The World Since 1945

The World Since 1945

An International History

Second Edition

P. M. H. Bell and Mark Gilbert

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
 CONTENTS

List of maps
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Prologue: A New Era in International Politics
1 The Second World War and its consequences
2 The beginnings of the post-war world
Part One: The Cold War, 1945–62
3 The antagonists
4 The beginning of the Cold War: From Potsdam to the Marshall
Plan, 1945–7
5 From the Prague coup to the North Atlantic Treaty, 1948–9
6 From Korea to Hungary, 1949–56
7 The Berlin and Cuba crises, 1957–62
Reflection: The Cold War in its early phases
Part Two: Decolonization and Wars of Succession, 1945–62
8 The Middle East, 1945–62
9 Transformation in Asia, 1945–62
10 The new Africa, 1945–62
11 The Afro-Asian movement and non-alignment, 1955–61
12 Latin America in the world, 1945–73
Reflection: The ‘Third World’
Part Three: Détente Between the Superpowers, 1963–80
13 Cold War and détente, 1963–9
14 The high tide of détente, 1969–75
15 The end of détente, 1976–80
Reflection: The essence of détente
Part Four: The Changing World Order, 1960s–1990s
16 The Arab–Israeli conflict, 1963–82
17 The geopolitics of oil, 1973–91
18 The rise of Asia, c.1962–1990s
19 Turmoil in Africa, c.1962–1990s
20 Latin America in world affairs, 1970s–1990s
Reflection: Where is Europe?
Part Five: The Ending of the Cold War
21 Renewed Cold War, 1980–5
22 Gorbachev and Reagan, 1985–8
23 Three years that shook the world, 1989–91
Reflection: The Cold War in retrospect
Part Six: After the Cold War
24 Global issues
25 Nationalism, political conflict and war in Europe
26 The wounded hegemon
27 Democracy and human rights
Guide to further reading
Index
 LIST OF MAPS

1 The world in 1945

2 Poland at the end of the Second World War
3 North Africa and the Middle East
4 Central Europe and the Iron Curtain
5 Korea, to illustrate the Korean War
6 Palestine and Israel
7 China and her neighbours
8 South-East Asia
9 Africa, showing dates of independence (insets: Chad; Western Sahara)
10 The Indian subcontinent
11 Latin America
12 The Caribbean
13 Freedom in the world 2015
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 A symbolic moment: American and Soviet Soldiers meet on the River Elbe,
27 April 1945. There is already a crack between them – to become the great
rift of the Cold War (Getty Images. Credit: Allan Jackson)
2 On the grounds of the Livadia Palace, Yalta, during the Three-Power
Conference: the British wartime prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill; the
thirty-second president of the United States of America, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt; and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin (Getty Images. Credit:
Keystone)
3 Crises point in the Cold War: an American supply plane lands in West
Berlin during the Soviet Blockade of 1948–9. The city was supplied by air;
the Soviets buzzed American aircraft but did no more. The Cold War
remained cold (Getty Images. Credit: Walter Sanders)
4 Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, addresses
the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states in April 1955 (Getty Images.
Credit: Keystone-France)
5 US president Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev seated in
the White House with a portrait of George Washington in the background
(Getty Images. Credit: Universal History Archive)
6 A different world takes shape outside the Cold War: traditional dress and
modern weapons as Iranian women take part in the Islamic revolution that
overthrew the shah, January 1979. A force at once old and new entered world
politics (Getty Images. Credit: Keystone)
7 Two men, two flags, one hope: an electric moment as Gorbachev and
Reagan meet at Geneva, November 1985. The Cold War was coming to an
end (Getty Images. Credit: Dirck Halstead)
8 The skyline of a central business district in Beijing (Getty Images. Credit:
Wang Zhao)
9 The Complexo do Alemao pacified community, or ‘favela’ in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil (Getty Images. Credit: Mario Tama)
10 Russian president Vladimir Putin (Getty Images. Credit: Sasha Mordovets)
11 Notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden addresses a news conference in
Afghanistan in 1998 (Getty Images)
12 British prime minister Tony Blair and US president George W. Bush talk
outside the Oval Office at the White House (Getty Images. Credit: Jim
Watson)
13 State president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela (Getty Images. Credit:
Thomas Imo)
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Philip Bell would like to thank Mark Gilbert for having drawn the threads of the
narrative together in such a thoughtful way; Mark Gilbert is grateful to Philip
Bell for having involved him in the project at all. Almost three decades ago, in
June 1990, Philip Bell examined Mark Gilbert’s PhD with judicious care, good
humour and great insight. He has been a friend and inspiration ever since.
Three research assistants helped in the final stages of the book’s preparation.
Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni helped plan out the chapters that constitute Part 6;
Catherine Simon collated and inserted a lengthy list of changes approved by
Philip Bell to the first edition; Kevin Matthees found sources, checked facts
tirelessly, corrected stylistic errors, made very useful suggestions, provided
precise summaries of complicated events and read every word of the manuscript.
Without his help in the spring of 2016 this book would undoubtedly have taken
much longer to conclude.
All three of these research assistants recently studied at SAIS Europe, the
Bologna Centre of the School for Advanced International Studies of the Johns
Hopkins University. For over sixty years, this remarkable institution has been a
place where students from all over the world have met to study international
relations. Our particular thanks go to Michael Plummer, director of the Centre
since September 2014.
We would like to record our gratitude to Bloomsbury for having been so
patient, courteous and professional. Particular thanks go to our editors, Claire
Lipscomb and Emma Goode, and to Ian Buck and Grishma Fredric for their
flexibility and help in the production process.
PMHB
MFG
21 August 2016
 Introduction

This book presents a compact account and analysis of international affairs

between 1945 and 2016 – from the end of the Second World War to the travails
of the new millennium. It deals with international history in all its various
aspects – relations between governments, the creation of new states through
decolonization, the influence of international organizations, the impact of war
and economic forces. The significance of such topics and the fascination there is
for them need little emphasis. The world was split by the Cold War, and at the
same time transformed by the emergence of new states in Asia and Africa. Since
the 1990s, global politics has been affected by the accelerating shifts in
population and economic activity away from the developed world and towards
the giant societies of what were once called the ‘Third World’ – the rapidly
developing countries of Asia, Latin America and, increasingly, Africa. In three
decades of rapid economic growth, China has become a power second only to
the United States.
Everyone who has lived through these changes has been affected by them, and
succeeding generations will also feel their effects. To understand them helps us
to make sense of the world in which we live.
The goal of this volume, in fact, is to present a broad overview of the changes
that have occurred in the international system of states in the last seventy years.
Of course, to deal with so vast a subject in a single volume (even a rather long
one) requires a good deal of simplification, with its consequent dangers. Anyone
familiar with the detail and depth of historical research knows that simplification
can distort a complicated reality. Yet simplification also has its advantages in
opening up any subject. Winston Churchill sometimes urged his military
advisers not to start by expounding all the difficulties involved in a proposed
operation – the difficulties, he said, would speedily argue for themselves.
Similarly, in any general history, it is a good plan to start by simplifying, and we
can be sure that the complexities will argue for themselves. To start with the
complexities may well mean getting lost straight away! In this book, therefore,
complicated matters are dealt with as straightforwardly as possible. Readers will
find ample means to pursue them further, starting with the suggestions for
further reading at the end of the book.
The structure of the book may need a few words of explanation. After a
prologue on the Second World War, which sets the scene for much of what
follows, the main body of the work is divided into six sections, which are both
thematic and chronological in organization. Part One deals with the Cold War,
from its origins to the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. Part Two deals with
international relations as they affected the rest of the world in approximately the
same period (although the chapter on Latin America concludes with the 1973
coup in Chile). This section, obviously, is much concerned with European
decolonization from Asia and Africa and its significance for global affairs. Part
Three is again concerned with the Cold War, but this time we concentrate on the
phenomenon of détente and discuss, chronologically, the years from 1963 to the
end of the Carter presidency in the autumn of 1980. Part Four is once again a
global survey: it contains chapters on key developments in Asia, Africa and
Latin America, and two chapters (on the Arab–Israeli question and the
‘geopolitics of oil’) that have the Middle East as their primary subject matter.
Part Five deals with the high politics of the end of the Cold War. Part Six strives,
in four thematic chapters, to give an impression of key developments in
international affairs since the end of the Cold War. A chapter on ‘global issues’
(demographics, economic development, migration, global warming, international
trade) is followed by a chapter on the revival of nationalism in post-Cold War
Eurasia. The next chapter, ‘The wounded hegemon’, deals with the role of the
United States in world politics since the end of the Cold War. The final chapter
in this section looks at democracy and human rights in the world since the
1990s.
At the end of each section we have paused for a ‘reflection’ – a short essay on
some aspect of the section in question. At times, these ‘reflections’ act as
conclusions, drawing together the threads present in the substantive chapters
preceding them; at other times, they introduce new material in order to make a
general point.
Organizing the book in this way necessarily led to some overlap, but we have
striven to keep this to a minimum, and, in any case, each part may be read
separately if need be.
Two things perhaps need to be said about the book’s treatment of its subject
matter. First, the book is in many ways traditionalist in its approach towards
international affairs. It deals primarily with wars, treaties, international
organizations, power politics, arms races, states and the actions of statesmen
(and a handful of stateswomen). Nor does it apologize for this. To paraphrase
one of Isaiah Berlin’s favourite remarks, the world is what it is, not something
else. Second, and despite the fact that both authors are scholars of the
international history of modern Europe, the book is genuinely global in scope
and, to this extent, is anything but traditional. Precisely because the book deals
with the traditional questions of international history, its focus is not
‘Eurocentric’ or even ‘Atlantocentric’. The Cold War was a global conflict, and
most of the post-war world’s distinctive events – its great wars, but also its most
important ideological and political shifts – took place in Asia, in Africa and in
the Middle East. We have tried to capture what these events meant for the
societies affected by them and to analyse their broader significance for
international politics. We may not have succeeded, but the attempt was sincerely
made.
The great Polish-British historian Lewis Namier urged the general historian –
and here we return to the theme of simplification – to ‘discover and set forth, to
single out and stress that which is the nature of the thing, and not to reproduce
indiscriminately all that meets the eye’.1 We think that the international politics
of the last seventy years has been characterized by the Cold War and by the shift
in the global power from the North and West of the world to the East and South.
These developments are the ‘nature of the thing’. We do not pretend that this
represents an insight of any great originality, but it is one that has the advantage
of being true. General histories are crafted upon (or perhaps around) such truths.
Reference notes are used mainly to acknowledge the sources for quotations and
statistics; every now and then we have made a bibliographical recommendation
in an endnote. We have all but abstained from citing our own previous works,
which makes this book very traditional indeed.
P. M. H. BELL
MARK GILBERT
Kew and Trento, August 2016

Note
1 Lewis Namier, ‘History and Political Culture’, in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present,
ed. Fritz Stern (London, 1970), p. 379.
 PROLOGUE

A New Era in International Politics

PHOTO 1 A symbolic moment: American and Soviet Soldiers meet on the River Elbe, 27 April 1945.
There is already a crack between them – to become the great rift of the Cold War (Getty Images. Credit:
Allan Jackson).
 1

The Second World War and its

consequences

The Second World War in Europe and the Pacific – The politics of the Grand
Alliance – The Yalta Conference – Europe in ruins – The war and the Western
European empires – Long-term consequences of the war.

The Second World War cast a long shadow, and what was for a long time called
‘the post-war world’ can still only be understood in the context of the Second
World War and its consequences.

The war in Europe

The war in Europe opened with a series of overwhelming German victories.
First, in September and October 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union together
crushed the Polish Army and partitioned Poland between them. Then, from April
to June 1940, the Germans invaded Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and
France and drove the British Expeditionary Force back across the Channel,
establishing a predominance over Western Europe which was to last for a further
four years. On 22 June 1941 – one of the most fateful dates in modern history –
Germany invaded the Soviet Union and in sweeping victories came to within 20
miles of Moscow before their advance was checked. For a time, the existing
European state system was completely demolished, and it seemed unlikely that it
could ever be put together again.
In the wake of these victories, Nazi Germany embarked on ‘the final solution
of the Jewish problem’; that is to say the annihilation of the Jewish population of
German-occupied Europe.1 This massacre of European Jews, and the appalling
horror of the camps into which they were concentrated, gave a new and
desperate resolve to the Zionist movement in its mission to establish a Jewish
state in Palestine; it also produced an immense wave of sympathy for this cause
among Western governments and public opinion. In this way, the Holocaust of
Jewish lives and the revulsion against it created the final impulse to set up the
state of Israel in 1948, from which there arose the long and bitter conflict
between Israel and the Arabs which persists to this day.
The tide of German victories, which had swept all before it in 1939–42, began
to ebb at the end of 1942. On the Eastern front, the Soviet triumph at Stalingrad
(from August 1942 to February 1943) was a psychological as well as military
victory. The Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 was another decisive turning
point, marking the end of the German drive towards Cairo. Behind the scenes,
the battle of industrial production shifted conclusively in favour of the Allies.
For example, in 1942, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union together
produced over 100,000 aircraft against Germany’s 15,000 – a prodigious
disproportion which desperate German efforts could not reverse.2 It is true that
even the possession of overwhelming material strength does not in itself
guarantee victory, as the Americans were to find out in the Vietnam War in the
1970s; but in the Second World War, the weight of industrial production applied
with ruthless determination proved decisive.
In the final stages of the war, between 1943 and 1945, the Soviets pursued their
westward drive with relentless perseverance, occupying large areas of Central
and Eastern Europe, including the great capital cities of Budapest, Vienna,
Prague, Warsaw and Berlin. Through these tremendous victories the Soviet
Union secured a military grip on half of Europe; and every bit as important
enjoyed an unrivalled prestige which extended beyond the Soviet armies to the
regime that had created them. It was after all the Red Army which fought all the
way to Berlin, and it was the Red Flag which was hoisted over the Reichstag
building. Victory conferred a powerful aura upon the Soviet system and upon
Joseph Stalin as its leader.
At the same time, the British and Americans closed in upon Germany from the
south and west, fighting their way up Italy and winning the decisive Battle of
Normandy in June–July 1944. They advanced into Germany, to within 50 miles
from Berlin, and met Soviet troops at Torgau on the River Elbe on 25 April
1945, shaking hands in genuine greeting as well as for the benefit of newsreel
cameramen and press photographers.
 At that point, the Soviet Union and the United States had emerged as the
principal victors of the war in Europe. It is true that Britain also shared the glory
of victory, having fought the whole war from first to last: until the summer of
1944 the British and Commonwealth armies had more troops in action in Europe
than the Americans. But after that the balance of power shifted decisively
towards the Americans; and in any case the economic and industrial strength of
the United States had long been predominant.
The victorious Allied armies met in the middle of a ruined continent. Parts of
the Soviet Union and Poland had been fought over no less than four times, as the
conflict swung to and fro. German cities had been laid waste by aerial
bombardment as well as by land campaigns. Casualties among all countries were
enormous. In Germany, war-related deaths were estimated at about 6,500,000,
with another 370,000 to be added for Austria, which was part of Germany during
the war. For the Soviet Union, a frequently cited figure for war dead was about
20 million, but other (and more reliable) estimates were as high as 25 or even 27
million. Polish war dead amounted to the formidable total of some 6 million, of
whom only about one-tenth were killed in action. French losses were about
600,000 and British 350,000.3
The survivors of this appalling conflict held on as best they could among the
wreckage of the continent. Industrial production was small, and in some cases
non-existent. Agriculture could not feed the people, and food rations, even when
they existed, were disastrously low. Most notoriously, the German-occupied
Netherlands were in a state of famine in the last winter of the war. The situation
was made disastrously worse by immense movements of people. Somewhere
between 10 and 12 million Germans fled or were driven from lands where they
or their families had sometimes lived for generations. To the east of the new
Polish border, along the Oder–Neisse Line and in the reconstituted
Czechoslovakia, only small German-speaking populations remained.4
It was across this devastated and chaotic continent that the two great victorious
powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, met in April 1945. Both these
states were partly but not fully European in their history and culture, but they
would now dominate European affairs. It remained to be seen what they would
make of the extraordinary state of affairs.

The war in the Pacific and East Asia

On the other side of the world, the war in the Pacific Ocean and East Asia
followed a pattern similar to that in Europe. The conflict began with a phase of
Japanese victories and conquest. Between 1937 and 1939 the Japanese occupied
north-east China, together with the main ports in the rest of the country, though
without actually finishing off the Chinese government and its armies. In 1939–
41 Japan occupied French Indo-China, without having to fire a shot. Then in
December 1941 and early 1942 they struck a series of devastating blows. They
almost destroyed the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December
1941. They captured Singapore from the British in February 1942, and
conquered the Dutch East Indies in March and April. They drove the British out
of Burma and the Americans out of the Philippines. The psychological effects of
these victories were even more far-reaching than the material. The European and
American control over South-East Asia had long depended on prestige and
reputation. When the Japanese destroyed prestige, it could not be fully restored.
The Japanese slogan was ‘Asia for the Asians’. It was true that in practice some
Asians were more equal than others, but in the long run this mattered little, and
the Japanese successes had effects which could not be undone.
The Japanese strategic aim was to secure a defensive perimeter far from their
home islands, in the firm belief that their enemies would be unable to recover
their lost territories. Not least, the Japanese were convinced that the Americans
would not accept the heavy casualties which would be involved in a long war. In
the event these assumptions proved ill-founded. The Americans had an immense
advantage, in that their war production far outstripped that of Japan. As early as
1942 the Americans manufactured nearly 48,000 aircraft and 1,854 major
warships, as against 9,000 aircraft and 68 warships for Japan. In 1944, American
production was over 96,000 aircraft and 2,247 warships, against 28,000 planes
and 248 warships by Japan.5 It was of course true that the Americans were
facing two major opponents (Germany as well as Japan), but their margin of
superiority was amply sufficient to fight two wars.
With these immense resources at their disposal, the Americans carried out two
vast offensive operations: one northward from Australia to the Philippines; and
the other westward across the Pacific towards the Japanese home islands. In this
latter offensive, the Americans fought some of the fiercest battles of the war:
Iwo Jima (from February to March 1945) and Okinawa (from April to June
1945). The capture of Okinawa alone (an island only 60 miles long) took eighty-
two days and cost 12,500 lives. The Japanese for their part committed 77,000
troops, of whom only 7,400 survived.6 These figures made the prospect of an
invasion of Japan a formidable proposition.
MAP 1 The world in 1945.

The Americans received much support in these campaigns. Australia played a

large part. The British recovered Burma, and sent a large fleet to the Pacific.
China fought a long war from 1937 to 1945, suffering heavy losses and tying
down large Japanese forces. In August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on
Japan and invaded Manchuria, striking a blow which was as much moral as
material, because it destroyed the hopes the Japanese placed on Soviet neutrality.
But even allowing full measure to all these allies, the major victor in the Pacific
War was the United States. American naval power controlled the seas, and US
submarines put a stranglehold on Japanese seaborne traffic. Amphibious
operations captured the island bases which allowed American bombers to attack
Japanese cities almost at will, causing severe damage and heavy loss of life.
Finally, American aircraft dropped two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima (6 August
1945) and Nagasaki (9 August), which were themselves largely the achievement
of American efforts. At the end of the war, it was an American general, Douglas
MacArthur, who accepted the Japanese surrender, and it was the United States
which was the principal occupying power.
 In this way, the Japanese victories of 1941–2 destroyed the authority of the
colonial powers in South-East Asia, and then the American victories of 1943–5
established American predominance in the whole of the Pacific Ocean. A whole
new pattern of power in the Pacific took shape.

The politics of the Grand Alliance

The ‘Grand Alliance’ was Churchill’s name for the coalition between Britain, the
United States and the Soviet Union which fought and won the war against
Germany, Italy and Japan. It was an uneasy and difficult alliance, but it worked
well enough to achieve its major objective, which was victory; and also to
establish a framework for the post-war world. The ‘Big Three’ – Roosevelt,
Stalin and Churchill – set the stage for international relations, and require our
attention.
President Roosevelt represented a puzzling mixture of idealism and ruthless
power politics. He revived a cause professed by Woodrow Wilson in the First
World War, and proposed a new international organization (the United Nations).
Like Wilson, he was a staunch advocate of the right of peoples to choose their
own government. But at the same time he set out to buy the entry of the Soviet
Union into the war against Japan by paying Stalin in the hard coin of territorial
gains, without reference to the wishes of the peoples concerned. The mixture
could perhaps not have stood up to open scrutiny by the press or Congress, but in
the secrecy of wartime it achieved the president’s aims.
Stalin too had different aspects to his policies. He worked primarily in terms of
territory. In December 1941, when the German armies were within a few miles
of Moscow, Stalin calmly presented Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary,
with a list of Soviet territorial requirements in Eastern Europe when the war was
over. These amounted to nothing less than the Soviet frontiers of June 1941,
including the Soviet annexations of the Baltic states and a large part of pre-war
Poland. Later in the war, at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin
explicitly stated that he intended to recover territory lost by Tsarist Russia in the
Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905; and with the assistance of Roosevelt,
that is what he achieved. In Stalin’s conduct of diplomacy, these territorial
ambitions went alongside ideological aims, each reinforcing the other. In April
1945 Stalin explained to Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav communist leader: ‘This
war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own
social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to
do so. It cannot be otherwise.’7 This remark had the virtues of simplicity and
accuracy, as was demonstrated at the end of the war, when the communist
system – political, social and economic – followed in the baggage-train of the
Red Army.
Churchill, the British prime minister, was in some respects very much a man of
the Victorian era, an old-fashioned imperialist who had served as a regular
solider in India and fought at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. He made no
secret of his views, declaring in a public speech in 1942: ‘I have not become the
King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British
Empire.’8 These sentiments were completely opposed to those of Roosevelt, who
was firmly anti-imperialist – though his anti-imperialism was selective and did
not apply, for example, to the American spheres of influence in the Caribbean
and Central America. Stalin, for his part, was not perturbed by Churchill’s
imperialism and found no difficulty in reaching an agreement with the prime
minister on spheres of influence in the Balkans – the so-called ‘percentages
agreement’ concluded in Moscow in October 1944. The two hard-headed realists
understood one another well enough, even though one was a conservative and
the other a communist.
After the war, and in the perspectives created by the Cold War, it was natural
for politicians and historians to see the politics of the Grand Alliance as a two-
sided affair, with the Americans and the British lined together against the Soviet
Union. This was a mistaken view. In fact, relations between the Big Three and
their respective countries took the shape of a cat’s cradle of criss-cross lines,
sometimes bringing two of the three allies together against the third, and more
often linking all three together in the pursuit of victory. This common interest
was still strong when the Big Three met in conference at Yalta, a former holiday
resort in the Crimea, in February 1945.

The Yalta Conference, 4–11 February 1945

Myths cling to the Yalta Conference like barnacles to a wreck. One of the most
powerful and long-lived myths is that at Yalta the Big Three agreed to partition
Europe, or even the world. A musical play, staged at Zagreb in the early 1970s
and entitled Yalta! Yalta!, opened with the words: ‘In February 1945 the leaders
of the three great powers met at Yalta to divide the world.’9 A musical may be
allowed a dash of fiction; but the same idea may be found in serious
interpretations of the conference. It is almost in vain that historians have pointed
out that Yalta divided neither Europe nor the world; but it is still worth asking
what actually happened there.
The first point to be recalled about Yalta was obvious at the time, but often
forgotten since: when the conference met, the war was far from over. The
German armies were fighting hard, and Hitler still hoped that the ‘unnatural
coalition’ ranged against him would break up. In the Pacific theatre, Japan held
vast territories, and the Japanese forces were if anything even harder to defeat
than the Germans. The allies who met at Yalta could not afford to relax their
military efforts, or to allow cracks to develop in their political unity.
Always alert to this military situation, the Big Three approached the great
issues of the conference with a determination to succeed. These issues were: (1)
To reach an agreement on the framework of a new world organization, the
United Nations; (2) to work out a policy towards Germany, notably on
occupation zones and reparation payments; (3) to tackle the Polish question; and
(4) to decide whether, and on what terms, the Soviet Union would enter the war
against Japan – which was by no means certain.

PHOTO 2 On the grounds of the Livadia Palace, Yalta, during the Three-Power Conference: the British
wartime prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill; the thirty-second president of the United States of America,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin (Getty Images. Credit: Keystone).

Agreement on the main lines of the United Nations Organization (UN) was of
crucial importance to President Roosevelt, who saw this as the key to the whole
post-war settlement. The main problems still outstanding were: the question of
what states were to be members of the UN and the establishment of a system of
voting in the Security Council, which was to be the main directing body in the
new organization. As to membership, the United States had proposed to
nominate the original signatories of the declaration on the UN in 1942, plus eight
others, of which six were in Latin America, and assumed (rightly or wrongly) to
be under American influence. Moscow had countered this gambit by proposing
membership for the Soviet Union, plus all fifteen of the individual Soviet
republics, which were in theory independent states but in practice under the
control of Moscow. Agreement on this potentially difficult issue came at an early
stage at the Yalta Conference, when Molotov, the foreign minister, who often
acted as Stalin’s ‘Mr. No’, declared unexpectedly that the Soviet request for
sixteen members was to be reduced to three – the Soviet Union, Ukraine and
Belorussia. On the system of voting in the Security Council, the Soviet Union
agreed that on matters of procedure the permanent members of the Council (the
United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, China and France) should not exercise a
power of veto; but on matters requiring action the permanent members should
possess a veto, and hence be entitled to prevent any action if they so wished. On
both these matters, therefore, the Soviet Union readily agreed to arrangements
that Roosevelt favoured. Stalin for his part gave up nothing of any importance to
the Soviet Union, and the conference got off to a positive and encouraging start.
On the German question, some matters had been settled before the Yalta
Conference met. At the Casablanca Conference (January 1943), Roosevelt and
Churchill had announced a policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ – that Germany,
Italy and Japan must accept total defeat, and not negotiate terms on which they
would capitulate, thus avoiding the difficulties which had arisen in 1918 as to the
terms of the German surrender. Stalin agreed at once. In 1944, the three Allies
agreed that the defeated Germany should be divided into three occupation zones,
American, British and Soviet, with Berlin also being split into three zones. The
issue of German frontiers was left open, though at the Tehran Conference in
1943 it was agreed that the Soviet Union should annex the northern part of East
Prussia. At Yalta, Churchill proposed a significant new departure: that France
should become one of the occupying powers. Somewhat reluctantly, Roosevelt
and Stalin agreed, though Stalin insisted that the French occupation zone must
be carved out of the British and American zones, leaving the Soviet zone
unchanged. The question of German frontiers was taken a step further, with
Poland to annex German territory in the east, up to the line of the River Oder.
German borders were thus being settled piecemeal, and primarily following
Soviet wishes.
As to reparations to be paid by Germany, the Soviet Union had the strongest
claim, on the grounds of the death and destruction wrought by Germany on the
Eastern front. Stalin opened by proposing that Germany should pay reparations
in kind (e.g. in manufacturing industry and agricultural produce) to a total of $20
billion. Britain and the United States demurred, and it was agreed that a
Reparations Commission should meet in Moscow to discuss the question, taking
the figure of $20 billion, with half to go to the Soviet Union, as the basis of their
consideration. This was in practice a long step towards meeting the Soviet
demands.
As to Poland, two key issues were open: the frontiers of a restored Poland, and
the make-up of its government. On frontiers, the Big Three agreed that the
Polish eastern frontier (mostly with the Soviet Union) should broadly follow a
line originally proposed in 1919 by the then British foreign minister, George
Curzon. The western frontier, with Germany, should follow the line of the River
Oder, and then along either the western or eastern branch of the River Neisse.
Stalin favoured the western Neisse, which allotted more territory to Poland,
while Roosevelt and Churchill preferred the eastern Neisse. This question was
left over and was later settled in practice at the Potsdam Conference, along the
line of the western Neisse.
The question of the composition of the Polish government was one of acute
difficulty. When the Yalta Conference began, two Polish governments were in
existence: the government in exile in London, which was directly descended
from the government of 1939; and a pro-Soviet government in the eastern town
of Lublin. Britain and the United States recognized the London government,
while the Soviet Union recognized the Lublin government. Stalin had always
maintained that the Soviet Union must have a ‘friendly’ government in Poland;
whereas the London government, for the most solid of reasons, could not by any
stretch of the imagination be regarded as ‘friendly’ to a country which had
colluded with the Nazis to invade Poland in September 1939 and had then
deported and massacred large numbers of Poles. On the question, neither Stalin
nor the Polish government in London could compromise, and Stalin held two
immense advantages: first, in January 1945, the Red Army already occupied
nearly all pre-war Poland; and second, Britain and the United States were
acutely conscious that they relied on the Soviet Union to secure a successful
outcome to the war. It was therefore not surprising that the Big Three agreed at
Yalta that ‘the Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland [i.e.
the Lublin Government] should … be reorganized on a broader democratic basis
with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles
abroad. This new government should then be called the Polish Provisional
Government of National Unity.’ The new government was to hold ‘free and
unfettered elections as soon as possible’.10 This wording accepted the Lublin
government as the basis for a new Polish government and so gave Stalin the
essence of what he required. He would certainly not have settled for less. The
London government was not even mentioned by name; and the reference to free
elections was to prove no more than a pious gesture. The leader of the London
Poles, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, did subsequently agree, however, to head the new
government.
The conference also adopted a ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’, proposed by
the Americans, by which the three Allied governments agreed to assist all
liberated countries to hold free elections. Stalin accepted this without demur, and
when Molotov grumbled that the Americans were getting too much of their own
way, Stalin calmed him down, saying: ‘We can deal with it in our, own way later.
The point is the correlation of forces.’11
Roosevelt had another vital objective at Yalta: to make sure of Soviet entry into
the war against Japan, which at that time still seemed certain to be long and
costly. To gain his objective he had to abandon any high-flown talk of free
elections or governments being responsive to the will of the people, and to meet
Stalin on his own terms. Stalin insisted on recovering ‘the former rights of
Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904’. Specifically this
meant: the return of South Sakhalin; the acceptance of Port Arthur as a Soviet
naval base, along with the recognition of rights in the commercial port of Dairen;
and the restoration of Soviet rights in the South Manchurian Railway and the
Chinese Eastern Railway. In addition, the Soviet Union was to annex the Kuril
Islands from Japan; and Outer Mongolia was to be accepted as a Soviet sphere of
influence. In return, Stalin undertook to enter the war against Japan three months
after the end of the war in Europe – a promise that he kept. This was a ruthless
piece of power politics, which Roosevelt accepted as a necessity, even though a
part of the price he paid to Stalin was at the expense of China, theoretically his
ally.
MAP 2 Poland at the end of the Second World War.

At the end of the Yalta Conference all the participants could claim to have
attained their main objectives. Churchill secured an occupation zone in Germany
for France, which was a step towards the British aim of restoring France as a
major power in Europe. Roosevelt cleared the way for the creation of the UN,
and gained from Stalin a firm undertaking to enter the war against Japan. Stalin
secured the acceptance of the Lublin government as the basis for the new
government of Poland; advanced the Soviet claims for reparation; and gained a
good price for entering the war against Japan. Last, but by no means least, all
three Allied leaders achieved their common purpose of keeping their alliance
together, which was far from being a certainty when the conference began.
Yalta did not partition the world. It did not even divide up Europe, though it did
potentially put Poland firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence – or rather,
domination. It did not reveal any deep division between the Soviet Union and the
Western powers to foreshadow the Cold War line-up. On the contrary, it cleared
the way towards winning the war, and setting up a framework for the post-war
world, based on a working combination of idealism and power politics. All
alliances must work by compromise, and the Yalta Conference was no exception.
When it ended, a cautious optimism was still in order.
 The Second World War and the shaking of the
European empires
For many years, and in some cases for centuries before the Second World War,
European powers controlled vast empires in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Their grip on these territories was shaken, in different ways and degrees, by the
impact of the war.

North Africa
The Second World War transformed the situation in French North Africa
(Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco). The crushing French defeat in 1940 dealt a
damaging blow to French prestige throughout the area, though the effects did not
become clear until late in 1942. In November 1942 American and British forces
invaded Morocco and Algeria, drawing the Germans into Tunisia to resist them.
Fighting continued until the Germans surrendered in May 1943, with the French
acting almost as bystanders in the territories which they nominally controlled.
Later in 1943 the situation changed again when General de Gaulle’s Free French
movement established its seat of government in Algiers, which for some time
became the capital of all French territories at war with Germany.
Tunisia was not a French colony, but a protectorate under the largely nominal
rule of the local bey, or king. Six months of German occupation, and conflict
with the British and Americans, broke the continuity of French authority, giving
Bey Muhammed al-Munsif the opportunity to appoint his own ministers and take
partial control of the country. In 1943 the French returned and imposed direct
rule, but were confronted by a growing nationalist resistance. The Germans had
released Habib Bourguiba, the leader of the Neodestour nationalist party, from
prison in France. Bourguiba returned to Tunisia, where he tried without success
to reach an agreement with the French. He then took refuge in Egypt, where he
lived in exile for four years. The cumulative effect of these events was to disrupt
the working of the French protectorate and to give a new impulse to Tunisian
nationalism.
Morocco was also a French protectorate, not a colony. American troops were
stationed in parts of the country from the end of 1942, and sometimes worked
with the Moroccans rather than with the French. During the Anglo-American
summit meeting at Casablanca in January 1943, President Roosevelt went out of
his way to meet the sultan, Sidi Mohammed ben Yusef, and held out hope of
American help in freeing Morocco from the French protectorate. In December
1943, a nationalist party, the Istiqlal, was founded, and it soon entered into
cooperation with the sultan against the French. In 1944, the French tried to
reassert their authority by imprisoning some of the Istiqlal leaders; but they
failed and had to make concessions to the nationalists. Even more than in
Tunisia, the French hold on Morocco was badly shaken.

