In the history of the postwar American empire, the early seventies was a watershed. For twenty years after the onset of the Cold War, the alternation of incumbents in the White House scarcely affected the continuity of the strategy laid out in NSC–68. At the turn of the seventies, however, deep changes in the environment of US global power coincided with a presidency less committed to the pious fictions and policy fixations of its predecessors, capable of pursuing the same ultimate ends with notably more flexible—if also, where required, yet more ruthless—means. As no American ruler before or after him has been, Nixon was an innovator. But his departures from the handbook for running the Free World came from the opportunities and constraints of the conjuncture. On all three fronts of US grand strategy, the years 1971–1973 saw dramatic changes.
The first came where everything had hitherto gone most smoothly. The reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, the highest American priority after the war, had been a resounding success. But after two decades, the former Axis powers were now—thanks to US aid, access to US markets and borrowing of US technology, combined with reserve armies of low-wage labour and more advanced forms of industrial organization than the US possessed—outcompeting American firms in one branch of manufacturing after another: steel, auto, machine tools, electronics. Under this German and Japanese pressure, the rate of profit of US producers fell sharply, and a US trade deficit opened up.1 Compounding this relentless effect of the uneven development of capitalism during the long postwar boom were the costs of the domestic reforms with which Nixon, like Johnson, sought to consolidate his electorate and tamp down opposition to the war in Vietnam, itself a further drain on the US Treasury. The upshot was escalating inflation and a deteriorating balance of payments. To cap matters, France—under De Gaulle and Pompidou, the one Western state to regain, for a season, real political independence from Washington—had started to attack the dollar with increasing purchases of gold. The latitude of American power over American interests, the remit of the imperial state beyond the requirements of national capital, was for the first time under pressure.
Nixon’s response was draconian. The principles of free trade, the free market and the solidarity of the free world could not stand in the way of the national interest. Wasting no time on diplomatic consultation, in a four-minute television address to a domestic audience he jettisoned the Bretton Woods system, cutting the link of the dollar to gold, imposed a tariff surcharge on all imports, and decreed a wage and price freeze. In the short run, devaluation restored the competitive punch of US exporters, and in the long run, delinkage of the dollar from gold gave the US state greater freedom of economic manoeuvre than ever before. The real structure of the liberal international order projected in 1943–1945 stood momentarily revealed. But this impressive success in the exercise of national egoism could only mask for a limited spell the irreversible alteration in the position of the United States in the world economy, of which Nixon was aware.
A month before delivering the American quietus to Bretton Woods, Nixon had startled the world with another, no less drastic reorientation of US policy, the announcement that he would shortly be travelling to Beijing. The victory of the Chinese revolution had been the worst blow Washington had ever suffered in the Cold War. Regarding the CCP as a more bitter enemy even than the CPSU, it had refused to recognize Mao’s regime, maintaining that the real China was its ward in Taiwan, and ignoring the split between Beijing and Moscow that became public in the early sixties and worsened steadily thereafter. Nixon now became determined to capitalize on this. Still mired in Vietnam, where the DRV was receiving assistance from both Russia and China, his aim was to increase his leverage on both powers, playing them off against each other to secure a settlement that would preserve the South Vietnamese state and American military credibility in Southeast Asia. In February 1972 his cordial reception by Mao in Beijing marked a diplomatic revolution. The two leaders agreed on the threat posed by the Soviet Union, laying the basis for a tacit alliance against it. Having obtained this understanding, Nixon proceeded to Moscow three months later, where—reminding Brezhnev of the potential dangers from China—he signed the first SALT agreement, amid much celebration of détente. The treaty did not halt the arms race, and the atmospherics of détente were of less effect than intended in neutralizing domestic opposition to the war in Indochina. But the basic strategic gain of Nixon’s turn was enormous, and would last. The Communist world was no longer just divided. Henceforward China and Russia would compete for privileged relations with the United States.
What this transformation of the dynamics of the Cold War could not deliver was Nixon’s immediate objective, a stalemate in Vietnam. Though Moscow and Beijing both urged another Geneva-style arrangement on Hanoi, they were not in a position to impose one. A further massive American bombing campaign failed to buckle the DRV. In January 1973, accords had to be signed in Paris for a withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in sixty days, sealing the fate of the southern regime. But the inglorious end of the long American intervention in Vietnam was rapidly recouped elsewhere. In September the Allende regime, the most advanced, freely elected socialist experience in South America, from whose example capital had most to fear, and whose fall Nixon had demanded from the start, was destroyed by the Chilean military.2 A month later, the Egyptian army was routed by the Israeli offensive across the Canal, and the Arab nationalism embodied by Nasser’s regime was finished, leaving the United States diplomatic master of the Middle East.
