pacific War came to an end the Truman administration kept Japanese forces in China at the ready under its command; dispatched 50,000 marines to hold the Tianjin–Beijing area for Chiang Kai-shek, and another 100,000 troops to occupy Shandong; airlifted half a million GMD soldiers to Manchuria to prevent it falling to the Communists; and over the next three years funnelled some $4 billion to prop up Chiang. American arms and assistance gave the GMD an initial edge, but wartime destruction and postwar corruption had rotted Chiang’s regime so far that the tide soon turned. As Communist advances from base areas close to the Soviet Union accelerated, direct American intervention in such a vast country looked too uncertain of outcome to be risked. The loss of China could not be stopped. To planners in Washington at the time, the victory of the Chinese Revolution, heavy a blow as it might be, was still strategically a sideshow.3 What mattered was keeping control of the industrial heartlands of the West and the Far East. But Asian communism, unlike European, was on the march.
Korea, the oldest Japanese conquest, would left to itself have been the scene of a revolution before China. After the Japanese surrender, only allocation of the South to occupation by the US and the North by the USSR prevented a victory of Korean communism, the strongest native force to emerge after the war, throughout the peninsula.4 Five years later, the regime set up under Russian protection in the North, emboldened by the triumph of the PLA and the semi-encouragement of Stalin, invaded the South in the hope of rapidly knocking over the unpopular counterpart set up by the US across the border. This was a direct assault on an American creation, in a more manageable space, with easy access from Japan. At Truman’s orders a counterattack rolled the enemy up the length of the peninsula, before being checked just short of the Yalu by Chinese entry into the war, and driven back close to the original lines dividing the country, where stalemate set in. Frustrating though the final upshot proved, saturation bombing by the USAF long after a truce became possible destroyed most of the North, saving the South for what would eventually become a showcase of capitalist development, and kick-starting highspeed growth in Japan with a boom in military procurements. Diplomatically, as a US war waged under the nominal banner of the UN, it laid down a marker for the future.
In the tropics, the threat came not in the form of regular armies in a civil war, but communist guerrilla forces newly sprung from the anti-Japanese resistance, fighting for independence against Western colonial powers restored to their prewar possessions. Even where colonial evacuation was swift, they could persist. In the Philippines, rigged elections after independence installed a compliant regime, but the Huks were not put down till 1955. In Burma, White Flag Communists were still in the field twenty years after the British had left. The major dangers, however, lay where the European powers clung on. In Malaya, where tin and rubber wealth ruled out any quick colonial exit, Britain had no little difficulty crushing a Communist movement rooted only in the Chinese minority of the population. Most precarious of all was Indochina. There France was bogged down in a war to reconquer a colony where the Communist party led a national liberation struggle in Vietnam that was not only based squarely on the majority of the population, but could rely on substantial military assistance from the CCP across the border. Funded by Washington, French repression was a losing battle. After contemplating a nuclear strike to save the day, the US drew back, joining France and Britain at Geneva in 1954 to impose division of the country along Korean lines—the best of a bad job, for the time being.
Financing the French war had been cheaper for Washington, and domestically less conspicuous, than fighting it. But the upshot was plainly shakier. If the South had been kept out of the hands of the Vietminh, there was no DMZ to seal it off from the North in future. The Republic proclaimed by Ho in 1945, before the French arrived back to reclaim it, had extended throughout the country, and enjoyed a nationwide legitimacy that the DPRK, founded after division in 1948, had never possessed. Elections in the South, supposedly scheduled at Geneva, had to be cancelled in view of the certain result, and a weak Catholic regime in Saigon propped up with funds and advisers against mounting guerrilla attacks by the Vietminh. There could be no question of letting it go under. As early as 1949, Kennan had urged American support ‘to ensure, however long it takes, the triumph of Indochinese nationalism over Red imperialism’.5 Within a dozen years, Kennedy had dispatched American forces to help hold the fort. Under Johnson they rose to over half a million, the number sent to Korea. But despite more tonnage of high explosives dropped on Indochina than the US had unloaded during the whole of the Second World War, with a destructive force equivalent to 200 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs; routine massacres by US troops; systematic use of torture by CIA interrogators and proxies; and some two to three million killed, the Vietnamese Revolution could not be broken.6 By the turn of the seventies, domestic opposition had made continuation of the war impossible, and once America withdrew, the regime in Saigon collapsed. It was the heaviest defeat of the United States in its history.
