The Second World War ended 65 years ago with the triumph of the Grand Alliance (principally the United States, the USSR, Britain, China, and France) over the forces of fascism and militarism. It was the hope of millions of people around the world that the end of World War II would usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Alas, it was not to be.
Instead, the two major powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – came into ideological and economic conflict in what we know as the Cold War. For nearly five decades the struggle between the two superpowers dominated world history. It was only with the dissolution of socialist states of Eastern Europe followed by the collapse of the USSR, that the Cold War came to an end.
During that span of time, the United States government, led by both Democratic and Republican presidents, followed a policy of confrontation that had profound effects both at home and abroad. While there were ebbs and flows in the dynamic of Washington’s policies, there was an overriding consistency that predominated. With the end of the Cold War, one could have expected a dramatic shift in the direction of our government’s relations with other countries, but that was not to be. To be sure, there were adjustments and some revisions in its thrust, but nothing of significance.
It is the main thesis of this paper that the consistency of United States foreign policy has led to its ossification, that is, it has not adapted to changing times. The world that exists at the outset of the second decade of the 21st century is a very different place than that which existed at the midpoint of the 20th. This has created serious problems both at home for American society and abroad for all of humanity.
This analysis of United States policy during the Cold War will not repeat the chronology of that conflict or of the events in the period since its demise. What we will look at are basic concepts that came to characterize US-USSR relations and have persisted into the present. The discussion will conclude with a survey of how those concepts affected domestic policy and their ramifications internationally.
To provide a more accurate assessment of US Cold War policies, one must mention that the picture has not been completely static and unchanging. There have been some major changes in our government’s policies over the decades, beyond the adjustments necessitated by the end of the socialist system in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The most profound development was the shift in US policy toward China. After two decades of heightened tensions and ideological confrontation, the United States recognized the People’s Republic, and has developed a much more normal state to state relationship with it.
Other adjustments to Washington’s international relations took place in Iran, where a US client state was replaced by a theocratic dictatorship; South Africa, where the national liberation movement – embodied by an alliance of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions – overthrew the white supremacist apartheid government; and Latin America, where a number of leftists governments have come to power in the last decade, most notably in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.
One might assume that it was inevitable that conflict would arise between the two most powerful erstwhile allies, the centers of two diametrically opposed ideologies. It is important to look at the history of the immediate post-World War II period, however, to see that the rise of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union did not have to happen. The ideological and political language and thought patterns that came to define the Cold War era (and after) did not yet exist. In the years just after the end of hostilities there were large sections of the US population that hoped for and struggled to build peace and ensure a continuation of the alliance between Washington and Moscow that had won the war. The high point of that movement was the Progressive Party campaign of Henry A. Wallace for president in 1948, which received over one million votes.
Unfortunately, such expectations were not to be. The forces of imperialism – the large corporations, the military, conservative politicians, and others – were to triumph and spend untold trillions of dollars and sacrifice millions of lives to the altar of “fighting communism.”
Within two years of the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman and his Republican opponents were able to fashion what Senator Arthur Vandenberg called a “bipartisan” foreign policy. In contrast to earlier presidential foreign policy initiatives which often were accompanied by strong political opposition, the two major political parties agreed on the basic assumptions in US relations with foreign countries. To that end, the United States undertook a major revision of its international policies and the government structure to carry it out.
A significant thread that has been woven through the Cold War and beyond has been the United States policy of foreign military aid and/or intervention. From the earliest days of the post-war era to the present day, this idea has been, in many ways, the bedrock upon which the structure of international relations has been built. In 1946, Clark Clifford, a presidential assistant recommend that the Congress “support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced by the USSR.” The first test of that idea, which came to known as the Truman Doctrine was in Greece and Turkey, where the United States would send $400 million dollars in aid to fight “communist” insurgents. In the two decades that followed Washington committed troops to Korea, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Southeast Asia. After the its defeat in Indochina, US presidents sent troops to Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and these are just the major efforts. Since the 1990s, the rationale turned from “fighting communism” to “fighting terrorism.”