MAP 3 North Africa and the Middle East.

Between Morocco and Tunisia lay Algeria, which, legally, was a constituent
part of France, and which had a European population of approximately 1 million.
After the French defeat in 1940, a number of Algerians who had previously
advocated assimilation with France turned instead to nationalism or to Islam –
sometimes to both. At the same time, and at that stage more significantly, the
French population had seen their links with metropolitan France cut, and yet
they had managed to govern the territory alone. Indeed, before the end of the war
Algiers had become the effective capital of the Free French and the springboard
for the liberation of southern France. Algeria thus assumed a new status and
gained a belief in its own independence.
In the event, it was the Algerian nationalist movement which first took armed
action. On 8 May 1945 (the date of the end of the war in Europe) there took
place demonstrations and an armed uprising against the French at Sétif, in the
Constantine district. This insurrection was crushed with great severity, with
casualties that the French put at 6,000 and the Algerians at 45,000. After this,
there were no further disturbances for another nine years; but what was to
become the Algerian War of Independence had begun.

The Middle East

Before the Second World War, the whole area of the Middle East from Egypt to
Iraq was under European (British and French) control or influence. Syria and
Lebanon were French mandates under the League of Nations, and they were
effectively treated as French colonies. Palestine was a British mandate, and it
was in the throes of a tangled three-cornered struggle between Arabs, Zionists
and the British. Egypt was an independent state, but it was bound by a treaty
with Britain (concluded in 1936) to accept British bases in the Suez Canal Zone
and Alexandria. Iraq was in much the same position – independent, but
accepting British military bases. Transjordan was under British influence, and its
army (the Arab Legion) was commanded by a British officer.
The war transformed this situation. In Syria and Lebanon, French authority was
shaken by the defeat of 1940 and later undermined by a long dispute between de
Gaulle and the British over the future of the two nations. After a long struggle,
French forces exited the two countries in 1947, leaving behind a bitter legacy of
enmity between France and Britain. In some respects the British fared better in
maintaining their position of predominance. Nevertheless, it proved impossible
for the British to encourage nationalist movements in Syria and Lebanon without
arousing similar enmity against themselves in Egypt and Iraq, where their
prestige had anyway been badly shaken by their wartime defeats.
The British actually encouraged cooperation among Arab states, in the hope of
directing Arab nationalism for their own purposes. In 1944 and 1945, on British
initiative, Egypt held two conferences which set up an Arab League comprising
seven members: Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Transjordan and
Yemen. A representative of the Palestinian Arabs also attended the conferences,
though without becoming a member of the League. The purpose of this new
body was to act together in matters of common concern, and the Palestine
question was mentioned as an example.
Palestine was indeed becoming the most difficult problem in the Middle East.
Britain was still the mandatory power, and since 1920 the British had been trying
to govern the territory under the ambiguous terms of the Balfour Declaration of
1917, which undertook to create a ‘national home’ for the Jewish people in
Palestine, without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the other
inhabitants of the territory. This was an impossible task, and the British found
themselves trapped between the opposing claims and aspirations of both Zionists
and Arabs.
In 1939, the British government, against the strong opposition of Winston
Churchill, set out a plan (or ‘White Paper’) by which Palestine was to achieve
independence in 1949, with Jewish immigration to be so limited as to ensure an
Arab majority. This conciliated Arab opinion enough to allow Britain to wage a
war against Germany with a minimum of Arab opposition. But it confronted the
principal Zionist organization, the Jewish Agency, with a cruel dilemma. On the
one hand, for Nazi Germany to win the war which broke out in 1939 would be a
disaster for the Jewish people; but on the other hand, the British policy was
designed to deprive the Zionists of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish
Agency therefore settled down to an apparently impossible task: to fight the war
as if there were no White Paper and to fight the White Paper as if there were no
war – an astonishing attempt to face both ways that in fact achieved a
remarkable degree of success. A Jewish Brigade, which became a valuable
military arm for the Jewish Agency, fought alongside the British Army after
1944. But the White Paper of 1939 remained Britain’s long-term objective, and
at war’s end, the British Navy turned back shiploads of Jewish refugees from
Europe.
By 1945 it was the British who faced an impossible dilemma. On the one hand,
they had to conciliate Arab opinion in order to maintain their own position in the
Middle East. But on the other hand, it became practically difficult and morally
indefensible to restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine just when the fate of
the European Jews in the Nazi death camps was becoming widely known. By
1947 Britain could no longer carry this double burden. The Labour government
announced that Britain was leaving the problem of Palestine to the newly
constituted UN thus setting the stage for one of the most intractable and bitter
conflicts of the post-war world.
All the way across North Africa and the Middle East a similar pattern of events
took shape. The crushing defeat of France in 1940 weakened French prestige and
authority. The British, by contrast, emerged from the war victorious, but events
thrust them into concessions to nationalist movements, and in Palestine their
position became more difficult as the war went on. Across the board, the two
colonial powers faced changes which proved irreversible.

East and South-East Asia

In Asia, profound changes were already under way before the Second World
War, and all the colonial powers were facing opposition to their predominance.
In China, a nationalist government challenged the unequal treaties imposed in
the nineteenth century. In India, Gandhi and the Congress Party organized
opposition to British rule. In the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China,
nationalist movements were increasing in strength. From the beginning of the
twentieth century, Japan had emerged as a great Asian power, well able to beat
Europeans in war and commerce. It was therefore upon an area already in
transition that the Second World War struck with sudden and devastating force.
In a few months at the end of 1941 and early in 1942, Japanese forces swept
aside British, Dutch and American resistance and occupied Malaya, Singapore,
Burma, the East Indies and the Philippines (from 1940 to 1941, they had
occupied French Indo-China without firing a shot). The colonial powers could
only partially recover from these crushing defeats, despite their victories in the
latter part of the war. They returned to their former possessions in 1945, but their
prestige had been seriously weakened and their authority was on borrowed time.
The Japanese encouraged nationalist movements all over South-East Asia. If
the Japanese had won the war, there might have been difficulties in this situation,
as nationalists came to resent exchanging old masters for new. But as events
turned out, the nationalist movements were able to gain what they could from the
Japanese victories, and then grasped further advantages from the Japanese
defeats, which in most cases left a gap in the exercise of power between the
defeat of Japan and the return of the colonial powers. For example, in the East
Indies the Indonesian nationalists led by Ahmed Sukarno were able to declare
independence in August 1945, before the Dutch could return and reassert their
authority – a task which eventually proved beyond either their strength or their
willpower.
The consequences of these events varied widely, and took very different
lengths of time to reach a conclusion. The British left India in 1947, but
remained in Hong Kong as a colonial power until 1997. The Dutch fought for
four years to regain control of the East Indies, before they gave up the struggle
and accepted Indonesian independence in 1949. The French held on to Indo-
China for nearly ten years before they acknowledged defeat. But sooner or later
the effects of the Second World War worked themselves out. The colonial
regimes in East and South-East Asia came to an end quickly in some cases and
slowly in others; but either way, one of the Second World War’s principal
consequences was the withdrawal of Europe from the Asian continent.
 Long-term consequences of the war
In the long term, three consequences of the Second World War came to dominate
international relations for the half-century after 1945. First, the United States and
the Soviet Union emerged as two superpowers, meeting face to face in Europe
and in East Asia. Exactly how that encounter would play out was not clear in
1945, but within a few years it was to develop into the confrontation which we
call the Cold War. Second, the European overseas empires in Africa, the Middle
East and Asia were so badly shaken that their disintegration became inevitable.
How this came about, and how they were replaced, became a theme of the post-
1945 age. (The land empire of the Soviet Union lasted much longer, while the
United States became an unusual sort of imperial power.) Third, the two atomic
bombs which exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a vital new
element to international affairs: the prospect of instant and widespread
destruction. This was one of the consequences of the Americans’ use of the
atomic bombs which is often overlooked. No demonstration against some
deserted island could have had the same psychological effect.
These three sets of events formed the framework of the new world order which
took shape after 1945.

Notes
1 J. A. S. Grenville, History of the World in the Twentieth Century (London, revised ed., 1998), p. 284.
Grenville observes that historians cannot be sure of the figure to the nearest million, which in itself is a
formidable comment. See also the article by Martin Gilbert on ‘The Final Solution’, in I. C. B. Dear and
M. R. D. Foot, eds, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford, 1995), pp. 364–71.
2 Figures in ibid., p. 1060.
3 Figures in ibid., p. 290. For an authoritative assessment of Polish war dead, see Halik Kochanski, The
Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (London, 2012), p. 532.
4 Henry Ashby Turner, Jr, Germany from Partition to Unification (New Haven, 1992), p. 6.
5 Dear and Foot, Second World War, p. 1060.
6 Ibid., pp. 603–4, 836–7.
7 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (London, Pelican ed., 1969), p. 90.
8 Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941–1945 (London, 1986), p. 254.
9 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘A Lesson to Learn from Yalta’, The Times (London), 11 February 1995.
10 US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta,
1945 (Washington DC, 1955), pp. 971–5.
11 Vyacheslav Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev,
ed. Albert Resis (Chicago, 1993), p. 51.
 2

The beginnings of the post-war world

Victors and vanquished – The post-war state system – The United Nations –
Other international organizations – Economic organization.

Victors and vanquished

The most obvious division in the world in 1945 was not between the East and
the West, or between capitalism and communism, or between imperial powers
and colonial peoples, between victors and vanquished. For a short time the
victors had the opportunity to remake the world. It was no easy task. Much of
the world was littered with the ruins of war, and even countries untouched
physically by the conflict were still affected by it. Moreover, history does not
come to an end, even at a turning point like that of 1945, and all kinds of issues
going back years or sometimes centuries were bound to reappear. But for a while
the board of world affairs was as clear as it was ever likely to be. It was a time of
hope and opportunity, as well as of ruin and despair. Who were the victors, and
what did they try to do with their victory?

The victors
The greatest victor of the Second World War was the United States of America.
The United States had been far away from the theatres of war. Japanese bombs
fell on Hawaii and German U-boats played havoc for a time off the Atlantic
coast, but mainland America was unscathed. American casualties in the war
amounted to 274,000 dead – little more than one-fifth of 1 per cent of the
population. The country’s economic strength was enormous. Its gold reserves
stood at $220 billion, approximately two-thirds of the world’s total. The country
as a whole had grown wealthier during the war, and the average standard of
living of individual Americans was high. The war effort had mobilized this
economic strength into military power. There were some 14,800,000 men and
women in the armed forces at the end of 1944. A vast fleet, with nearly 68,000
vessels of all types, was complemented by an air force that included 3,000 heavy
bombers. Moreover, the United States was the only country to have
manufactured and used atomic bombs.1
For Americans this was a new situation, and their attitudes towards it varied
widely. The country’s wartime leaders were mostly determined that the United
States should now act as a world power and not withdraw into the isolation and
neutrality that had been attempted in the 1920s and 1930s. They expected to
bring their troops home from Europe, but they also intended to maintain bases in
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The United States would play a leading part in
the United Nations. They would pursue American economic interests, to make
sure that wartime prosperity was not lost in the peace. At the same time, the
idealism which was so deeply rooted in the American mindset was still strong. In
1961, Henry Kissinger (later to become secretary of state) asked Harry S.
Truman (who replaced Roosevelt in April 1945) which foreign policy decision
he would most wish to be remembered for. His reply was: ‘We completely
defeated our enemies [in the Second World War] and made them surrender. And
then we helped them to recover, to become democratic, and to rejoin the
community of nations. Only America could have done that.’ This combination of
pride in American strength and faith in American virtue was characteristic not
only of Truman, but of most of his fellow countrymen.2
There was another strand in American thought and sentiment. Isolationism,
though rejected by most American leaders, was very much alive, especially in
the Midwest. It was also somewhat confused in nature because there were some
who wished to be free from entanglements in Europe but were keenly interested
in the Pacific and China. In sum, the United States was broadly conscious that it
had a new world role, but was by no means sure what it was to be.
The second power among the victors was the Soviet Union. At the end of 1944
the strength of the Soviet armed forces stood at a total of 11,200,000. The Red
Army was equipped with 11,000 tanks and self-propelled guns; and the air force
comprised 14,500 combat aircraft. These forces had played by far the largest part
in the defeat of Germany. Soviet power and prestige stood at a pinnacle. But the
cost had been enormous. Authoritative figures published in 1990 gave a total of
8,668,000 military dead. As we have seen, estimates for military and civilian
casualties together reached a total of some 26–28 million dead.3 The comparison
with the 274,000 fatalities suffered by the United States is sobering – American
losses were barely one-hundredth that of the Soviet. To the loss of life was added
the immense destruction wrought during the campaigns on the Eastern front. The
Soviet Union thus displayed the extraordinary spectacle of vast military strength
combined with immense human and material losses.
The Soviet Union was geographically the heir to the old Russian Empire,
stretching all the way from eastern Europe to eastern Asia. Its population was
varied, multinational and at different stages of economic development. Stalin
saw himself as the successor of the Tsars in his foreign policy – for example, he
set out deliberately to recover territory lost in the Russo-Japanese War from
1904 to 1905 and at the end of the Great War; and from 1945 to 1946 he was
pursuing a long-standing aim of Russian policy, a base on the straits between the
Black Sea and the Mediterranean. But he was also the leader of the world’s first
socialist state, and his concerns were ideological as well as territorial. As two
contemporary Russian historians sum the matter up, he pursued ‘the promise of
Communist revolutionary universalism combined with the necessities of survival
for the Soviet Union, the first and unique “Socialist” empire’.4 The Soviet Union
thus combined great military power with the aspirations and attractions of the
socialist ideal.
In 1945, however, Stalin was primarily concerned with the security of the state.
He imposed the severest possible control over Soviet territories recovered from
the Germans. Prisoners of war released from German captivity were often sent
straight to the Gulag (the Soviet slave labour camps) for fear that they had
somehow been contaminated by foreign ideas. But this was usually hidden from
the outside world, where Stalin appeared as a benevolent patriarch, the hero who
had won the war and saved his country and a world statesman of the first rank.
At the end of the Second World War there was no certainty that the United
States and the Soviet Union would swiftly become enemies. It appears that
Stalin regarded Truman as inexperienced (which he was) and weak (which he
was not) and thought that he would not last long. There was a brush between
Truman and Molotov on 23 April 1945, when the new president lectured the
Soviet foreign minister about the necessity of keeping agreements. This episode
was later seized upon by some writers as the beginning of the Cold War, but at
the time Molotov and Stalin agreed to keep quiet about it, and Molotov merely
recalled many years afterwards that Truman had been ‘a bit half-witted’.5
Truman, for his part, was not enamoured of the Soviet Union. When Germany
attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 he had candidly (if rashly) remarked that the
two sides should be encouraged to kill one another as far as possible – though he
did not want to see Hitler win under any circumstances. But when he became
president he continued to follow Roosevelt’s line of cultivating good relations
with Stalin, and he speedily recognized that the Americans needed Soviet
military support against Japan. He sent Harry Hopkins (Roosevelt’s old
confidant) to visit Stalin at the beginning of June 1945, with reassuring
messages. When Stalin nominated a new Polish government, the United States
recognized it quickly (on 5 July 1945), though there had been no free elections
and none were in the offing. There were difficulties between the two great
powers, but that is the story of all alliances at the end of a war.
Next among the victors stood Great Britain. The British had fought the war
from start to finish. They had stood almost alone in 1940, and in 1945 they were
still one of the Big Three in world politics. Their casualties (350,000 dead,
including civilians) had not been heavy when compared with those between
1914 and 1918.6 But the country was gravely weakened. People were weary
after six years of war. Industrial production had concentrated on the war effort.
Reserves of gold and foreign currency had been run down, and Britain now
depended on loans to pay for imports. When American Lend-Lease aid ended
with the end of the war, Britain had to request a large loan ($3.75 billion) from
the United States. Despite these difficulties, in 1946, the British still expected to
overcome their problems and maintain their position as a world power.
France too was among the victors – an occupying power in Germany and
Austria, and a permanent member of the Security Council of the UN. But this
status masked serious weaknesses. The defeat of 1940 had been a crushing blow,
and the long period of German occupation had left deep divisions. Casualties
had been heavy – about 600,000 dead, military and civilian included.7 The
economy was dislocated; industrial production was low; food was scarce; and
reserves of gold and foreign currency were almost exhausted, so that France too
had to ask for US loans in 1946. Despite these difficulties, General de Gaulle,
the premier of France at the end of the war, was determined that his country
should regain the greatness of its international position; and his successors
remained committed to that lofty aim.
During the war, President Roosevelt referred to the ‘Four Policemen’ who
would keep the peace in the post-war world. The fourth power he had in mind,
along with the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain, was China; but in
fact China was in no position to play such a role. Casualties had been heavy –
perhaps 13 million Chinese died during the war years. The country was plagued
by civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and the
communists, led by Mao Zedong. The whole country was devastated by the long
years of war against Japan. China was treated by courtesy (especially courtesy
towards Roosevelt) as a great power and was granted permanent membership of
the Security Council; but this was merely a façade. In practice, China was too
weak and divided to play an active part in world affairs until its own problems
had been resolved.
As the Second World War came to an end, the principal victors met in
conference at Potsdam (from 17 July to 2 August 1945). Stalin, Truman and
Churchill (who was replaced by Clement Attlee when the Labour Party won the
British general election on 26 July) grappled with a massive agenda, much of
which they dealt with by postponement rather than action. One issue which they
could not delay was that of terms for a Japanese surrender. At the time, the
United States and Britain were at war with Japan, but the Soviet Union was not,
and the Japanese were trying to invoke Soviet mediation to bring hostilities to an
end. The three powers agreed on the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July 1945,
which called on Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Declaration also
asserted that Japan must give up all territories acquired since 1914. War
criminals were to be brought to justice, and Japanese government was to be
democratized, with security for freedom of speech and fundamental human
rights. More to the point in military terms, President Truman told Stalin on 24
July that the United States had developed a weapon of ‘unusual destructive
force’ – meaning the atomic bomb. Stalin was already aware of this from his
own sources, notably Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet agent in the British team of atomic
scientists; but he gave no sign that he was aware, and merely replied, ‘I hope you
will use it on the Japanese.’8
The conference spent much time on Germany, to which we will turn later, and
on Poland. On the question of Poland’s western frontier, which had been left
over at Yalta, the Big Three agreed to treat the line of the rivers Oder and
Western Neisse as the administrative boundary between Poland and Germany.
This meant in practice that the Poles took over all the territory up to that line; but
the question of de jure sovereignty was left to a future peace conference. On the
question of the make-up of a Polish government, there was no agreement in
principle between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States and
Britain on the other; but in practice Moscow was determined to control the
government set up after Yalta.
 The three powers agreed to set up a Council of Foreign Ministers, in which
France was to take part, to deal with the defeated European countries (Germany,
Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Finland) and to prepare peace treaties. This allowed
various contentious issues to be postponed and ensured that the Potsdam
Conference reached a reasonably successful conclusion. The code name for the
conference was ‘Terminal’, and if not exactly a happy ending for the wartime
alliance, it was at least a tolerable one. Yet at the same time there was a sense of
unease, at any rate among the British and American delegations. When Truman
left Potsdam, he remarked with feeling that ‘he never wanted to live in Europe,
and never wanted to go back’.9

The vanquished
The principal defeated powers were crushed to an extent unprecedented in
modern times. ‘Unconditional Surrender’ was the doctrine proclaimed by
Roosevelt at Casablanca in 1943, and against Germany it was rigorously
imposed. The German armed forces capitulated – or were wiped out. Allied
armies occupied the whole country. No German government remained. The only
effective currency was cigarettes. A modern state had simply ceased to exist.
Germany had temporarily disappeared, but the German Question remained, in
various forms. Was Germany to be united or divided? Where were its frontiers to
lie? What sort of political system and social organization should be imposed
upon it? What scale of reparations should be exacted from Germany, and how
were they to be paid? These questions, fudged at Yalta, were only partially
answered at the Potsdam Conference. The Allied powers agreed that Germany
should be administered as a whole, by an Allied Control Council meeting in
Berlin, and should be treated as an economic whole. However, each occupying
power was to carry out the supposedly joint policies in its own zone, which was
bound to leave scope for differences of practice. Acceptance of the Oder–Neisse
line as the Polish administrative border provided a practical, though not a legal
answer to the main frontier question. There was agreement that Germany was to
be de-Nazified, though not on exactly how this was to be accomplished; it was
agreed, too, that new political institutions were to be introduced slowly, starting
with municipalities and local government.
In Japan, the state was not utterly dissolved as it was in Germany, in that the
emperor remained, forming a symbol of continuity with the past. Moreover,
some sections within the Japanese government had begun to think the
unthinkable, and to make preparations for defeat even before the war ended.
Even so, Japan was in a calamitous condition. Casualties had been severe –
somewhere between 2,350,000 and 2,700,000 killed, including 350,000–393,000
civilians (about 210,000 of them by the two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki).10 About a million Japanese troops were scattered over the former
theatres of war and were shipped back to the home islands, where food was
already scarce. The Americans occupied the Japanese mainland, but no one
knew how they would use their authority.
One distinctive feature of the treatment of Germany and Japan at the end of the
Second World War was the holding of trials for war crimes. This was not
completely new, because after the First World War there had been a low-key trial
of a dozen Germans, before a German court. But the trials in 1945 and 1946
were a very different matter. On 8 August 1945 the United States, the Soviet
Union, Britain and France agreed to set up an International Military Tribunal for
the trial of the major German war criminals. The indictment, published on 6
October 1945, was drawn up under four main headings: (1) the formulation of a
common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes; (2) crimes against peace: the
planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars of aggression; (3) war
crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war, including the murder and
deportation of civilians and the wanton destruction of towns or villages; (4)
crimes against humanity: the extermination, enslavement or deportation of
civilian populations, and persecution on political, racial or religious grounds,
whether or not such persecution was in violation of the domestic law of the
country where it had taken place. There were difficulties under all these
headings. It was not easy to establish what constituted a conspiracy. Most
countries made plans for war involving attacks on others – it is the job of
military staffs to prepare for war. The Allied bombing offensive had destroyed a
number of cities. The Soviet Union (though not on trial) was certainly guilty of
exterminating and deporting peoples on a large scale. The trial was held at
Nuremberg, in Germany, from October 1945 to October 1946. Of the twenty-two
accused (one of them, Martin Bormann, in his absence), three were acquitted;
seven were sentenced to imprisonment for various terms – Hess and Raeder for
life; and twelve were sentenced to death. Of these twelve, ten were hanged and
Goering committed suicide. Bormann in fact had died in Berlin in 1945.11
The war crimes trial held in Tokyo from May 1946 to November 1948 proved
more difficult and controversial. Twenty-eight Japanese leaders were charged
with war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The emperor
of Japan, Hirohito, was exempted from trial on the express instruction of General
MacArthur, the Allied supreme commander and virtual ruler of Japan. The
judges failed to achieve unanimity in their verdicts – those from France and the
Netherlands recorded dissenting judgements on certain points, while an Indian
judge found all the defendants not guilty. As a result of these problems, and also
because the sessions went on for a long time while the world changed around
them, the Tokyo war crimes trials made less impact than those at Nuremberg.
The impact upon the public mind of these trials, and especially those at
Nuremberg, nevertheless had a lasting effect on attitudes towards international
affairs. The emphasis on crimes against humanity engendered a new sensitivity
towards human rights and an increased concern with events inside other
countries, as distinct from the long-standing tradition of minding one’s own
business. This was also influenced by the role of publicity in international
affairs. The reporting, particularly by photographs and newsreel film, of the
opening of the German concentration camps in 1945, left a lasting mark on the
public mind. The combination of publicity and human rights came to form a new
element in world affairs.

International organizations of states

For two centuries up to the end of the First World War, European states had
dominated world politics, evolving a system of conducting international affairs
by means of the balance of power and a series of great treaties which established
a European and world order: Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1815) and Versailles
(1919).
In 1919 this era was already coming to an end, with the United States playing a
powerful role at the Paris Peace Conference. By 1945 it had definitively ended.
There were no longer five or six European great powers, similar in weight and
authority, able to balance one another and to control the continent and most of
the world. Instead, two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union,
dominated the scene. Of the two, the United States was much the stronger; but
both stood head and shoulders above the rest. Neither was fully European. The
United States had a population largely of European extraction, but was far
removed from the old continent both geographically and in spirit. The Soviet
Union was the successor of one of the old European states, Russia, but it had
always been doubtful how far Russia was European, either geographically or in
spirit. The indisputably European states – Britain, France, Germany and Italy –
were in decline or were being eclipsed.
The old European state system could no longer regulate its own continent, still
less the world. What was to replace it? During the Second World War, President
Roosevelt threw his energy and prestige into creating a new world organization
to succeed the old League of Nations; and his influence and determination
prevailed. On 1 January 1942, in Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill and the
ambassadors of the Soviet Union and China signed the United Nations
Declaration, pledging its signatories to employ all their resources to secure total
victory and not to make a separate peace. This document also created the basis
for a new world organization, and gave it a name. Roosevelt introduced the term
‘United Nations’ instead of ‘Associated Powers’; and Churchill approved, with a
literary touch in a quotation from Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’: ‘Here, where the
sword United Nations drew.’12 The plan was elaborated at a Conference of
Foreign Ministers (Soviet, American, British and Chinese) in October 1943, and
at the three-power summit conference at Tehran in November 1943. A
conference at Dumbarton Oaks in New Hampshire from September to October
1944 prepared the main outlines of the new organization; and, as we have seen,
the Yalta Conference in February 1945 resolved crucial questions relating to its
membership and constitution. The San Francisco Conference (from April to June
1945) produced the final draft of the United Nations Charter, which was signed
on 26 June by the representatives of fifty-one states. The fact that this conference
began while the war was still in progress in both Europe and the Pacific showed
the urgency with which the task was undertaken. At the end of the First World
War, the creation of the League of Nations had been part of the peace settlement;
but in 1945 the UN was set up before the war was over. If its founders had
waited for the peace settlement, the delay would have been lengthy and perhaps
fatal.
The purposes of the UN were threefold. The first was to prevent war by means
of collective security – an aim which the League had failed to achieve. If
conflicts could not be prevented, the UN would have the lesser but useful task of
containing or resolving them. Second, the UN was to promote peace by
promoting international cooperation in economic and social affairs, in culture
and in thought. This arose from a widespread belief that the Second World War
had arisen partly from economic causes and partly from perverted ideas which
had taken root in the minds of men. Third, under Article 56 of the Charter, the
member states of the UN were to promote respect for human rights and universal
freedoms for all – this too looked back to the 1930s, in a belief that the internal
tyranny of Nazi Germany had given rise to its aggressive foreign policy. To
achieve these purposes, the UN was comprised of three main bodies: the General
Assembly, the Security Council and the Secretariat. The General Assembly
consisted of representatives of all the member states, on a footing of equality
(one country, one vote), and was to meet annually. The Security Council was
made up of five permanent members (the United States, the Soviet Union, the
United Kingdom, France and China) and six temporary members, elected for
two-year terms by a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly, although the
number of temporary members was subsequently increased to ten in 1966. The
Security Council was to remain in permanent session. On all substantive matters,
requiring action, the permanent members could exercise a veto, that is, a single
negative vote by a permanent member was sufficient to reject a resolution. The
Secretariat was the administrative body of the UN, headed by a secretary-
general, appointed by the General Assembly for a five-year term.
The Charter of the United Nations included two articles which were difficult to
reconcile with one another, with consequences that were to raise intractable
problems. Article 2 (7) laid down that the UN was not authorized to intervene in
‘matters which are essentially within the sovereign jurisdiction of any state’.
Article 56, on the other hand, specified that member states of the UN were to
promote respect for human rights, which might well be regarded as falling
within the sovereign jurisdiction of particular states. Article 2 (7) might also
impede the discussion of wars or violence within states, unless the situation was
clearly ‘international’.
A case in point arose as early as 1947, when a dispute occurred between India
and Pakistan over the territory of Kashmir. India claimed that the Kashmir
dispute was an internal matter, to be dealt with by the Indian government,
because Kashmir was a province of India. Pakistan, on the contrary, argued that
the dispute was an international one, between the two sovereign states of India
and Pakistan, and therefore a proper matter for discussion by the UN. The new
Indian premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, received an early lesson in power politics over
the Kashmir question: the Americans, he complained, made ‘no bones’ about
their sympathy for Pakistan and used the UN to promote Pakistan’s cause.13 A
similar dispute arose in relation to the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. France
claimed that the war in Algeria was an internal matter, because Algeria was in
law a part of France, and the conflict was in fact a rebellion against legitimate
French authority. The Algerian nationalist movement, the National Liberation
Front (FLN), maintained that the war was one of national independence and was
therefore an international matter in which the UN could properly intervene.
In later years, new states which had used the UN to help in their struggles for
independence from colonial powers took advantage of Article 2 (7) to prevent
intervention in what they now claimed had become their internal affairs. For
example, the General Assembly from time to time made general declarations
denouncing racism and genocide. On the one hand, the UN took no action
against the government of Idi Amin in Uganda (from 1971 to 1979), which
expelled Asians from the country and slaughtered thousands of people within it.
On the other hand, the government of South Africa claimed that its policy of
apartheid was a matter for its own domestic jurisdiction; but the UN argued that
apartheid was a danger to peace and was therefore a proper concern of the
organization and imposed economic sanctions against South Africa accordingly.
A simpler matter arose from Article 51 of the UN Charter, which maintained
the inherent right of individual states of self-defence against armed attack, or
collective self-defence against attack. Similarly, Article 52 permitted the
formation of regional arrangements for the maintenance of international peace
and security. Between them, these provisions gave ample scope for the formation
of alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 was an obvious example) which
sometimes proved more effective instruments of collective security than the
more generic provisions of the UN Charter.
In subsequent years, the deficiencies and failures of the UN became sadly
plain. The organization was intended to prevent war, but the years since its
foundation have been marked by almost incessant conflict in different parts of
the world. The UN’s cultural and economic organizations fell far short of
success: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) absorbed large funds for small results, while the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) proved unable either to predict famines or to
cope with them when they occurred. Neither made any significant contribution
to the peace of the world.14
Yet the UN survived and achieved some solid if unspectacular successes,
largely by accepting the facts of international life. The power of veto exercised
by the permanent members of the Security Council was simply an
acknowledgement that if one of these powers, and especially one of the two
superpowers, was opposed to some policy or action, it would not work. Indeed,
without the acceptance of the veto, Stalin would not have permitted the United
Nations to come into existence at all; and the United States had no intention of
allowing its vital interests to be endangered by a majority vote – though in 1945
American leaders did not find it necessary to say so. Similarly, the contradiction
between the assertion of human rights on the one hand and the rights of states to
control their own affairs on the other was another necessary compromise. States
would never have accepted an organization with unlimited rights to intervene in
their internal affairs.
In the event, the UN took on a number of significant roles in international
affairs. First, the Security Council provided a centre for diplomatic activity,
sometimes public and confrontational, but often secret and conciliatory. In some
of the more glacial periods of the Cold War, the Security Council was one of the
rare places where American and Soviet representatives could meet frequently
and discreetly. Second, the General Assembly became a forum for the expression
of views on world affairs, not usually leading to any immediate or practical
results, but gradually introducing new climates of opinion, for example, on
colonialism and international trade. Third, the UN undertook peacekeeping
operations, the first of which, the UN Truce Supervision Organization, was set
up as early as June 1948 to oversee the ceasefire in Palestine between Israel and
its opponents. Next was the UN Military Observer Group, created in January
1949 to supervise a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. Both of
these bodies were still in existence half a century later, bearing strange testimony
to their success as well as their failure. Ceasefires, by definition, are not peace;
but they are in many respects better than war; and these early UN contributions
to international relations were to have many successors. A fourth area where the
UN made a definite impact was that of human rights. In December 1948 the
General Assembly adopted a Declaration on Human Rights. This was passed
without a contrary vote, but there were a number of abstentions, by the Soviet
bloc, Saudi Arabia and South Africa – an interesting and disparate group. The
communist governments argued that they held their own view of human rights,
which was different in principle from that of bourgeois states. (In practice, their
regimes continued to be characterized by one-party rule, political purges and
labour camps.) Saudi Arabia reserved the right to practise Islamic law. South
Africa pursued its own policy of apartheid and racial discrimination. It may well
be that other countries had reservations about human rights, but preferred not to
express them. In any case a new and dynamic element was introduced into
international relations, with consequences that increased with the passage of
time.
These functions taken up by the UN were less dramatic than some of its
founders hoped for when the organization was founded in 1945: the UN did not
become the ‘parliament of Man’ envisaged by the poet Tennyson.15 Its
achievements were nevertheless solid and in some respects far-reaching. The UN
carved out a life of its own and exercised a fitful but vital influence in world
affairs.
In the immediate post-war period, a number of existing international
organizations changed their character, and some new ones were created, in a
movement which involved several different areas. One was the Commonwealth
(until 1949 still called the British Commonwealth), which in 1945 consisted of
Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (which narrowly voted to join
the Canadian federation in 1948), New Zealand and South Africa. These were all
independent states, but they were united by common allegiance to the British
crown and by long habits of cooperation.
In 1950 the Commonwealth took a decisive step in adaptation to a changing
world, when India (independent since 1947) chose to remain in it when it
became a republic, using the device of recognizing the British monarch as head
of the Commonwealth. This apparently formal arrangement in fact opened the
way for any former British colony to join the Commonwealth on attaining
independence. Nearly all chose to do so. By 1966, when African decolonization
had been largely completed, membership had expanded to twenty-three, with
Barbados, Cyprus, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi,
Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Trinidad
and Tobago, Uganda and Zambia joining the original members.16 One original
member, racist South Africa, left the organization in 1961 and rejoined only after
the fall of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s. British governments valued
the Commonwealth for reasons of prestige and as a means of exercising informal
influence; and all the members found enough advantage to keep it in being.
One of the advantages of the Commonwealth was that it was global in
membership. Other international organizations were regional in their scope. In
the Middle East, the Arab League was founded at a conference in Cairo on 22
March 1945. Its members were Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria,
Transjordan (later Jordan) and Yemen. Representatives of the Palestinian Arabs
attended as observers. The main purposes of the League were to represent the
Arab world at the UN (whose founding conference was about to meet in San
Francisco); to promote cultural and economic links between its members; and to
act together on the question of Palestine – which meant opposing a Jewish state.
The League’s headquarters were established in Cairo, with the League Council
meeting twice a year at different capitals. The League has proved long-lived,
though Egypt was suspended from membership in 1979, when it concluded a
peace treaty with Israel; and the headquarters was moved to Tunis until Egypt
rejoined in 1989.
In the American hemisphere, the International Union of American Republics
had been set up as long ago as 1890, changing its name to the Pan-American
Union in 1910. In April 1948 this body was renamed the Organization of
American States (OAS). It now included Canada as well as the United States and
most of the Latin American states, with the lofty aims of advancing peace,
justice and hemisphere cooperation, as well as the more precise object of
defending the sovereignty, integrity and independence of member states. The
headquarters of the OAS was to be in Washington, and the secretary-general was
to be from Latin America. The OAS set up new structures: a General Assembly
to meet annually, a Permanent Council and a Conference of Foreign Ministers to
meet in case of need. Over time, the OAS became the scene of a constant tug of
war between the United States, which used the organization to exert its own
influence, and the Latin American states, which sought to oppose that influence.
Europe, meanwhile, was the scene for a number of new organizations between
states. In May 1948, a Congress of Europe, with representatives from twenty-
four European countries, met at the Hague to discuss various projects for
European unity, ranging from simple cooperation to federal union. This led to
the creation of the Council of Europe (1949), with a Parliamentary Assembly
and a Committee of Ministers. A series of moves towards West European
integration followed, notably the Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and,
eventually, the European Economic Community (EEC), which in time proved
the most successful of West European organizations. The Soviet bloc mirrored
these developments by creating its own trade organization, Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (Comecon), in 1949. It was flanked by the Communist
Information Bureau (Cominform), a body designed to coordinate the ideological
outlook of the Soviet bloc states, which was founded in September 1947.