But no domino effect followed. British and French colonialism had perforce both enjoyed unstinting support in Southeast Asia, once they were battling communism, the former with ultimate success, the latter—faced with a much more powerful movement—with failure requiring an American relay. For two reasons, Dutch colonialism was another matter. Relatively speaking, beside Britain or France, the Netherlands was a quantité négligeable on the European chequerboard, which could be given instructions without ceremony; while in the Dutch East Indies, unlike in Malaya or Vietnam, nationalist forces put down a communist uprising during the anti-colonial struggle.7 As Marshall’s undersecretary Lovett gratefully acknowledged, the nascent Indonesian Republic—still at war with the Dutch—was ‘the only government in the Far East to have crushed an all-out Communist offensive’. Six months later, NSC–51 determined it imperative to pressure the Dutch to hand over power to those who had shown ‘unexcelled skill’ in liquidating a revolt instigated by the Kremlin. Within two days Acheson told the Dutch that no Marshall Aid would be forthcoming unless they quit.8 Independence did not, however, quell communism in Indonesia, which within another decade had become the strongest mass force in the country. The tolerance of the PKI by Sukarno’s regime prompted an unsuccessful CIA bid to overthrow it in the late fifties. But the growth of the party alarmed the hardened Indonesian military no less. Within a few months of US troops disembarking at Da Nang in 1965, the largest Communist party in the Free World was wiped out, half a million of its members and their families massacred by an army which needed little prompting from the CIA to do its work, if some assistance in targeting PKI leaders. The slaughter accomplished, the Suharto dictatorship received every benefaction from Washington.
The pogrom in Indonesia, a country with nearly three times the population of Vietnam, more than counterbalanced the setbacks in Indochina. With the destruction of the PKI, the danger of revolutionary contagion in the zone where communism and nationalism had fused most directly was over. By the end of the war in Indochina, any threat to capital in Southeast Asia had been defused. Where the Japanese armies had stopped, there was no comparable tinderbox. In the Subcontinent, the British could transfer power to national movements above suspicion of any radical temptations. In Pakistan, Washington had a staunch ally from the start. In India, Congress might make the occasional anti-American noise, but it could be counted on to give short shrift to communism.
III
The Middle East presented an altogether different scene. There the imprint of European imperialism was shallower. Egypt had been put under British tutelage in the late nineteenth century, though never annexed, and British protectorates managed from India stretched along the Gulf coast. But for the rest of the region the arrival of European colonialism came late, with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and camouflaged under mandates, was brief. Largely untouched by the Second World War, by its aftermath the whole region was composed of formally independent states, except the British colony in Aden, all ruled by conservative monarchies or emirates of one kind or another, except for Syria, where French colonial rule had been republican, and Lebanon, which the French had succeeded in detaching from it as a separate unit on exiting. Popular risings in Iraq and Palestine had been crushed by the British before the war, nationalist currents had not been steeled in resistance movements during the war, and the influence of communism was generally modest. So far, so good. But the region was close to the Soviet Union, as Southeast Asia had not been. It contained the largest oil reserves on earth, whose Saudi fields were early designated by Hull ‘one of the world’s greatest prizes’,9 their ruler courted by Roosevelt on his way home from Yalta. It now further contained a state that owed its existence to Truman, who had steamrollered a partition of Palestine through the UN for the creation of Israel. But in Washington there was no overall scheme for the region. Roosevelt had made the Saudi connexion. Truman bequeathed the Israeli. In the cartography of American power, these were still scattered bivouacs between the great emplacements of Eurasia.