While the military carried out large-scale overt actions, the United States carried on a second, secret strategy of subversion, deceit, and destruction though the apparatus set up when Mr. Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, which replaced the War Department with the Department of Defense, and established the Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA) as a tool to maintain foreign compliance with Washington’s international objectives. One can only describe the role of the CIA over the past sixty years as “sordid.” Few countries have escaped its influence. The agency has undertaken a litany of actions that include overthrowing legitimately elected governments, assassinating national leaders, and covert assistance to groups that range from the “Contras” in Nicaragua to the mujahadeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Though the Cold War ended nearly two decades ago, the role of the intelligence community in Iraq and Afghanistan is well-known.
To this day little is known about the CIA’s activities outside Congress and the White House. The agency’s budget is never published and any debates or hearings of substance are held behind closed doors.
One of the first building blocks of the dawning Cold War came in 1949 when the United States and eleven other nations established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Its purpose was to defend Western Europe from a perceived Soviet attack. United States troops, which remained in Europe after the end of World War II to occupy the defeated fascist states, now had a reason to remain there indefinitely. Five years later, in 1954, the Soviet Union and its allies formed the Warsaw Pact. For 40 years the two sides maintained heightened alert, eyeball to eyeball.
The creation of NATO was but one of several regional military alliances set up to ring the socialist world. There was one, CENTO, in the Middle East; another, SEATO, in southeast Asia, and one among the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. These alliances eventually dissolved or became insignificant.
NATO, however, perseveres. Even though the reason for the alliance’s creation (the “Soviet threat”) disappeared with the end of the Soviet Union, NATO did not disappear. Instead the alliance, led by Washington underwent an expansion from twelve to 28 members, most of whom are eastern European. In the last two decades NATO was the centerpiece of military actions in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Far from disappearing, NATO welcomes any nation that agrees to “contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.” No one explains where the threat to the security to the region comes from.
Afghanistan and Central Asia are, compared to other regions of the world, relatively new areas of interest to the United States. Other trouble spots have remained areas of contention for decades, of which Korea, Israel and the Middle East, and Cuba are the most prominent. In each case it is as if these crisis areas flared up, waxed hot for a period of time, then seemed frozen in amber.
The Korean Peninsula has been an area of contention since the outbreak of hostilities in 1950. After a bloody three year conflict which took nearly 40,000 United States military lives, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Korean lives on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, there has remained an uneasy truce. Every so often there are military events between the two sides that escalate tensions. The recent shelling of a South Korean island by the North is but the latest episode.
Today, over 60 years since the beginning of the Korean War, the United States maintains a military force of 30,000 personnel in the southern part of the peninsula. Relations between the two sides remain poor, and attempts in the 1990s to normalize intra-Korean communication and transportation, foster family reunions, and expand other activities were later scuttled by the George W. Bush administration.
On the other side of Asia, relations between Israel and its neighbors, the Palestinians foremost, remain on hair-trigger alert. The Israeli government has repeatedly used force and intimidation to carry out its policies.
From the earliest days after World War II, when Jewish people who had survived the Holocaust sought refuge in Palestine to the current day, the region has been seen endless bloodshed and destruction. When in 1947 the United Nations decided to divide Palestine into Palestinian and Jewish states, the nascent Israeli government worked to prevent the Arab population from forming its own government. Harry Truman recognized Israel as a country in 1948 and Washington became Israel’s staunchest ally. “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” according to Jeremy M. Sharp, a specialist in Middle East Affairs at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. That was particularly true in the years after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel began its occupation of Arab territory. In 2008 the United States provided Israel with $2.4 billion in aid out of a total foreign aid budget of $26 billion.