II
Nixon’s departure was followed, after a brief interim, by a tonal and tactical reversion to more standard styles of American Weltpolitik. In a typical bout of domestic positioning, détente soon came under Democratic attack as an unprincipled sellout to Moscow. In late 1974 the Jackson–Vanik amendment blocked the granting of MFN status to the USSR for obstructing Jewish emigration from Russia to Israel. A year later, SALT II was dead in the water. Nixon had not held high enough the banners of the Free World—in particular the cause of human rights, picked out by Jackson and blazoned by Carter in his campaign for the White House, which henceforward became an ideological staple of all regimes in Washington. The Cold War was not to be waged as a mere power-political contest. It was a moral-ideological battle for civilization, as Nitze had seen.
Strategically, little altered. Nixon’s legacy was not discarded, but substantively consolidated. There would be no return to benevolent American indifference—let alone assistance—to the economic rise of Japan or Germany. The First World had become a clear-cut arena of inter-capitalist competition in which US predominance was at stake, to be assured where necessary without compunction. Nixon had cut the dollar free from gold, and shown scant respect for laissez-faire totems at home or abroad, but the oil shock of 1973 had compounded the underlying economic downturn in the US with a steep burst of inflation, which the floating exchange rates instituted at the Smithsonian in 1971 did little to improve. By the end of the decade the temporary boost to American exports from the 1971 devaluation was exhausted, and the dollar dangerously low. With Volcker’s arrival at the Fed under Carter, there was an abrupt change of course. Interest rates were driven sky-high to stamp out inflation, attracting a flood of foreign capital, and putting massive pressure on dollar-denominated Third World debts. But once the dollar strengthened again—US manufacturers paying the price, the trade deficit widening—the Reagan administration did not stand on ceremony. After ruthless arm-twisting, Japan and Germany were forced to accept enormous revaluations of the yen and the Mark to make American exports competitive once more.3 The Plaza Accords of 1985, clinching the relative economic recovery of the US in the eighties, left no doubt who was master in the liberal international order, and intended to remain so.
Beyond the First World, Nixon’s two other great legacies each required completion. In the Far East, China had been wooed into an unspoken entente with America, but there were still no diplomatic relations between the two states, Washington maintaining formal recognition of the GMD regime in Taiwan as the government of China. In the Middle East, Israel had been handed victory, and Egypt saved from disaster, but a settlement between the two was needed for the US to capitalize fully on its command of the situation. Within a few months of each other, unfinished business in both theatres was wrapped up. In the autumn of 1978 Sadat and Begin signed a US-monitored agreement at Camp David returning Israeli-occupied Sinai to Egypt in exchange for the abandonment by Egypt of the allies who had fought with it, whose territories Israel continued to occupy, and of empty promises to the Palestinians, promptly discarded. A deluge of US military aid to both countries followed, as henceforward interconnected, if incommensurate ramparts of the American system in the Middle East: Israel an ally more than capable of independent action, Egypt a pensionary incapable of it.
In the Far East, China was easier game. Some tractations were needed to finesse the problem of Taiwan, but once Beijing made no case of continued American commercial and material support for the island, provided Washington withdrew recognition of the ROC, the way was clear for the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two powers on the first day of 1979. Two weeks later, Deng Xiaoping arrived in the US for a tour of the country and talks at the White House, aiming not only for a compact with America as a strategic counterbalance to Russia, as Mao had done, but integration into the global economic system headed by the US—an Open Door in reverse—which Mao had not. The entrance ticket he offered was a Chinese attack on Vietnam to punish it for having overthrown the Pol Pot regime, a protégé of Beijing, in Cambodia. The US, still smarting from its humiliation in Indochina, was happy to accept it. The Chinese invasion of Vietnam did not go well, and had to be called off with heavy casualties and little to show for it. But it served its political purpose, blooding China as a reliable US partner in Southeast Asia, where the two powers joined forces to sustain the Khmer Rouge along the Thai border for another dozen years, and entitling the PRC to the full benefit of American investors and American markets. Carter—human rights a better magic cloak for Pol Pot than Chicago economics for Pinochet—had proved an effective executor of Nixon.