But if in the first phase of the Cold War, while not a blank zone, the Middle East had relatively low salience for the US, one country was a concern from the beginning. Iran was not only the world’s second largest petroleum producer. It abutted directly onto the USSR, and harboured the only communist movement in the region with a significant following in the aftermath of the war. There in 1951 the Mossadegh government nationalized the British-owned and controlled oilfields in Abadan. In London, Bevin wanted to dispatch the Royal Navy to repossess them. For Washington, this could only worsen matters, inflaming a Persian nationalism already subject to contagion from communism in the shape of the local Tudeh Party.10 The solution was not gunboats, but covert action. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a military coup to oust Mossadegh, installing in power the young Pahlavi Shah, whose regime made short work of the Tudeh.11 For its services, the Eisenhower administration forced a reluctant Whitehall to give the American oil majors a cut of the British stake in Abadan.
Where there was no direct communist threat on the ground, there was less need for collaboration with older empires, whose interests might conflict with US objectives. Three years later, the potential for tension between these exploded when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. The US had no time for Nasser, who had rejected its insistence that he enter secret talks with Israel and give Moscow a cold shoulder. But it feared that any overt military assault to regain the Canal might align the entire Third World against the West in its battle with the Soviet Union.12 Furious that Eden ignored his warnings, Eisenhower brought the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt to an abrupt halt by cutting off support for sterling, leaving London high and dry. The real position of its European allies within the postwar American order, normally enveloped in the decorous fictions of Atlantic solidarity, was made brutally plain.
But there was a cost to the operation. Having defied the West, Nasser’s prestige in the Arab World soared, fanning a more radical nationalism in the region, with fewer inhibitions about close ties with the USSR. After getting rid of Mossadegh, the US had sought to create a cordon sanitaire against communism with the Baghdad Pact, putting together Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. In 1958 the scheme collapsed with an Iraqi Revolution that overthrew the monarchy, and brought to power a military regime well to the left of Nasser’s, supported by what was now the strongest communist movement in the Middle East. In response, the US landed 14,000 marines in the Lebanon to defend its Maronite president from the spectre of subversion. Five years later came the putsch that first brought the Baath to power in Baghdad, of which the CIA was given advance knowledge, supplying in return lists of Iraqi communists to be killed in the slaughter that followed it. None of the military regimes of the time—Syria was now under Baath control too—could be trusted by Washington, however, since no matter how they treated their own communists, they were no friends of free enterprise or foreign investment, and all alike not only welcomed arms and assistance from Moscow, but menaced reliable neighbouring dynasties.
In this unsatisfactory scene, the Israeli blitz of June 1967, wiping out the Egyptian air force in a few hours and seizing Sinai, the Golan Heights and the West Bank in less than a week, struck like a political thunderbolt. Nasser, whose bungled support for a Yemeni republic that was feared by the Saudi monarchy had long been an irritant, was now a busted flush in the Arab world, while Israel emerged as overwhelmingly the strongest military power in the region. After the Tripartite attack on Egypt of 1956, France—along with Britain—had helped Israel to become a clandestine nuclear power, as part of the secret pact between the three that launched the Suez expedition, and for a time Paris had been Israel’s closest ally in the West. But the spectacular success of the Six-Day War altered all calculations in the US, where the Jewish community was buoyed with new enthusiasm for the homeland of Zionism, and the Pentagon saw a prospective regional partner of formidable punitive strength. Henceforward, American policy in the Middle East pivoted around an alliance with Israel, confident that the Arab oil kingdoms would have to put up with it.
There remained the problem of the flow of Soviet arms and personnel to Egypt and Syria, stepped up after the Arab disaster of 1967, and viewed in Washington as the spearhead of Russian penetration of the Middle East. To win American favour, Sadat expelled all Soviet advisors from Egypt in 1972, and a year later launched a joint attack on the Israeli gains of 1967 with Syria and Jordan. This time a massive airlift of US tanks and aircraft saved the day for Israel, whose counterattack was only stopped from crossing the Canal and annihilating the Egyptian army by last-minute American dissuasion. The 1973 war yielded a near-perfect result for Washington, demonstrating that no amount of Soviet armour could compete with combined American and Israeli capabilities in the region, and putting the Egyptian military regime into its pocket as henceforward a US dependent.