Over the years there have been advances toward peace in the Middle East: the Camp David Accords in 1978, the Oslo Accords in 1993, and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. Yet these milestones have been the first steps in what should be a comprehensive peace agreement. Little of substance has been achieved in the last two decades. The United States has been, and continues to be, Israel’s main ally. No matter what the reason Washington gave for its support: 1) during the Cold War, US foreign policy leaders said that Israel was an outpost of democracy in a region dominated by dictatorships and Soviet influence; or 2) in recent years that Israel is a bulwark against “radical Islamic terrorism,” the United States continues to aid Israel. Undeterred by the stalemate, the forces of peace – be they Arab, Israeli, or others – struggle to end Israeli policies of death and destruction. As we enter the second decade of the twenty first century, one can predict when peace in the Middle East will break out.
Closer to home, there remains the intractable problems of US-Cuban relations, which have remained frozen for nearly half of a century. From the day Fidel Castro led his revolutionary army into Havana on New Years Day 1959 up to the present, the United States government has followed a policy aimed at the overthrow of the new people’s government. There followed a series of actions that included the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, to numerous CIA-directed attempts to assassinate Castro. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 and has never resumed them. Shortly thereafter, President Kennedy set up the trade embargo that remains to this day. By 1964 travel to Cuba was banned by the State Department.
For years the United States accused the Cuban government of being an outpost of Soviet communism and training forces designed to overthrow governments in Latin America. Even after the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, US relations with Cuba have changed little. If anything, Congress, through the “Torricelli law,” and the Helms-Burton Act has tightened the screws even further. In recent years relations between the two countries have improved incrementally.
There are other US foreign policy objectives in other parts of the world that have remained basically unchanged for decades. For example, the conflict in Kashmir has never been resolved. Cyprus remains a divided island, and the Democratic Republic of Congo suffers from on-going violence and war.
One special area of outdated policies is the organizational structure of the United Nations as an institution. The UN was created in 1945 as a league of victors of World War II. As such, organs such as the Security Council were set up in a way that gave the five world powers at the time – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China (which was dominated by the Nationalists, who in 1949 were exiled to Taiwan) – veto power over all decisions. For a quarter century those countries dominated the organization. It took until 1971 before the Peoples Republic of China, took its rightful seat at the Council table.
It seems that the Security Council has ignored the major changes in the geo-political map of the world over the last fifty years. Membership on the Council was expanded in the 1960s, but few other changes were made to accommodate the ebbs and flows of world power.
For most of the last half-century countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have demanded that the United Nations, the Security Council in particular, be reformed. Britain and France have undergone a relative decline in their power, while countries such as India, Brazil, among others, have grown enormously in stature. Yet, one would never know that from the way the United Nations is still organized.
The legacy of the Cold War continues to frame the thinking and policies of the United States government in many other ways. These range from the use of subtle catchphrases to the excessively bloated defense budget.
One example, which many people seem to take for granted or do not think about is the number of United States military installations around the world. Accurate figures are hard to find, but according to the Defense Department itself, the United States maintains over 700 bases in over 130 countries. By best estimate over 250,000 military personnel are deployed in these locations, not to mention thousands of local workers and other foreign nationals. The amount of money spent annually on foreign military bases in not clear from the defense budget, but one estimate puts the total over $100 billion dollars.
In Germany and Japan, the countries that lost the Second World War, the United States has maintained a continuous military presence, now more than 65 years long. The number of installations on every continent other than Antarctica has mushroomed over the decades, yet the US government has never explained the need to maintain such a large system.
While maintaining these foreign bases, the United States has been the number one exporter of arms to foreign countries. There is no single figure for the total expenditures that included export of weapons foreign nations, but the anecdotal evidence shows that the policy has ebbed and flowed over time. For example, the total arms sales under various programs between 1950 and 1967 came to $46 billion, an average of under $3 billion a year. During the Carter administration, the numbers decreased from over $9 billion in 1977 to $8 billion two years later, but then more than doubled in 1982 under Reagan to over $20 billion. In the eight years of the Reagan administration, arms sales totaled over $92 billion, an average of more than $11 annually. Clinton oversaw the transfer of more than $46 billion in arms just to the Middle East during his years in the White House. If anything, the sales of weapons expanded dramatically in the new century. One estimate states that the United States has sold over $166 billion between 2002 and 2009, forty percent of the world’s total, or as much combined as the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council.