Economic organization: The Bretton Woods

Conference, July 1944
During the Second World War the American government, and especially the
secretary of state, Cordell Hull, believed firmly that the war had largely been
caused by the economic conflicts arising from the great depression of the 1930s
and subsequent attempts at self-sufficiency and currency control. The United
States therefore set out to create a new world trade system, with lower tariffs and
convertible currencies. This policy was motivated by a genuine desire to set the
world to rights and by an immense confidence that the United States could do so.
It would also advance America’s economic interests because lower tariffs would
favour the most efficient producers (mostly American) and open up markets for
American exporters. Washington assumed a happy coincidence between the
improvement of the world and the advance of American commerce. Others
looked on this assumption with a more jaundiced eye.
The Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944 prepared the framework for the
economic organization of the post-war world. It was attended by forty-four
states, with the Soviet Union attending while refusing to be bound by its
conclusions (Haiti, Liberia and New Zealand took up the same position). The
conference launched two new organizations: the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the
‘World Bank’). The IMF was designed to prevent the pre-war problem of
countries running balance of payment deficits, which were followed by runs on
their reserves of gold or foreign currency. Each member of the IMF was to pay a
subscription according to his or her economic ability, one-quarter in gold and
three-quarters in currency. The IMF would then, from these reserves, grant
governments credits to meet deficits in their balance of payments. The World
Bank was founded in order to finance post-war reconstruction. Its funds were to
be raised from capital subscribed by member states, and later by its own
earnings. As the requirements of post-war reconstruction diminished, the World
Bank extended its activities to providing loans for capital investment, and funds
to assist economic development in poorer countries. The headquarters of both
the World Bank and the IMF were situated in Washington. The managing
director of the IMF was invariably European; all the early presidents of the
World Bank were Americans.
The Bretton Woods Conference also agreed to establish stable exchange rates,
by what amounted to a return to the gold exchange standard for all the
participant countries. Each signatory to this agreement undertook to maintain a
stable exchange rate for its currency, using the measurement of either gold or a
convertible currency, which was in practice the US dollar, with a fixed rate of
one ounce of gold to $35. The United States held the greater part of the world’s
gold reserves and was therefore the only state capable of assuring the
convertibility of its currency into gold.
 This new monetary system gave considerable advantages to the United States.
The US dollar had the privileged status of being the equivalent of gold (indeed,
better, since one could earn interest on dollar holdings) and was both a national
and an international currency. It was convertible anywhere, allowing Americans
to purchase goods, services or property with their own currency. No other
currency in the world at that time had such power. But the advantages did not
accrue solely to the United States. Stable exchange rates were considered to be a
common interest, much preferable to the monetary confusion of the 1930s. The
United States provided stable exchange rates, and other countries on the whole
benefited from them. When in 1971 the United States had to abandon the gold
standard and allow the dollar to float, the consequences were mixed and not
always to the advantage of those who had grumbled at American domination.
The Bretton Woods Conference also proposed to set up an International Trade
Organization, but this scheme was not accepted by the US Congress. However,
in October 1947, a conference held at Geneva reached a General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which proposed to introduce systematic tariff
reductions by all the members of the conference. GATT became established as
an organization, not simply as an agreement. Its headquarters were set up in
Geneva, with a director general and a secretariat; and its members met once a
year, and also in special conferences, to pursue the slow and difficult task of
translating an agreement on the principle of tariff reduction into actual changes.
As statesmen looked around in 1945 and the following four or five years, they
could find solid cause for satisfaction. The wartime alliance, despite some
friction, was still in working order and held out the possibility of forming the
basis for a new power system. A new world organization (the UN) had come into
being on the initiative of one of the superpowers, the United States, and with the
agreement of the other, the Soviet Union. There was a strong and encouraging
trend towards regional cooperation. Vital steps had been taken to establish a new
world economy, with provisions to finance reconstruction and stabilize exchange
rates. The ‘only’ problem was that in the meantime the Cold War had begun.
Many of the moves towards greater international economic and political
organization were by-products of this new conflict, which would dominate world
politics until 1991.

Notes
1 I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot, eds, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford, 1995),
 pp. 290, 1060, 1199; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1989), pp. 460–1.
2 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (London, 1995), p. 425.
3 Dear and Foot, Second World War, pp. 1060, 1231–2, 1235; Robert Service, A History of Twentieth
Century Russia (London, 1997), pp. 286, 295. Figures for civilian casualties vary widely.
4 Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 1996), p.
12.
5 Ibid., p. 95.
6 Dear and Foot, Second World War, p. 290.
7 Ibid.
8 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (London, 1994), p. 210.
9 Ibid., p. 209.
10 John Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Essays in History, Culture and Race (London, 1996), p. 121;
Dear and Foot, Second World War, p. 290, gives lower estimates.
11 Table in Dear and Foot, Second World War, p. 826.
12 W. S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. III: The Grand Alliance (London, 1950), p. 605.
13 For Nehru’s complaint, see Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest
Democracy (London, 2007), p. 73.
14 Rosemary Righter, Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order (London, 1995), pp. 46, 327 for
FAO, passim for UNESCO.
15 For the early years of the UN, see Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the
Quest for World Government (London, 2006).
16 For dates of Commonwealth membership, see
http://www.commonwealthofnations.org/commonwealth/.
 PART ONE

The Cold War, 1945–62

PHOTO 3 Crises point in the Cold War: an American supply plane lands in West Berlin during the Soviet
Blockade of 1948–9. The city was supplied by air; the Soviets buzzed American aircraft but did no more.
The Cold War remained cold (Getty Images. Credit: Walter Sanders).
 3

The antagonists

Power, ideology and proximity – National ambitions – Perceptions of the world –

Superpower rivalry.

The Soviet Union and the United States at the end of

the Second World War
In October 1944 President Roosevelt declared that ‘in this global war there is
literally no question, political or military, in which the United States is not
interested’. In 1946, Foreign Minister Molotov asserted that ‘the USSR is now
one of the mightiest countries of the world. One cannot decide now any serious
problems of international relations without the USSR.’ In these circumstances,
the interests of the two states would be almost certain to conflict at some point
and at some time.1 The histories of Athens and Sparta in Ancient Greece, Rome
and Carthage during the Punic Wars, Habsburg and Valois in the sixteenth
century, Britain and France in the eighteenth century – all showed that it was
virtually impossible for two great powers to come into close contact with one
another without also coming into conflict. There would have to be some
powerful reason if the United States and Soviet Union were to be different.
Moreover, it is almost a commonplace that alliances break down when wars
come to an end and common enemies are defeated. This had happened to the
British, French and Americans after the defeat of Germany in 1918. It was
almost certain to happen again in the case of the Grand Alliance in 1945, when
victory was achieved and ideological differences, suppressed or ignored while
the war continued, rose to the surface.
Indeed, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were made
more difficult because each embodied a creed. The United States was the
standard-bearer of democracy, individual liberty and capitalism. The Soviet
Union was the world’s first and greatest socialist state, committed to building
communism at home and displaying the beacon-light of the Workers’ Fatherland
to communists and sympathizers all over the world.
The two elements of power and ideology were so closely intertwined that it is
very difficult to decide which was more important. On the one hand, if
communism had been embodied only in some small state (e.g. Albania), the
United States would scarcely have been perturbed; so from the American point
of view it was communism plus power which produced conflict. On the other
hand, the Soviet Union was hostile to Switzerland, a small country which offered
no threat to its security but epitomized bourgeois values and success; so in this
case, power was unimportant and ideology was crucial. Between these two
extremes there were many variations, and the two elements of power and
ideology went together in different proportions.
To the problems arising from power and ideology was added at the end of the
Second World War the new fact of proximity. The United States and the Soviet
Union had lived in the same world for a quarter of a century without being more
than distantly hostile to one another, because they were geographically far apart.
Their nearest point of contact was at the Bering Straits, where the western tip of
Alaska is only 80 miles from the easternmost cape of Siberia; but there was no
acute confrontation across those icy waters. It was when the Americans and
Soviets met in the middle of Europe that they looked at one another with
different eyes and their troubles began.
These three factors of power, ideology and proximity, taken together, made
conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States at least probable and
perhaps inevitable. But before going on to examine how the long and
complicated struggle which we call the Cold War actually came about, let us
pause to look briefly at the two superpowers as they stood between 1945 and
1946.

The Soviet Union

In June 1943 the Soviet Union adopted a new national anthem, which opened
thus:
An indestructible union of free republics
Has forever been welded by Russia the Great.
 Long live the land created by the will of the peoples:
The united, powerful Soviet Union!
It went on to proclaim that ‘Stalin brought us up’.2 The new anthem thus linked
together three great defining features of the state: Russia the Great, the heir of
the Tsarist Empire; the Soviet Union, the product of the Bolshevik Revolution;
and Stalin, who presented the formidable visage of a Red Tsar.
The mixture was a complicated one, and the inheritance of the country’s
foreign policy was equally complex, made up of an uneasy combination of
expansionist drive and deep-seated insecurity. For centuries Moscow had
claimed to be the ‘Third Rome’ (after Rome itself and Byzantium), with a
mission to safeguard the Russian Orthodox religion and the Slav peoples in other
countries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia had pushed
southwards into the Caucasus and Central Asia, and eastwards through Siberia to
the Pacific. Russian armies had imposed order in Budapest in 1849 on behalf of
the Habsburgs, and crushed risings in Poland in 1830 and 1863 on their own
account. In theory, the communist regime discarded much of this inheritance,
rejecting religion altogether and claiming to rise above race or nationality. But in
practice, the drive for expansion continued and retained many of its old features.
During the Second World War, Stalin deliberately set out to recover lost Tsarist
territory in Poland and in the Far East. After the war, the Soviet Army was again
to crush national aspirations in Budapest in 1956 and to suppress Polish
independence.
At the same time, and under both Tsarist and Soviet regimes, insecurity and
fear of invasion remained endemic. These fears went far back to the irruption of
the Mongols in the thirteenth century (vividly evoked by Eisenstein in the
opening scenes of Alexander Nevsky), followed by the invasions by Charles XII
of Sweden in 1709, Napoleon in 1812 and the Germans from 1917 to 1918.
Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks between 1918 and 1920 gave these
apprehensions a new, ideological twist. Finally the German assault in 1941 and
the great struggle which followed confirmed all these obsessions about foreign
invasion and the absolute necessity of security. Soviet foreign policy thus had
deep roots in both a tradition of expansion and a chronic sense of insecurity. It
was a difficult combination for the Soviets themselves to manage and for
outsiders to understand.
The nature of the Soviet state which lay behind this foreign policy has been
crisply defined thus: ‘The USSR was a highly centralized, one-party
dictatorship. It enforced a single official ideology; imposed severe restrictions on
national, religious and cultural self-expression. Its economy was predominantly
state-owned.’3 All these aspects of the Soviet system had their impact on
relations with other countries; but in 1945 the great problem was that the system
itself was in disarray. The war had left a trail of material destruction and
administrative confusion. Armed opposition to Soviet authority was active in
eastern Poland, in the Baltic states (annexed between 1939 and 1940) and in the
Ukraine, where guerrilla bands held out until the middle of the 1950s. Stalin’s
answer was severe and large-scale repression. Dissident populations in the Baltic
states and Chechnya were deported in large numbers. Party control over
literature, science and the arts was tightened. Ideological orthodoxy, which had
been somewhat relaxed during the war in order to appeal to Russian patriotism,
was sternly reimposed to ensure internal unity and to eliminate all external
influences.
As the head of the state, Stalin emerged from the Second World War with his
authority over his own country and the international communist movement
virtually absolute. (There were some doubts and discontents in Tito’s
Yugoslavia, but these were not yet significant.) The triumphs of 1945 allowed
him to shrug off the disasters of 1941, and in the years to come he was
untouchable in a way that none of his successors had been. In this position of
supreme authority, he contrived to pursue two purposes: the security of the
Soviet state, which he saw largely in territorial terms; and the defence and
advancement of socialism. There is no sign that he saw any contradiction
between the two. In the pursuit of security, he was prepared to do business with
any and every specimen of humanity. In 1939 he had met Ribbentrop and made a
deal with Hitler. During the war he was on good terms with Churchill and
Roosevelt. After the war he maintained good relations with Chiang Kai-shek and
the Chinese Nationalists before, in 1950, welcoming Mao Zedong to Moscow
and signing a treaty of alliance with the new Chinese communist government. In
these contacts he did not allow considerations of ideology to interfere with the
pursuit of the interests of the Soviet state, as these were interpreted from time to
time. In the years immediately following the war, he made some public moves
away from the revolutionary inheritance of Bolshevism – the title of commissar
for foreign affairs was changed to that of foreign minister, and even the famous
Red Army was renamed the Soviet Army. Yet the Soviet Union still embodied
the Bolshevik Revolution, and in 1945 it was still the only socialist state in the
world. Its interests were therefore by definition the same as those of international
communism, and there was no distinction between them. As two recent
historians of Soviet foreign policy concluded, Stalin was motivated by twin and
inseparable purposes: ‘the promise of Communist revolutionary universalism
combined with the necessities of survival for the Soviet Union, the first and
unique “Socialist” empire’.4
On 9 February 1946, Stalin struck a confident note in a speech at the Bolshoi
Theatre, in which he claimed that the Second World War had been ‘a kind of
examination for our Soviet order, for our state, for our Communist Party’. They
had passed the test, and victory had demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet
order. Yet at the same time the Soviet Union must still press on to produce 50
million tons of iron, 60 million tons of steel, 60 million tons of petroleum, and
only thus would the country be safe against all contingencies. He also stressed
the importance of science, declaring that Soviet scientists would be able to
overtake the achievements of science elsewhere.5 His thoughts doubtless dwelt
at that point on the atomic bomb. Stalin had been well informed about the
progress of the American atomic project and received news of an imminent test
just before he set off to the Potsdam Conference. Even so, he was badly shaken
by the actual explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in August 1945 he
threw everything into building a Soviet atomic bomb. He put Lavrenti Beria (the
head of the secret police) in charge of a vast project, which moved at headlong
speed, so that a bomb was tested as early as 1949. But for the time being, the
Soviet Union was behind the United States in a vital area of power and prestige.
Stalin put a brave face on it, claiming that the bomb was only intended to
frighten those with weak nerves; but in practice his caution, always a marked
characteristic of his foreign policy, was reinforced.
Stalin’s right-hand man in foreign policy was Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign
minister from 1939 to 1949. Molotov was an old Bolshevik who never lost his
original convictions – ‘a man morally committed to the Revolution’.6 Even when
Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev had him expelled from the Communist
Party, he insisted on going personally to the bank every month to pay his party
dues, until after twenty-three years he had the satisfaction of seeing his
membership formally restored. He took a straightforward view of his work as
foreign minister. Reflecting in 1974, he remarked: ‘My task as minister of
foreign affairs was to expand the borders of our Fatherland. And it seems that
Stalin and I coped with this task quite well.’ And again: ‘Stalin often said that
Russia wins wars but doesn’t know how to avail itself of the fruits of victory. …
But we did well after this war [the Second World War] because we strengthened
the Soviet state. It was my main task as minister of foreign affairs to see that we
would not be cheated.’7 On relations with the United States, his views were brisk
and matter of fact.
The cold war – I don’t like the expression. It sounds like Khrushchev’s. … But
what does the ‘cold war’ mean? Strained relations. It was entirely their doing or
because we were on the offensive. They certainly hardened their line against
us, but we had to consolidate our conquests. … To squeeze out the capitalist
order. This was the cold war. Of course, you had to know when and where to
stop. I believe in this respect Stalin kept well within the limits.8
There was no rancour in this, and no sense of lost opportunities to maintain good
relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet purpose
was ‘to squeeze out the capitalist order’; and the Western powers ‘behaved the
only way they could – as enemies of the Soviet Union and the Socialist way of
life’.9 Molotov made no particular distinction between ideology and power
politics, both of which worked in the same direction.
By September 1946 he had taken stock of the situation, in consultation with the
Soviet ambassador in Washington, and reached some general conclusions about
relations with the United States. The Americans had abandoned isolation and
were set on achieving world supremacy. They would seek to limit or dislodge
Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and to establish new
bases on the periphery of the Soviet Union. To counter these policies, the best
strategy was to exploit contradictions between the imperialist powers, especially
the Americans and the British, whose interests were bound to clash in the Middle
East, as the Americans sought to increase their control over the oilfields.10 At the
time these were cautious and not unreasonable calculations, and their
conclusions were far from apocalyptic.
Stalin and Molotov were hardened by years of war and political struggle, and
they were far more experienced than any Western statesmen following
Roosevelt’s death and Churchill’s electoral defeat in 1945. Truman especially
seemed to them a beginner in international affairs – Stalin called him a ‘petty
shopkeeper’.11 They were not afraid of their American opponents and were
unlikely to be perturbed by difficult negotiations or verbal confrontations. Their
approach was prudent and calculating – as Molotov said, ‘You had to know
when and where to stop.’ The United States was their enemy; but it was an
enmity which might last a long time. There was no need to hurry.

The United States

The American political system and tradition were very different from those of
the Soviet Union. The United States was founded on the principles of individual
liberty and democratic elections for all kinds of office, from the presidency to
the local school board. Its vast area was held together by a flexible form of
federal government which retained important powers for the individual states of
the Union. The American economic system was based on free enterprise,
vigorous capitalism and the free market, tempered by limited government
intervention and the recent New Deal radicalism of Franklin Roosevelt’s
presidency. The broad though not unmixed success of this form of government
and economics had given the great majority of the American people an
enormous confidence in their own country and way of life, recently reinforced
by victory in war over Germany and Japan.
The foreign policy of this comparatively new state (just under 170 years old in
1945) comprised different and sometimes contradictory strands. The United
States had been created by a long westward expansion from the original thirteen
states on the Atlantic coast. This expansion had involved movements of
population and settlement on a vast scale. It had also included small wars against
the Indians, or Native Americans, and a big war against Mexico in 1846–8,
which bore some resemblance to the Russian conflicts with the khanates of
Central Asia and the Turks. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
there had been no firm idea of where this expansion should stop. In 1898, in the
Spanish–American War, the United States annexed Hawaii in the middle of the
Pacific Ocean and the Philippines on the far side of it. By 1945 the Philippines
were on the way to independence, but in 1959 Hawaii became a fully fledged
state of the Union. The tradition of expansion, justified by the claim to be
working out the ‘manifest destiny’ of the American people, was very strong.
Yet this expansion was accompanied by an equally powerful tradition of
opposition to colonialism as practised by other countries. The United States had
come into existence by breaking free from the British Empire and regarded itself
as the natural leader for other peoples rightly struggling to be free. There was
also a strong current of even higher idealism, claiming for the United States the
role of leading the world to a better form of political and international
organization. During the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson embodied
this idealism and tried to put it into practice by proclaiming new principles of
international conduct and creating the League of Nations to put them into
practice.
At that stage he was decisively repudiated by the United States Congress and
public opinion, then under the powerful influence of so-called isolationism,
which formed yet another strand in the American outlook on foreign affairs.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, had warned
his fellow countrymen against the dangers of ‘entangling alliances’, and his
words had made a lasting impression. In the nineteenth century, most immigrants
to the United States from Europe wished to leave Europe and its troubles behind
them. At the end of the First World War isolationism prevailed over Wilson’s
internationalist idealism, and at the end of the Second World War there was still,
at the very least, a strong instinct to ‘bring the boys home’.
All these instincts were real and deep-rooted. They were tempered by a strand
of realpolitik and power politics, personified about the turn of the century by
Theodore Roosevelt but practised by many of his predecessors and successors.
The United States treated the Caribbean as its own sphere of predominance;
installed an American zone to ensure control of the Panama Canal; and extended
its economic influence over much of Central and South America. By the end of
the Second World War this predominance in the Western hemisphere was
accompanied by the new strategic interests of a superpower, with large armed
forces, bases stretched across the Pacific and the sole possession of the atomic
bomb.
Foreign policy was also influenced by the interests of a vast capitalist and free-
market economy. As the Second World War ended, the American economy was
thriving, stimulated by the almost unlimited demands of war. Yet many
Americans were afraid that the wartime boom would collapse into depression,
and therefore they sought to promote their continued prosperity by securing
markets for their exports, raw materials for their industries and access to oil to
meet the growing demand for fuel.
American foreign policy was also subject to the influence of an active and alert
public opinion. It was true that the main body of the American public took little
or no interest in foreign affairs, except in wartime; but there was a substantial
minority that did. Readers of the serious press, especially on the east coast;
pressure groups associated with foreign causes such as Zionism or missionary
enterprises in China; and the various groups of ‘hyphenated Americans’ (Polish-
Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans) – all made their presence felt.
Newspaper editors and columnists and radio commentators could be highly
influential. One example was Walter Lippmann, an outstanding newspaper
columnist who became something of an oracle for the American political elite.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee often focused on the opinions of these
different groups and itself brought pressure to bear on the government. The
upshot was a complicated mixture of opinions and pressure groups, which no
president or secretary of state could afford to ignore. It was a situation
completely unknown in the Soviet Union and was frequently baffling to Soviet
leaders and officials who were accustomed to a very different system of
conducting foreign policy. (Indeed, it could sometimes be equally difficult and
disconcerting for America’s allies.) Between 1945 and 1946 American public
opinion was highly diverse and certainly not settled in an anti-Soviet stance. The
East Coast press and New Deal activists of the Roosevelt era were still radical in
their outlook, and the wartime enthusiasm for the Soviet Union continued well
into 1946. It was symptomatic that when Churchill made his famous speech at
Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, denouncing the iron curtain which had fallen
across Europe and appealing for a renewed Anglo-American alliance, he evoked
as much hostility as support in the American press and public opinion.
The presence of these different elements – idealism, power politics, economic
interests and the various currents of public opinion – meant that American
foreign policy was sometimes uncertain, or even erratic. One set of views or
interests could pull against another. For example, American economic interests
required sterling to become freely convertible into dollars after the war, to the
advantage of American exporters; but when the British introduced convertibility
in 1947, its effects were so damaging to the British economy that the United
States speedily agreed to the abandonment of the attempt. The value of Britain as
an ally outweighed the advantages of convertibility for American economic
interests. Again, in 1945, American idealism in its anti-imperialist mode led the
United States to oppose the return of French forces to Indo-China; but by 1950,
the influence of power politics and the new idealism of the Cold War brought the
Americans to aid the French in their struggle against Vietnamese nationalist and
communist forces. The very nature of American politics meant that there were
always tensions and disagreements about foreign policy; which made it all the
more remarkable when the United States set out to pursue a long-term policy and
stuck to it, as it did – despite many ups and downs – during the Cold War.
The head of the US government from 1945 to 1953 was President Harry
Truman, the former vice president, who suddenly acceded to the highest post
after the death of Roosevelt in April 1945. He was not a commanding figure in
the United States and was virtually unknown in the rest of the world. He was
almost totally inexperienced in foreign policy. But he had learnt about life and
politics in two hard schools: he served as an artillery officer in France in 1918,
and he made his way as a politician in the tough world of Kansas City politics,
which was run (as was the whole state of Missouri) by the local political boss,
Tom Pendergast. It was said that Truman once remarked that Stalin’s methods
were similar to Pendergast’s, which was certainly unfair to Pendergast, but
showed that Truman recognized when he had come up against a tough character.
In 1945 Truman was feeling his way, but he soon showed remarkable strength of
character and powers of decision.12

Condemned to enmity?
Was it inevitable that these two superpowers, with their different interests and
outlooks, would become opponents? The weight of historical precedent, and the
pressures created by rivalries of power, interest and ideology and the problems
of proximity, all indicated the likelihood of conflict. Yet in 1945 there were
significant pointers in the opposite direction.
When Truman became president of the United States, and was finding his
bearings in his new responsibilities, he was anxious to follow the lines laid down
by Roosevelt in dealing with Stalin and to pursue his predecessor’s vision of a
new world order. As we have seen, he had previously expressed some hostility to
communism, but he held no fixed view that the Soviet Union was an enemy and
was perfectly willing to meet Stalin and get on with him. There were signs that
Stalin too wished to avoid direct confrontation with his wartime allies. In
Europe, some communist leaders complained that Stalin was keener on reaching
agreements with the ‘imperialists’ than on supporting them. For example, Tito
felt he received insufficient support for his territorial demands in Trieste; while
in France and Italy fleeting communist ideas of seizing power were firmly
checked by Moscow. In the Pacific, a significant issue arose concerning the
arrangements for the surrender of Japanese forces in the home islands of Japan.
On 16 August Stalin wrote to Truman proposing that Soviet forces accept the
surrender of Japanese troops in northern Hokkaido, the part of Japan nearest to
Soviet territory. Truman refused, insisting that Japanese forces on all the home
islands surrender to the Americans. Stalin at first responded by ordering his
troops to occupy Hokkaido; but he then countermanded the order on 22 August
to avoid trouble with the Americans.
Above all, the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 was at least a partial success,
if only because the three participants were determined that it should not fail.
They still had to finish the war against Japan; they agreed on the outlines of a
German policy; and the Americans and British accepted what amounted to a
Soviet solution to the Polish question. They agreed to carry forward their
cooperation by means of the Council of Foreign Ministers (American, British,
French and Soviet), which was to pursue the work begun at Potsdam and prepare
peace treaties. All was not well in the wartime alliance, but in many respects it
continued to work. In the autumn of 1945, the two superpowers had not yet
become antagonists.
In 1945 there was no certainty as to how events would turn out. We now know
that the next forty-five years were to be dominated by the struggle between the
superpowers which we call the Cold War. A string of questions arises in relation
to that development. What was the Cold War, and how did it earn that striking
but imprecise designation? How and why did the Cold War come about? Do we
know who started it – indeed, does such a question have much meaning in the
context of these complicated events? We will examine these questions in the
next four chapters.

Notes
1 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, paperback ed., 1989), p. 470,
juxtaposes the two quotations and argues that a clash of interests was inevitable.
2 Quoted in Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia (London, 1997), pp. 282, 315.
3 Ibid., p. xxi.
4 Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 1996), p.
12.
5 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy (London, 1994), pp. 148–
9.
6 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 82.
7 Vyacheslav Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev,
ed. Albert Resis (Chicago, 1993), pp. 8, 53.
8 Ibid., p. 59.
9 Quoted in Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 89.
10 Memorandum by Novikov, ambassador in Washington, as amended by Molotov, 27 September 1946,
ibid., pp. 101–3.
11 Ibid., pp. 43, 95.
12 See Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (London, 1994), chapters 4 and 7.
 4

The beginning of the Cold War: From

Potsdam to the Marshall Plan, 1945–7

Conferences and peace treaties – Germany and the German Question – The
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – Turkey and Greece – Kennan’s ‘long
telegram’ and Churchill’s Fulton speech – The Truman Doctrine – The Marshall
Plan – The concept of containment.

In the period that elapsed between the Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945
and the summer of 1947, relations between the antagonists broke down. In
Western Europe, the communists moved into bitter opposition to the democratic
governments of the region. Subsequently, the North Atlantic Treaty (April 1949)
bound together the United States, Canada and ten European countries in alliance
against the Soviet Union. In Eastern Europe, Stalinist regimes were imposed
almost everywhere. Europe was divided by an ‘iron curtain’ of barbed wire,
minefields and machine guns. Across this great divide, the two sides tried to
undermine one another by propaganda, espionage and covert operations.
Yet they went no further. American and Soviet tanks confronted one another on
occasion. Soviet fighters buzzed American transport aircraft. But the fateful
shots were never fired. It was the Cold War, not a third world war, which began
between 1945 and 1949.
These events raise two crucial questions. First, how and why did the
superpowers and the European countries move from the position in 1945 to that
of 1949? Second, why did hostilities remain ‘cold’, rather than resulting in the
actual fighting which sometimes seemed so close? Discussion of these questions
has been much influenced by debates as to who started the Cold War, or who
was responsible for it. Schools of thought have arisen among historians,
especially in the United States (orthodox, revisionist, neo-revisionist, post-
revisionist), holding that the Soviets were to blame, or the Americans, or both at
once, or neither.1 These debates have done much to stimulate research, but here
it is best to start by trying to explain what happened rather than ascribe
responsibility. Let us begin by clarifying the course of events, in two stages:
first, from the Potsdam Conference to the Marshall Plan (from 1945 to 1947),
and then in the next chapter from the Czechoslovakian crisis of February 1948 to
the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949.

The Council of Foreign Ministers, 1945–7

At the beginning – though this is often forgotten – real progress was made
towards a peace settlement in Europe after the Second World War. As we have
seen, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the victorious powers made
arrangements for the administration of Germany, and fixed a de facto frontier
between Poland and Germany. It was assumed that peace treaties would be
drawn up, as was customary at the end of wars; and the conference agreed to set
up a Council of Foreign Ministers to prepare peace settlements with the various
former enemy powers: first with Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland;
and later with Austria and Germany. The Council was to consist formally of the
representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and
China; but China played little part, and it was understood that France was to be
concerned only with the treaties involving Italy and Germany.
There ensued a series of meetings and conferences between 1945 and 1946, as
follows:
• Council of Foreign Ministers, London, from September to October 1945
• Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (USA, USSR, Britain), Moscow, December
1945
• Council of Foreign Ministers, Paris, from April to May 1946
• Council of Foreign Ministers, Paris, from June to July 1946
• Paris Peace Conference (twenty-one countries), from 29 July to 15 October
1946
• Council of Foreign Ministers, New York, from November to December
1946
• Council of Foreign Ministers, Moscow, from March to April 1947
 • Council of Foreign Ministers, London, from November to December 1947
The result was a series of five peace treaties, with Italy, Romania, Hungary,
Bulgaria and Finland, all prepared at the Paris Peace Conference which formally
concluded on 10 February 1947. Peace treaties with Austria and Germany were
discussed at the Council of Foreign Ministers in Moscow, between March and
April 1947, but without reaching agreement.
Despite these later failures, the peace treaties signed in February 1947
represented a considerable achievement by the victorious powers and
demonstrated that they could still attain a measure of agreement and
compromise. They deserve careful attention.
The treaty with Italy included some complicated territorial arrangements. Italy
lost the Dodecanese Islands to Greece, and Albanian independence was restored
after its annexation by Italy in 1939. Italy also lost territory to Yugoslavia; and
the port of Trieste had to be left in dispute, with the United States and Britain
supporting the Italian claim to retain it, while the Soviet Union supported the
Yugoslav attempt to annex it. A compromise based on zones of administration
was reached; but it was not until 1954 that a final solution had been reached by
which Trieste itself was retained by Italy and the hinterland passed on to
Yugoslavia.
In Africa, Italy had held colonies in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and
Libya. Ethiopia had already resumed its independence, which was confirmed by
the treaty. But the other three territories presented problems. In 1946, the Soviet
Union claimed a mandate over Libya under the aegis of the United Nations
(UN), which would have established a Soviet foothold in the central
Mediterranean. Britain opposed this, and countered by proposing independence
for all three colonies. A decision was postponed, using a formula by which if the
four victorious powers (USA, USSR, Britain and France) failed to reach
agreement within a year of the Italian peace treaty coming into force, the matter
was to be referred to the General Assembly of the UN – an early example of the
use of the UN as an escape route from a diplomatic impasse. In the event the
four powers did not agree, and the UN made a series of rulings by which Italian
Somaliland became a UN trust territory in 1950; Libya became independent in
1951; and Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia in 1952 – an arrangement which
was later bitterly disputed by Eritrean separatists.
The treaty also imposed restrictions on Italian internal affairs, by which the
Italian government undertook not to allow the resurgence of Fascist
organizations; to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms; and to limit
the size of its armed forces. Italy was to pay reparations to Yugoslavia, Greece,
the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Albania, in descending order of magnitude.
Overall, the treaty was greeted with dismay in Italy. Italians regarded themselves
as being among the victims of Fascism and considered that they had redeemed
themselves by switching sides in September 1943 and by fighting a sometimes
heroic war of popular resistance against the German army of occupation. On 10
February 1947, Il Popolo, the newspaper of the ruling Christian Democracy
party, proclaimed that ‘Rome is united in dignified protest while at Paris Italy is
being mutilated’.2
The other peace treaties imposed a number of territorial changes. Romania lost
Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, which had annexed these
provinces in 1940. Bulgaria retained the southern Dobrudja, even though it had
been gained from Romania under a German-imposed treaty in 1940, but returned
some Serbian territory to Yugoslavia and Western Thrace to Greece. Hungary
returned to the frontiers of 1920, losing (or returning) Transylvania to Romania
and southern Slovakia to Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union obtained the right to
maintain troops in Hungary and Romania, in order to safeguard communications
with its occupation forces in Austria. Finland ceded to the Soviet Union three
pieces of territory previously lost in 1940: the port and province of Petsamo in
the north; an area in the centre of the border with the Soviet Union; and the
Karelian isthmus in the south east. The Soviet Union secured a lease of the
Porkkala–Udd area as a naval base for fifty years – though in fact they were to
give it up in 1955. All five countries were to pay reparations of varying amounts
to their different enemies (although only Finland did pay its reparations bill in
full).
These were important treaties, dealing with some difficult issues, and implying
serious consequences for the countries directly concerned. It is true that they
were of lesser importance for the superpowers, but they still showed what could
be achieved by patient negotiation between the victors. Germany presented
much more serious problems.