IV
Remote from the Soviet Union, clear of European empires, unscathed by the war, Latin America was home territory for Washington, the province of the Monroe doctrine and Olney’s famous corollary: ‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition’, since ‘its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation’. From the last years of the nineteenth century to the Great Depression, the US had dispatched troops and warships to crush strikes, put down risings, oust rulers or occupy territories in the Caribbean and Central America, with uninhibited regularity. Since then there had been no obvious call to do so. The US had made sure of the allegiance of a Latin American cortège—numerically the largest single bloc—in the UN before it was even founded, with the Act of Chapultepec in early 1945. The Rio Treaty of Inter-American Defence followed in 1947, capped by the formation of the Organization of American States, headquarters in Washington and expressly devoted to the fight against subversion, in 1948. Two years later Kennan, warning against ‘any indulgent and complacent view of Communist activities in the New World’, made it clear that ruthless means might be required to crush them: ‘We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors’, he told US ambassadors to South America summoned to hear him in Rio. ‘It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists’.13
At the time, with the notable exception of Perón’s regime in Argentina, virtually all Latin American governments, a medley of conservative autocracies of one kind or another—traditional dictators, neo-feudal oligarchies, military juntas, single-party rule—with a sprinkling of narrowly based democracies, were more or less congenial helpmeets of US business and diplomacy. Living standards, however low for the majority of the population, were nevertheless on the whole somewhat higher than in Southeast Asia or the Middle East. In the first years of the Cold War, the region offered fewer reasons for alarm than any other in the postcolonial world.
The election of a left-wing government in Guatemala, nationalizing landholdings of the United Fruit Company and legalizing the local Communist Party, changed this. Mounting a land invasion by mercenaries, backed by a naval blockade and bombing from the air, the CIA ousted the Arbenz regime in 1954, the New York Times exulting that this was ‘the first successful anti-Communist revolt since the war’.14 Six years later, when the victory of the Cuban Revolution brought expropriation of American capital to the doorstep of the US,15 the Kennedy administration attempted without success a larger CIA invasion to crush it, and then imposed a naval blockade to stop Soviet missiles arriving in the island, whose withdrawal had to be exchanged for abandonment of further military action against Cuba. With this, Latin America moved to the top of the Cold War agenda in Washington. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, guerrilla movements sprang up across the continent, while the US touted an Alliance for Progress as the liberal alternative to their radical goals, and armed counterinsurgency campaigns in one country after another—Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala—to root them out.
But the traditional forces of the Latin American right—the army, the church, latifundists, big business—were quite capable of taking the initiative to destroy any threat from the left, with or without it taking up arms, in the knowledge that they could count on the blessing, and where need be, material backing of the US. In 1964, the Brazilian military staged the first of the counterrevolutionary coups against an elected government that swept the major societies of the continent, while the aircraft carrier Forrestal and supporting destroyers hovered offshore in case help was required.16 A year later, US marines waded into the Dominican Republic to repel an imaginary communist danger, Brazilian troops returning the favour in their train. In Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, whether popular hopes for an alternative order took shape in urban guerrillas, populist labour movements, socialist or communist parties, all were crushed by ferocious military dictatorships, acting with the support of the US. By the mid-seventies, the Cuban Revolution had been isolated and the continent was armour-plated against any further challenge to capital.
As a theatre of the Cold War, Latin America saw the widest breadth of political forms and energies pitted against the American imperial order, and least connected—ideologically or materially—with the distant Soviet state. To Cuba, Moscow supplied an economic lifeline without which it could scarcely have survived, but strategically it was at variance with Havana, deploring its revolutionary activism throughout. The letter of the Olney Corollary no longer held—the juntas in Brasília or Santiago were not mere subjects of the US, and Cuba could not be retaken. But its logic was still in place. To all appearances, in the first quarter of a century of the Cold War, nowhere was American victory so complete.
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1In his critique of Kennan’s ‘X’ article, Walter Lippmann had foreseen this landscape from the outset. ‘The Eurasian continent is a big place and the military power of the United States, though it is very great, has certain limitations which must be borne in mind if it is to be used effectively’, he observed dryly. ‘The counterforces which Mr X requires have to be composed of Chinese, Afghans, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Austrians, of anti-Soviet Poles, Czechoslovaks, Bulgars, Yugoslavs, Albanians, Hungarians, Finns and Germans. The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets’: The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy, New York 1947, pp. 11, 14.