Further strengthening of positions in the Middle and Far East was no guarantee of security elsewhere in the Third World. The late seventies and eighties saw not a contraction, but an expansion of danger-zones for the US into areas hitherto little touched by the Cold War.4 Africa had long been the continent least affected by it. The Algerian Revolution, the one mass armed struggle of the late fifties and early sixties, had caused some anxiety, but the rapid capture of power by an introverted military regime with few ideological ambitions allayed these. Elsewhere, there was no comparable scale of European settlement, with the exception of the white racist stronghold of South Africa, which could look after itself. In between, French and British colonies run by a handful of administrators, undisturbed by any wartime radicalization, covered most of the vast sub-Saharan spaces. There, decolonization could be handled without much difficulty, with a controlled transfer of power to generally moderate elites still highly dependent, materially and culturally, on the former metropoles.
There were two other colonial powers, however, of lesser size and self-confidence, who in opposite ways flubbed this process, putting Washington on the alert. Belgium, having for years made no effort to prepare a suitable postcolonial landing in the Congo, granted it independence overnight in 1960. When amid chaotic conditions following a mutiny of the ex-colonial gendarmerie against its white officers, Lumumba—elected leader of the country—appealed for Soviet aid, the CIA was instructed to poison him. After this came to nothing, the US—in effective control of the UN operation ostensibly sent to stabilize the situation—orchestrated a seizure of power by troops under Mobutu, a CIA asset, ensuring Lumumba’s death par pouvoir interposé, and the dictatorship in the Congo of their parachutist commander for thirty years.5
Portugal, itself a dictatorship dating back to fascist times, whose identity as a European power was inseparable from its African empire, had no intention of relinquishing its colonies, and by outlasting France and Britain on the continent for over a decade, created the conditions for a radicalized anti-imperialism looking for aid and inspiration to the USSR, otherwise present elsewhere only in South Africa. When, after a dozen years of armed struggle, a metropolitan revolution finally brought decolonization, the richest Portuguese possession of Angola was divided between three movements for independence, two of the right, backed by the Congo and the PRC, and one of the left, backed by Russia. Alarmed at the prospect of this last winning the contest between them, in 1975 Washington supplied its opponents with funds, weapons and officers in a covert CIA operation from the north, while inciting South Africa to invade the colony from the south. Before Luanda could fall, Cuban troops ferried from the Caribbean in Soviet transports arrived in strength, clearing the north and obliging the South African column to withdraw. For the US, defeat in Angola was consignment of the country to communism, and in the eighties it stepped up support for the rival force remaining in the field, led by Pretoria’s ally Savimbi. A second South African invasion, assisted by Savimbi, was halted thirteen years later by another Cuban expedition, larger than the first. In Angola, by the time Reagan left office, America had been worsted.6
The only African arena to have escaped European colonization prior to the First World War, and then been only briefly conquered after it, predictably became the other proving ground of the last phases of the Cold War, as a feudal kingdom overdue for explosion. The Ethiopian revolution that toppled the archaic local dynasty in 1974 became steadily more radical as the group of junior officers who took power underwent a series of convulsive purges, ending in a regime that not only called for Soviet military assistance, but—rather than talking vaguely of African socialism, as many others had done—proclaimed the goal of creating a society based on scientific socialism, Soviet-style. Imperial Ethiopia had, traditionally, been a plaque tournante of American strategic dispositions in the Horn. When it appeared to have capsized into communism, the US instigated an invasion by Somalia in 1977 to reclaim the Ogaden region. As in Angola, the incursion was beaten back by a combination of Cuban troops and much more Soviet armour and oversight, a bitter pill for Washington to swallow. At the helm of the NSC, Brzezinski declared the death of détente in the sands of the Ogaden. Success in the Congo had confirmed the value of the UN as a cover for US operations in the Third World. Setbacks in Angola and Ethiopia offered lessons in how better to run proxy wars.