Germany and the German Question

Much of European international politics in the first part of the twentieth century
had been dominated by the German Question: what role was this comparatively
new, prosperous and powerful country to play in Europe? Twice, in 1914–18 and
1939–45, Germany had fought great wars to establish its hegemony, and in 1945
there was widespread fear that it might try again. The question of how to prevent
such an attempt was crucial, especially to the Soviet Union and France, which
had been invaded by Germany, and only marginally less so to Britain. The
United States, safe across the Atlantic, took a more relaxed view.
As well as these vital but rather general questions, there were a number of
specific matters to be resolved in 1945. Where were the German borders to be
fixed? In the west, France claimed that the Saarland should be detached from
Germany, preferably to the benefit of France. In the east, the Oder–Neisse line
settled at Potsdam was only an administrative device, and a recognized frontier
between Germany and Poland remained to be agreed by treaty.
Behind the question of frontiers lay another issue: Was Germany to be kept in
one piece or not? At Yalta, the establishment of four occupation zones (Soviet,
American, British and French) had been agreed on, with a corresponding
division of Berlin into four zones, but the issue of breaking Germany up
permanently had been postponed. At Potsdam, the Big Three decided to keep
Germany in one piece (though diminished in size by loss of territory in the east)
and to administer the country as a whole. The four commanders-in-chief of the
occupation forces would constitute a Control Council, in which each power
would possess a veto, so that decisions could only be reached unanimously.
Similarly, Berlin was to have its central authority, subject to the Control Council.
In principle, the joint administration of occupied Germany required agreement
between the occupying powers on the aims which they were to pursue. In
practice, this proved to be impossible. The Soviets, seeking both revenge and to
make up some of their immense material losses, made the exaction of
reparations their first objective, removing equipment, machinery and even whole
factories when they could be found from their own occupation zone, and
whenever possible from the other zones as well. One historian says, ‘The
Russian appetite for German factories and goods was insatiable.’3 The Soviet
occupiers also took reparations from current production, both industrial and
agricultural, in their own zone.
The Americans and the British took a very different view. Their occupation
zones were densely populated and mainly industrial and required imports of food
and raw materials. They therefore argued that current industrial production
should pay for imports, and that some of the agricultural production of the Soviet
zone should feed the population of the Western zones. In fact, the Americans fed
the population of their zone at their own expense; and in July 1946 the British
government introduced bread rationing at home (a measure never found
necessary during the war) in order to export wheat to the British zone in
Germany.
In these circumstances, the Americans and the British ceased to treat Germany
as an economic whole. As early as May 1946 General Clay, the commander-in-
chief of the American occupation zone, stopped the transfer of reparations from
the American to the Soviet zone. In July, the American and British zones were
merged, for administrative purposes, into the clumsily named ‘Bizonia’. These
changes arose from the practical necessity of feeding the German population, but
the Americans quickly pressed the more general issue of promoting German
economic recovery. In a speech at Stuttgart on 6 September 1946, Secretary of
State James F. Byrnes declared that the economic recovery of the continent as a
whole would slow down if Germany was turned into a poorhouse. Instead,
Germany must be allowed to export enough goods to pay her own way. This was
a sensible course of action; but it was not the policy that had been agreed by the
Allies in 1945. In their zone, the Soviets continued to exact reparations rather
than restore the economy; and the French too stood out of Bizonia and continued
to take reparations out of current production until 1947. The economic division
of Germany had begun.
The political division of Germany also began in 1946. Early that year the
Soviet occupation authorities permitted the resumption of political activities
within their zone, but insisted on the amalgamation of the Communist Party and
the Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Unity Party, which was simply a
front for communist control. In the other zones, political activity also resumed;
and the British and the Americans, in different ways, encouraged the
development of political pluralism. The Communist Party attempted
amalgamation with the Social Democrats, as in the east, but the latter firmly
refused, recognizing a takeover when they saw one. In Berlin, the Social
Democratic Party and the Socialist Unity Party existed side by side, and their
relative popularity was tested in elections for local government and a mayor in
October 1946. The result was a substantial victory for the Social Democrats,
who were supported by both the British and the American occupation
authorities. A crucial political division of Germany thus began, with the Soviets
insisting on the hegemony of the Socialist Unity Party in their zone, and the
Americans and the British developing a multiparty system based on their own
form of representative democracy. The French, for their part, were more
reluctant than any of the other occupying powers to entrust the Germans with
political responsibilities, arguing that caution should prevail.
 By the beginning of 1947, the Allied policy towards Germany that had been
sketched out at Potsdam had broken down, and the economic and political
division of the country was under way. It remained to be seen whether the
occupying powers could agree on a new policy. From 10 March to 24 April
1947, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and
France met in conference in Moscow to discuss the preparation of peace treaties
with Germany and Austria. They held no fewer than forty-three sessions, mainly
on reparations and economic questions, but failed to reach agreement on any
substantial matter. The participants agreed that there should be a peace
conference to draw up a German peace treaty, but not on which countries should
be invited – for example, the Soviets proposed to leave out the British
Commonwealth states (which had fought throughout the war) and various Latin
American countries (which had entered the conflict late in the day). The British
and the Americans wanted to include both groups. The Soviets insisted on the
sum of $10 billion in reparations to be paid in part from current production in the
whole of Germany, as had been agreed at Potsdam. The Americans and the
British were opposed to the Soviets taking reparations from current production
in their united zones. However, on this question, the Soviets were adamant – as
Stalin told Secretary of State George C. Marshall on his face, the Americans and
the British could afford to be generous on reparations, but the Soviet Union
could not. On the question of the future government of Germany, the Soviets
favoured a centralized government and claimed a share in the control of the
Ruhr. The Americans and the British proposed a strong form of federal
government, while the French argued for a weak form. In the course of the
meetings, the French were forced into what was for them an unwelcome choice.
At the start of the conference, the French had hoped to cooperate with the Soviet
Union on reparations, on which they held similar views, in return for Soviet
support on French claims in the Saarland; but Molotov refused even to discuss
the Saarland, and the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, concluded that
France would have to work with the Americans and the British, join Bizonia and
relax its reparations policy. This change, which was implemented by June 1947,
established the division of Germany on an East–West basis, which it thereafter
retained. It also meant that France had effectively joined the western camp in the
developing Cold War.
The Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers thus failed to make any progress
towards a German peace treaty and confirmed the division of Germany which
had been under way for over a year. This division, which was of crucial
significance in the whole of post-war international relations, did not come about
by agreement between the superpowers, but when it came they acquiesced in it.
This created a paradoxical state of affairs which was to persist until 1990. The
Soviets and the Americans both insisted that it was desirable to reunite Germany
and to end the unnatural division of the German people. The British and the
French occasionally echoed these sentiments, with varying degrees of
conviction. Yet every practical step taken by these various governments
confirmed the status quo. The superpowers spoke of a united Germany; but by
their actions they made sure that it remained divided.
A divided Germany was the most obvious, and in many ways the most
perilous, element in the Cold War, raising from time to time the imminent danger
of war. Yet what also emerged in Germany was a tacit willingness on both sides
to maintain the status quo. The German Question threatened war, and yet it also
held the secret of stability and safety.
The division of Germany was the most important event in Europe between
1945 and early 1947, and played the greatest role in the deterioration of relations
between the United States and the Soviet Union. But there were two lesser
developments which also had their effects, in one case chronic and insidious, in
the other acute and incisive. The first was the establishment of a Soviet bloc in
Eastern Europe; the second was the situation in Greece and Turkey.

The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

It was Stalin’s intention throughout the Second World War to establish a Soviet
sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, to ensure the security of the Soviet Union
and to extend the area of communist control. In 1945–6 this sphere was firmly
established. Its core consisted of the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, which
in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic, and five central and East
European states: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. At
this stage, there were considerable differences between the regimes operating in
these countries. In Poland, the government formed in June 1945 was
predominantly communist. Elections held in January 1947 were accompanied by
intimidation and fraud, and the misnamed ‘Democratic Bloc’ led by the
communists grabbed 80 per cent of the votes. Mikołajczyk, the leader of the
Peasant Party and the prime minister, was forced to flee the country. In Hungary,
the Smallholders’ Party won 57 per cent of the vote, and the Communist Party
only 17 per cent in the November 1945 elections; but the coalition government
which followed allowed the communists to control the Ministry of the Interior,
and so the security police. In Bulgaria, where there was more sympathy for
Russia than elsewhere, a new constitution along Soviet lines was introduced in
1947, which effectively gave power to the communists under the name of the
Fatherland Front. In Romania, the Soviets intervened to nominate a government
as early as February 1945, but coalition governments survived and the monarchy
remained until King Michael was forced to abdicate in December 1947.
Czechoslovakia held a key position, because it was a country with a strong
parliamentary tradition, and with a president (Edouard Benes) who was
determined to cooperate with the Soviet Union on a friendly basis, balancing
between east and west. In the first post-war elections, the Communist Party
emerged as the strongest single party, with 38 per cent of the vote, which was far
from overwhelming. In a coalition government, the prime minister, Klement
Gottwald, was a communist, but the foreign minister was Jan Masaryk, the son
of the founder of the Czechoslovakian state and a figure much respected
throughout Western Europe. As in Hungary, the communists controlled internal
security and also the radio.
Throughout Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was militarily predominant.
Soviet troops were stationed from 1945 onwards in Poland, Romania and
Hungary. Czechoslovakia had no Soviet garrison, but was almost entirely
surrounded by Soviet-occupied territory. There were other important forces
tending to communist control. Over much of Eastern Europe, socialism seemed
to offer the best way forward – other economic and social systems had been tried
and failed, and conservatism had often been discredited by association with
fascism. More sinister links were also established. In each country, a secret
police force was set up on the pattern of the NKVD and under the command of
Soviet officers. Communist leaders in the various countries became dependent
on the Soviet Union, which kept them in positions of power, privilege and
financial advantage. In April 1947, Matyas Rakosi, the Hungarian communist
leader, visited Molotov and asked him how long Soviet troops were going to stay
in Hungary – not because he wanted them to leave, but because he was anxious
for them to remain.
On the edges of this Soviet sphere of predominance there lay debatable lands.
In the north, Finland escaped Soviet occupation and gradually evolved a
successful compromise between acceptance of Soviet control in foreign affairs
and a full measure of internal freedom. To the south, Tito’s government in
Yugoslavia could claim to have liberated the country largely by its own efforts
between 1944 and 1945; and the Yugoslavs were closely attached to the Soviet
sphere between 1945 and 1947 without entirely falling within it. For example,
Tito used his own initiative to try to set up a form of confederation between
Yugoslavia and other Balkan states during 1946–7, and he provided support for
the Greek communists when Stalin did not. In June 1948 these differences were
to develop into a fatal split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. These two
exceptions to the rule of Soviet predominance were to prove of considerable
importance in the long run; but between 1946 and 1947 it was the mass of the
Soviet bloc which loomed large.
In some ways, there was no great reason for the establishment of this bloc to
impinge on Soviet–American relations. The United States had no immediate
interests in Eastern Europe (though the Polish-American population counted for
something in American public opinion). It soon became clear that while the
Americans might grumble about Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, they were
not prepared to take serious action to disrupt it, and certainly not to risk war.
Even so, the Soviet Union was a presence looming over the rest of Europe. Its
armed forces were far stronger than any that could be deployed by any other
European power, and greater in numbers than anything the Americans could
deploy. In 1947, it was natural to ask where the advance of Soviet power was
going to stop, and to be alarmed about the possible answers. By the end of that
year, the image of the Soviet Union in the West was changing rapidly, from the
much-admired wartime ally and the benevolent ‘Uncle Joe’ to something much
more threatening.
MAP 4 Central Europe and the Iron Curtain.

The United States reacts, 1946–7

From 1945 to 1946 there was a continuous state of tension, a sort of grumbling
appendix of a crisis, in Turkey and Greece. In June 1945, Foreign Minister
Molotov asked the Turkish government for the lease of a base on the straits
between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean – a long-standing Russian aim
going back to the time of the Tsars. The Turks refused. In August 1946 the
Soviets renewed their request for a base, coupled with a demand for a revision of
the rules governing the passage of warships through the straits, laid down by the
Montreux Convention of 1936. Again the Turks refused. On this occasion, the
United States thought that a Soviet attack on Turkey was likely, and prepared a
war plan which included the possibility of using atomic weapons. In the event,
Moscow did not press its demands. At the same time a civil war was continuing
in Greece between the government, supported by the British, and communist
guerrillas, supported by Yugoslavia (though not by the Soviet Union – Stalin
stood by his agreement made with Churchill in October 1944).
So far, these events were not of decisive importance. The appendix grumbled
on, geographically on the margins of Europe and apparently on the margins of
everyone’s concerns. Yet in 1947 this area was to produce a decisive
development in the shape of the Truman Doctrine of March 1947. To grasp why,
we must go back a little in time.

The ‘long telegram’ and the Fulton speech, 1946

At the beginning of 1946 American policy towards the Soviet Union was
becoming uncertain. Meetings of foreign ministers were growing increasingly
difficult. Truman felt that Roosevelt’s hope of building a rapport with Stalin and
bringing the Soviets into the international club was failing. On 5 January 1946,
the president expostulated to James F. Byrnes that he was ‘tired of babying the
Soviets’.4 But no new policy was in prospect.
Early in 1946 two interventions, one private, the other highly public, brought
new influences to bear on American policy: George Kennan’s ‘long telegram’
from Moscow (22 February 1946) and Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, on
5 March.
Kennan was a senior diplomat, temporarily in charge of the American Embassy
in Moscow. In February 1946 he received a routine enquiry from the State
Department about a particular aspect of Soviet activity. In reply, he analysed the
roots and nature of Soviet foreign policy, in a telegram of some 8,000 words, ‘all
neatly divided’ (in Kennan’s characteristic description), ‘like an eighteenth-
century Protestant sermon, into five separate parts’. Kennan wrote from a long
experience of Soviet affairs (he had first been posted to Moscow in the 1930s, at
the height of Stalin’s purges) and a deep knowledge of the Russian language,
literature and history. As early as September 1944 he had pointed out in a
memorandum to Washington that the Russians would establish their own sphere
of influence in Eastern Europe and in parts of Asia, and argued that the United
States should draw a line beyond which they would not allow Soviet power to
operate unchallenged.
In the ‘long telegram’, Kennan explained that the Soviet leaders worked on the
fixed assumption that they were surrounded by capitalist enemies, whom one
day they would have to fight (though fortunately the capitalists were also hostile
to one another, and their disputes could be exploited). In this hostile world, the
security of the Soviet Union could only be achieved by ‘a patient but deadly
struggle for the total destruction of their rivals’. This belief was dogmatic (and
Kennan urged his readers not to underrate the importance of dogma); but it was
also deeply rooted in geography and history, which had left the Russian people
with a profound sense of insecurity. Kennan concluded: ‘Here we have a
political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States
there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is necessary and desirable that
the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be
destroyed, the international authority of our state broken, if Soviet power is to be
secure.’ Coping with this challenge was ‘undoubtedly the greatest task our
diplomacy has ever faced and probably the greatest which it will ever have to
face’.
Kennan’s specific recommendations at the end of this formidable assessment
were slender. He suggested that the American public should be educated in the
realities of the situation, and that the United States should put forward a positive
and constructive picture of the world which it would like to see; this amounted to
little more than an exercise in propaganda. There were no recommendations for
economic or military aid to other countries, nor did Kennan use on this occasion
the word ‘containment’ to describe the nature of his policy.5
Truman seemingly did not read Kennan’s long telegram; but it made a great
impact in the State Department, where opinion was uncertain as to how to
respond to Soviet policy. One official wrote later that ‘there was a universal
feeling that “this was it”’.6 In April 1946, Kennan was appointed to the National
War College, where he explained his views to influential audiences. Later, he
became head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Kennan’s
achievement was to present, at a crucial psychological moment, a coherent
interpretation of Soviet policy, grounded in experience and history. Such an
analysis had been lacking before. Its consequences took effect over time.
Truman may not have read the long telegram, but he certainly heard Winston
Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946 – indeed he discussed it
with the British statesman in advance. At the time, Churchill was admirably
placed to make the maximum impact without making any formal commitment.
He was out of office, and therefore did not speak for the British government,
never mind the American; but he still bore all the immense prestige of his
wartime leadership. In his speech, Churchill set out his interpretation of the
current situation in Europe in words which instantly became famous: ‘From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent.’ To the east of that line lay the Soviet sphere, subject to an
increasing measure of control from Moscow, and where communist parties had
attained a power far beyond their numerical strength in the countries concerned.
Churchill was careful to say, ‘I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war.
What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power
and doctrines.’ This presented a danger that could not be removed by a policy of
‘wait and see’ or by appeasement. The Russians admired strength and had no
respect for weakness. Churchill referred to his own warnings about Germany in
the 1930s, when war ‘could have been prevented in my belief without the firing
of a single shot’. The solution was to achieve ‘a good understanding on all points
with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organization …
supported by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its
connections’. Here lay the core of Churchill’s thought: that America, Britain and
all the English-speaking peoples of the Commonwealth should combine ‘in
fraternal association’ to create a secure peace.7
Three points stand out from the whole speech. First, the striking image of ‘the
iron curtain’ was to be part of the common parlance of the next forty years and
more and encapsulated a vital part of the Cold War. Second, the proposal for an
association between the United States and Great Britain to oppose Soviet power
and doctrine was the basis for a future Western alliance. And third, often missed
by immediate commentators, was the call for a settlement with the Russians. The
Fulton speech was the recognition of a threat, a summons to stand up to it and a
proposal to remove it by agreement.
The reception of this speech in the United States was mixed, with hostility
probably prevailing over cordiality. Even Truman cautiously distanced himself
by claiming (falsely) that he did not know what Churchill was going to say. Even
so, Kennan’s long telegram in private and Churchill’s Fulton speech in public
together did much to change the way in which American official and public
opinion thought about relations with the Soviet Union and about foreign policy
in general.
Another event, much less conspicuous in the history books, showed that the
American government was ready for a change in policy. Towards the end of
February 1946 the Turkish ambassador to the United States died in post, and
Truman decided to send his coffin home in an American battleship, the USS
Missouri, accompanied by two aircraft carriers and several other warships. This
ostentatious display of naval power, far beyond anything required by diplomatic
courtesy, was a gesture of support for Turkey against Soviet pressure for a base
on the Turkish Straits. Truman, the man from Missouri, was ready to look tough
and had found an appropriately named battleship to make his point.

The Truman Doctrine

In the autumn of 1946 Truman was reflecting on his problems with the Soviet
Union. On 21 September he wrote privately, ‘We are not going to have any
shooting trouble with them [the Russians] but they are tough bargainers and
always ask for the whole earth, expecting maybe to get an acre.’ At the
beginning of 1947, while still in the New Year mood, the president made a list of
things he had to do, ending with an exhortation to himself: ‘Make it plain that we
have no territorial ambitions. That we only want peace, but we’ll fight for it!’ He
was determined that the United States would not be bulldozed and thought that
he could impress this on the Russians, who were bullies who would cave in if
you stood up to them.8 Tough bargaining and refusal to be bulldozed amounted
to an attitude, but not yet a policy.
The decisive change came at the end of February 1947. During that month, the
British government, in the grip of an acute economic crisis, decided to reduce its
overseas expenditure. On 24 February Britain informed the United States that it
would withdraw its troops from Greece. Truman decided at once that the United
States must step in to replace Britain and that aid should also be extended to
Turkey. On 27 February he invited leading members of the Congress to the
White House, where George Marshall, the secretary of state, expounded the
situation thus:
If Greece should dissolve into civil war it is altogether probable that it would
emerge as a communist state under Soviet control. Turkey would be
surrounded and the Turkish situation … would in turn become still more
critical. Soviet domination might thus extend over the entire Middle East to the
borders of India. The effect of this upon Hungary, Austria, Italy and France
cannot be overestimated. It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first
crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle
East and Asia.9
This was an early statement of what became known as the ‘domino theory’, on
the analogy of a line of dominoes so placed that if the first were knocked over,
the rest would follow. Greece and Turkey were the first dominoes. But it was
unlikely that such considerations would carry much weight with the remaining
isolationists in Congress, to whom Greece and Turkey seemed a very long way
off. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, an influential Republican and a former
isolationist, bluntly advised Truman that the best way to persuade Congress to
provide the necessary money was to ‘scare hell out of the country’.10
Truman absorbed this advice, and when he addressed Congress on 12 March,
he specifically requested a bill to provide aid to Greece and Turkey, but he based
his appeal on much wider grounds. He declared that a worldwide struggle was in
progress between two ways of life, one based on free institutions and
representative government, the other on terror, oppression and the suppression of
personal freedoms. He then moved to the heart of his address: ‘I believe that 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.’ This support
should primarily take the form of economic and financial aid, because ‘the seeds
of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want’.11
Truman’s proposal (which at once became known as the Truman Doctrine)
came under fire from two directions. In Congress, opponents of the bill to
provide aid to Greece and Turkey pointed out that the Greek government was
corrupt and that Turkey was by no means a democracy; and it was wrong for the
United States to protect countries which were morally unworthy. (The bill passed
the Senate by 67 votes to 23, and the House of Representatives by 287 to 107 –
large majorities, but far from unanimity.) On the other hand, Kennan in the State
Department criticized the proclamation of an apparently universal commitment
to ‘free peoples’ when all that was actually required was limited support to two
particular countries.
In practice, the Truman Doctrine proved to be flexible in its application. In the
House of Representatives, one member pointed out that nothing was being done
for China, where (as in Greece) the government was waging a civil war against
communists. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, speaking for the
administration, replied that China, by virtue of its size, was a different case and
that the president had not laid down that the United States must act in the same
way in all circumstances. Moreover, Truman had referred in his speech to
totalitarian, not communist, regimes, which left some leeway in action. The next
year, in 1948, the American government was to extend economic aid to
Yugoslavia when it broke away from the Soviet bloc, even though it remained a
communist regime, on the grounds that it was in American interests to support
Tito and weaken the Soviet Union. But despite this flexibility, it remained true
that the criticism levelled at the Truman Doctrine from two very different angles
presented a problem from which American policy could never escape. An
important section of American opinion demanded strict morality in foreign
policy; and yet American interests frequently required support for dubious (or
even wicked) regimes.
The Truman Doctrine marked a crucial departure in American policy. Aid to
Greece and Turkey brought a clear but limited American commitment in the
Mediterranean, while the proclamation of support for free peoples, however
open to interpretation in practice, was bound to be far-reaching in its
implications. Curiously, it did not bring about any immediate change in
American relations with the Soviet Union. It elicited no particular response from
Stalin, who had never been particularly interested in Greece. He seemed to have
regarded Truman’s speech largely as a reaction to his own earlier demands on
Turkey for a base on the Turkish Straits, which in any case he was not prepared
to press. The assumption must be that the Truman Doctrine posed no threat to
vital Soviet interests. Stalin was to respond very differently to another American
intervention later in 1947: the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan, 1947

On 15 April 1947, during the long drawn-out Moscow Conference of Foreign
Ministers, the American secretary of state George Marshall met Stalin. In the
course of their conversation, and apparently in a genuine attempt to cheer
Marshall up, Stalin remarked that the interminable discussions at the conference
were only the first skirmishes – ‘It was necessary to have patience and not
become depressed.’ Far from being comforted, Marshall was dismayed, and
concluded that Stalin intended to let matters drift until Europe disintegrated, and
to advance Soviet interests in the resulting chaos. Speaking on the radio after his
return to the United States, Marshall said: ‘The patient is sinking while the
doctors deliberate. So I believe that action cannot await compromise through
exhaustion.’12
The ‘patient’ was Western Europe, which in the spring of 1947 faced a severe
economic and psychological crisis. The winter between 1946 and 1947 had been
exceptionally severe, and the harvests for 1947 promised to be poor. In France,
the daily bread ration was reduced on 1 May from 300 to 250 grams, a grim
measure for a people dependent on their bread. Food rationing in Britain was
more stringent than in wartime. Everyone suffered from the so-called dollar gap
– the inability of Britain, France and other European countries to pay (in dollars
or in exports) for their imports from the United States. Psychologically, the crisis
was one of exhaustion after six years of war and two of post-war struggle, with
no end in sight. In Britain, Attlee’s Labour government was stable, but France
and Italy were in the grip of deep uncertainty, with weak governments, the
break-up of post-war coalitions and growing communist parties. In large parts of
Europe, economic hardship was already severe, and political upheaval seemed
likely to follow.
The sense of crisis was strong, and even before Marshall’s return from Moscow
with his doleful message that the patient was sinking the American
administration was considering ways of meeting it. A joint committee of the
State, War and Navy Departments concluded on 21 April that substantial
economic aid to Europe was in American interests, and that it would be best
arranged through the coordination or integration of the different European
economies. In May, Marshall set Kennan’s newly established Policy Planning
Staff to work on the problem, and by 23 May they had produced three key
principles for an aid policy. First, the proposal should not be directed against
communism as such, but against economic disaster, which would make Europe
vulnerable to totalitarian movements generally. Second, a detailed plan for
assistance must not come from the United States, but from a number of
European states acting jointly. Third, an offer of aid should be open to the
countries of Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union, though it should be so
formulated that the Soviet satellites could join only by accepting a large measure
of economic coordination with others. This principle of coordination was of
crucial importance to the Americans, partly on grounds of efficiency, to prevent
a series of competing national demands, and also because it would appeal to
public and Congressional opinion.13
It so happened that Marshall was to attend the degree ceremonies at Harvard
University on 5 June to receive an honorary degree. He informed the president of
the university that he proposed to make a few remarks, and perhaps ‘a little
more’, to mark the occasion.14 In the event, it proved to be surely the most
momentous address ever given on a degree day.
In his speech, Marshall referred to the European economic crisis and pointed
out that ‘the consequences to the economy of the United States should be
apparent to all’. He went on:
It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in
the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be
no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against
any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its
purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to
permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free
institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a
piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government
 may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.
Any government willing to assist could expect cooperation from the United
States; any government which manœuvred to block recovery could expect no
help.15
Kennan himself described the purposes of Marshall’s proposal as being to save
European countries from economic disaster and to enable them to live in the
future without ‘outside charity: (a) So that they can buy from us; (b) So that they
will have enough self-confidence to withstand outside pressures’.16 These
objectives have been much scrutinized. Alan Milward argued, with the benefit of
hindsight, that there was in fact no severe economic crisis in Western Europe
early in 1947, except in the form of a shortage of foreign exchange, which arose
from an increase in investment and production.17 This argument would have cut
little ice at the time, though it may well be that the crisis was as much
psychological as economic. Others have claimed that the real crisis lay within
the American economy, which needed European recovery for its own purposes.
There is little point in enquiring whether American motives were self-interested
or for the benefit of others, when in practice they were both at once. It was a
simple fact that European states could not ‘buy American’, and so benefit
American producers, unless they had enough dollars or unless their own
currencies could be made strong enough to be convertible with the dollar.
Equally, American security depended on saving western European countries
from political collapse, possible communist insurrection or perhaps even Soviet
invasion. The European countries themselves would benefit from American
economic aid and from greater stability. The United States thus pursued its own
interests in ways which worked to the advantage of others.
In his speech at Harvard, Marshall launched an idea, not a plan. Everything
depended on the reactions to it. The key lay with Britain and France in Western
Europe, and the Soviet Union in the East. Ernest Bevin and Georges Bidault, the
British and French foreign ministers, respectively, met on 17 June and agreed
that Marshall’s suggestion should be taken up at once, but differed on the thorny
question of whether to invite the Soviet Union to join them. Bidault, for internal
French political reasons, wished to bring the Soviet Union in at an early stage.
He suggested that France, Britain and the Soviet Union should meet and then
jointly invite other governments to a conference on the American initiative.
Bevin was reluctant to bring in the Soviets, believing that they would only create
difficulties; but after some demur he agreed to the French idea. Bevin and
Bidault together invited Molotov to meet them, and a meeting of the three
foreign ministers was arranged in Paris on 27 June.
Would the Soviets agree? Indeed, had Marshall been serious in offering aid to
the whole of Europe, east as well as west, or did he always expect that Moscow
would refuse? It was almost certain that Congress would not vote to provide aid
to the Soviet Union. But equally Kennan assured Marshall that the Soviets
would not agree to take part in the scheme. The crux lay in the American
insistence on economic coordination, which effectively presented the Soviets
with the choice of either accepting the aid and giving up the exclusive control of
their own economy, or refusing economic coordination and thus excluding
themselves from aid. As Charles Bohlen, a State Department official, said later:
‘We gambled that the Soviets could not come in’; so the Americans could make
the offer and let Moscow bear the onus of refusing.18
At this early stage, the Soviets temporized. They considered allowing all the
East European states to attend the conference, but then dispute its conclusions
and withdraw, trying to take some of the West European governments with them.
Bevin and Bidault stuck together, rejected Molotov’s proposals and insisted that
Marshall’s scheme be discussed as it stood. Above all, they held fast to the idea
of a coordinated programme for aid.
Molotov could not agree to this. On 2 July he declared that the Anglo-French
proposals for a coordinated programme would lead to a loss of economic
independence and were incompatible with national sovereignty. He left the
conference and returned to Moscow. Bevin and Bidault were on the whole
relieved by his departure and went ahead on their own. They sent out joint
invitations to a general conference on Marshall’s proposals, to be held in Paris
on 12 July. Twenty-two European governments were invited (excluding the
Soviet Union and Spain, which under Franco was still ostracized from
international society).
For a time there was doubt as to the responses of the East European states.
Czechoslovakia and Poland initially accepted. The Hungarian press agency
reported that its government would take part. This state of affairs did not last
long. The Soviet government intervened to make the East European states fall
into line. Between 9 and 11 July, the governments of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Albania and Finland all declined to
attend the conference.
Stalin’s reasoning appears to have been simple, and from his own point of view
well founded. If the countries of Eastern Europe had attended the conference and
accepted Marshall Aid, they would have had to accept coordination in economic
planning, and thus been opened to Western economic influence, with inevitable
political consequences. The Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, built up since 1945,
would have been endangered, and probably crumbled away. Moreover, Stalin
regarded Marshall’s proposals as an attempt to revive German power and direct
it against the Soviet Union, which, whatever Marshall’s intentions in 1947, was
eventually what happened. Looking back long afterwards, Molotov commented
that ‘if Western writers believe we were wrong to refuse the Marshall Plan, we
must have done the right thing. … The imperialists were drawing us into their
company, but as subordinates. We would have been absolutely dependent on
them without getting anything useful in return.’19
Sixteen states attended the conference which opened in Paris on 12 July 1947:
Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey
and the United Kingdom. Bevin was elected chairman, and Britain and France
took the lead in the conference’s proceedings, which were remarkably rapid. In
just five days the conference set up a Committee for European Economic Co-
operation, which in two months prepared a joint plan to submit to the United
States. Under this plan, an Organization for European Economic Co-operation
(OEEC) was to be set up in order to administer Marshall Aid, and also to
coordinate the assistance given by member states to one another, with the object
of restoring the European economy by the end of 1951. The details were worked
out during the winter of 1947–8, and the OEEC was formally set up on 16 April
1948, with its headquarters in Paris.
Meanwhile, Truman and Marshall tackled the problem of convincing Congress
of the necessity for giving away large sums of American money. Fortunately for
them, the Soviets played into their hands. In February 1948, before Congress
voted on the legislation for the Marshall Plan, the communists seized power in
Czechoslovakia, sending shivers through all of Western Europe and across the
Atlantic. The Senate approved the European Recovery Programme on 31 March
by a vote of 69–17, and the House of Representatives followed on 2 April by
329–74.
In the event, Marshall Aid continued until 1953, and amounted to a total of
nearly $13 billion. It comprised four crucial elements. First, the aid was to be
provided mainly in kind, not in cash. Second, there must be coordination and
self-help among the recipients – the Americans refused to accept piecemeal
requests, or applications for help which the Europeans could provide for
themselves. Third, the United States was to decide on the commodities which
were to be sent free of charge, and also on their use. This was essential to satisfy
Congress, which was afraid of waste and fraud. Fourth, the term of the plan was
limited to four years, which allowed the Americans to see a limit to their efforts
and the Europeans an end to the controls they were accepting.
The chief beneficiaries of aid and the amounts involved were as follows:20

Amount of aid ($ million) Amount in gifts

Total 12,992.5 9,290

France 2,629 (20.3% of total)

Italy 1,434.6 (11%)

Low Countries 1,078.7 (8.3%)

West Germany 1,317.3 (10.1%)

United Kingdom 3,165.8 (24.4%)

Marshall Aid did not bring immediate results. In France, unemployment almost
doubled between 1948 and 1950, rising from 78,000 to 153,000. In Italy, the
unemployment figures went down slightly, from 1,742,000 in 1948 to 1,615,000
in 1950.21 The powerful communist parties in France and Italy, which
campaigned violently against Marshall Aid, maintained their support among
voters. But gradually the programme took effect, especially on the balance of
payments problem. To take France as a crucial example, in 1948, Marshall Aid
financed 30.1 per cent of French imports; and over the whole period of the aid
programme, it financed the equivalent of 69.5 per cent of the total deficit in the
French balance of payments.22 France was thus able to carry out a substantial
programme of reconstruction and investment without reducing standards of
living, even when gold and foreign currency reserves were virtually exhausted.
In return for Marshall Aid, the recipient countries had to make certain
concessions to American economic policy. They had to adhere to the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed on 30 October 1947, and thus
accept some lowering of tariffs and phasing out of quotas, which the French in
particular found difficult (and to some degree managed to evade). The recipients
of Marshall Aid usually had to accept certain types of American exports,
whether they wanted them or not, which led to much grumbling, especially in
France, about ‘chewing-gum imperialism’. It was in the nature of things
impossible for aid on this scale to be given without arousing resentment as well
as gratitude among those being helped.
In general the Marshall Plan was a success story, and it has remained a model
for all such projects – though one more often aspired to than achieved. Its final
success was probably even more psychological than economic. Participating
countries came to believe that there was a way through their difficulties. In July
1947 Kennan wrote that the plan was necessary ‘so that they [the European
countries] will have enough self-confidence to withstand outside pressures’.23
That self-confidence had been achieved, in full measure, by the time Marshall
Aid came to an end.