2For Gramsci, corruption as a mode of power lay between consent and coercion. Logically enough, therefore, its use has spanned the entire arc of imperial action, across all zones of the Cold War. The worldwide role of the clandestine distribution of money in securing the American empire—Spykman’s ‘purchase’—has tended to be cast into the shadow by the role of covert violence. More discreet, its scale remains more secret than that of resort to force, but has been more universal, extending from the financing of parties of the postwar political establishment in Italy, France, Japan and cultural institutions throughout the West, to renting of crowds in Iran and rewards for officers in Latin America, subsidies for Afghan warlords or Polish dissidents, and beyond. A full reckoning of it remains, of course, to date impossible, given that even the overall budget of the CIA, let alone its record of disbursements, is a state secret in the US.
3Kennan, whose opinions about China skittered wildly from one direction to another in 1948–1949, could write in September 1951: ‘The less we Americans have to do with China the better. We need neither covet the favour, nor fear the enmity, of any Chinese regime. China is not the great power of the Orient’: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 45. There was no doubt an element of sour grapes, along with blindness, in this pronouncement, at which Spykman might have smiled.
4Not least because of the 75,000–100,000 Korean veterans who fought alongside the PLA in China during the Anti-Japanese and Civil Wars; the indigenous culture of the regime set up in the North; and the strength of postwar guerrillas in the South: see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York 1997, pp. 199, 239–42 ff; Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution 1945–1950, Ithaca 2003, pp. 241–4, passim. In November 1947, Kennan lugubriously concluded that whereas communists were ‘in their element’ in Korea, ‘we cannot count on native Korean forces to hold the line against Soviet expansion’: State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. I, p. 135. Division of the country was one of Stalin’s two great timorous blunders in the last months of the war, its consequences more disastrous than his failure at Berlin. Without any necessity, as Khrushchev later complained, he acceded to an American request that US troops occupy the southern half of the country, when none were anywhere near it, and the Red Army could without breaking any agreement have strolled to Pusan. Naturally, Truman did not reciprocate the favour and allowed not so much as a Soviet military band into Japan.
5Kennan, ‘United States Policy Towards South-East Asia’, PPS 51, in Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. III, p. 49. See, on this document, Walter Hixson, ‘Containment on the Perimeter: George F. Kennan and Vietnam’: Diplomatic History, April 1988, pp. 151–2, who italicizes the phrase above. In the same paper, Kennan explained that Southeast Asia was a ‘vital segment in the line of containment’, whose loss would constitute a ‘major political rout, the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia’ [sic]. Kennan would later support Johnson’s expansion of the war after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, endorsing the massive bombing of the DRV—Operation Rolling Thunder—in February 1965 as a weapon to force, Kissinger-style, the enemy to the negotiating table. Though increasingly critical of the war as damaging to the national interest, it was not until November 1969 that Kennan called for US withdrawal from Vietnam. At home, meanwhile, he wanted student protesters against the war to be locked up, and collaborated with William Sullivan, head of COINTEL-PRO, a longtime associate, in the FBI’s covert operations against student and black opponents of the government. See Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War, New York 2009, pp. 221–2—a characteristic exercise in New Yorker schlock, by a staffer who is Nitze’s grandson, that sporadically contains material at variance with its tenor.
6For documentation, see Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, New York 2013, pp. 11–15, 79–80, 174–91, based on, among other sources, discovery of ‘the yellowing records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’, a secret Pentagon task force, whose findings lay hidden for half a century, as well as extensive interview material.
7The presence of communists in the anti-colonial struggle had been cause for acute alarm in Washington—Kennan deciding, in typical vein, that Indonesia was ‘the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin’. Its fall would lead to nothing less than ‘a bisecting of the world from Siberia to Sumatra’, cutting ‘our global east–west communications’, making it ‘only a matter of time before the infection would sweep westwards through the continent to Burma, India and Pakistan’: Miscamble, Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, p. 274.
8Robert McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–49, Ithaca 1971, pp. 242–4, 290–4.