Across the Atlantic, South America had been so scoured of threats to capital by the late seventies that the military regimes which had stamped them out could withdraw, their historical task accomplished, leaving democratic governments in place, safe from any temptation of radical change. Central America, however, lay in a different political time zone. Long a political backwater, home to some of the most benighted tyrants on the continent, its brief episodes of insurgency quickly snuffed out, most of the region had remained quiet during the period of high revolutionary activism to the south. The overthrow by Sandinista rebels in 1979 of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, whose rule under American patronage dated from the time of Roosevelt, brought the country into the full glare of US counterinsurgency.7 The Nicaraguan revolutionaries were closely linked to Cuba, and in 1981 their victory set off an insurrection in El Salvador that developed into a civil war lasting a decade, and a briefer uprising in Guatemala—where guerrillas were an older phenomenon—broken by all-out repression. Local oligarchs and officers reacted to the wave of regional radicalization with death-squads, disappearances, torture, massacres. In these two countries, the Carter administration supplied American training and assistance. Reagan, no less determined to hold the line in El Salvador and Guatemala, decided to tackle the root of the problem in Nicaragua itself.
From 1982 onwards, the US assembled an army of counterrevolutionaries, well funded and equipped, in Honduras and Costa Rica to destroy the Sandinista regime. Cross-border raids and attacks multiplied, with widespread sabotage of communications, destruction of crops and economic installations, and assassination of civilians, in a campaign under direct American control and design. Without being able to hold large swathes of territory, the Contras put the country under siege. Privation and fatigue gradually weakened popular support for the Sandinista government, until at the end of the decade it agreed to elections if the Contras were stood down, and was defeated by the candidate of the State Department, who alone could deliver an end to the American embargo impoverishing the country. Central America was not Africa. The US could fight a proxy war against a small opponent to complete success—rounding off its grip on the region with an invasion of Panama straight out of the twenties, before Nicaraguans even went to the polls, to get rid of an unsatisfactory strongman.8
Much more was at stake in the other zone to open up as a front in the last decade of the Cold War. Between the Arab world and the Subcontinent lay two states that had never been subject to European mandate or conquest, though each had been the object of repeated intrusion and manipulation by imperial powers. Since its installation by US and British intelligence in the fifties, the royal dictatorship in Iran had become the linchpin of American strategy in the region surrounding the Gulf, recipient of every kind of favour and assistance from Washington. In Afghanistan, the monarchy had been terminated by a dynastic cousin seeking to update the country with Soviet aid. In January 1978, massive demonstrations broke out against the Pahlavi regime, long a byword for tyranny and corruption, and within a year it was finished, the shah fleeing into exile and the Shi’a cleric Khomeini returning from it to head a revolutionary regime of unexpected Islamist stamp, equally hostile to the Iranian left and to the American superpower.9 In April 1978, Afghan communists targeted for a purge hit back with a coup that put them in power overnight. Though not equivalent, both upheavals were blows. Afghanistan might have semi-lain within Moscow’s diplomatic sphere of influence, but the establishment of a Communist regime there was another matter, a threat to Pakistan and unacceptable in principle. But the country was poor and isolated. Iran, double in size and population, and one of the world’s largest oil producers, was neither. In itself, no doubt, an Islamic regime was less dangerous than a Communist one, but its anti-imperialist fervour could prove the more destabilizing, if unchecked, in the Middle East. The US embassy was seized and its staff held hostage in Teheran, not Kabul.
Fortuitously, the problem of how to deal with the Iranian Revolution found a happy solution within less than a year of the overthrow of the shah, with the all-out attack on Iran launched by Iraq in September 1980, in the belief Teheran was much weakened by a Khomeinist regime still preoccupied by repression of a range of internal oppositions. Saddam Hussein’s bid to seize the oil-rich, predominantly Arab, province of Khuzestan unleashed the second-longest conventional war of the twentieth century, with undercover US encouragement and assistance.10 Calling on every reserve of Iranian patriotism, the Khomeinist system survived the assault. But for American purposes, the war was cost-effective. Without the commitment of any US troops, or even CIA operatives, disabled within the country, the Iranian Revolution was pinned down within its own borders for nearly a decade, and its external impetus largely exhausted by the struggle for defensive survival. When the war finally came to an end in 1988, the clerical regime was still in place, but it had been contained, and with the proclamation of the Carter Doctrine and its implementation by Reagan, the Gulf converted into a military walkway for US power in the region.