The concept of containment

In July 1947, a month after Marshall’s speech at Harvard which launched the
Marshall Plan, the influential American periodical Foreign Affairs published an
article (signed only ‘X’) entitled ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’.24 The author
was in fact George Kennan, and the article was a reworking, after a year and a
half and for a different readership, of the ideas set out in his ‘long telegram’. His
basic theme remained that the Soviet Union, for its own political and ideological
reasons, was implacably hostile to the outside world. The aim of its policy was
‘to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin
of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these
philosophically and accommodates itself to them.’ It followed therefore that ‘the
main element of any United States policy towards the Soviet Union must be that
of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive
tendencies.’ The Russians must be confronted with ‘unalterable counter-force at
every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a
peaceful and stable world’.
Kennan went on to evoke a remarkable vision of the future. At some point
there might occur a crisis within the Soviet system, in which leaders tried to win
active participation from supporters who had been schooled only in obedience.
This would ‘disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument’,
and as a result ‘Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the
strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies’.
Something like this was actually to happen in the late 1980s, when Gorbachev
tried to reform the Soviet system, and instead brought about its demise. But in
1947 it seemed a distant, and most likely a vain, hope; and meanwhile Kennan
offered only a task with no end in sight, demanding a patience, endurance and
flexibility which would test the will and capacity of the American people to the
utmost.
In his memoirs, Kennan complained that the word ‘containment’ had been
turned into the basis of ‘one of those indestructible myths that are the bane of the
historian’.25 There was some truth in this, in that the concept of containment was
used to attribute coherence to policies which were often improvised rather than
systematic. Yet Henry Kissinger was surely right to argue that ‘all the various
strands of American post-war thought were brought together’ in Kennan’s
article, which for over a generation served as ‘the bible of the containment
policy’.26 There are times when an author catches ‘a tide in the affairs of men’ in
a way almost independent of his own intentions. Kennan struck such a time with
his ‘X’ article in July 1947.
The concept of containment was to become the staple of American foreign
policy and proved in the end to be a remarkable success. But almost from the
start it came under fire from widely different angles. Some critics argued that
‘containment’ would draw the United States into excessive commitments to
countries of dubious moral standing, and so into positions which would prove
untenable. (Vietnam was later to prove a case in point.) Others claimed that the
United States should aim not merely at containment but at actively liberating
countries under Soviet control. There were sceptics who held that containment
was mistaken because there was nothing to contain – Soviet policy was
supposedly motivated by fear, not expansionism. All these viewpoints won
support from different sections of American opinion, producing a sustained
debate on the conduct of foreign policy. Yet throughout the discussions, the basic
idea of containment held fast and elicited a remarkably tenacious response from
the American people.
In 1947 the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan marked important practical
departures in American foreign policy, and Kennan’s ‘X’ article was published at
the precise moment to give these changes a theoretical basis. American policy
was assuming a new shape. The latter part of 1947 and 1948 were to see Stalin’s
response.

Notes
1 Michael J. Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since
1941 (Cambridge, 1995) provides an excellent guide.
2 Quoted, Sara Lorenzini, L’Italia e il trattato di pace (Bologna, Italy, 2007), p. 107.
 3 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949
(Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 169.
4 Harry S. Truman, Year of Decisions (London, 1955), p. 492.
5 George F. Kennan, Memoirs, Vol. I: 1925–1950 (London, 1967), p. 293. Long excerpts from the
telegram are printed, ibid., pp. 547–59.
6 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (London, 1994), p. 248; Louis Halle, The Cold War as
History (New York, 1967), p. 105.
7 For the Fulton speech, see Martin Gilbert, Never Despair: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London,
1988), pp. 192–206; for the New York speech, see ibid., pp. 215–17.
8 Ferrell, Truman, pp. 249–51.
9 Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall, Vol. IV: Statesman, 1945–1959 (New York, 1987), p. 164.
10 Ferrell, Truman, p. 251.
11 Royal Institute of International Affairs, Documents on International Affairs, 1947–1948 (London,
1952), pp. 2–7.
12 Pogue, Marshall, Vol. IV, pp. 191 (Stalin’s remarks) and 200 (Marshall’s broadcast).
13 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. III, pp. 223–9.
14 Pogue, Marshall, Vol. IV, pp. 209–10.
15 Text of Marshall’s speech, RIIA, Documents, pp. 23–6.
16 Kennan memorandum, 23 July 1947, quoted in Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the
Making of American Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1992), p. 60; Richard J. Barnet, Allies: America,
Europe, Japan since the War (London, 1984), pp. 113–14.
17 Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe (London, 1987), pp. 1–17.
18 Quoted in Diane B. Kunz, Butter and Guns: America’s Cold War Economic Diplomacy (New York,
1997), p. 34.
19 Vyacheslav Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev,
ed. Albert Resis (Chicago, 1993), p. 62.
20 Maurice Vaisse, Les relations internationales depuis 1945 (Paris, 3rd ed., 1994), p. 19.
21 B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970 (London, abridged ed., 1978), pp. 67–8.
22 Hubert Bonin, Histoire économique de la IVè République (Paris, 1987), p. 153.
23 Quoted in Barnet, Allies, p. 114.
24 ‘X’ (George F. Kennan), ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 4, July 1947,
pp. 169–82.
25 Kennan, Memoirs, Vol. I, p. 356, where he also records that Marshall was shocked by the publication of
the article. ‘Planners don’t talk’ was his soldierly comment.
26 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (London, 1994), p. 454.
 5

From the Prague coup to the North

Atlantic Treaty, 1948–9

Cominform and Czechoslovakia – The Berlin blockade – The Brussels and North
Atlantic Treaties – The two Germanies and the Soviet–Yugoslav split –
Reflections on the beginnings of the Cold War.

In the latter part of 1947 and the first half of 1948, Stalin developed his response
to the American policy initiatives outlined in the previous chapter. The Soviet
leader intensified ideological orthodoxy, eliminated the remnants of political
pluralism in the so-called People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe,
excommunicated Tito’s Yugoslavia and heightened tensions in Germany by
blockading the western zones of Berlin. The West’s response, in line with
Kennan’s precepts, was to hold firm and ‘contain’ Stalin’s moves.

Cominform and Czechoslovakia, 1947–8

The disarray among the Eastern European governments on whether or not to
attend the Paris conference on Marshall Aid in July 1947 brought Stalin to the
point where he could no longer tolerate divergences within the Soviet bloc. He
imposed order through the familiar instruments of ideology and party discipline.
He summoned a conference of Communist Party leaders at Szklarska Poreba,
Poland, from 22 to 27 September 1947, under the chairmanship of Andrei
Zhdanov, the ideological spokesman of the Soviet government. As well as the
Soviet Union, there were delegations from the communist Parties of Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia and from the French
and Italian parties. Zhdanov’s keynote speech set out the dogmatic thesis that the
world was divided between the imperialist and capitalist camp, led by the United
States, and the socialist camp, led by the Soviet Union. In this context, the
Marshall Plan was interpreted as a programme for the enslavement of Europe
and not for its reconstruction. The conference set up the Communist Information
Bureau (Cominform), with the ostensible purpose of promoting unity and
cooperation between the member parties by exchanging information, and in
practice to ensure uniformity under Stalin’s control. Its headquarters were to be
established in Belgrade.
At that stage, it appeared that Czechoslovakia represented the weakest link in
the chain of Soviet control. The Czech representatives at the Szklarska Poreba
conference, along with the Italian and French leaders, were criticized for their
shortcomings in advancing communism. Indeed Czechoslovakia differed
markedly from other Eastern European countries. There was no Soviet garrison.
There was a strong tradition of parliamentary democracy. The president, Eduard
Benes, was committed to a pro-Soviet foreign policy, while trying to maintain
his country as a bridge between East and West, combining some of the elements
of each in its political and economic systems. Czechoslovakia, like Finland, thus
lay within the Soviet sphere but was not fully integrated into it – a balance which
was important for the country itself and for international relations in Europe as a
whole. By the beginning of 1948, this sort of balance was no longer acceptable
to the Soviet Union.
During 1947 there had been signs that the communists were losing ground in
Czechoslovakia, and a public opinion poll in January 1948 put their support at
only 25 per cent. The Communist Party reacted by sending, on 20 February
1948, a ‘People’s Militia’, some 15,000 strong, to exert pressure on the streets.
On the same day, twelve ministers (out of a total of twenty-six) resigned from
the government, hoping to force Benes to form a new administration without the
Communist Party and to call elections, which would reveal the weakness of the
Communist Party in the country. The communist premier, Klement Gottwald,
was in constant touch with the Soviet ambassador; and the Soviet deputy foreign
minister, Zorin, on a visit to Prague, promised that the Soviet Union would not
allow Western intervention. The Soviet Army moved some of its troops in
Poland to the Czech border. Benes at first resisted this communist pressure, but
on 25 February he appointed a new government, nominated by Gottwald and
consisting of a majority of communist ministers, with a few socialists, and with
Jan Masaryk remaining as foreign minister. On 10 March, however, Masaryk’s
body was found beneath a window of the Foreign Ministry building – whether
his death was the result of murder or suicide remained unclear.
In these political changes, the constitutional forms were observed: Gottwald’s
government won the approval of a majority of deputies in parliament. But these
forms did not last long. The former Social Democratic Party was soon absorbed
into the Communist Party, and other political parties were placed under
communist control. In May 1948 elections produced a communist-dominated
legislature, which introduced a new constitution on the Soviet model. Benes
resigned as president on 7 June and died soon afterwards. Czechoslovakia came
firmly within the Soviet sphere.
The impact of these events in the West was immense. Stalin may well have
thought that he was simply consolidating his grip on his sphere of influence, and
in some sense this was true. But in Western eyes Czechoslovakia was different
from the rest of the Soviet bloc. Britain and France were sharply aware of
accusations that they had let Czechoslovakia down in the Munich crisis in 1938;
and in March 1939 the German ‘coup of Prague’ had been the prologue to war in
September.
Events in Czechoslovakia thus touched a sensitive nerve. Léon Blum, the
veteran French socialist leader, asked how it came about that the socialist and
other democratic parties in Prague had melted away so swiftly; and many
pointed out in reply that collaboration with the communists was a one-way
street, ending in a takeover. The death of Jan Masaryk shocked Western opinion.
If it was suicide, then Masaryk had despaired of his country under the new
regime; if it was murder, it showed how far the communists would go. Either
way, the prospects were gloomy. In Western Europe, the danger of internal
subversion and perhaps war suddenly loomed large. The West responded by
drawing together in the Treaty of Brussels, which we will consider later in this
chapter. But soon after the Czechoslovakian coup a new and more dangerous
crisis arose over Berlin.

The Berlin blockade, 1948–9

In 1946 the Americans and British had united their occupation zones in Germany
into the Bizone; and in 1947 it was decided that all the Western zones (but not
the Eastern) were to receive Marshall Aid. The division of Germany was well
under way. Berlin, on the other hand, though divided into occupation zones, was
still being administered jointly by the four occupying powers: the Soviet Union,
the United States, Britain and France. Berlin was thus in a different situation
from the rest of Germany, and presented an opportunity to Soviet policy.
It appears that at the end of 1947 Stalin decided to squeeze the Western powers
out of Berlin. On 20 March 1948, at what was expected to be a regular meeting
of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, Marshal Sokolovsky (the commander-in-
chief of the Soviet zone) read at high speed a list of accusations against the
Western occupying powers, and then left. This proved to be the last full meeting
of the council, though the Western commanders continued to meet in the absence
of the Soviet representative. On 1 April 1948 Soviet troops stopped the regular
American, British and French trains on their way to Berlin, just inside the Soviet
zone, pushed them into sidings and left them there for over twelve hours before
sending them back where they had come from. This was the beginning of a
campaign of harassment and delays to Western traffic, amounting to a form of
limited blockade, which caused inconvenience and irritation, but at that stage not
much more.
Meanwhile, the Western powers were proceeding with plans to form a new
state in West Germany, based upon the three Western occupation zones. In June
1948, the United States, Britain and France agreed to unify their zones of
occupation, and announced that they were to arrange elections for a constituent
assembly, which would then prepare a constitution for a new West German state.
They also made secret preparations for the introduction of a new currency, the
Deutschmark, in the Western zones and in Berlin. These were two crucial steps.
The creation of a West German state would signify the formal division of
Germany; and the introduction of the Deutschmark led to an immediate conflict
with the Soviet Union.
The new currency was introduced in the Western zones on 20 June 1948. On 23
June, the Soviets introduced their own currency reform in their occupation zone,
and declared that it applied to the whole of Berlin. The Western powers
introduced the Deutschmark in Berlin on the same day; and it was at once clear
that the Western currency commanded public confidence and the Eastern did not.
This proved to be the trigger for drastic Soviet action. On 24 June the Soviet
occupation forces halted all rail, road and water traffic between the three
Western zones and Berlin. Postal services ceased to operate. Electricity supplies
to West Berlin from outside were cut off. The blockade of West Berlin had
begun.
The introduction of the Deutschmark was the immediate cause of the blockade,
because if the new currency were allowed to circulate freely throughout Berlin it
would undermine the value of the East German currency and the stability of the
Soviet zone. But Stalin’s underlying intentions in imposing the blockade remain
unclear. He had been thinking for some time of squeezing the Western powers
out of Berlin – perhaps to consolidate the Soviet zone, perhaps to block the
creation of a new state in West Germany, perhaps to force a negotiation on a
complete German settlement in his own favour. For any of these purposes, a
blockade of Berlin presumably seemed a safe bet: the Western powers ‘would
have to give up either Berlin or their German policy’.1
The result was a crisis of a kind not seen since the end of the Second World
War. The government of the United States was convinced that if they gave up
West Berlin they would not be able to hold on anywhere else in Europe, if only
because no one would believe that they would. In any domino theory, West
Berlin was a crucial domino, and if it fell the rest of Western Europe would fall
with it. There was no halfway house.
Truman reacted to this crisis with both determination and caution. He told one
adviser on 28 June that ‘we were going to stay – period’, but added the next day
that he intended to stay ‘as long as possible’, by which he meant ‘short of war’.2
How could this be done? In principle, there was a way open. In the muddled
(and supposedly temporary) agreement achieved at the Potsdam Conference in
1945, there had been no written provision for access to Berlin by the Western
powers by rail, road or water; but by a curious quirk there was a written
agreement on access by three designated air corridors. On 25 June, General Clay,
the American commander-in-chief, began, with Truman’s support, to send
supplies to Berlin by air along these air corridors. But at the time no one
considered that this could be anything more than a temporary expedient. The
Americans considered sending a convoy of lorries down one of the roads to
Berlin, with an escort of troops and tanks; but they shrank from such a
potentially provocative step. Instead, the airlift was developed into a regular
means of supply. The Americans brought aircraft from all over the world; the
Royal Air Force made its contribution; a completely new airfield was built in the
French sector of Berlin, bringing the number of landing-grounds up to three. The
momentum was kept up even during the difficult winter months. In one
extraordinary period of twenty-four hours on 15 and 16 April 1949, aircraft
landed in Berlin at the rate of almost one a minute, keeping troops in the Soviet
garrison awake with the roar of their engines. In the whole period of the
blockade, 277,804 flights delivered 2,325,809 tons of cargo.3 The Berliners
suffered a hard winter, with barely adequate supplies of coal and long electricity
cuts. Food rations were actually increased in the course of the blockade, but
remained very tight. All the time, the Soviets watched the aircraft coming in,
sometimes ‘buzzed’ them at close range, but never took the final step of shooting
one down.
This was the most acute form of ‘Cold War’. The Soviet Union and the United
States confronted one another on an issue of the utmost importance to them both.
They came to the verge of war, but did not cross over. The Americans did not try
to force a land passage; the Soviets did not attempt to close the air routes. It was
a psychological test of will rather than a direct trial of strength.
The contest went on for ten and a half months and then ended suddenly, in
complete defeat for the Soviet Union. Stalin lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949
without any conditions and without achieving any of his objectives. The Western
powers remained in Berlin, which was now divided in two. Progress towards a
new West German state continued at a steady pace. Indeed, a new solidarity
emerged between the West Berliners and their former enemies. The American
and British air forces which only recently had strained every nerve to bomb
Berlin now worked round the clock to bring supplies to that same city –
sometimes it was even the same airmen who were involved. Germans who had
survived the air raids now welcomed their former attackers and endured
hardships with a stoicism which commanded admiration among their former
enemies: a change without which the new West German state, and later the new
Western Europe, could never have been achieved.
The significance of the Berlin crisis of 1948–9 cannot be overstated. It was a
true crisis, in both senses of that sometimes overused word: it was a time of
acute danger, and it was a turning point in international affairs. The United
States displayed immense material strength, technical proficiency and powers of
endurance, all deployed in the service of a remarkably sure-footed
statesmanship. Britain took its full share, and France, though previously
separated from the Americans and British on the question of Germany, rallied to
their support. The psychological foundations of a Western alliance were laid in
this time of trial as they could not otherwise have been. Stalin, for his part,
completely miscalculated the reactions of his opponent, and made an immense
effort without achieving any result whatsoever – indeed by the end of the
blockade his position was actually worse than at the beginning. It was a sign of
the extraordinary strength of his position in the Soviet Union and the world in
general that he survived this defeat without the slightest loss of prestige or
power.
 The Czechoslovakian coup of February 1948 and the Berlin blockade of 1948–
9 set alarm bells ringing throughout Western Europe and the United States.
Memories of the 1930s, when Hitler had picked off his enemies one by one until
it was almost too late to resist him, were still fresh in everyone’s minds. In face
of the advance of Soviet power in Czechoslovakia and the tremendous trial of
the Berlin blockade, the Western powers produced a determined response.

The Brussels and North Atlantic Treaties, 1948–9

From November to December 1947 the Council of Foreign Ministers of the four
former wartime allies met in London for what proved to be the last time. The
conference ended in failure on 15 December, marking the end of the mechanism
which the Big Three had set up at Potsdam in 1945 to continue their wartime
cooperation. For some time there were no more great-power conferences, and
the two superpowers virtually ceased to communicate with one another.
The Foreign Ministers’ meeting collapsed at a time when communist
opposition to the Marshall Plan was at its height, especially in France and Italy.
In both countries there was extreme tension. In these circumstances, Ernest
Bevin, the British foreign secretary, believed that Western Europe faced an
imminent danger of internal communist subversion or external Soviet invasion,
or possibly both at once; and he sought for some means to counter the threat. He
cloaked his thoughts in obscure phraseology, speaking sometimes of a federation
of Western Europe, sometimes of a ‘spiritual federation of the West’; but his
underlying message was plain. The West European states must act quickly to
support one another, and they must bring in the Americans, who alone had the
military strength to resist the Soviets if it came to the use of force.4
The response to Bevin’s ideas was at first uncertain. France in particular, with
its large Communist Party and a difficult domestic situation, wanted to avoid
offending the Soviet Union, and if possible to prevent the final division of
Europe into hostile camps. Negotiations to form an alliance between Britain,
France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (the Benelux countries)
began in February 1948, but made little progress until the bombshell of the
communist takeover in Czechoslovakia at the end of that month. This caused
such alarm that a five-power conference of Britain, France and the Benelux
countries met at Brussels and on 17 March 1948 concluded the Treaty of
Brussels, which bound all the participants to come to the help of the others in the
event that any one of them was attacked in Europe. The preamble made a token
reference to preventing a renewal of German aggression, but the unnamed
aggressor envisaged in the treaty was plainly the Soviet Union.
The Brussels Treaty was a gesture rather than a practical step towards security.
In military terms, the five treaty powers could not defend Western Europe
against a Soviet attack. The British and the French, who would provide most of
the military strength, knew they would have to bring in the Americans. The
initiative for what emerged as the North Atlantic Treaty thus came from Western
Europe.
The Americans were already anxious about Europe. To Washington, Italy
seemed the point of greatest danger. Elections were due in April 1948, with the
communists and socialists cooperating in a ‘Popular Front’. In the elections of
June 1946, these two pro-Moscow parties together had polled about a million
more votes than the conservative Christian Democrats, and it seemed likely that
they might win in 1948. The State Department was nervous about the election
results, and an academic expert on international relations told the Policy
Planning Staff on 1 March that ‘if Italy goes Red, Communism cannot be
stopped in Europe’.5 The Americans therefore made every effort to ensure that
Alcide De Gasperi, the leader of Christian Democracy, won the elections. They
delivered wheat to prevent a reduction in the bread ration; they encouraged
Italian-Americans to write to their relations in Italy and urged them to vote
Christian Democrat; they supplied money through the Central Intelligence
Agency to the Italian centre parties. The elections took place on 18 and 19 April
1948, and in the event the Christian Democrats won by a wide margin, gaining
307 seats against 182 for the left-wing parties.6 Yet for some time the sense of
crisis had been sharp, and anxiety (in Italy and in the State Department) had
been keen.
This sort of anxiety, and clandestine intervention, did not mean that the
American government, or the Congress, was eager for a military alliance to
protect Western Europe. The American response to the British and French
approaches for an alliance was initially cautious. Secret talks between the
Americans, the British and the Canadians began in Washington on 22 March and
produced a proposal for a North Atlantic Defence Treaty by 1 April. (The
‘secrecy’ of these talks was badly undermined by the fact that Donald Maclean, a
Soviet agent, was a member of the British delegation. Stalin was thus well
informed about the negotiations, though it is hard to tell what effect this
knowledge had on his policy.)
The discussions on a treaty then stalled. Both Marshall, the secretary of state,
and President Truman were uncertain as to the best course to adopt. One
difficulty was the likelihood of opposition from Congress, but in June this was
diminished by the advocacy of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, who was a
Republican and former isolationist. By 1948 Vandenberg had become committed
to devising a bipartisan policy towards Europe. He put before the Senate a
resolution which recalled the right of collective self-defence enshrined in the
United Nations Charter, and affirmed the desirability of American association
with arrangements for such self-defence. His carefully worded resolution, which
made no mention of a treaty, an alliance or Europe, was accepted by the Senate
on 11 June by 64 votes to 16. But there remained a wide gap between this and
something more precise.7
The start of the Berlin blockade brought some sense of crisis, but still no great
haste. Talks on a security treaty involving the United States, Canada, Britain,
France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg began on 6 July, but they
moved with painful slowness. The Americans delayed because the next
presidential election was due in November, with campaigning taking up the
summer and autumn – not the best time to undertake novel and far-reaching
commitments. They also insisted that the Congress’s constitutional right to
declare war must be preserved, so that a treaty should not include any automatic
obligation to go to war. The French took an assertive position, demanding that
Italy be included among the participants in a treaty, to protect the Mediterranean,
and also that the treaty should specifically cover Algeria, which was then legally
part of France.
The re-election of Truman in November cleared away domestic difficulties and
bolstered the cause of an Atlantic security pact. In a series of meetings in
Washington from 14 January to 15 March 1949, agreement on a final draft text
was reached. The various governments involved gave their approval, and the
North Atlantic Treaty was signed on 4 April 1949. No one could say that the
Americans had forced the pace, or leapt hastily to the defence (or the
domination) of Europe. But when they did eventually make up their minds, the
consequences were far-reaching.
The North Atlantic Treaty was to remain a predominant feature of the
international landscape for decades to come, and continued to function despite
the demise of its opponent, the Soviet Union. What did the treaty provide for,
and what was its significance? The twelve states which signed the treaty in April
1949 were: the United States and Canada in North America; Iceland in the North
Atlantic; and Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom in Europe. The key article of the
treaty was Article 5, which stated that an armed attack against one or more of
these states would be considered ‘an attack upon them all’. The other member
states would then take forthwith such action as each deemed necessary,
including the use of armed force. This preserved the rights of the Senate, while
creating an expectation that in practice an attack on one signatory would result in
war against the entire alliance. Article 6 defined the territories which were
covered by the treaty: the territories of the signatories in Europe and North
America; the Algerian departments of France; islands north of the Tropic of
Cancer (in effect, the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores). This article
also extended to any attack on the occupation forces of any of the signatories in
Europe, thus covering West Germany and West Berlin, and the western zones in
Austria and Vienna. The Senate ratified the treaty on 21 July 1949, after twelve
days of debate, by 82 votes to 13.8
For the United States the treaty was a remarkable departure – the first
peacetime alliance in American history. Yet it was not presented as such. Henry
Kissinger commented much later that ‘America would do anything for the
Atlantic Alliance except call it an alliance’.9 A State Department memorandum
carefully examined various other alliances to show how the North Atlantic
Treaty differed from them. The government claimed that it was not a military
alliance, but an alliance against war itself. This had the strange consequence that
an alliance to preserve the balance of power and the security of Western Europe
was justified primarily in moral terms. In one sense it was an evasion of the
issues; yet in a deeper sense it was vital. The North Atlantic Treaty committed
the United States to what proved to be a long haul of forty years, a burden that
could not have been sustained without a strong sense of moral certainty. For the
European members, the treaty represented an insurance policy which added a
military element to the economic support provided by Marshall Aid.
The North Atlantic Treaty said nothing about a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. Not until December 1950 (after the outbreak of the Korean War)
did the signatories of the treaty agree to set up an integrated defence
organization, with a command system modelled on the Anglo-American joint
commands during the Second World War. The first supreme commander was
General Eisenhower, who had commanded the Allied Armies in Western Europe
in 1944–5. This command structure, always headed by an American general, and
the presence of American troops on the ground confirmed the practical
expectation that the United States would be involved in any war from the
beginning. Thus the North Atlantic Treaty evolved into the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, whose initials, NATO, have entered everyday speech.
NATO faced notable difficulties. It was a military organization without many
troops, and without a convincing strategy, because in 1950, before the
deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, no one really knew how Western
Europe could be defended against an all-out Soviet attack. Could a Soviet
offensive be stopped in the middle of Germany, or on the Rhine; or could the
generals only plan for a more orderly repetition of the Dunkirk evacuation of
1940? In the event, this was not put to the test. No Soviet invasion was launched,
and it appears that none was seriously contemplated.
The true importance of the North Atlantic Treaty was political, and above all
psychological. NATO developed into a flexible and durable political instrument,
involving the United States in European affairs in a way which ensured stability
without complete American predominance. Under the cover of the NATO shield,
however inadequate in military terms, the states of Western Europe recovered
their nerve. Even at the worst of times, there were to be no more alarms like
those of 1947 and 1948, when it appeared that everything might dissolve into
chaos, and so invite a Soviet attack even if none was actually planned. These
advantages were purchased at a certain price in diplomatic rigidity, in that the
creation of NATO meant the institutionalizing of the Cold War; but this was a
price which proved well worth paying.

The two Germanies and the Soviet–Yugoslav split

Between 1948 and 1949 there were two other developments of long-term
significance for Europe and for the Cold War. First, the division of Germany was
finally sealed by the establishment of two German states, the Federal Republic
of Germany (FRG) in the west and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in
the east. In 1948, a long conference in London between the three Western
occupying powers agreed to convoke a constituent assembly to prepare a
constitution for a federal and parliamentary West German state. The assembly
met in 1948, and formulated a Basic Law for the new state, which formally came
into existence in May 1949, with Konrad Adenauer being elected as its first
chancellor in September of that year. West Germany was not yet fully sovereign,
because an Allied High Commission exercised wide control over economic and
foreign policy, and it was to remain entirely demilitarized, without armed forces.
In the next few years, the FRG in fact moved rapidly towards control of its own
economic affairs, but only slowly towards rearmament, which was a highly
sensitive issue internally as well as abroad. In the Soviet occupation zone, the
creation of an East German state followed some distance behind these
developments in the West. The constitution of the GDR was enacted in October
1949. In contrast to the federal and parliamentary structure of West Germany, the
GDR was a centralized socialist state, firmly under the control of the Socialist
Unity Party, which was itself tightly monitored by the Soviet Union. The two
Germanies did not officially recognize one another’s existence. Their separation
was total and was marked on the ground, on the eastern side of the boundary, by
the physical barrier of the ‘iron curtain’, a line of barbed wire, minefields and
machine guns. It was a striking fact that the machine guns did not point
outwards, to deter attack, but inwards to prevent the GDR’s citizens’ escape.
As Germany and Europe separated into two halves, the eastern half showed its
first crack. When the Soviet Union set up the Cominform in 1947, the
headquarters of the new organization had been established in Belgrade. But in
1948 there occurred a bitter conflict between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
Yugoslavia was in a different position from the other East European countries, in
that Tito’s partisans had largely liberated the country themselves, with more help
from the British than from the Soviets. Tito was in a strong position and a strong
character who tended to take his own line in both internal matters and foreign
policy. This was unwelcome to Stalin, who in 1948 put heavy pressure on him to
conform. He accused the Yugoslav Communist Party of deviations from
Marxist–Leninist doctrine, and of pursuing a course unfriendly to the Soviet
Union. On 28 June 1948 the Cominform, meeting in Bucharest, the capital of
Romania, ordered the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the organization; Pravda
described Tito as ‘the fascist hireling of the USA’.10 Soviet advisers left the
country, economic assistance was cut off and brutal purges of so-called Titoist
spies began in the rest of Eastern Europe. The whole panoply of Soviet
propaganda was directed against Yugoslavia. Yet though the trumpets sounded,
the walls did not tumble down. Tito defied his new enemies, formerly his
friends, and survived. He declared that Yugoslavia would fight if attacked, and
threatened to drench the country’s soil in blood. Stalin did not attack, though it
appears that an invasion plan, including Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian and
Bulgarian forces, was prepared in the summer of 1950. Yugoslavia was thus
expelled from the Soviet bloc, and lived to tell the tale.
The United States, faced with this new situation, showed remarkable flexibility.
The Americans tried to persuade Tito to join NATO, but he preferred not to take
the risk. Instead he negotiated military agreements with Greece and Turkey
(February 1953), and accepted arms, along with the assistance of US advisers. In
these unexpected circumstances, the American government adopted a policy of
cautious encouragement to Tito, notably in economic relations. Tito, for his part
– though without making any specific bargain – closed the Yugoslav border with
Greece and ceased to send help to the Greek communists. The Soviet bloc had
developed a serious split. The Americans were therefore willing to blur the lines
of their opposition to communism. The Cold War was going to be a complicated
affair.