The rationale for these various aspects of United States foreign policy since World War II is that the United States is the “leader of the free world” (even in 2010 one can still hear this language) and that our country has been “fighting communism” (until the early 1990s) or “fighting terrorism.” The concentration of wealth and power in a hands of a small number of media conglomerates has controlled how the people of the United States hear and learn about the world. Those who differ from the established line of thought are marginalized or denied access to the levers of information.
The largest and most immediate legacy of the Cold War remains the huge defense budget. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the institutionalization of the Cold War, the US government greatly increased spending on the military. For comparison, in the years before World War II (years of United States “isolationism”), the War Department yearly budget varied between $1 and $2.5 billion dollars. By the late 1940s, the yearly Pentagon budget was consistently over $100 billion and within two decades was several hundred billion dollars a year. There were fluctuations, of course, particularly during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. One of the cornerstones of the “Reagan Revolution” was markedly higher defense budgets.
Even in the years after the demise of the Soviet Union, defense budgets have remained high. Carl Cornetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives has stated that the total military spending since 1998 has totaled $6.5 trillion dollars. Estimates for FY 2011 are in the $700 billion range. Cornetta has pointed out that “looking forward, the Obama administration’s 2010 budget plan allocates an average of $545 billion (2010 USD) per year to the DoD base budget for 2011-2017.” In addition, it set aside a “place keeper” sum of $50 billion per year for military operations, recognizing that actual war costs will vary. The Pentagon already is expected to request at least $163 billion for contingency operations in 2011. In other words, if unchecked in the seven years ahead, the US government plans to continue the same level of spending authority on defense that it has in recent decades. Since the end of World War II, one can estimate that the total expenditure for the Pentagon is approximately $21 trillion dollars.
The social impact of this defense spending and of all Cold War policies outlined in this paper is staggering. In the immediate post-war decades the United States was the dominant economic and military power on Earth. The capitalist class undertook an offensive to destroy socialism and overthrow the peoples governments and eliminate the national liberation movements around the world. For nearly thirty years the United States economy was able to balance its military and civilian commitments. But with the ending of the Vietnam War, the rise of competing economies in Europe and Asia, and the dismantling of the US manufacturing base, along side the growth of an increasingly complex global economy, things changed.
Other countries, unburdened by a massive military budget dedicated to worldwide intervention, were able to modernize their economies and meet many of the needs of their people. In areas as diverse as health care, housing, transportation, education, and the environment foreign governments have met the needs of their people better than has the government of the United States. One only has look at our cities, transportation networks, and health care systems to see that our country has slipped from its status as pre-eminent world power and is danger of falling further behind the others.
At a time of serious economic problems, we are burdened with an aging infrastructure, a health care system that underserves millions of people, and an education system that is seemingly alway in crisis. One constantly hears that there is no money to fund these programs or provide assistance to states and municipalities that are overburdened and underfunded. While the lives of working-class Americans deteriorates, Wall Street rakes in the profits, with the total reaching a record $1.66 trillion in the third quarter of 2010. Never in the history of the United States has the gap between rich and poor been wider.
The ultimate answer to the problems created by outdated Cold War style policies is for the US working class to replace capitalism with socialism. But that will not happen soon. A significant step out of the current economic quagmire is for the United States government to look at the world we live in, both at home and abroad, and fundamentally change its foreign policy to reflect new realities. The days of the Cold War are long over.
Increasing numbers of people in our country are demanding new policies. In recent years the movements for social change within the United States have increased their calls for a reduction in military spending and the use of the money saved for domestic purposes. It is crucial to the future of the United States that these movements also speak out and demand an end to outdated foreign policies. The time has come for the United States to pursue a course where we are not the number one country dominating the world, but one country among many that seeks peace and international understanding.
Photo: U.S. Army