Afghanistan could be tackled more ambitiously than Iran, along Central American rather than Southern African lines. If Baghdad was an arm’s length Pretoria, Islamabad would be a close-range Tegucigalpa, from which the US could mount a proxy war against Communism with an army of Contras who, however, would become more than mercenaries. As early as July 1979, before the monarchy had collapsed in Iran or Soviet tanks were anywhere near Kabul, the US was bankrolling religious and tribal resistance to the Saur Revolution. When Moscow reacted to fratricide in Afghan communism with a full-scale military intervention in December, Washington saw the chance to pay the USSR back in its own coin: this would be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Under the benevolent awning of the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan, massive transfers of money and advanced weaponry were funnelled to mujahedin fighters against atheism. Divided from the start, Afghan communism had tried to compensate for the weakness of its basis in a still overwhelmingly rural and tribal society with the ferocity of its repression of opposition to it, now superimposed with the ponderous weight of an alien army. In these conditions, the US had little difficulty sustaining hi-tech guerrilla attacks on it for over a decade, irrigated with CIA and Saudi funding, but grounded in passionate religious-popular sentiment. Dependent for military survival on Soviet air and land power, the regime in Kabul was politically doomed by it.
V
In their long contest with the United States, the rulers of the Soviet Union believed by the mid-seventies that they had achieved strategic nuclear parity, and therewith recognition by Washington of political parity as a superpower of equal standing at large. Détente, in their eyes, signalled its acceptance of these realities. So they saw no reason why the USSR should act with less freedom than the US where the frontiers between the two blocs were not, as in Europe, fixed fast by mutual agreement. Central America was within the hemispheric domain of the US and they would not interfere. But Africa was a terrain vague, and Afghanistan a borderland of the USSR in which the US had never been greatly involved. Military power-projection in such regions was not a provocation, but within the rules of the game as understood by Moscow.
These were illusions. What Brezhnev and his colleagues believed was a strategic turning point was for Nixon and Kissinger a tactical construction. No American administration had any intention of permitting Moscow to act in the Third World as Washington might do, and all had the means to see that it would come to grief if it tried to do so. The apparent Soviet gains of the seventies were built on sands, brittle regimes that lacked either disciplined communist cadres or nationwide mass movements behind them, and would fall or invert in short order once support from Moscow was gone. The ultimate disparity between the two antagonists remained as great as it had ever been at the dawn of the Cold War, before Mao’s victory in China altered the extent of the imbalance for a time. Even with lines of communication as short as those to Afghanistan, Moscow was trapped as Brzezinski had intended. The Red Army had no remedy against Stinger missiles. To demoralization beyond the perimeters of Stalin’s rule was added fraying within them. Eastern Europe had long been off-limits to the US, which had stood by when East German workers rose in 1953, Hungary revolted in 1956 and Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968. But détente, which had deluded Soviet leaders into thinking they could act with less inhibition in the Horn or the Hindu Kush, where it had no bearing for Washington, allowed the US to act with less inhibition in Europe. There the Helsinki Accords, where Moscow paid for formal recognition of territorial borders that were never in real dispute with formal recognition of human rights that eminently were, had changed the coordinates of the Cold War. This time, when Solidarity erupted in Poland, there could be no Iron Curtain. American subventions, sluiced through the Vatican, could not be stopped, nor a rolling Polish insurgency broken.
Along with military wounds and political troubles came economic pressures. In the seventies, rising oil prices had compounded recession in the West. In the eighties, falling oil prices hit Soviet trade balances that depended on hard currency earnings from the country’s energy sector to pay for medium-tech imports. If the origins of the long downturn in the OECD lay in the dynamics of uneven development and over-competition, its consequences could be checked and deferred by a systemic expansion of credit, to ward off any traumatic devalorization of capital. In the USSR, a long economic downturn began earlier—growth rates were already falling in the sixties, if much more sharply from the second half of the seventies; and its dynamics lay in plan-driven lack of competition and over-extension of the life span of capital.11 In the thirties, Trotsky had already observed that the fate of Soviet socialism would be determined by whether or not its productivity of labour surpassed that of advanced capitalism. By the eighties, the answer was clear. The GNP and per capita income of the USSR were half those of the US, and labour productivity perhaps 40 per cent. Central to that difference was a still larger one, in reverse. In the much richer American economy, military expenditures accounted for an average of some 6–7 per cent of GDP from the sixties onwards; in the Soviet economy, the figure was over double that—15–16 per cent.