Reflections on the beginnings of the Cold War

In the years we have just examined, from 1945 to 1949, the wartime alliance
between the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain broke down. The two
superpowers entered a period of strained relations so severe that they ceased to
practise all but the most formal diplomatic relations. Most of Europe was sharply
divided. The Soviet Union imposed an iron control on most of Eastern Europe.
The United States, through Marshall Aid and the North Atlantic alliance,
established its own sphere of economic and military influence on Western
Europe. Yet the two sides in this great divide stopped there. They did not go to
war. This was the state of affairs which became known as the ‘Cold War’: war
insofar as there was a condition of intense hostility, but cold in that there was no
actual fighting.
The exact nature of this phenomenon of the Cold War will be examined later.
Let us look now at the more limited question of how the division of Europe
came about, and review the chronological pattern of events.
First, in 1946, the division of Germany began, with the Soviet Union taking the
initiative in political affairs by imposing its social model in the east, and the
Americans taking the lead in the economic division of the country. Second, there
was a period from February to July 1947 in which the United States formulated a
new policy and took the initiative. This was the time of the Truman Doctrine, the
launching of the Marshall Plan and the crystallization of the concept of
containment in Kennan’s ‘X’ article. Third, there followed a period in which the
Soviet Union imposed rigid control on its sphere in Eastern Europe, established
Cominform and launched the communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia
and the imposition of the Berlin blockade. Fourth, the Czech crisis and the
Berlin blockade brought a reaction from the Western powers in the form of the
Brussels Treaty of 1948 and the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949. The
chronological pattern, therefore, was not one in which one side alone took the
initiative and set events in motion, but of each side moving at different times, in
a form of alternation.
There were two other aspects to these events. First, the division of Europe was
not total. There were a number of intermediate countries, not fully within either
of the two blocs or spheres of influence. In the north, Finland remained a
multiparty liberal democracy and was free from Soviet occupation; however, it
accepted that its foreign policy must not be anti-Soviet. The Finnish government
declined to attend the Paris conference on Marshall Aid. A Treaty of Friendship
between Finland and the Soviet Union (6 April 1948) expressed in its preamble
the Finnish desire to stand aside from the competing interests of the great
powers, and Article 3 confirmed that neither state would join a coalition directed
against the other.11 In the elections of July 1948 not a single communist member
was returned, and the Finnish Communist Party ceased to take part in
government. The Soviet government expressed its concern, but took no action.
Neighbouring Sweden accepted Marshall Aid, but remained neutral in its foreign
policy and did not join the North Atlantic Alliance. In the centre of Europe,
Switzerland took part in the Marshall Plan but retained its traditional neutrality.
Austria was split into four occupation zones, but the division was much less rigid
and severe than that imposed in Germany. In the Balkans, Yugoslavia broke from
the Soviet bloc without joining the Western bloc, and accepted American
economic aid while remaining firmly communist. The point about these
countries was that none was of sufficient weight to tilt the balance of power, and
most were not in a geographically crucial position.
The second point was that the division of Germany and Europe was accepted
by the two superpowers, without war and in the course of time by a form of tacit
consent. This was a time not only of Cold War but of Cold Peace, which in
Europe was to become, by historical standards, a very long period of peace
indeed. Between 1945 and 1949, this came about without the mutual deterrence
of atomic or nuclear weapons which later became so important. There was
indeed a military balance, in that the United States possessed atomic bombs but
did not use them, and the Soviet Union possessed very large land forces and
equally did not use them. But it was probably more important that the two
superpowers actually preferred the division of Europe, and especially of
Germany, to any available alternative. The ‘German Question’, which had
plagued Europe since before 1914 and produced two great wars which had
involved both the United States and Russia, was resolved – crudely and harshly,
but effectively. The division of Germany and of Europe brought a form of
stability which was fundamentally acceptable to the two superpowers.
It is thus possible to trace how the Cold War in Europe came about, and draw
up a chronology in which the two superpowers alternated in taking decisions
which ended by 1949 in the division of the continent. There is a natural, and
almost irresistible, desire to go on from there to discuss responsibility for these
events, and there has in fact been a long-running debate over the responsibility
for the Cold War – a new ‘war guilt’ question. It is vital to remember, however
(though it is very rarely done), that we must also assess where the credit lies for
the establishment of the Cold Peace.12

Notes
1 J. A. S. Grenville, History of the World in the Twentieth Century (London, revised ed., 1998), p. 389.
2 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (London, 1994), p. 258.
3 Ibid., p. 259.
4 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Vol. III: Foreign Secretary (Oxford, paperback ed., 1985), pp. 498–500.
5 Arnold Wolfers, quoted in Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American
Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1992), p. 104.
6 Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, 1948, p. 9529.
7 Miscamble, Kennan, pp. 163–4.
8 Text of the North Atlantic Treaty in J. A. S. Grenville, The Major International Treaties, 1914–1973: A
History and Guide With Texts (London, 1974), pp. 335–7; see also pp. 337, 383–4; Senate vote, D.
Cook, Forging the Alliance: NATO, 1945–1950 (London, 1989), p. 227.
9 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (London, 1994), pp. 460, 462.
10 Quoted in Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia (London, 1997), p. 310.
11 Text of treaty in H. M. Tillotson, Finland at Peace and War (London, revised ed., 1996), pp. 322–3; see
also pp. 246–8.
12 See John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Enquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1987)
for a full exposition of this idea.
 6

From Korea to Hungary, 1949–56

Situation at the end of 1949 – The Korean War, 1950–3 – Western Europe and
the German Question – Eisenhower becomes president – The death of Stalin and
crisis in East Germany – Germany and Austria, 1954–7 – Khrushchev, de-
Stalinization and the Hungarian rising, 1956.

In the second half of 1949 two events took place which transformed the Cold
War and shifted the balance of power. On 29 August the Soviets exploded an
atomic bomb. American intelligence knew of this test almost at once, and
Truman announced the news publicly on 23 September. Then on 1 October Mao
Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The
communists had won the long civil war in China against the Kuomintang, and
this enormous country (with a population estimated at about 550 million) had
joined the communist camp. Communism was not so much on the march as
advancing like an express train.
These events shook the Americans badly. They had expected their monopoly of
atomic weapons to last longer than four years. They had regarded China as their
special protégé in Asia. Roosevelt had promoted China as one of the ‘four
policemen’ who would control the world after the Second World War. American
companies and churches had invested material and spiritual capital in the
country. Now the United States had ‘lost China’ – or so it was alleged. American
public opinion set out to look for those who had misled – or worse, betrayed –
the country. In the next few years, it was impossible for any American political
leader to appear to be ‘soft on communism’, and thus repeat the mistakes
allegedly made in China.
This mood would probably have taken root in American public opinion in any
case, but the situation was emphasized and probably prolonged by the
intervention of Joseph McCarthy, Republican senator for Wisconsin. McCarthy
seized on the so-called loss of China to make sensational accusations about
communist agents in the State Department and communist influence throughout
the country – in Hollywood, the trade unions, the teaching profession and
elsewhere. McCarthy’s principal weapon was accusation, with or without
evidence, followed by an assumption of ‘guilt by association’. He was willing to
risk attacking the highest in the land and even those with the highest credentials
of patriotism and loyalty – at one point he called for the impeachment of Harry
Truman, and even attacked George C. Marshall, whose record of service to his
country was unrivalled. Yet for a few years he released fears which in turn grew
because he fed them. President Eisenhower himself preferred not to confront him
openly. McCarthy’s influence in the Senate and in the country increased until
1954, when he was finally censured by the Senate itself. The phenomenon of
McCarthyism was a measure of the shock delivered to the American nervous
system by the ‘loss’ of China.
In the face of the Soviet atomic bomb and the Chinese revolution, the National
Security Council – the adviser on strategic issues to the president – undertook a
review of American interests, dangers and options and produced a long
memorandum (NSC–68, dated 14 April 1950).1 The council took the sweeping
view that ‘a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere’, and
illustrated its case by reference to the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in
1948. In itself, Czechoslovakia was of small material importance to the United
States; equally, the Soviet Union gained no resources which it did not effectively
control before the coup. Even so, ‘in the intangible scale of values’ the
Czechoslovakian coup counted as a loss to the United States. It was by
maintaining ‘essential values’, at home and abroad, that the United States would
preserve its integrity and frustrate ‘the Kremlin design’ to preserve absolute
power within the Soviet Union and eliminate all opposition outside it. The
authors followed George F. Kennan’s earlier papers on containment in assuming
that one important purpose of American policy was ‘to foster a fundamental
change in the nature of the Soviet system’; but meanwhile there would have to
be a great military as well as moral effort. The memorandum therefore
recommended large increases in American military strength. At the time,
however, it was by no means clear how these were to be paid for. President
Truman deferred approval of the document until September 1950, by which time
events in Korea had given it a new significance.
 For Stalin, too, the Soviet atomic bomb and the Chinese revolution transformed
the situation. He had always put a brave face on the American possession of the
bomb, claiming that there was no need to be afraid of it; but he could now look
the United States in the face as an equal. As for China, his relations with the
Chinese communists had often been poor, but he appreciated the potential weight
of China in world affairs. In 1948 he said: ‘If socialism is victorious in China
and our countries follow a single path, then the victory of socialism in the world
will be virtually guaranteed. Nothing will threaten us.’2 By the end of 1949 that
position had been reached. Stalin’s assessment was optimistic, but he
undoubtedly had good grounds for confidence.
Between 1945 and 1949 the centre of the Cold War and of Soviet–American
relations was in Europe, and the sharpest crisis arose over Berlin. In 1950 the
focus of attention abruptly shifted to Korea, which to most people in America
and the Soviet Union was a remote and unknown country.

The Korean War, 1950–3

Japan had annexed Korea in 1910. During the Second World War, at the Cairo
conference (December 1943), President Roosevelt and Chinese leader Chiang
Kai-shek had declared that the country should be independent when the war was
won. As hostilities actually came to an end in the Far East in 1945, much had to
be improvised. After the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945
its troops began to enter Korea from the north. American troops did not land in
the south until 8 September; in the meantime the Americans had instructed the
Japanese Army, which had been ordered to surrender by Emperor Hirohito on 15
August, to maintain order until their arrival. The Americans and Soviets had
agreed, for practical purposes, to divide Korea along the 38th Parallel of latitude,
with the Americans occupying the south and the Soviets the north. In July 1948
the Republic of Korea was set up in the South, with Syngman Rhee as president;
and in the same month the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was created
in the North under the leadership of Kim Il Sung. Both Kim and Rhee were
intense nationalists, anxious to unite the country, and willing to use force to do
so if the opportunity offered. Both laid claim to the whole of Korea as their
territory. Soviet troops withdrew from North Korea in December 1948, and
American forces from the South in June 1949; both left behind military missions
and advisers. The two rival Koreas then confronted one another, in a state of
profound hostility.
 On 25 June 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and advanced
rapidly southwards, carrying all before them in pursuit of what seemed likely to
be an instant victory. How did this assault come about?
The plan for an attack on South Korea appears to have originated with Kim Il
Sung, who put the idea to Stalin in 1949 and asked for his support. Stalin did not
take up the proposal at that stage, but he received Kim again in April 1950. This
time, Stalin agreed to support a North Korean attack on the South, on certain
conditions: the North must be sure of quick success; there must be no likelihood
of American intervention; and no escalation into world war. The Soviet Union
provided military equipment, and Soviet generals drew up a plan for the
offensive, assuming a rapid advance and complete victory in three to four weeks.
The date of the attack was set for 25 June in order to finish the campaign before
the start of the rainy season.

MAP 5 Korea, to illustrate the Korean War.

Thus Kim Il Sung proposed, but Stalin decided. Why did Stalin take up the
idea in 1950 when he had left it alone in 1949? The emergence of communist
China clearly changed the situation, in at least two ways. First, Stalin did not
wish to appear to be holding back the cause of revolution in Asia by restraining
Kim Il Sung, especially when Mao might intervene and take the lead; and
second, the Chinese could now be brought in to share the risk of starting a war in
Korea (Stalin in fact insisted that Kim should only attack South Korea after
securing Mao’s agreement in person, which he duly did). The successful Soviet
atomic test may also have instilled an extra degree of confidence into Stalin’s
usually cautious approach.
In any case, the risks did not seem great. There was ample reason for Stalin to
believe that the Americans would not intervene. In March 1949 General
MacArthur, the American commander in Japan, had stated publicly that the
American defensive perimeter in the Pacific ran along a string of islands from
the Philippines to the Aleutians, excluding Korea. The policy was confirmed by
the secretary of state Dean Acheson on 12 January 1950 in a speech at the
National Press Club in New York.3
However, the United States abandoned all these statements and intervened in
Korea almost at once. On 25 June, the day of the North Korean attack, the
Americans put a resolution to the Security Council of the United Nations (UN)
calling for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of North Korean forces behind the
38th Parallel. The resolution was passed by 9 votes to nil, with Yugoslavia
abstaining. The Soviet Union, which could have vetoed the resolution, was
absent, boycotting meetings of the Security Council in protest against the
Council’s refusal to allow communist China to take over China’s permanent seat,
which was retained even after defeat by Chiang Kai-shek. That same evening,
Truman ordered American air drops of supplies to the South Koreans, the
Seventh Fleet took up station in the Taiwan Straits to prevent a Chinese attack
upon Taiwan and on 29 June MacArthur was instructed to send air and naval
forces to take part in the fighting. Once these troops had been committed, it was
impossible to leave them without reinforcements, and the die was cast.4
The Americans thus found themselves committed to a large-scale war which,
as events turned out, was to last for three years. How did this come about? By
instinct, Truman was a fighter, determined not to be pushed around. He also felt
strongly that in the 1930s Germany and Japan had been allowed to get away with
a series of aggressions which had finally resulted in all-out war. That must not be
repeated: there must be no more appeasement. There was also a swift
reassessment of the strategic assumptions which had placed Korea outside the
American defensive perimeter. The question of whether Japan could be held in
face of a hostile Korea was suddenly faced with a new urgency, and answered in
the negative. This conclusion was made clearer by the general American belief
that North Korea was simply a Soviet puppet, and that they faced aggression by
a single, monolithic communist bloc. Domestic politics and the state of public
opinion also played a part: the Truman administration already stood accused of
having ‘lost China’, and could not afford to lose Korea as well. All these motives
came together and inspired Truman to decisive action.
The president was also encouraged by a wide measure of international support.
The American intervention went forward as a UN operation. British troops
arrived quickly in Korea and were soon followed by Australians, New
Zealanders and Canadians, forming for the first (and doubtless the only) time in
history a Commonwealth division. France and Turkey provided contingents, and
in all a sixteen-member ‘coalition of the willing’ provided forces of various
types and sizes. The presence of these allies on the battlefield was of great
political significance.5
In July and August, the South Koreans and Americans clung to a defensive line
round Pusan, which seemed likely to be broken at any moment. Then on 15
September MacArthur launched an audacious landing from the sea at Inchon,
halfway up the west coast of Korea, threatening to cut off the invading forces in
the south. The North Koreans retreated in disorder to avoid encirclement; the
South Korean capital, Seoul, was liberated; and the Americans were faced with
another crucial decision. Truman’s orders to MacArthur at the start of the
campaign had been to assist South Korean forces south of the 38th Parallel. The
question now arose of whether to cross that line.
In part this was a practical matter. On the ground, a parallel of latitude has no
topographical significance, and troops in close pursuit of a retreating enemy
were bound to cross such an artificial boundary. But local crossings for tactical
purposes and a decision to advance far to the north, with the object of occupying
the whole of Korea, were two very different issues. The American government
and high command finally decided to go ahead. The clinching political argument
was a moral one – that to halt on or near the 38th Parallel would check
aggression but impose no penalty or punishment upon it. Moreover, the
American instinct at that time was that wars were to be won, not drawn. Finally,
the striking success of the Inchon landings induced a heady sense of optimism
which helped to carry the day. On 27 September Truman gave permission to
MacArthur’s forces to cross the parallel, unless there was evidence that this
would bring about substantial Soviet or Chinese intervention. This risk was
judged to be slight. South Korean forces, and then on 8 October American
troops, crossed the line and occupied the Northern capital, Pyongyang, before
heading full tilt towards the Chinese border on the Yalu River. On 7 October the
UN General Assembly passed a resolution proposing to establish ‘a unified,
independent and democratic government’ for the whole of Korea; and on 17
October Truman publicly repeated those exact words.6 This proved to be a
decision even more fateful than the original intervention at the end of June.
For some time the consequences of the American advance remained uncertain.
The troops fanned out over the wide spaces of North Korea, their supply lines
lengthening and their caution diminishing. On 1 October Kim Il Sung appealed
to Stalin for help. Stalin was anxious to keep a low profile, and declined to
commit Soviet troops. Instead, the communist leader asked Mao to send Chinese
divisions in the guise of ‘volunteers’. Mao demurred, arguing that such a force
would be enough to provoke the Americans but not enough to stop them; and the
result might be an American declaration of war on China, which would bring in
the Soviets as well. Stalin replied (5 October) predicting that the Americans
would back down in the face of Chinese intervention; but if not, and it came to
war, the Soviet Union and China were stronger than their enemies. ‘If war is
inevitable, let it happen now, and not in a few years.’7 Mao agreed to send nine
Chinese divisions, though he asked for Soviet equipment and air cover. But the
die was not yet cast. On 12 October Stalin advised Kim Il Sung to get his
remaining forces out of Korea to Chinese or Soviet territory; which amounted to
telling him to accept defeat. Then, the very next day, Stalin changed his mind,
apparently in the certainty that the Chinese were going to fight. Thus up to 12
October the Soviets and Chinese were hesitant and uncertain, and the American
estimate that the risk of intervention was slight seemed justified.
Events proved otherwise. Mao was determined not to see the Americans on the
Yalu, with their aircraft ranging freely into Chinese airspace. The People’s
Republic was barely a year old and could not take such a risk, either materially
or in terms of prestige (the Americans were not the only ones to fear the domino
effect of their enemies’ victories). On 19 October 1950 Chinese forces poured
south across the Yalu River in large numbers, fighting with astonishing dash and
ferocity. They took the UN forces completely by surprise, and drove them back
southwards in disorder. They crossed the 38th Parallel yet again, and the South
Korean capital, Seoul, changed hands for the third time in six months. It was not
until January 1951 that the Americans and their allies stabilized the front, some
100 kilometres south of the 38th Parallel.
 The Chinese intervention demanded further decisions from the Americans.
MacArthur claimed that they must now carry the war to China, by aerial
bombardment and naval blockade, and took his arguments to the press and
members of the Congress. Truman and the chiefs of staff disagreed, and on 11
April 1951 the president dismissed MacArthur from his command – a
courageous act, even in a career notable for its courage. This action ensured that
on the American side the war remained limited. The Chinese and the Soviets
tacitly accepted the same principle. The result was an extraordinary situation.
Within Korea the war was fought with the greatest intensity and ferocity. But the
fighting was geographically limited to the peninsula itself, with Manchuria
remaining a safe haven for the Chinese and Japan for the Americans. Each side
foreswore complete victory – effectively settling for stalemate. Each side
accepted a limitation in weapons, in that neither used the atomic bomb – though
Truman publicly referred to it in November 1950, and Eisenhower later hastened
the achievement of an armistice by hinting at its use in 1953.
Within these limits, however, neither side gave way. On a number of occasions
from July 1951 onwards, Kim Il Sung asked Stalin to make peace, because
North Korea was suffering heavily from American air bombardment, but Stalin
insisted on holding on, keeping the Americans tied down in Korea and believing
that they could not endure the trials of a long and fruitless war. In the United
States, the people indeed grew war-weary, but on this occasion they stood firm.
Twenty years later Vietnam was to impose a longer and a sterner test.
On the ground, the situation changed yet again in 1951. MacArthur’s successor,
General Ridgway, undertook a new offensive, recaptured Seoul (which thus
changed hands for the fourth time) and pushed the front back northwards to a
line running diagonally across the peninsula, mostly just to the north of the 38th
Parallel. There it was to remain, though at a continuing cost to both sides.
In July 1951 negotiations for an armistice began, but remained stalled for two
years, largely as a result of differences on the fate of the prisoners taken by the
two sides. The Americans insisted that no prisoners of war, on either side, should
be repatriated against their will. The Chinese, supported by Stalin, required that
all Chinese and North Korean prisoners must be returned. What was at stake on
each side was a Cold War propaganda point. The Americans wanted to
demonstrate that some of the enemy prisoners did not wish to return to their
‘socialist fatherlands’; the Chinese and North Koreans could not risk any such
result. Propaganda was not restricted to the issue of prisoners: communist
accusations that the Americans were using germ warfare achieved such notoriety
that when General Ridgway was appointed as supreme commander for NATO in
1952 he was greeted in Paris by vast crowds shouting ‘Ridgway la Peste’
(‘Ridgway the Plague’). On military terms alone the war could almost certainly
have been concluded in 1951; but ideological point-scoring kept it going until
1953, with heavy loss of life and widespread destruction.
The election of General Eisenhower in November 1952, with his immense
prestige as a soldier, brought a new impetus to the negotiations. Eisenhower was
willing to be tough with Syngman Rhee in South Korea, and with Republican
congressmen who opposed an armistice. There was first an exchange of sick and
wounded prisoners of war, and finally an agreement that prisoners who did not
wish to return to their own countries should present their cases to a Repatriation
Commission, made up of representatives of Sweden, Switzerland, Poland,
Czechoslovakia and India.
An armistice was finally signed on 27 July 1953, at the village of Panmunjom.
There was to be a ceasefire along the lines held by the opposing armies on that
date, with a narrow demilitarized zone between the two forces. The level of
armaments on each side was to be stabilized (a provision which was often
disregarded). Nearly 23,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners in UN hands
were handed over to the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission; only 137
agreed to repatriation to their own countries, and all the rest chose to go to South
Korea or Taiwan. Three hundred and forty-nine prisoners in Chinese or North
Korean hands refused to return to their own countries; these included 325
Koreans, 21 Americans and 1 Briton.8 A conference was to meet to work out a
lasting settlement. This conference never met. The ceasefire line remained in
place, with representatives of the two sides meeting every week to exchange
salutes and information (or accusations) about the armistice arrangements. This
strange ritual thus came to embalm an aspect of the Cold War at its most rigid.
Casualties in the war were heavy – 33,699 Americans were killed and a further
107,755 were wounded; 415,000 South Koreans were killed and 429,000 were
wounded; 1,263 Commonwealth forces were killed and 4,817 were wounded.
The Chinese and the North Korean losses together were estimated to have been
around 1,500,000, with this figure including both the killed and the wounded.9 In
Korea, the physical damage was severe, especially in the north, which was
heavily bombed. At the end of everything, Korea remained divided along a line
not far removed from the original border along the 38th Parallel. Without a
permanent settlement, the peninsula remained a potential point of conflict, either
between the two Koreas or between the United States and China. In the event,
there was some friction but no further conflict. Not for the first time, the
supposedly temporary proved remarkably stable.
Of the great powers engaged in the war, China emerged greatly strengthened in
prestige. The Chinese had taken on the US Army in battle, and won. They had
saved North Korea and emerged as the leading communist power in Asia. The
Soviet Union lost ground during the war, with its influence in North Korea
largely supplanted by that of China. But though the Chinese emerged
strengthened from the war, they also learnt caution. Victory over the Americans
had been costly and far from complete. They fought no more battles against the
United States in the years to come, though sometimes they had the opportunity
to do so, for example, over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu.
The war had profound effects on the United States. Korea was a success for
containment, but at a great cost in military and economic terms. Yet the effort in
Korea itself was only part of the story. American defence expenditure rose from
$14.5 billion in 1950 to $49.6 billion in 1953. Between 1951 and 1953 the
number of men in the American armed forces doubled. The United States
pressed on with research on a hydrogen bomb, strengthened the bomber fleet and
built nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Despite being technically at peace the
country embarked on military preparations comparable to those undertaken
during the Second World War.10
The effects of the Korean War were also felt on the other side of the world.
There seemed an obvious analogy between a divided Korea and a divided
Germany, and fears sprang up of a sudden attack across the iron curtain. After its
signature in 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty had remained essentially a notional
deterrent, with little military reality on the ground. When the Korean War began,
this no longer seemed adequate, and the United States began to look for soldiers
to man the defences of Western Europe. With Britain and France already fully
stretched, the only source of new manpower was the former enemy, West
Germany. At a NATO meeting on 15 September 1950 Dean Acheson proposed
to end the policy of demilitarizing Germany and to establish West German forces
under NATO command. Yesterday’s enemies were to become allies. The same
was to some degree true of Japan, which during the Korean War became a major
source of supplies for the Americans.
In all these ways, the Korean War was a turning point. It extended the Cold
War to Asia, and demonstrated how it could unexpectedly explode into actual
fighting. Indeed, the Korean battles represented the Cold War at its most
ferocious, though without direct Soviet–American conflict. Its effects rebounded
back onto the other half of the globe. The transformation of Western Europe,
already under way with Marshall Aid, entered a new phase.

Western Europe and the German Question, 1948–53

One of the most remarkable events of the decade following 1948 was the
recovery of Western Europe. With help from Marshall Aid, the West European
countries achieved substantial economic growth. At the same time, they
developed welfare states and mixed economies which permitted private
capitalism and state control to work side by side, creating a political and social
stability which had often been absent in the 1930s. Moreover, there was a new
spirit abroad, giving a fresh impulse to the ancient desire to create some form of
political union to match Europe’s historical and cultural identity.

THE DIVISION OF GERMANY: KEY DATES

FEBRUARY 1944
YALTA CONFERENCE: Agreed to divide Germany into four occupation
zones – Soviet, American, British and French.
FEBRUARY 1948
US and British zones united in BIZONIA.
JUNE 1948
Soviet Union imposed blockade on routes into West Berlin. Western
powers responded by AIR-LIFT.
1949
12 May, End of Berlin blockade.
23 May, Establishment of Federal Republic of Germany (WEST
GERMANY). ADENAUER as chancellor.
7 October, Establishment of German Democratic Republic (EAST
GERMANY). ULBRICHT as leader of Socialist Unity Party.
MAY 1955
WEST GERMANY joins NATO.
 For a time, this movement towards unity was widespread. Churchill spoke in
Zurich (19 September 1946) of establishing ‘a kind of United States of
Europe’;11 and he later accepted the honorary presidency of the Congress of
Europe which met at the Hague in May 1948 to act as a forum for many different
brands of the ‘European ideal’. In May 1950 the French foreign minister Robert
Schuman gave the concept a firmer shape. He proposed to end the age-old
conflict between France and Germany, and at the same time to take the first step
towards a European federation, by creating a Coal and Steel Community, which
would place responsibility for the coal and steel industries of member states
under a single ‘High Authority’.
The ‘Schuman Plan’ was a strikingly bold move. It represented a significant
‘pooling’ of sovereignty between the member countries. Six West European
states (France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg)
agreed, after lengthy negotiations, to form this new community. Britain, whose
coal and steel industries would have been opened to competition, objected to the
cession of national sovereignty implied by Schuman’s scheme and stayed out:
many have since argued that by so doing Britain ‘missed the bus’, and abdicated
the leadership of Western Europe to France.
In practice, the Coal and Steel Community (which began to operate in 1952)
had only limited success in freeing trade in coal and steel, and in rationalizing
the industries of its member states, but its significance lay not in the details but
in the wider consequences. A Franco-German collaboration was begun which
was to flourish over the next half-century; and the institutions created for the
Coal and Steel Community formed the framework for the European Economic
Community (EEC) which followed in 1957. Between them, these two
developments were a significant innovation in the history of Western Europe.
The immediate next step after the creation of the Coal and Steel Community
was an attempt by the same six countries to form a European Defence
Community (EDC). When the Americans proposed West German rearmament in
September 1950, the French were naturally dismayed. They had seen enough of
German armies during the previous forty years (a sentiment in which they were
not alone); and yet they could not oppose the American demand outright – they
were receiving Marshall Aid and needed the United States to fund their colonial
war in Indo-China. They therefore emphasized that they would allow the
reconstitution of German military forces only as part of a wider European Army.
After lengthy negotiations, a treaty to set up the EDC was signed, on 27 May
1952, by the six countries that already made up the Coal and Steel Community
(Britain again stood out). West Germany was to provide twelve divisions to the
common defence, which was to be coordinated by the Supreme NATO
commander in Europe. It was also to regain its sovereign status once the new
Community began to function. On Italian insistence, the EDC treaty indicated
that the Community was intended as a prelude to a wider ‘Political Community’
of the six member states: a West European federation.
The EDC scheme aroused extraordinary levels of rhetoric on both sides of the
iron curtain – a fact that illustrated how delicate the question of West Germany’s
rebirth as a fully independent nation was. Yet the idea, despite its origin as a
French scheme, was never fully accepted inside France. On 30 August 1954 the
French National Assembly, with many powerful evocations of French
nationalism, killed the project by failing to ratify the treaty. It was a thoroughly
confused and ultimately fruitless exercise, which seemed for a time to have
deprived the European idea of its momentum. But throughout these tortuous
events the idea of German rearmament slowly advanced and became acceptable;
and all the time the institutions of the Coal and Steel Community settled down
and assumed permanence.
In all these developments, the first chancellor of the new West German state,
Konrad Adenauer, played a vital role. Adenauer was seventy-three when he
became chancellor, yet he was the very opposite of an old man in a hurry. He had
seen two world wars, two German defeats and two occupations, and he had
learnt the value of patience. ‘I think patience is the sharpest weapon of the
defeated. I can wait.’12 He worked closely with the Americans, without
becoming their puppet. He won the confidence of French politicians. He
advanced the cause of West German independence, while being prepared to
sacrifice a part of that independence to the progress of European integration. By
following a policy of Westpolitik, he went far towards providing an answer to
the ‘German Question’ – what was Germany’s role in international affairs to be?
To Stalin these events in Western Europe appeared full of danger. He was
strongly opposed to the emergence of an independent and armed West Germany.
On 10 March 1952 he suddenly proposed to revive negotiations for a German
peace treaty. The essential stages were to be: first, the creation of a unified
Germany, committed to a status of neutrality in its foreign relations; second, the
holding of free elections in the new state; finally, this united, neutral Germany
would be permitted to maintain its own armed forces. All foreign troops were to
withdraw from its territory within a year of its creation.
It is not clear whether this was a serious attempt to resolve the German
problem, or only a tactical move to forestall West German rearmament and stop
the progressive absorption of West Germany into Western European institutions.
In any case, the Western powers regarded Stalin’s move with deep suspicion.
The United States, Britain and France replied quickly (25 March), agreeing to
German unification but rejecting neutrality, maintaining that a united Germany
should be free to make its own alliances – meaning that it could join NATO.
They accepted the idea of free elections, but only on condition that the rights of
free speech and assembly should be granted at once in the whole country. There
followed an exchange of notes, in which Stalin gradually moved towards the
Western position; but the affair petered out by the end of 1952. The Cold War
pattern was too firmly set to be broken. West Germany was already in existence
and was being integrated with other West European countries through the
Schuman Plan. Adenauer was not prepared to throw these advantages into the
melting pot.
For the United States, NATO had achieved stability in Europe, which needed to
be reinforced by West German rearmament. A united, armed yet neutral
Germany would introduce a new and uncertain element – after all, Germany had
been united and armed before 1939, and neutrality could be quickly abandoned.
Moreover, could Stalin be trusted? Since the Czechoslovakian coup in 1948 most
people in the West had concluded that deals with Stalin tended to be one-way
traffic. Soviet conceptions of ‘free elections’ were certainly different from those
in the West. Recent Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe offered a discouraging
prospect. So it came about that Stalin’s proposals, which might have led
somewhere if made in 1947, merely ran into the sand in 1952. The Cold War had
its own momentum, and it created situations that were difficult to change.
Indeed, both sides had come to prefer the stability they knew to the potential
risks of movement.
Yet events were not completely frozen. American presidential elections came
round inexorably every four years, and even Stalin was mortal. In January 1953
General Eisenhower took office as president of the United States. In March 1953
Stalin died. Together, these two events brought a new aspect to international
affairs.

The opening of the Eisenhower presidency

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who assumed office in January 1953, had made
his reputation first as an Allied supreme commander during the Second World
War, and later as the first supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. He
had an amiable grin, an easy-going public manner and an attractive nickname –
‘I like Ike’ was one of the simplest and most appealing slogans ever devised for a
presidential election campaign.
A man so apparently open and uncomplicated, who yet achieved such
remarkable success in military affairs and later in politics, has left historians
baffled. Certainly his outward simplicity was misleading. Richard Nixon, who
served as his vice president, described him as ‘complex and devious’. Henry
Kissinger, who knew a thing or two about complexity, observed of Eisenhower
(along with Reagan) that ‘presidents who appear to be the most guileless often
turn out to be the most complex’.13
Eisenhower cultivated a relaxed style, but appearances were deceptive. He
worked hard and kept the key decisions on foreign and military policy in his own
hands. He was a soldier who had seen enough of war and wanted to avoid it in
future. Like Truman, he was convinced that the policy of appeasement in the
1930s had led to war and must on no account be repeated. He did not invent the
‘domino theory’, which had been expounded by Marshall (though without the
name) in 1947, but he took it over and attached it firmly to Indo-China, with far-
reaching consequences. On 4 April 1954 he wrote to Churchill, back in power
after 1951, that if the French failed in their attempt to retain Vietnam ‘the
consequent shift in the power ratio throughout Asia and the Pacific could be
disastrous. … It is difficult to see how Thailand, Burma and Indonesia could be
kept out of Communist hands. This we cannot afford. The threat to Malaya,
Australia and New Zealand would be direct.’14 In practice, his policy was
usually more flexible than this might imply; at bottom, he believed that relations
with the Soviets were a problem to be managed rather than a crusade against
evil. For Eisenhower, managing the problem meant holding the balance between
military expenditure and government solvency and holding this balance over a
long period. In the long term, Eisenhower believed that American assets – moral
and political as well as military – were superior to those of the Soviet bloc.
History was on the side of the United States.15
In this fundamental optimism he differed markedly from his secretary of state,
John Foster Dulles. A lawyer by training and a presbyterian by upbringing,
Dulles thought that communism was a form of sin with which there could be no
compromise. He talked about ‘rolling back’ communism and liberating countries
trapped in the Soviet bloc – in such a view, containment was not enough. Yet
together he and the president made a strong team. Eisenhower could let Dulles
take the brunt of criticism so that he could appear as the ‘reasonable man’ in the
fray. Yet he also benefited from the respect which Dulles could inspire even in
his opponents – as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, ‘Dulles knew how far he
could push us, and never pushed us too far.’16 In practice, Eisenhower was
prepared to be flexible in his methods in foreign policy; and for all its rhetoric
the new administration aimed more at the consolidation than the extension of
American commitments.