9Hearden, Architects of Globalization, p. 124. Hull’s overriding concern was to keep Saudi petroleum out of British hands: ‘the expansion of British facilities serves to build up their post-war position in the Middle East at the expense of American interests’. As early as February 1943 Roosevelt issued a finding that ‘the defence of Saudi Arabia’ was ‘vital to the defence of the United States’: see David Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of US Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954, Baltimore 1986: ‘the idea that the United States had a preemptive right to the world’s oil resources was well entrenched by World War II’: pp. 37, 208. Such was the spirit in which FDR told Halifax: ‘Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours’. In August 1945, Ibn Saud granted Washington its first military base in the region, in Dhahran. But it was still British bases in the Cairo–Suez area that counted as the Cold War got under way. ‘From British-controlled airstrips in Egypt, US bombers could strike more key cities and petroleum refineries in the Soviet Union and Romania than from any other prospective base in the globe’: Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 113.
10Kennan was indignant, arguing in 1952 that the US should give full support to a British expedition to recapture Abadan. Only ‘the cold gleam of adequate and determined force’ could save Western positions in the Middle East. ‘Abadan and Suez are important to the local peoples only in terms of their amour propre … To us, some of these things are important in a much more serious sense, and for reasons that today are sounder and better and more defensible than they ever were in history’, he wrote to Acheson. ‘To retain these facilities and positions we can use today only one thing: military strength, backed by the resolution and courage to use it’: Mayers, Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, pp. 253–5. Kennan went on to deplore the Republican Administration’s opposition to the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, and applaud its landing of troops in the Lebanon.
11Of the coup, the CIA could record in its secret history of the operation: ‘It was a day that should never have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful if any other can come up to it’: see Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II, New York 2009, p. 123. For a recent neo-royalist attempt, by a former functionary of the Shah, to downplay the role of the CIA in the coup, on the grounds that Mossadegh had aroused opposition in the Shi’a hierarchy, see Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mossadeq Revisited, New York 2010, and successive rebuttals in Iranian Studies, September 2012.
12Should Britain and France send in troops, Eisenhower cautioned Eden on September 2, ‘the peoples of the Near East and of North Africa and, to some extent, of all of Asia and all of Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation and, perhaps, not even in a century, particularly having in mind the capacity of the Russians to make mischief.’ Counselling patience, US policy-makers believed the crisis could be resolved by diplomacy and covert action. ‘The Americans’ main contention’, Eden remarked on September 23, ‘is that we can bring Nasser down by degrees rather on the Mossadegh lines’: Douglas Little, ‘The Cold War in the Middle East: Suez Crisis to Camp David Accords’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. II, Cambridge 2010, p. 308.
13See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, New York 1993, p. 109. On getting back to Washington, Kennan hammered his message home: ‘Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of the communist attack, then we must concede that harsh measures of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedures; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternatives, to communist success’: see Roger Trask, ‘George F. Kennan’s Report on Latin America (1950)’, Diplomatic History, July 1978, p. 311. The Southern hemisphere, in Kennan’s view, was an all-round cultural disaster zone: he doubted whether there existed ‘any other region of the earth in which nature and human behaviour could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of life’.
14In 1952, Truman had already approved a plan developed by Somoza after a visit to the president for a CIA operation to overthrow Arbenz, countermanded at the last minute by Acheson, probably out of fear it would fail: Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States 1944–1955, Princeton 1992, pp. 228–31. Richard Helms, promoted to chief of operations at the CIA the following year, explained to Gleijeses: ‘Truman okayed a good many decisions for covert operations that in later years he said he knew nothing about. It’s all presidential deniability’: p. 366.
15At which the overthrow of the regime in Havana rapidly became ‘the top priority of the US government’, in the younger Kennedy’s words: ‘All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.’ Kennan, consulted by the elder Kennedy before his inauguration, approved an invasion of Cuba, provided it was successful: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 172.
16McGeorge Bundy to the NSC, 28 March 1964: ‘The shape of the problem in Brazil is such that we should not be worrying that the military will react; we should be worrying that the military will not react’: Westad, Global Cold War, p. 150. On April 1, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon could teletype Washington that it was ‘all over, with the democratic rebellion already 95 per cent successful’, and the next day celebrate ‘a great victory for the free world’, without which there could have been ‘a total loss to the West of all South American Republics’. For these and other particulars of ‘Operation Brother Sam’, see Phyllis Parker, Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964, Austin 1979, pp. 72–87.