2 the Return of Fear

#2 – The Return of Fear

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan (1947)

On March 12, 1947 Truman had announced a policy of military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey only two weeks after the British had declared they could no longer bear the costs of supporting those countries.
Truman insisted it must “be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures…. We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”
Secretary of State Marshall was constructing a Cold War grand strategy. Kennan’s Long Telegram had identified the problem: the Soviet Union’s internally driven hostility toward the outside world. Kennan had suggested no solution. Marshall now told Kennan to come up with one.
The European Recovery Plan committed the US to nothing less than the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it instantly came to be known, did not differentiate between those parts of the continent that were under Soviet control and those parts that were not, but the thinking that lay behind it certainly did.
Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threats to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into power.
American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the USA could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War. (Gaddis, 32)
Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan had laid for him. He built the wall that would divide Europe. He was caught off guard by Marshall’s proposal and sent a large delegation to Paris to discuss Soviet participation.
He withdrew it shortly thereafter while allowing delegations from Eastern Europe to remain and then forbade them – most dramatically the Czechs whose leaders were flown to Moscow to get the word – from receiving such assistance.

Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Berlin

Stalin responded to the Marshall Plan just as Kennan had predicted he would: by tightening his grip wherever he could. In September, 1947, he announced the formation of the Cominform, whose task was to enforce orthodoxy within the international Communist movement.
In February, 1948 Stalin approved a plan by Czech communists to seize power in the only Eastern European state that had retained a democratic government. Shortly after the coup the broken body of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, son of the post WWI founder of the country – Thomas Masaryk, was discovered in a Prague courtyard. It was never established if he jumped or was pushed to his death.
Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia had come to power on his own. His partisans had driven the Nazis out, not the Red Army. Efforts by the Cominform to heel Moscow’s commands caused him to break with Moscow by June, 1948.
Stalin was not worried. “I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,” he said. But Tito survived and was soon receiving American economic assistance.
Stalin then blockaded Berlin and the allies improvised an airlift for the beleaguered city winning the gratitude of the Berliners, the respect of most Germans and a global public relations triumph that made Stalin look both brutal and incompetent.
Stalin’s responses to the Marshall Plan increased, not decreased, the Soviet Union’s security problems. The US Congress approved the Marshall Plan.
Events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.
By the time Stalin lifted the Berlin blockade in May, 1949 the treaty establishing NATO had been signed in Washington and the Federal Republic of Germany had been declared in Bonn. Tito’s heresy was unpunished demonstrating it was possible for communists themselves to achieve a degree of independence from Moscow.
There were no signs of the disagreements among capitalist Stalin’s ideological illusions had led him to expect. His strategy for gaining control of postwar Europe lay in ruins and he had largely himself to blame.

The Soviet Bomb and the People’s Republic of China

On August 29, 1949 the Soviet Union tested a nuclear weapon in the deserts of Kazakhstan. The American monopoly on atomic weapons was ended. Truman would have to consider expanding American conventional forces, stationing U.S troops in Europe and building more atomic weapons to maintain a quantitative and qualitative lead over the Soviet Union.
Truman also had to ponder creating a “super-bomb” or “hydrogen” bomb that would be a thousand times as destructive as the bombs which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the end Truman pursued all of these objectives. He had hoped for a peace dividend which would allow him to balance the federal budget after years of deficits. He had taken a major risk with the Marshall Plan which committed the US to invest almost 10% of annual government expenditures in the reconstruction of Europe.
A second expansion of the Cold War occurred in East Asia where on October 1, 1949 a victorious Mao proclaimed the formation of the People’s Republic of China. Mao’s victory surprised both Truman and Stalin both of whom had expected the Nationalists to win.
Mao was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. He was more than ready to defer to Stalin as the head of the international communist movement. “The new China,” he announced in June, 1949, “must ally with the Soviet Union and with the proletariat and broad masses of the people in all other countries and form an international united front. We must lean to one side.”
This “lean to one side” comment fed fears within the United States that international communism was a monolithic movement directed from Moscow. Perhaps Stalin had intended the Chinese communist victory all along as his own “second front” in the Cold War, in the event his strategy in Europe did not work out.
Stalin fed these fears by stating: There should be some division of labor between us. The Soviet Union cannot… have the same influence in Asia as China is in a position to do… By the same token, China cannot have the same influence as the Soviet Union has in Europe. So, for the interests of the international revolution…. You may take more responsibility in working in the East… and we will take more responsibility in the West. In a word, that is our unshirkable duty.”
Mao agreed, he travelled to Moscow at the end of 1949 and stayed two months. The visit produced a Sino-Soviet Treaty in which the two communist states pledged to come to the assistance of the other in case of attack.