The death of Stalin and crisis in East Germany

On 5 March 1953, Stalin died. For a quarter of a century he had dominated (and
terrorized) the Soviet Union and the international communist movement. Since
the end of the Second World War his prestige had been immense throughout the
world, and within the Soviet bloc unassailable. His death opened a new and
uncertain era.
On 1 December 1952 Stalin had told a meeting of his immediate entourage:
‘When I die, the imperialists will strangle all of you like a litter of kittens.’17
There was alarm in Moscow that the Americans had elected a general in order to
wage war, and when Stalin died his successors feared a surprise attack. The
Soviet Union was in serious difficulties. Agriculture was failing to meet its
targets. The non-Russian nationalities were still refractory. There was unrest
even in the camps of the Gulag, which contained 5.5 million prisoners.18 Stalin’s
successors were deeply divided among themselves. None had the grasp of all
aspects of policy which Stalin had maintained.
It was the situation in East Germany that brought the divisions within the
leadership to a head. In 1952 Stalin had laid down that the East German
communist regime should proceed with the ‘construction of socialism’ (the
collectivization of agriculture and Soviet-style control of all industry), with
disastrous results. Production of all kinds fell, and there was a stream of refugees
to West Berlin. Even the East German communist leader Walter Ulbricht warned
of the dangers of building socialism without laying proper foundations. In May
1953 the Soviet leaders were divided as to what to do. Molotov, who had
returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was willing to relinquish the policy
of ‘forced socialism’ in East Germany. Lavrenti Beria, the head of the secret
police, was prepared to go further and accept a policy of abandoning socialism
itself. Molotov recalled him as saying: ‘Why should socialism be built in the
GDR? Let it just be a peaceful country. That is sufficient for our purposes.’19
Gromyko (later Soviet foreign minister) reported Beria as describing East
Germany as ‘not even a real state. It is only kept in being by Soviet troops.’20
Georgy Malenkov, the premier, supported Beria, but Molotov would have none
of it. For him, East Germany had to be a socialist state, partly as a matter of
principle, and partly because he did not believe that a bourgeois Germany would
remain peaceful. Nikita Khrushchev, the party boss who would soon emerge as
the most powerful figure in the new leadership, supported Molotov, and Beria
gave way.
In East Germany itself the situation grew worse. On 17 June 1953 the industrial
workers of East Germany, whom the communist regime was supposed to
represent, mounted a widespread strike. Soviet tanks were used to quell the
workers’ protests and to sustain Ulbricht’s government, which would have fallen.
In the short run, the Soviet Union set out to consolidate the East German state. In
1954 the Soviet government agreed to renounce reparations payments from East
Germany (which had still been exacted up to that time), and to write off East
German debts to the Soviet Union. The economy began to pull round, and the
state itself began to settle down. The country’s new status was recognized in
1955, when East Germany became an ally of the Soviet Union and one of the
founding members of the Warsaw Pact.
By that time Lavrenti Beria was dead. He was arrested on 26 June 1953 in a
daring coup by his rivals in the Soviet leadership and was executed the following
December. Malenkov was forced to give up the post of premier in January 1955.
Khrushchev emerged as the dominant figure in the Soviet government, with far-
reaching results.
It is not clear if the death of Stalin and the uncertainties of his successors
offered a serious opportunity to the United States, whether for military action or
for some diplomatic initiative. There is no sign that the Americans ever
contemplated an attack on the Soviet Union, and in any case they were still tied
down in Korea. As for diplomacy, when Stalin died Eisenhower had been
president for only two months, and little had been done to prepare for the event.
Eisenhower remarked indeed that the result of seven years’ talk about what
would happen when Stalin died was zero.21 The president did make a speech on
16 April 1953, hoping for a new start in Soviet–American relations, and
outlining the sort of changes he was looking for – an end to the Korean War,
some liberalization in Eastern Europe and a settlement in Austria. The Soviet
reply, delivered through the press, was non-committal.
 Germany and Austria, 1954–7
In 1954 an attempt was made to deal with the German Question. In February the
foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France met
in Berlin to discuss the possibility of German reunification. It was the first such
meeting since December 1947, and therefore a remarkable event in itself, and a
sign of a thaw in the most severe diplomatic frosts of the Cold War. But though
the ministers met and talked, and so restored some of the civilities to
international relations, they reached no agreement. In 1952 the Western powers
had obstructed Stalin’s proposals for reunification, and by 1954 it appears that
Stalin’s successors had decided that they preferred the division of Germany to
the likelihood that a united Germany would turn decisively to the West. The
disturbances in East Germany in 1953 had cleared the minds of the Soviet
leaders on this issue. So the Berlin conference dispersed without agreement on
its main subject, though the ministers agreed to call another conference, in
Geneva, on the very different topic of Indo-China, this time with the
participation of communist China – a sign that they were determined to go on
talking about something, even if Germany had proved a fruitless subject.
In fact, in 1954, the division of Germany was being more firmly sealed by the
integration of West Germany into the West European defence arrangements. The
EDC had collapsed in August 1954, but the fundamental problem remained. The
North Atlantic alliance did not have enough troops on the ground. British MP
Fitzroy Maclean remarked in the House of Commons in May 1952 that NATO
was ‘like the Venus de Milo, plenty of SHAPE but no arms’.22 In 1954, NATO
disposed of only twenty divisions (five of them American) in the crucial Central
European sector, rather than the thirty which were thought necessary (although
the American units were armed from 1954 with tactical nuclear weapons that
would have been able to destroy any advancing Soviet army, albeit at colossal
cost to the civilian population). When the European Army project failed, it was
the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who produced a solution.
Eden arranged a conference in London (from 28 September to 3 October)
attended by Britain, the six Coal and Steel Community countries, the United
States and Canada. The problem was still how to meet the American insistence
on German rearmament while allaying the widespread fears of German military
resurgence. Eden’s solution was to use the existing machinery of the Brussels
and North Atlantic Treaties. He proposed that West Germany should be admitted
to the Brussels Treaty (along with Italy) and to NATO. It should then form its
own army, to be placed in its entirety under an integrated NATO command (the
French, British and other armies only placed a part of their forces under NATO
command). Eden also undertook to maintain a force of four British divisions on
the continent of Europe, which were not to be withdrawn without the agreement
of a majority of the states belonging to the Brussels Treaty. These proposals
found wide agreement, and a further conference in Paris (23 October 1954)
agreed to remove the remaining restrictions on West German sovereignty. West
Germany was to establish an army of up to twelve divisions, and to be admitted
to NATO on a footing of equality with the other members of the treaty.
In the end, the deed was done with surprising ease. The prolonged and obscure
wrangling over the EDC had accustomed public opinion to the basic idea of
West German rearmament, and diverted attention to the secondary question of
how it was to be achieved. When the final agreement was reached, it seemed to
be refreshingly simple. Moreover, when it came to the point, the West Germans
proved less than enthusiastic about actually forming an army. There was a strong
pacifist movement among the younger generation. When conscription was
introduced in 1956, the period of service was set at only one year. By 1960 there
were only seven West German divisions available for NATO, and the twelve
divisions envisaged in 1954 were not attained until 1963.
The long-term significance of Eden’s plan proved to be political rather than
military. West Germany advanced to full sovereignty, began to conduct its own
foreign policy and became a full member of NATO. East Germany became a
member of the Warsaw Pact when it was formed in 1955. The German Question
was being steadily resolved by the consolidation of the status quo, which meant
the acceptance of partition.
In 1955 a number of events brought a further relaxation in the tension of the
Cold War in Europe. On 15 May 1955 the Austrian State Treaty was signed in
Vienna by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. (It was a
‘State Treaty’ because Article 1 recognized the re-establishment of Austria as a
sovereign state; and it was not strictly speaking a peace treaty, because the
former wartime allies had agreed that Austria was not to be regarded as an
enemy but as one of Hitler’s victims.) The background to this agreement was
essentially a bargain by which the Soviet Union secured Austrian neutrality in
return for a withdrawal of all occupation forces from the country. Under the
treaty, Austria resumed its independent existence within the boundaries on 1
January 1938 (i.e. before the Anschluss with Germany) and renounced political
or economic union with Germany. All occupation forces were to leave the
country before the end of the year. Neutrality was not comprised in the treaty,
but was laid down in a constitutional law passed by the Austrian Parliament on
26 October 1955, declaring Austria’s perpetual neutrality and prohibiting any
military alliance or the establishment of any foreign bases on Austrian territory.
These arrangements brought about the first troop withdrawals in Central Europe
since 1945, including the first retirement by Soviet forces from territory they had
occupied. It was true that Austria was a small country, much less important than
Germany, where division still prevailed; but even so, the State Treaty of 1955
was a remarkable and encouraging event. The new Austrian status of neutrality
was one to which others could aspire, as the Hungarians were to do in 1956.
Paradoxically, one of the immediate consequences of the Austrian treaty was to
draw the lines of European alliances more firmly. Until the treaty was concluded,
Soviet forces had been stationed in Hungary and Romania, under the terms of
the peace treaties of 1947, in order to secure communications with the Soviet
occupation troops in Austria. With the end of the Austrian occupation, this
technical basis for the presence of the troops in Hungary and Romania came to
an end; but the Soviets had no intention of removing their forces. The previous
arrangements were therefore replaced by the creation of a new military alliance.
On 14 May 1955 the Soviet Union and seven other communist states (Albania,
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland
and Romania) signed the Warsaw Pact for collective defence. They undertook to
consult together on all international questions involving their common interests
and to set up a unified military command, with its headquarters in Moscow. Two
formal alliances – NATO and the Warsaw Pact – now confronted one another in
Europe.
Yet, almost immediately after the formation of the Warsaw Pact, there took
place at Geneva (from 18 to 23 July 1955) the first post-war conference of heads
of government of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. On
paper, the major issues of the Cold War in Europe (the German Question,
European security and disarmament, the restoration of East–West contacts) were
on the agenda. In practice little was done about any of them. President
Eisenhower made a spectacular move with his ‘open skies’ proposal for free
aerial reconnaissance over the territories of each power bloc; but this was mere
window dressing, and even those who devised it did not expect it to be accepted.
There was a complete lack of substantial progress, and yet Western politicians
and public opinion claimed to regard the Geneva Conference as a striking
success. ‘The spirit of Geneva’ became the catchword of the time, and even
Dulles, that stern enemy of communism, was prepared to say that Soviet policy
was now based on tolerance. On the Soviet side, Khrushchev was convinced that
Eisenhower (whom he treated as a war veteran like himself) would not permit
any serious military conflict to come about – a marked change from the fears
which were aroused by Eisenhower’s election at the end of 1952. These beliefs,
though exaggerated in some respects, had solid foundations. Psychologically, the
Geneva Conference was important as a break in the tension of the Cold War. The
deep diplomatic frost of the Cold War was thawing after some six or seven years.
The four foreign ministers had last met in London in December 1947; they met
again in Berlin in February 1954; and then the heads of government met at
Geneva in July 1955, to general satisfaction. The way ahead was open, and the
start made at Geneva led eventually to Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in
1959.
It was significant that the Geneva Conference attempted nothing serious on
Germany. German reunification had temporarily disappeared from the
diplomatic scene. The Soviets tacitly accepted West German rearmament and
membership of NATO. Khrushchev, on his way home from Geneva, paused in
East Germany and formally recognized the sovereignty of East Germany. A few
weeks later, from 9 to 13 September, he received Chancellor Adenauer on a visit
to Moscow, and established diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and
West Germany. The German Question, though no one liked to say so, was being
settled along the lines of partition and the acceptance of two separate German
states.
Of those two states, East Germany was fully absorbed into the Soviet bloc, by
the formal machinery of the Warsaw Pact and the powerful presence of a Soviet
garrison, while West Germany was becoming steadily more involved in the
integration of Western Europe. In 1955 the six member states of the Coal and
Steel Community resumed their movement towards integration. A conference of
the six at Messina from 1 to 2 June 1955 agreed to set up a Customs Union and a
community for the development of atomic energy. Within a year these proposals
were elaborated in detail and, after further negotiations between the member
states, embodied in two Treaties of Rome, signed on 25 March 1957, setting up
the EEC and Euratom. It was plain throughout these negotiations that Chancellor
Adenauer was determined to bind the Federal Republic of Germany firmly into
the new organization of Western Europe. With every step towards West
European integration, the barrier between West and East Germany grew higher,
and the division of Germany more pronounced. The construction of the EEC was
an important step in the Cold War for this reason. The economic pact reinforced
the military–political normalization of West Germany constructed in the
previous years.

Khrushchev, the ‘Secret Speech’ and the Hungarian

rising, 1956
On 25 February 1956, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union met in closed session to hear a remarkable speech by Nikita
Khrushchev, the general secretary of the party – the post from which Stalin had
ruled the Soviet Union for so long. Now, not quite three years after Stalin’s
death, Khrushchev launched an astonishing attack on his predecessor. He
denounced the great purges of 1937 and 1938 (at least in part), criticized Stalin’s
failure to foresee the German assault in 1941, revealed something of the
deportations carried out within the Soviet Union during the war and even
attacked some of the post-war purges. He traced the root of all these evils to
Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, an act of scapegoating which allowed Khrushchev
to pass over his own part in the pre-war purges, and to exempt the present
leadership from blame. (He also played down the vast scale of the purges by
concentrating on the murder of thousands of party officials rather than on the
millions of ordinary citizens who suffered death or imprisonment in the Gulag.)
Khrushchev sought to reassure the Party Congress that criticism of Stalin did not
mean an attack on the system. The heritage of Lenin, he declared, remained
intact, and the dictatorship of the Communist Party would continue – as indeed it
did for another thirty-five years. But the communist system had been so bound
up with Stalin that in the long run these assurances proved empty. Khrushchev
had begun a change which no one knew how to stop.
The Secret Speech – which was soon widely distributed in the West – was the
key moment of the so-called thaw. In May 1955 Khrushchev had already
repaired relations with Yugoslavia and had put a new emphasis on the concept of
‘peaceful coexistence’ with the United States. War between the communist and
capitalist camps was no longer inevitable, the Soviet leader believed, partly
because nuclear weapons would destroy all parties to a conflict, and partly
because there were now social and political forces at work in the new states of
Asia and Africa which would deter the imperialists from war.23
Khrushchev’s speech also opened up new vistas for relations between the
Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe. In April 1956 Khrushchev
announced the dissolution of Cominform, as a practical demonstration of the fact
that ‘different roads to socialism’ were open. It remained to be seen who would
first try to find a route without Moscow’s permission. Not surprisingly, it was the
Poles who made a start. Poland was in ferment in the summer of 1956. Its
intellectuals were demanding a more humane form of socialism and in June 1956
workers in Poznan, Poland’s fourth-largest city, mounted mass protests against
the regime, marching under banners that proclaimed ‘We want God’, ‘Down
with Red Bourgeoisie’ and ‘We want UN-supervised elections’.24 Troops
commanded by Marshall Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Russian citizen of Polish
origin, suppressed the protests with savage brutality.
The only way to restore the party’s authority was the return of a prodigal son.
In October 1956 Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been purged from the Polish
Communist Party in 1951, returned as party leader. Gomulka was very much his
own man – he had been one of the few communist leaders willing to argue with
Stalin. His readmission to the party leadership prompted the Soviet government
to make ostentatious preparations for military intervention. On 19 October
Khrushchev flew to Warsaw, together with a powerful team from the Soviet
leadership, intent on berating the Poles into submission. The Poles refused to be
browbeaten. Gomulka insisted that Rokossovsky, who had been forced out,
could not be reinstated. He guaranteed that the Polish party would maintain
socialism and Polish membership of the Warsaw Pact – a vital reassurance that
Poland would not attempt to become neutral. But it would do it in its own way.
Khrushchev, faced with the certainty of Polish military resistance if he tried
intervention, backed off from confrontation.
These dramatic events were closely followed in Hungary. In recent years the
Soviets had intervened repeatedly and arbitrarily in Hungarian affairs. In 1953,
after Stalin’s death, they dismissed Matyas Rakosi (the principal architect of the
policy of terror since 1948) as head of the Communist Party, and replaced him
by Imre Nagy, a reformist. In 1955 the Soviets reversed themselves, dismissing
Nagy and restoring Rakosi. In July 1956, as the turmoil in Poland mounted,
Rakosi was replaced by Erno Gero, another hardliner. These frequent
interventions aroused much resentment and made nonsense of any idea of a
‘Hungarian road to socialism’. Even the partial success of Gomulka in Poland
thus appeared all the more significant and attractive, especially for Hungary’s
large class of talented intellectuals.
Prodded by the intellectuals, public opinion in Hungary began to stir. On 23
October, a demonstration by students and others in Budapest demanded the
return of Nagy, the trial of Rakosi and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from
Hungary. This proved to be the start of what soon became an insurrection. On 24
October, Soviet tanks were attacked in the streets of Budapest. Nagy became
prime minister, intending only to reform the communist system, but he quickly
found himself carried away by events and by the demands of the crowds in
Budapest. On 30 October Nagy took the drastic step of abandoning one-party
rule by forming a new government that included the Smallholders’ Party, which
had gained a majority of votes in the elections of November 1945. Even so, on
the same day, the Soviet government declared publicly that all socialist states
should be equal. Soviet troops withdrew from Budapest. For a moment it
appeared that a compromise was possible.
The Hungarian government then took a fatal step. On 31 October Nagy
declared that Hungary was to become neutral (on the model provided by Austria
in 1955) and was to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. He also requested the UN
to recognize Hungary’s new status as a neutral state. This brought the Soviet
government to the point of decision. Moscow could not possibly accept
Hungary’s neutrality in foreign policy, and political pluralism in domestic
politics, without risking the break-up of the pact and of the whole Soviet bloc in
Eastern Europe. During the night between 3 and 4 November the Soviet Army
returned to Budapest in irresistible force, crushing all opposition. Serious
fighting went on until 14 November, and sporadic resistance until the end of the
month. Casualties have been estimated at 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet
troops killed.25 Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled to nearby Austria. The
Soviets imposed Janos Kádár as the head of a new government. A savage
clampdown on political unorthodoxy began. Nagy, who had taken refuge in the
Yugoslavian Embassy, was arrested, imprisoned in Romania and, in 1958,
executed along with other key members of his government. The Hungarian
attempt to break free from the Soviet bloc was over – but in 1989 the memory of
Nagy and his comrades was remembered and rightly honoured.
What was the significance of these tragic events? The Hungarian rising was a
spontaneous movement, inspired by patriotism and resentment at constant Soviet
interference in Hungarian affairs, which drew together groups and individuals of
widely different characters and aims. It owed something, but not much, to
encouragement from Radio Free Europe, the American radio station which at the
time conveyed the impression that the United States would support a rising. In
fact, as an American historian of Hungarian origin has written, it was very much
‘a Hungarian Revolution’, making ‘impulsive, at times heroic and even
unrealistic demands’.26 It swept along those supposed to be in charge of events
by its emotional force and exhilarating optimism. Bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive, though the dawn proved short-lived, and was followed not by the day but
by the dark – or at best twilight.
The Hungarian rising of 1956 was a grave blow to the Soviet Union. The
Soviet government first failed to prevent an open insurrection; it then hesitated;
and finally demonstrated, with a heavy hand, the limits to the freedom allowed
to its satellites, even after the Khrushchev speech. In the short term, the lesson
was well learnt. There was no further trouble in the Soviet bloc until 1968. But
in the long run, the consequences of the Hungarian rising were to prove
damaging, perhaps even fatal, to the Soviet system. More obviously than in East
Germany in 1953, Soviet predominance was shown to depend solely on force,
with corrosive effects within the Soviet bloc and among progressives in the
West, some of whom came to realize (though often with painful slowness) that
the Workers’ Fatherland was a tyranny.
The Hungarian rising was thus a crisis for the Soviet Union and for
communism. Its impact on international affairs was less significant. There was
no likelihood of American armed intervention, and thus of general war. On 25
October 1956 Dulles instructed the American ambassador in Moscow, Charles
Bohlen, to assure the Soviet government that the United States had no vital
interests in Central Europe. On 31 October Eisenhower said publicly that while
the United States was ready to give economic help to new and independent
governments in Eastern Europe, it did not regard them as potential allies. As a
one-time director of the CIA has said: ‘President Eisenhower decided that it was
tough on the Hungarians, but they weren’t worth World War Three.’27 The
United States was not going to challenge Soviet predominance in Eastern Europe
– certainly not by going to war, and in the event not even by economic or
diplomatic means. The Soviet government appeared to understand this perfectly
well; and the acceptance of the status quo by both sides was a confirmation of
the division of Europe and a sign that the international system there had attained
a high degree of stability.
This American passivity in face of what was at least an opportunity to
embarrass the Soviet Union arose partly from the fact that a presidential election
was taking place in November 1956, and Eisenhower was seeking re-election as
a man of peace. It also owed something to the simultaneous crisis over the Suez
Canal – Soviet troops re-entered Budapest on 4 November, and British and
French paratroops dropped at the northern end of the Canal on 5 November. The
Suez crisis distracted much of the world’s attention from Hungary; and the
United States and the Soviet Union even found themselves on the same side in
opposing the Anglo-French action against Egypt. But it seems certain that, even
without Suez, the Americans would have done nothing to save Hungary. On the
most basic assessments of risk, the unwritten rules of the nuclear age meant that
the Soviets could do as they wished in their own zone.
In the simultaneous crises over Hungary and Suez, it was striking that Asian
and African opinion was far more critical of Britain and France over Suez than
of the Soviet Union over Hungary. An attack by European imperialists on Egypt
was regarded as far worse than an attack by one set of Europeans on another.
The Soviet Union gained much credit for its support for Egypt, and this sudden
popularity in the Third World contributed to the mood of self-confidence,
verging on euphoria, which seems to have gripped Khrushchev towards the end
of 1956. At a reception in the Polish Embassy in Moscow on 18 November
1956, Khrushchev said to his Western guests: ‘If you don’t like us, don’t accept
our invitations and don’t invite us to come and see you! Whether you like it or
not, history is on our side; we will bury you!’ The British ambassador, who was
present, thought that the gist of the remark was ‘We shall be at your funeral’
rather than ‘We shall dig your grave’; but whatever the correct translation,
Khrushchev certainly meant that the Soviets were going to win the struggle
between capitalism and communism.28 It was in this mood that Khrushchev
embarked upon a course which led to crises in Berlin and Cuba and largely
decided the nature of the next phase of the Cold War.

Notes
1 For the text of NSC-68, US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. I,
pp. 237–79.
2 Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997), p. 66.
3 See Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War (London, revised ed., 1997), pp. 181–2; Vladislav
Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 54–5,
62–4.
4 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (London, 1994), pp. 318–19.
5 Max Hastings, The Korean War (London, 1987), pp. 443–4, puts the strength of the outside contingents
in January 1952 at: Australia, two battalions; Belgium, one battalion; Canada, a brigade group; Ethiopia,
one thousand; France, one battalion; Netherlands, one battalion; New Zealand, one battalion;
Philippines, five thousand; Thailand, four thousand; Turkey, six thousand; United Kingdom, two
 brigades.
6 Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, 1950, pp. 10,996, 11,021.
7 Quoted in Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 67; see generally pp. 65–9.
8 Hastings, Korean War, pp. 405–6.
9 Casualty figures in ibid., p. 407.
10 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1989), p. 495.
11 Martin Gilbert, Never Despair: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London, 1988), pp. 265–6.
12 Quoted in Richard J. Barnet, Allies: America, Europe, Japan since the War (London, 1984), p. 55.
13 Quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1980s (London, 1984), p.
461; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (London 1994), p. 631.
14 Peter G. Boyle, ed., The Churchill–Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–1955 (London, 1990), p. 136.
15 R. A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (Oxford, 1981), p. 11.
16 Khrushchev Remembers; with Introduction, commentary and notes by Edward Crankshaw (Boston,
1970), p. 398; cf. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York, 1982), p. 162.
17 Quoted in Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 145.
18 Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia (London, 1997), pp. 329, 335.
19 Vyacheslav Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev,
ed. Albert Resis (Chicago, 1993), p. 334.
20 Quoted in Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 161.
21 Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, Vol. II: The President (London, 1984), p. 67.
22 Quoted in David Reynolds, ed., The Origins of the Cold War in Europe (London, 1994), p. 16. SHAPE
was the acronym for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.
23 For Khrushchev’s speech, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 559–618.
24 Quoted in Pawel Machcewicz, ‘Intellectuals and Mass Movements: The Study of Political Dissent in
Poland in 1956’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 6, 1997, p. 363.
25 David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (London, 1998), p. 59.
26 John Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War (New York, 1966), p. 357.
27 William Colby, quoted in Gabriel Partos, The World That Came in from the Cold (London, 1993), p.
108.
28 Khrushchev’s remark quoted in Lukacs, Cold War, p. 151; cf. Partos, The World That Came, p. 119.
 7

The Berlin and Cuba crises, 1957–62

Khrushchev and Soviet foreign policy – Berlin crisis and the U-2 plane –
Kennedy and Khrushchev – Cuba and the Vienna Summit – The Berlin Wall –
Cuban missile crisis – State of the Cold War at the end of 1962.

Nikita Khrushchev was an enthusiastic traveller. In 1954 he visited China. In

1955 he went to Belgrade, and then to Burma, India and Afghanistan. In 1956 he
went to England (where he stayed at Claridge’s, London’s most luxurious hotel,
and went on a tourist trip to Oxford). In 1959 he became the first Soviet leader to
visit the United States, where he conferred with Eisenhower at Camp David and
met a farmer in Iowa. Summit conferences took him to Paris and Vienna, and he
addressed the United Nations in New York. These were travels which Stalin
would never have contemplated, and they displayed a new awareness of the
outside world. Khrushchev set in train crises over Berlin (as Stalin had done in
1948) and Cuba (which Stalin would surely have regarded as far too distant to
meddle with). He took an ardent interest in the new states of Asia and Africa,
believing that the new world could be called into action to upset the balance of
the old.
What lay behind this almost frantic activity? What were Khrushchev’s ideas on
foreign policy? He cut a strange figure – erratic, impulsive and sometimes self-
contradictory. At home, he launched a grandiose scheme to plough virgin lands
in Kazakhstan, putting vast areas under cereal cultivation, only to turn much of
the territory into a dustbowl and finish with an output lower in 1963 than in
1958.1 He was self-confident to the point of brashness – on one famous occasion
he took off his shoe and banged it on the desk at the General Assembly of the
UN. At the same time he was nagged by fears of falling short of Stalin’s
immense authority (during the Hungarian rising in 1956, he imagined people
saying that in the old days everyone had obeyed Stalin, but now ‘these bastards’
had lost Hungary – which therefore he could on no account afford to do).2 He
genuinely wanted to improve relations with the United States, and yet he
plunged into a challenge to the Americans in the Caribbean.
Among these contradictions, three themes remained constant. First,
Khrushchev took his faith seriously and believed that communism would
triumph, not just in the Soviet Union but in the world at large. He was convinced
that the revolutionary potential of the Third World would tilt the balance of
power in favour of the Soviet Union. He confidently planned to overhaul the
Americans in milk, butter and meat production between 1961 and 1962, and in
industrial output between 1970 and 1975. It seems that he did not really believe
in the reality of American prosperity. On one occasion he met Vice President
Nixon for a debate in a model American kitchen, and refused to believe that such
kitchens were commonplace in the United States – it must be a put-up job, a sort
of Potemkin kitchen. Second, Khrushchev understood that in the age of nuclear
weapons the Soviet Union and the United States could destroy each another and
must therefore act with appropriate caution. The safety of his country, and of the
revolutionary ideal which he cherished, depended on the two superpowers
attaining a level of agreement sufficient to avoid a nuclear war. Third,
Khrushchev was increasingly conscious of the dangers arising from the dispute
between the Soviet Union and China, which developed from 1956 onwards,
introducing a new complication in Soviet foreign policy and in the socialist
camp. For all his impulsiveness, Khrushchev’s policy rested firmly on these
perceptions.
Khrushchev also introduced an improved system for securing information and
advice on foreign policy through various research institutes dealing with the
United States and Canada, the world economy and international affairs, Africa
and the Far East. These bodies provided reports for the International Department
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, headed by Boris Ponomarev,
which dealt with policy towards all non-communist states. In 1957, Foreign
Minister Molotov conspired to remove Khrushchev from power, but failed and
was himself dismissed. (It was a sign of change in the Soviet Union that he
survived and lived quietly in retirement.) Khrushchev appointed Andrei
Gromyko, an experienced diplomat who had been successively ambassador to
the United States, chief permanent delegate to the UN and ambassador to the
United Kingdom, as the new foreign minister. Khrushchev valued his steadfast
obedience (he once remarked that Gromyko would ‘sit on a block of ice if I tell
him to’), but even more his skill and persistence in negotiation.3 Gromyko’s
impassivity made an excellent foil to Khrushchev’s ebullience, and he was to
remain Soviet foreign minister from 1957 to 1985, ensuring a long continuity of
direction in foreign policy.

Berlin crisis, first phase: 1958–60

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM), and in October 1957 put a satellite (the Sputnik) into orbit round the
earth. Khrushchev attended the second ICBM launch in person, and boasted
publicly that the Soviet Union would turn out missiles like sausages. This was
bluff. Two years later, when Khrushchev announced the formation of ‘Rocket
Strategic Forces’, there were only four missiles of the relevant type ready for
use. But the confidence behind the bluff was real. Khrushchev believed firmly
that the Soviet Union was drawing ahead of the United States in missile
technology; and he frightened many Americans into thinking the same thing.
The idea of a ‘missile gap’, to the advantage of the Soviets, took root.
Encouraged by these events, Khrushchev reopened the question of Berlin,
which had slumbered uneasily since the end of the Berlin blockade in 1949. His
basic motive was simple. He remarked on one occasion: ‘What would you do if
you had an aching tooth? You’d have it out.’ That was what he felt about Berlin
– it was an aching tooth.4 There were more sophisticated calculations. The lack
of a German peace settlement left European affairs in a constant state of
instability, which could be ended to Soviet advantage by a new and permanent
arrangement in Berlin. Ulbricht, the communist leader of East Germany, feared
West Berlin’s display of capitalist prosperity and wanted to get rid of it.
Khrushchev was willing to help him, and so promote the cause of a socialist East
Germany. The technical opportunity was always present, because the
arrangements for Western access to Berlin by land had remained doubtful ever
since 1945, and could be called into question at any time. Above all, Khrushchev
was convinced that the Americans would not fight over Berlin. He could
therefore act boldly yet safely.
On 10 November 1958 Khrushchev demanded an end to Berlin’s status as a
city occupied by the four powers, and announced his intention to hand control
over access to East Berlin to the German Democratic Republic (GDR). On 27
November he followed this up with notes to the United States, British and
French governments, declaring the existing four-power agreements on Berlin as
null and void and demanding that all occupation troops leave the city within six
months. If they did not, the Soviet Union would unilaterally conclude a peace
treaty with the East German government and hand over control of all movements
in and out of East Berlin to the East German authorities. On 10 January 1959 he
presented the Western powers with a draft treaty setting out a new status for
Berlin.
The six-month deadline for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Berlin
was a form of ultimatum, with an implied danger of war if the Western powers
continued to enforce their rights of access on Berlin when the six months were
up. The Western powers differed markedly in their responses. The Americans
had no wish to go to war over Berlin and were prepared to try to find a
compromise on the question of access. Secretary of State Dulles suggested on 26
November 1958 that the East Germans could be regarded as agents of the Soviet
Union, which would sidestep the issue of principle involved in East German
control of access to Berlin. He was also willing to consider treating Berlin as a
‘free city’, without occupation forces; though he insisted that the existing rights
of the occupying powers should be maintained while negotiations went on.
Macmillan, the British prime minister, wanted the Western powers to accept East
German control over the lines of communication, rather than risk using force to
maintain their rights of access. He virtually invited himself to Moscow in
February 1959 to seek a solution by personal contact with Khrushchev, but
without success. In France, de Gaulle had recently become president of the new
Fifth Republic. He took a strong line on Berlin, partly because he refused to be
bullied, but even more because he was determined to stand by West Germany.
He was building a close relationship with Adenauer, who was convinced that
Khrushchev’s Berlin policy was ultimately designed to force West Germany out
of NATO and its role in West European integration. De Gaulle therefore assured
Adenauer that France would stand firm about Berlin, if necessary at the risk of
war. He snubbed American and British suggestions for ‘exploratory talks’ with
the Soviets, remarking that there was nothing to explore – only rights to be
maintained.
Strangely, Khrushchev made little attempt to exploit these differences between
the Western powers. He agreed to a meeting of foreign ministers, which
convened at Geneva only a fortnight before the six-month deadline was due to
expire. The ministers reached no agreement, the deadline arrived and nothing
happened. The Soviets continued to control the access routes to Berlin, and
traffic passed as usual. The foreign ministers went on talking until August, and
then parted without agreement.
The crisis was not resolved. Khrushchev simply seemed to lose interest in it for
a time. Arrangements were now well under way for Khrushchev to visit the
United States – an unprecedented journey for a Soviet leader, and one to which
he was keenly looking forward. For a time, the Berlin question was put on one
side.
Khrushchev’s visit to the United States took place from 15 to 27 September
1959. He made it a family affair, being accompanied by his wife, son and two
daughters, as well as by a party of about a hundred. His talks with Eisenhower
were inconclusive, because neither was prepared to move from his existing
position on disarmament, Berlin or the Middle East; but they got quite far
enough on the simple central point that neither of them wanted a war. Most of
the visit was public in nature. Khrushchev visited Washington, New York, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Des Moines and Pittsburgh. He spent a day with
Roswell Garst, a farmer in Iowa who had made a name for himself by arranging
exchange visits between American and Soviet farmers and had already met
Khrushchev in the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader was greeted almost
everywhere by large crowds, sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes merely
curious. He became involved in heated discussions about the speech in which he
had said ‘We will bury you,’ and explained that it was not a matter of physically
burying anyone, but of the historical development of society. Still, he insisted
that ‘capitalism will be buried and will change to communism’ – which
doubtless did not comfort his American audience.5 The visit produced little
substantial result, but it was remarkable that it took place at all.
In the wake of this visit, Soviet–American relations appeared to improve for a
time. Two further meetings were agreed on: a four-power summit in Paris in
May 1960, to discuss Berlin; and later a journey by Eisenhower to Moscow to
repay Khrushchev’s visit. But suddenly everything collapsed. On the eve of the
Paris summit, the Soviet government released the news that on 1 May they had
shot down an American U-2 photographic reconnaissance aircraft in the region
of Sverdlovsk, about 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow. Such flights had been
going on since 1955. In June 1956 Khrushchev had personally told the American
chief of air staff, General Twining, to stop sending planes into Soviet air space –
‘We will shoot down all uninvited guests’; and in fact the Soviets had made
some interceptions.6
There was therefore nothing new about this flight, which could have been dealt
with behind the scenes if Khrushchev had so wished. Instead, he chose to make
the incident public in the most dramatic way possible. Tactically, he played the
game with great skill. Soviet officials announced the shooting down of the U-2
on 5 May. The Americans claimed that the aircraft had been engaged in weather
reconnaissance and had gone off course. Then on 7 May the Soviets produced
the pilot, Gary Powers, with his films, a flight plan and a ‘confession’. The
Americans were forced to own up. Secretary of State Christian Herter admitted
the facts; and on 11 May President Eisenhower confirmed in public that such
flights were made and maintained firmly that they were necessary for American
security. Khrushchev, who had by then arrived in Paris for the summit, made his
participation in the conference conditional upon an American apology for the
operation, the punishment of those involved and an undertaking not to make any
further flights.
Khrushchev thus chose to make a crisis out of an episode which could easily
have been resolved quietly. Why was this? The answer may lie partly in impulse
– Powers’s flight took place on May Day, a high point in the Soviet calendar,
which Khrushchev took to be a deliberate insult. Tactically, it may be that
Khrushchev expected Eisenhower to disown the flight, and so begin the Paris
Conference at a moral and diplomatic disadvantage. On the other hand, he may
have foreseen that his demands about Berlin were not going to succeed and so
chose to break off the conference on grounds of his own choosing. He was at any
rate able to demonstrate that he had not gone ‘soft on capitalism’ after his visit to
the United States in 1959.
In the event, Eisenhower (supported by de Gaulle) refused Khrushchev’s
demands for an apology, and the Paris Conference collapsed before it began. Yet
this proved a strangely hollow crisis, with only limited consequences. On the one
hand, Khrushchev scored a propaganda victory, wrong-footing the Americans
and damaging their prestige. On the other hand, Eisenhower’s frankness in
taking responsibility for the flights and his insistence that they were necessary
won him respect among those who responded in strategic rather than emotional
terms. The steadfast support of de Gaulle, who was far from being an automatic
supporter of the United States, was particularly significant. Meanwhile, the
Berlin question, which was to have been discussed in Paris, remained
unresolved.