Since the fifties, American grand strategy had classically aimed to ‘put the maximum strain’, as NSC–68 had enjoined, on the Soviet system. The Reagan administration, mauling its flanks in Central Asia and infiltrating its defences in Eastern Europe, also piled on economic pressure, with a technological embargo striking at Russian oil production, and a quadrupling of Saudi output that lowered oil prices by 60 per cent. But its decisive move was the announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative to render the US invulnerable to ICBM attack. Originating in an evaluation of the Soviet threat by Team B within the CIA that rang the alarm at a ‘window of vulnerability’—yet another avatar of the bomber and missile gaps of the fifties and sixties—which Moscow could use to obliterate or blackmail the West, SDI was a technological scarecrow whose putative costs were enormous. That it could not actually be built was of little importance. What mattered was that it intimidate a cornered Soviet leadership, now flailing about in bungled attempts to revive the economy at home, and increasingly desperate for Western approval abroad.
Aware that the USSR could no longer hope to match so costly a programme, Gorbachev travelled to Reykjavik to try to deliver his country from the crippling weight of the arms race altogether.12 There US officials were stunned as he made one unilateral concession after another. ‘We came with nothing to offer, and offered nothing’, one negotiator remembered. ‘We sat there while they unwrapped their gifts’.13 But it was no dice. SDI would not be abandoned: Gorbachev came away empty-handed. Two years later, a ban on intermediate-range missiles was small consolation. It had taken thirty years for the Soviet Union to achieve formal nuclear parity with the United States. But the goal was overvalued and the price ruinous. American encirclement of the USSR had never been primarily conceived as a conventional Niederwerfungskrieg. From the start, it was a long-term Ermattungskrieg, and victory was now at hand.
Amid a continually worsening crisis of material provision at home, as the old economic system was disrupted by addled reforms incapable of giving birth to a new one, withdrawal from Afghanistan was followed by retreat from Eastern Europe. There the regimes of the Warsaw Pact had never enjoyed much native support, their peoples rebelling whenever they had a chance of doing so. In 1989, emboldened by the new conjuncture, one political breakout followed another: within six months, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania. The signal for the upheaval came in the spring, when the Hungarian government was secretly paid a billion Deutschmarks by Kohl to open its border with Austria, and young East Germans started to pour across it.14 In Moscow, Gorbachev let matters take their course. Making no attempt to negotiate Soviet exit from the region, he placed his trust in Western gratitude for a unilateral withdrawal of the 500,000 Red Army troops stationed in it. In exchange, Bush Sr offered a verbal promise that NATO would not be extended to the borders of Russia, and declined to supply any economic aid until the country was a free market economy.15 His call for Europe to be whole and free was met. For the USSR itself to become free, it would have to be divided. Gorbachev survived his unrequited pursuit of an entente with America by little more than a year. What remained of the Soviet establishment could see where his conception of peace with honour was leading, and in trying to depose him, precipitated it. In December 1991, the USSR disappeared from the map.
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1For this development, the indispensable account is Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006, pp. 99–142.
2The director of the CIA cabled its station chief in Santiago on 16 October 1970: ‘It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure towards this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that USG and American hand be well hidden.’ See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, New York 2003, p. 64. In dealing with Chile, Kissinger was true to Kennan’s recommendations two decades earlier. In 1971, Kennan remarked: ‘Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has’, and eight days after the coup in Chile wrote to Kissinger, who had just become secretary of state, ‘I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, p. 621.
3Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 190, 206–7; The Boom and the Bubble, London and New York 2002, pp. 60–1, 106–7, 122–3, 127.
4Though, of course, never entirely out of sight in Washington. There is no better illustration of how imaginary is the belief that Kennan’s doctrine of containment was geographically limited, rather than uncompromisingly global, than PPS 25 of March 1948 on North Africa, which—after remarking that ‘the people of Morocco can best advance under French tutelage’—concluded: ‘The development of the US into a major world power together with the wars that have been fought by this country to prevent the Atlantic littoral of Europe and Africa from falling into hostile hands, the increasing dependency of England upon the US and the situation brought about by the rise of air power and other technological advances, have made it necessary that a new concept should be applied to the entire group of territories bordering on the Eastern Atlantic at least down to the “Bulge” of Africa. The close interflexion of the French African territories bordering on the Mediterranean must also be considered an integral part of this concept. This would mean, in modern terms, that we could not tolerate from the standpoint of our national security the extension into this area of any system of power which is not a member of the Atlantic community, or a transfer of sovereignty to any power which does not have full consciousness of its obligations with respect to the peace of the Atlantic order’: Anna Kasten Nelson, ed., State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. II, pp. 146–7.