Espionage and the Outbreak of War in Asia

With Mao in Moscow and Truman giving the okay to “Super” two major espionage cases broke, on in the USA with Alger Hiss convicted of perjury for having denied being a Soviet agent during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and one in Britain where German scientist Klaus Fuchs confessed to having spied for Russia while working on the Manhattan Project.
Espionage had made it possible for the Soviets to go nuclear in 1949 rather than years later. Perhaps espionage had resulted in the loss of China as well. Senator Joseph McCarthy raised the question of how these disasters had befallen the United States and leveled an accusing finger at the “traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer – the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government that we can give.”
Treason in high places seemed implausible until, on June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea.
Stalin had become convinced that a second front was now feasible in East Asia and that it could be created by proxies thus minimizing the risk to the Soviet Union. He believed the Americans would not respond.
The US had done nothing to save the Chinese Nationalists and in January, 1950 Secretary of State Acheson had publicly announced that the American defensive perimeter did not extend to South Korea.
Stalin spoke with Mao Zedong concerning a copy of the National Security Council statement his spies had provided. He then told the North Korean dictator Kim il Sung “according to information coming from the US the prevailing mood is not to interfere.”
Kim in turn assured Stalin that the attack will be swift and the war will be won in three days. Stalin’s green light to Kim Il-sung was part of the larger strategy for seizing opportunities in East Asia that he had discussed with the Chinese.
After endorsing the North Korean attack he also encouraged Ho Chi Minh to intensify the Viet Minh offensive against the French in Indochina. Victories in both locations would maintain the momentum generated by Mao’s victory the previous year.
They would compensate for setbacks the Soviets had encountered in Europe and would counter American efforts to bring Japan within its system of postwar military alliances.
A particular advantage of this strategy was that it would not require direct Soviet involvement: the North Koreans and Viet Minh would take the initiative operating under the pretext of unifying their respective countries.
And the Chinese, still eager to win Stalin’s approval were more than willing to provide backup support if needed.

The American Response

The unexpected attack on South Korea was almost as great a shock as Pearl Harbor had been nine years earlier. Its consequences for Washington’s strategy were at least as profound. The fact that South Korea had been invaded so blatantly across the 38thParallel sanctioned by the United Nations appeared to challenge the entire structure of postwar collective security.
It had been just this sort of thing that had led to the collapse of international order in the 1930s and to the subsequent outbreak of WWII. Truman repeatedly told his advisors, “We cannot let the U.N down.” It took his administration only hours to decide that the US would come to the defense of South Korea and that it would do so not just on its own authority but under that of the UN as well.
The US was able to do so for two reasons: It had an army stationed in Japan and the Soviets were boycotting the UN Security Council as a protest against the organization’s refusal to seat the Chinese communists.
With U.N approval, then, the international community mobilized within days to counter this new threat to international security, yet another response Moscow had not anticipated.

Summation of the Cold War 1945-1953

Victory in WWII did not bring security to the victors. Neither the US, nor Great Britain, nor the Soviet Union at the end of 1950 could regard the lives and treasure they had expended in defeating Germany and Japan as having made them safer. The members of the Grand Alliance were now Cold War adversaries.
Ideologies were as polarizing as they had been before the war, fears of surprise attack continued to haunt military establishments in Washington, London and Moscow. A contest that had begun over the fate of postwar Europe had now spread to Asia.
Stalin’s dictatorship remained as harsh as it had always been but with the onset of McCarthyism in the US and with irrefutable evidence that espionage had taken place on both sides of the Atlantic, it was not at all clear that the western democracies could retain their tolerance for dissent and the respect for civil liberties that distinguished them from the dictators whether of the fascist or communist variety.
“The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down. If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.” (George Kennan, Speech, National War College, 1947)
The postwar international order was characterized by fear which helps explain the popularity of George Orwell’s 1984 when it appeared in 1949 and became an instant literary triumph.
By 1950 Kennan was fearful there was no future for man. Atomic and hydrogen bombs reach “backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes. They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take into account the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other’s errors and mistakes. They imply the admission that man not only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy.”

NAME:______PER:_____DATE:______

#2 – Fear Returns

In March, 1947 what countries did Truman decide to give military and economic assistance?

What did the European Recovery Plan become known as?

The Marshall Plan was shaped on the premise that Europe was at risk of ?

What did the US believe was the gravest threat to Western Europe post-war?
How did Stalin respond to the Marshall Plan?
In 1948, what Eastern European country had the only democratic government?
When Stalin blockaded Berlin, what was the response of the US & Great Britain?
What convinced Europe countries that they needed military protection?
What military treaty was signed?
When did the Soviets test a nuclear weapon?
Where did the second expansion of the cold war occur?
What was the result of Mao’s 2-month visit to Moscow in 1949?
What was the espionage case in the US?
What was the espionage case in Great Britain?
Stalin endorsed attacks in two Asian countries. What were these countries?
What was compared to the collapse of international order in the 1930s?
What was the characterization of post-war international order?