5The UN bureaucracy and the US secret state were in full agreement, Hammarskjöld opining that ‘Lumumba must be broken’, his American deputy Cordier that Lumumba was Africa’s ‘Little Hitler’, and Allen Dulles cabling the CIA station chief in Leopoldville: ‘In high quarters here it is held that if [Lumumba] continues to hold office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.’ In Washington, Eisenhower gave a green light to the disposal of Lumumba, and an emissary was dispatched to poison him. The best documentation of his fate is Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, London and New York 2001, pp. 17–20 ff and passim. The Congo operation was much more important in setting a benchmark for subsequent use of the UN as an instrument of American will than its function as an international fig leaf for the war in Korea.
6See the fine account in Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 218–46, 390–2.
7Somoza, to whom Stimson had taken a liking on a visit during the second US occupation of Nicaragua in 1927, became the first head of the National Guard created by the Marines as Roosevelt took office. After murdering Sandino in 1934, he was in due course welcomed to Washington in unprecedented style by the president: ‘Plans called for Roosevelt, for the first time since entering office in 1933, to leave the White House to greet a chief of state. The vice-president, the full cabinet, and the principal leaders of Congress and the judiciary were all scheduled to be present for the arrival of Somoza’s train. A large military honour guard, a twenty-one gun salute, a presidential motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a state dinner, and an overnight stay at the White House were all part of the official itinerary’, with ‘over five thousand soldiers, sailors and Marines lining the streets and fifty aircraft flying overhead. Government employees released from work for the occasion swelled the crowds along the procession’: Paul Coe Clark, The United States and Somoza: A Revisionist Look, Westport 1992, pp. 63–4.
8‘Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the US government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of US military forces, three by means of CIA-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct US participation, usually through military coups d’état … The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Between 1975 and 1991, the death toll alone stood at nearly 300,000 in a population of less than 30 million. More than 1 million refugees fled from the region—most to the United States. The economic costs have never been calculated, but were huge. In the 1980s, these costs did not affect US policy because the burden on the United States was negligible’: John Coatsworth, ‘The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, pp. 220–1.
9On the last day of 1977, Carter had toasted the shah in Teheran—‘there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship’—as a fellow-spirit in the cause of ‘human rights’, and a pillar of stability in the region, upheld by ‘the admiration and love your people give to you’: see Lloyd Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad, New York 2008, p. 51. When the US embassy in Teheran was seized by students two years later, Kennan urged an American declaration of war on Iran: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 278.
10See Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990, New York 1994, pp. 42–8.
11Vladimir Popov, ‘Life Cycle of the Centrally Planned Economy: Why Soviet Growth Rates Peaked in the 1950s’, CEFIR/NES Working Paper no. 152, November 2010, pp. 5–11—a fundamental diagnosis, showing that in effect the Soviet economy suffered from its own, much more drastic, version of the same problem that would slow American growth rates from the seventies onwards, in Robert Brenner’s analysis.
12Gorbachev to the Politburo in October 1986: ‘We will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it, because we are at the limit of our capabilities. Moreover, we can expect that Japan and the FRG could very soon add their economic potential to the American one. If the new round begins, the pressure on our economy will be unbelievable’: Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill 2007, p. 292. As Reagan candidly recalled: ‘The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever’: An American Life, New York 1990, p. 267.
13‘Secretary Schultz, not then deep in nuclear matters, nevertheless caught the drift. We had triumphed’: Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, New York 1989, p. 55. Adelman was arms control director under Reagan.
14Harper, The Cold War, p. 238.
15‘Disappointed by the failure of his personal relations with Western leaders to yield returns, Gorbachev tried to make a more pragmatic case for major aid. As he told Bush in July 1991, if the United States was prepared to spend $100 billion on regional problems (the Gulf), why was it not ready to expend similar sums to help sustain perestroika, which had yielded enormous foreign-policy dividends, including unprecedented Soviet support in the Middle East? But such appeals fell on deaf ears. Not even the relatively modest $30 billion package suggested by American and Soviet specialists—comparable to the scale of Western aid commitments to Eastern Europe—found political favour’: Alex Pravda, ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1990–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, p. 376.