Khrushchev and Kennedy, 1960–1: The Bay of Pigs

 and the Vienna summit
In November 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States,
defeating Richard Nixon by a very narrow margin in the popular vote. The
incoming president was young (only forty-three), wealthy and largely without
experience in world affairs. During his election campaign he had played up the
‘missile gap’, and in general espoused ‘hawkish’ views on the Cold War.
Kennedy made sure that no one could say he was soft on communism by
declaring that ‘the enemy is the Communist system itself – implacable,
insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination … a godless tyranny’.7
Yet at the same time he also insisted on the need for negotiation with the Soviet
Union. Kennedy was an unknown quantity – which in a curious way he has
remained, suspended between the early adulation of the ‘Camelot’ era and the
later criticisms of poor judgement and lack of real achievement.
Khrushchev was privately pleased by Kennedy’s victory. In public, the two
men opened a long-range verbal bombardment against one another. On 6 January
1961 Khrushchev made a speech predicting that the victory of communism
would come, not through nuclear or conventional war, but through wars of
national liberation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Kennedy took this as a
direct challenge and replied in the course of his inaugural address as president,
declaring that freedom faced an ‘hour of maximum danger’, which he assumed
the duty of confronting. ‘I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it.’
America, he proclaimed, would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and the
success of liberty’.8 It was an extraordinary commitment, which eventually
proved impossible to fulfil. The price of an immense defence budget and the
burdens of the Vietnam War proved to be more than the United States was
willing to bear. But meanwhile Khrushchev’s challenge had been taken up in no
uncertain terms.
Behind the scenes there was another story. The Soviet experts estimated that
Kennedy would be pragmatic in foreign policy and would be in favour of talks
with the Soviet Union. Khrushchev made a point of consulting the American
ambassador in Moscow frequently, and also opened a new confidential channel
to the White House, bypassing the Soviet ambassador in Washington, by using
Georgi Bolshakov, nominally the head of the TASS press agency and in fact a
colonel in Soviet military intelligence. Bolshakov made contacts with Robert
Kennedy, the president’s brother (and also the attorney general), and with Pierre
Salinger, the president’s press secretary, so that there were secret
communications behind the scenes in marked contrast to the public sparring.
The state of American–Soviet relations thus remained uncertain, when
suddenly they were tested at an unexpected point – Cuba. Since becoming
independent from Spain in 1898, Cuba had remained very much under the
influence of the United States, which took most of its exports and dominated its
economy. In the 1950s the country was run by a dictator, Fulgencio Batista;
while in the hills and forests of the interior a young rebel, Fidel Castro, led a
resistance movement. In 1958 the United States suspended arms supplies to the
dictator, destabilizing his regime. In January 1959 Batista gave up the struggle
and fled. Castro and his band of bearded guerrillas came down from the hills and
set up a new government in Havana. Among them was the Argentine Ernesto
(Che) Guevara, who was proven to be one of the most magnetic figures of Third
World mythology.
Castro was strongly anti-American, and it may well be that at that stage he took
to communism more as a function of his anti-Americanism than out of
conviction. (He maintained diplomatic relations with Franco’s government in
Spain, which was anathema to most true left-wingers; and in return Spain took
no part in the later American-led economic sanctions against Cuba.) In Moscow,
there was some reluctance to believe that Castro and Guevara were true
Marxists. Curiously (and as it proved disastrously) the Americans deliberately
pushed the Castro regime into close relations with the Soviet Union, in the belief
that this would render it unpopular at home and so bring about its fall. For
example, the American government preferred Cuba to buy jet fighters from the
Soviet Union rather than from Britain, in order to demonstrate Cuban
dependence on Moscow. This elaborate policy failed completely in its main
objective. Castro established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union on 7
May 1960, and he remained solidly in power. In Moscow Khrushchev came to
regard Castro and Guevara as heroes, who were bearing the flame of revolution
in the centre of the Caribbean. When Khrushchev addressed the UN General
Assembly in 1960, he deliberately sought out Castro and hugged him in a
demonstration of friendship and support.
The Americans then tried a new tack by imposing a general economic embargo
on Cuba. At one time, these measures would have been fatal; but Castro could
now play the Soviet card. The Soviet Union supplied him with arms, of which
the first shipment arrived in September 1960. In November Guevara visited
Moscow to sell sugar to the Soviets. Khrushchev welcomed him warmly; invited
him to stand with the Soviet leaders at the great parade on the anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution; he also made sure that the Soviet Union and its East
European satellites took all Cuba’s sugar exports. For Khrushchev, Castro’s
success in Cuba came as confirmation of his belief that imperialism would be
defeated by revolution in the Third World. If revolution could succeed in
America’s backyard, its victory was certain.
Thus by the end of 1960 Cuba had been drawn into the Soviet camp. In dismay,
the Americans looked for other means of overthrowing Castro. There was no
shortage of Cuban opponents of the Castro regime, some in Florida and others in
military-style camps in Guatemala. The CIA recruited a force of these exiles to
land in Cuba and lead a revolt. When Kennedy took office at the beginning of
1961 this plan was already well advanced. The new president might have
dropped it or strengthened it, but in fact he did neither; and as a result he fell
between two stools. The so-called Cuban Brigade, operating from Guatemala,
landed some 1,400 men at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba on 17
April 1961. American aircraft with Cuban markings and flown by Cuban exiles
made ineffectual bombing attacks on Cuban airfields. No rebellion broke out to
support the invaders. The landing force suffered over a hundred fatal casualties,
and most were taken prisoner, to be displayed for photographers and film crews.
American participation had been clear enough to attract attention, but utterly
insufficient to ensure success. The result was a foreign policy humiliation.
In Cuba, Castro’s authority was consolidated. His prestige was at its height, and
he seized the opportunity to crush internal opposition and round up CIA agents.
On May Day 1961 he publicly proclaimed that Cuba was a socialist state and
announced that there was no need to hold any elections, since there was in effect
a plebiscite every day in favour of the regime. The Americans in their dismay
conceived a series of operations to overthrow or assassinate Castro – including
an extraordinary scheme to poison some of his cigars. More seriously, they also
attempted sabotage of the Cuban sugar crop and copper mines. (These plans
were collectively code-named MONGOOSE, presumably after Kipling’s short
story in which a brave and tenacious mongoose kills a cobra; but the Americans
failed to live up to this example.)
Cuba was now firmly established in the Soviet camp, as much by American
errors as by Castro’s own policies. The regime became the standard-bearer for
socialism in Latin America; and Cuba attained the status of an ally, rather than a
mere satellite, of the Soviet Union.
It so happened that on 12 April 1961, a few days before the landing at the Bay
of Pigs, the Soviet Union had put the first man into space. Yuri Gagarin became
an instant hero, circling the earth under the sign of the hammer and sickle.
Khrushchev was thus full of confidence at the time of the American disaster. He
had known of the American plan in advance, but kept his own counsel until the
day after the attack, when he wrote to Kennedy to declare that the American
action threatened the peace of the world, and that Cuba would receive ‘all
necessary assistance’ in repelling the attack. Moreover, he warned that if the
conflict continued in Cuba there might be a new conflagration elsewhere –
meaning Berlin.9 When the Americans did nothing to follow up the landing,
Khrushchev had every reason to think that his threats had taken effect.
Contemporaneously with events in Cuba, the Soviet and American leaders
were in contact by secret channels to prepare for a summit. Khrushchev, buoyed
by successes in space and in the Caribbean, was eager for a meeting, and was
sure that he faced a weak president whom he could put under pressure. Kennedy,
more vaguely, wanted to meet Khrushchev and size him up.
The two leaders encountered each other at Vienna from 3 to 4 June 1961.
Khrushchev was ebullient and pleased at being the old hand facing the ‘new boy’
on the international scene. He lectured the president on the history of the Cold
War, and dug into the past to recall the fate of the Holy Alliance, which had
failed to hold back revolution in the 1820s. He talked a good deal about the Bay
of Pigs, rubbing salt into the wound of the American failure. Kennedy, by
contrast, was uncertain and defensive, and failed to impose himself on the
discussions. After the meetings, James Reston of the New York Times asked
Kennedy if they had been pretty rough, and the president replied, ‘Roughest
thing in my life … he just beat hell out of me.’10 Khrushchev came away
convinced that Kennedy was weak. Kennedy concluded that Khrushchev was in
a mood to take risks. In the course of the meeting, Khrushchev yet again set a
six-month deadline on his demands relating to Berlin; and it seemed that this
time he meant business.
There was a strange sequel to these events. Kennedy was so dismayed by the
almost simultaneous setbacks of the Bay of Pigs and the Soviets putting the first
man into space that he sought for some spectacular success to redress the
balance. He found the answer in space, and authorized the Apollo moon
programme, designed to restore American prestige by landing men on the moon.
Some eight years later, on 20 July 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft came down on
the moon, and men took their first lunar walk. It was indeed a remarkable feat;
but by that time the situation on earth had changed completely, and the danger to
American prestige came from quite a different quarter, in Vietnam.

The Berlin Wall and the end of the Berlin crisis, 1961–
2
In 1958 Khrushchev had put the Western powers under pressure by provoking a
crisis over access to Berlin. But by 1961 it was the Soviet Union and East
Germany that were under pressure over Berlin. The East German population,
especially the educated young, was draining away to the West through the city,
most of them bound for West Berlin. From 1957 to 1961 the outflow was as
follows:11
1957 261,622
1958 204,092
1959 143,917
1960 199,188
1961 (to 30 June) 103,159
Both the Soviets and East Germans were alarmed at this migration. Ulbricht, the
head of the East German government, asked Khrushchev for aid – food, hard
currency and even Soviet ‘guest workers’. Khrushchev declined to send workers
and was reluctant to take the drastic step of closing the door, which would be
tantamount to admitting that the only way to keep the people of the GDR in their
own country was to fence them in.
By July 1961 time was running out. Ulbricht warned the Soviets that if the
border in Berlin was kept open, the collapse of the GDR was inevitable –
literally driving the Moscow leadership up the wall.12 They were prepared to risk
the blow to their prestige; and they did not expect any serious reaction from the
Americans. The head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin, put various measures in
hand to tie the Americans down elsewhere by inciting trouble in Central
America and Africa; spreading rumours of moves to ‘liberate’ South Korea,
Taiwan and South Vietnam; and exaggerating the scale of Soviet nuclear
armaments.13
When they reached their decision, the Soviets moved swiftly. Overnight,
between 12 and 13 August 1961, East Berlin was cut off from West Berlin by a
barrier of barbed wire. Over the next few months this barrier was built up into
the Berlin Wall, an ugly obstacle of concrete blocks, some 4 metres high, and
with 300 watchtowers along its 111-kilometre length.
 At first, the Americans offered no reaction – it was two days before they even
lodged a protest. Eventually, under pressure from Willy Brandt, the mayor of
West Berlin, they sent a symbolic detachment of 1,500 troops (accompanied by
Vice President Lyndon Johnson and General Lucius Clay, who had been the
American commander-in-chief in Germany at the time of the Berlin blockade)
along the Autobahn to West Berlin, thus asserting their right of access. At
bottom, Kennedy was relieved by the severance of the two Berlins, which
offered a way out of the Berlin problem without war. It is also hard to see what
else he could have done. As it was, the situation looked quite dangerous enough.
On 22 October 1961 East German police tried to stop the American deputy
commandant from entering East Berlin, causing a tense incident. On 27 October
American and Soviet tanks took up station at ‘Check-Point Charlie’, the
authorized crossing-point between the two halves of the city; the American tanks
were carrying equipment suitable for knocking down a wall. The two forces
stared at one another for two days, during which time the good sense of those on
the spot and intensive diplomacy behind the scenes took the sting out of the
situation. In 1962 the Americans were still looking for a compromise on access
to West Berlin.
Such a compromise proved to be unnecessary. In January 1963 Khrushchev
himself announced that the success of the Berlin Wall made a new settlement
about Berlin unnecessary; and he was right. The Wall ended, at one and the same
time, the haemorrhage of people from East to West Germany and the Soviet
attempt to drive the Western powers out of Berlin. It was a grave and self-
inflicted blow to Soviet prestige, and a propaganda gift to the West, because
nothing could conceal the simple fact that the Wall was built to confine the East
Germans in their own country. The Wall nevertheless achieved what Khrushchev
and Ulbricht hoped: it stabilized the East German state, which began an
economic recovery that improved living standards – not up to West German
levels, but much higher than they had been before.
The Berlin Wall closed the German Question for many years to come, setting in
concrete the division between the two Germanies and the two halves of Berlin
until all was changed in 1989. The Wall was a remarkable symbol of the Cold
War. It was ugly, brutal and inhuman, cutting a city in two and separating
families and friends. It caused grief and hardship; yet compared to a shooting
war it cost few lives. In political terms it represented a crude form of stability.
Yet the Cold War was never stable. When it settled down in one place it broke
out in another; and in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the
verge of actual war.

The Cuban missile crisis, 1962

In July 1962 Raoul Castro, Fidel Castro’s brother and defence minister of Cuba,
visited Moscow to initiate a secret agreement providing for the stationing of
Soviet missiles in Cuba. In late September and early October 1962 some 85
Soviet vessels sailed to Cuba carrying 42 intermediate-range missiles with 164
nuclear warheads, and 42,000 Soviet troops to guard them. The missiles were to
be kept under Soviet control, and the installations which would render them
operational were to be completed between 25 and 27 October.14
Why did Khrushchev make this daring move? Its strategic value was doubtful,
and at best temporary. Soviet long-range missiles were already capable of
reaching targets in the United States; and fairly soon the Soviets would have
submarine-launched missiles which would be safer from attack than land-based
rockets in Cuba. In terms of foreign policy it might have been a bargaining
move, enabling Khrushchev to demand concessions elsewhere. Given
Khrushchev’s mood at the time, it may well have been inspired by genuine
commitment to Castro and his revolutionary regime – Cuba had become to the
Soviet Union what Berlin was to the United States, a symbol of its ideology and
prestige. Indeed, it may be that prestige was the key to the operation, in that
Khrushchev may have been aiming to compel the United States to accept the
Soviet Union as an equal – specifically, since the United States had stationed
missiles in Turkey, next door to the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union could station
them in Cuba. Among all these explanations, it is not surprising to see Kennedy
giving up in despair – ‘Well, it’s a goddam mystery to me.’15
The Soviets made little attempt at concealment; and indeed the voyages of so
many ships and the landing of their cargoes was almost bound to be observed.
But for various reasons, including bad weather over Cuba, it was not until 16
October that President Kennedy learnt that the Soviet Union was not only
building bases in Cuba (which had been known for some time) but was also
installing sites for medium-range missiles. This was rapidly confirmed by
photographs taken by U-2 reconnaissance planes. How would the Americans
react?
In principle, they had several courses open to them. They might accept the fait
accompli, do nothing and await the outcome. In practice, this was virtually
impossible, because no president could show such weakness on a crisis so close
to America’s shores. They might negotiate, perhaps through the UN, or through
established confidential channels. This would have the advantage of avoiding an
immediate confrontation, but would present the Soviets with the opportunity of
spinning out the negotiations until their position in Cuba had become
impregnable. On the other hand, the Americans might use force, in different
forms. They could bomb the missile sites; but they could not be sure of
destroying them all, and it would be dangerous to miss even one or two. They
could launch a full-scale invasion, after the style of Normandy in 1944; and in
fact the Americans moved large amphibious forces to Florida. But such an
operation would involve delay; it would mean direct conflict with Soviet forces,
which had always been avoided hitherto; and it might have involved heavy
casualties.
In these circumstances, a naval blockade offered an attractive alternative. A
blockade would do nothing about the missiles and troops already in Cuba, but
would prevent their reinforcement. It would exploit American superiority at sea,
where the Soviets were at their weakest; it would gain a little time while making
a show of strength; and it would not rule out any of the more drastic options –
preparations for invasion or air strikes could still go forward. The Americans
opted for a blockade. On 22 October 1962, in a television broadcast, Kennedy
announced the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, together with the 42,000
troops. As a countermeasure, he declared that ‘a strict quarantine’ would be
established around Cuba: with effect from 24 October, ‘all ships of any kind
bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of
offensive weapons, be turned back’.16 The use of the word ‘quarantine’ instead
of ‘blockade’ sidestepped questions as to whether a blockade could be
established except in time of war, or whether a blockade might in itself be an act
of war. It was a subtle choice of word; but the practical consequences were the
same. American warships were ordered to take station some 1,300 kilometres
from the eastern tip of Cuba – a distance later changed to 800 kilometres, at
British suggestion, allowing the Soviet government an extra day to decide on its
response. On 23 October Kennedy signed an order putting the ‘quarantine’ in
place with effect from 2.00 pm GMT on 24 October (10.00 am in Washington,
and 6.00 pm in Moscow).
The American warships took up their positions. During the morning of 24
October a number of Soviet vessels were heading for Cuba. The American
‘Crisis Committee’ which was watching the situation from Washington expected
an encounter somewhere between 10.30 and 11.00 am. In this respect it was an
extraordinarily public crisis. American television showed a Soviet tanker, the
Bucharest, approaching the ‘quarantine’ line, with American warships close by.
Along with much of the American population, the staff of the Soviet Embassy in
Washington gathered round TV sets to watch. The world held its breath. The
tanker passed unimpeded, to sighs of relief. But the Bucharest carried no
missiles. Two other Soviet vessels, the Gagarin and the Komiles, were nearing
the American line. At 10.25 am Washington time these ships were reported to
have stopped; by 10.30 am there were reports that six ships in all had stopped or
turned back.17 The Soviets chose to avoid the confrontation, and sea power had
begun its work without a shot being fired. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, felt
the tension slacken: ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just
blinked.’18
This was only a temporary respite, however. The basic situation remained
unchanged. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were still there, and their installation
was still going ahead. Even so, a psychological turning point had been passed,
and an opportunity opened for negotiation. The secretary-general of the UN, the
Burmese U Thant, tried to find a compromise in the afternoon of 24 October,
sending identical messages to Moscow and Washington, proposing that the
Soviet government should cease to send weapons to Cuba and that the United
States should lift its quarantine. On 25 October Khrushchev agreed to his part of
the bargain (after all, his ships had already turned round); but Kennedy declined
(the quarantine was doing its work). Khrushchev then proposed a summit
meeting with Kennedy, but the president made no reply.
During the night between 25 and 26 October, Khrushchev received an
erroneous report that the Americans were about to invade Cuba, and began to
display an anxiety which by some accounts verged on panic. It is striking that
throughout this crisis Khrushchev sought to avoid direct confrontation with
American forces; he ordered the ships to turn back, and he did not want the
troops in Cuba to face an invasion. Meanwhile, the Americans kept the pressure
on. American warships and aircraft ostentatiously increased their surveillance of
Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic. Reconnaissance aircraft made low-level
flights over Cuba. On 27 October an American U-2 plane was shot down by
anti-aircraft fire. The Cubans publicly took the responsibility, but the Soviet
forces in the island were put on high alert. Khrushchev sent their commander an
order forbidding any use of nuclear weapons. The risk of war was acute.
Despite this extreme tension, or perhaps because of it, the outline of a solution
began to emerge. Khrushchev raised the idea that the Americans should remove
their missiles from Turkey to balance the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from
Cuba. He also sought an assurance from the United States that there would be no
invasion of Cuba. On 26 October, the Americans maintained in public that they
would not negotiate unless the Soviet missiles were previously withdrawn from
Cuba; but they indicated in private that they would not invade Cuba if the
missiles were removed, and that American missiles would be withdrawn from
Turkey after a suitable delay.
These confidential exchanges led Khrushchev to broadcast at 5.00 pm Moscow
time on 27 October that he would withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba in
return for undertakings that the United States would not invade the island and
that they would remove their own missiles from Turkey. Kennedy made his reply
public: he accepted that Khrushchev was to remove the missiles from Cuba; and
agreed that the United States would remove the ‘quarantine’ measures promptly,
and would give assurances that there would be no invasion of Cuba. In private,
Robert Kennedy assured the Soviet ambassador that the United States would
remove its missiles from Turkey, but he could not make this concession public.
The worst phase of the crisis thus came to an end. On 20 November Kennedy
ordered the lifting of the ‘quarantine’ (though of course the US Navy could
reimpose it at any time). The Soviet forces in Cuba dismantled the missile sites.
The Soviet missiles, tactical bombers and land forces (except for a single
brigade) left Cuba by March 1963. The withdrawal of the aircraft and land forces
had not formed part of the original bargain and represented an additional
concession by Khrushchev.
This settlement appeared balanced, but was in practice in favour of the United
States. Khrushchev withdrew the missiles from Cuba, and so abandoned a
position which he had very publicly taken up. The Americans, however, had had
no intention of invading Cuba except to destroy the Soviet missiles; so when the
missiles went they were only giving up something which they did not propose to
do anyway. As for the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, these could be withdrawn
without significant strategic effect. Khrushchev thus gave up a prominent
venture, to which he had pinned his prestige. The Americans gave up two points
which were largely hollow.
The Cuban missile crisis was for a short time intensely dangerous. When
Soviet cargo ships approached the American quarantine line no one knew what
would happen if an American warship fired on a Soviet vessel, or attempted to
put a search party on board against resistance. Again, when the American
reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, the Soviets feared some form of
retaliation. The two superpowers came near to the brink of war; and they drew
back. Nuclear deterrence worked, helped on the American side by the strength
and flexibility of sea power.
The shock of these events produced widely different effects on the relations
between the superpowers. On the one hand, the American and Soviet leaders
were so shaken by their near-disaster that they agreed to improve the speed and
reliability of their communications with one another. They installed a so-called
hot line (in fact a teletype) between the two capitals to allow them to
communicate directly, securely and almost instantaneously. This proved to be a
psychological gesture rather than a practical measure – the ‘hot line’ was not
used for another five years (during the Middle East crisis of 1967), and then to
only modest effect. But after the intensity of the missile crisis, even a
psychological gesture had its value. The superpowers also began to move
towards a treaty to limit the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in
which they were joined by Britain but not by France. The Americans and Soviets
thus took deliberate steps towards détente – the lessening of tension in the Cold
War. On the other hand, the Cuban missile crisis led to an intensification of the
arms race. Both superpowers increased their production of nuclear weapons; and
the Soviets, conscious that they had been thwarted by American sea power, set
out to build an ocean-going fleet. Thus while moving delicately towards détente
the rivals trod heavily towards greater armaments.
In the Cuban missile crisis, the two superpowers confronted one another and
negotiated with one another virtually alone. The Americans communicated to
some extent with their principal NATO allies; Macmillan in Britain and de
Gaulle in France tried to influence American policy; but at the height of the
crisis there could be no doubt that this was an American affair. Similarly
Khrushchev virtually disregarded the Chinese, who were furious at the
compromise settlement, which they regarded as surrender. He also ignored
Castro, agreeing to withdraw the missiles and troops without consultation with
the Cubans. (Castro, though, struck a blow for self-respect by refusing to allow
American inspectors to verify the withdrawal on the ground.)
Of the two, in their lonely eminence, the United States emerged the stronger.
Kennedy gained personal prestige through his handling of the crisis. He showed
firmness in imposing the naval blockade, subtlety in calling it a ‘quarantine’ and
flexibility in seeking a successful compromise – a remarkable performance.
Khrushchev, however, had been rash in taking up a position in Cuba which he
could not sustain, and had suffered a public defeat when Soviet ships turned
back rather than test the American blockade. In the personal rivalry with
Kennedy, in which Khrushchev had seemed so superior at Vienna in 1961, he
was now very much the also-ran. It was not long before he paid the price, being
deposed from power in 1964.
But the American success was by no means complete. Cuba remained defiant,
a resolute and vigorous enemy of the Americans, a beacon for revolution and
left-wing aspirations in Latin America and a lively critic of American policy at
all kinds of international gatherings. In the 1970s Cuban expeditionary forces
were to intervene in Africa, providing the Soviet Union with an acceptable
‘Third World’ military arm in countries where Soviet forces would have been
less welcome. Castro remained a thorn in the American flesh, defying the might
of the United States from a mere 150 kilometres across the sea. There were only
two superpowers, and the United States was the stronger of the two; but a tiny
enemy could still flourish in the Americans’ own backyard. The facts of power
were more complicated than might appear on the surface.

The Cold War at the end of 1962

The Cuban missile crisis showed the two superpowers standing alone, with
greater military and nuclear strength than they had ever previously possessed.
Yet in many ways their power and prestige were lower than they had been just
after the Second World War. In Latin America, American influence was
unchallenged at the end of the war, but was successfully defied by Cuba between
1961 and 1962. In 1947 the United States was the saviour of Western Europe
through the Marshall Plan. By 1962 Western Europe was organized in the EEC,
though its most prominent figure, General de Gaulle, hoped to detach it from the
American sphere of influence (although he would swiftly be disappointed). At
the end of the Second World War, the Americans could play the card of being the
liberator of colonial peoples; but by 1962 most of the new countries which had
emerged from the ruins of the European empires were fiercely anti-American –
and the United States was being depicted as a ‘neo-colonial’ power.
As for the Soviet Union, between 1947 and 1948, its power was supreme in
Eastern Europe. But its control had been challenged in East Germany in 1953
and in Poland and Hungary in 1956. In 1961 it had been compelled to admit that
the people of the GDR could only be kept in their own country by the Berlin
Wall. Yugoslavia had successfully defied even Stalin, and still pursued an
independent course. China had become openly hostile to the Soviet Union,
creating a rift in the communist world more dangerous and damaging than
anything which confronted the United States in Western Europe (see Chapter 9).
Even though the Soviet Union enjoyed the admiration of most of the former
colonial states, it could prove an expensive and often unrewarding activity to
support them.
Each of the superpowers had grown in military strength and possessed in its
nuclear arsenal the means to destroy its opponent beyond hope of recovery. Yet
this immense power could not be used, for fear of mutual annihilation, and thus
existed in a curious vacuum. In these circumstances, a state of de facto stability
was established between the two great rivals. They continued to be ideological
opponents, conducting a constant propaganda conflict against one another. They
were engaged in clandestine combat by espionage and subversion. They pursued
arms races of immense complexity and exorbitant expense. Yet they had
become, in Raymond Aron’s telling phrase, frères-ennemis – brothers as well as
enemies. They confronted one another, yet they negotiated with one another; and
they were prepared to settle down and live with one another, even if it was only
on a temporary basis. The Cold War had reached a sort of stalemate. It is time to
look back and examine the nature of this strange conflict.

Notes
1 Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia (London, 1997), pp. 350–2.
2 Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 1996), p.
184.
3 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New
York, 1995), pp. 32–3, 574–5.
4 Sir Frank Roberts, quoted in Gabriel Partos, The World That Came in from the Cold (London, 1990),
pp. 39–40.
5 Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, 1959, pp. 17,079–85.
6 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 159. According to Soviet sources, the
Americans lost 130 pilots on reconnaissance over the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
7 Speech by Kennedy at the Mormon Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, quoted in Michael R. Beschloss, The
Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (London, 1991), p. 25. The parallel with President
Reagan’s speech referring to the ‘evil empire’ are close; yet Kennedy’s remarks have gone largely
unnoticed.
8 Quoted in Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (London, 1991), p.
253.
9 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 242.
10 Beschloss, The Crisis Years, pp. 224–5.
11 David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (London, 1998), p. 342.
12 See Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet–East German Relations, 1953–1961
(Princeton, 2003) for Ulbricht’s role.
13 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 253–5. The Central American countries
named were Nicaragua, San Salvador and Guatemala; the African countries were Kenya, Rhodesia and
Portuguese Guinea.
14 Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 73; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 265.
15 A phrase used by President Kennedy on 16 October during discussions with Secretary of State Dean
Rusk, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara and others. Kennedy secretly recorded his conversations;
they have been published in Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes (Boston MA, 1997).
16 Quoted in Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 484.
17 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency
from Washington to Bush (London, 1995), p. 296.
18 Quoted in James Hershberg, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis’, in Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II
(Cambridge, 2010), p. 67.
 Reflection

The Cold War in its early phases

The Cuban missile crisis revealed the two superpowers standing alone, with
greater military strength than they had ever previously possessed. Each held in
its nuclear arsenal the means to destroy its opponent beyond hope of recovery.
Yet this immense military power could not be used, because war meant instant
mutual annihilation. They confronted one another, but they had to live with one
another, even if only on a temporary basis. The Cold War had reached a
condition of stalemate, and this offers us an opportunity to examine the nature of
this strange dispute.
What’s in a name? In this case rather a lot. The term ‘Cold War’ is at once
useful and misleading. It is useful because it reminds us that we are dealing with
a conflict which was not a war in the usual sense of the term. It involved no
direct fighting between the principal antagonists, but instead drew them into
various other forms of dispute, for example, arms races and ideological conflicts.
This was an unusual sort of conflict, which required a special name. As early as
October 1945, George Orwell, in prophetic moods, foresaw the coming of ‘a
peace that is no peace’, in which a great power would live in a permanent state
of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours. The phrase came into general circulation in
1947, when Walter Lippmann, an influential American journalists and
newspaper columnist, used it as the title of a widely read book.1
Since then the phrase has become an indispensable part of our vocabulary, so
that it is almost impossible to describe the second half of the twentieth century
without using it. Once used, it leads to other questions. When did the Cold War
start? What was it all about? Where was its centre? Such questions may appear
simple, but they are by no means easy to answer.
When did the Cold War start? Some historians have no hesitation in choosing
1917, the date of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which brought into being a
socialist state which by its very nature was in conflict with bourgeois and
capitalist states.2 Other writers argue that the wartime alliance between Britain,
the United States and the Soviet Union was based on the realities of strategy and
power politics, which might well have continued as the fighting came to an end.
In this scenario, the start of the Cold War may be placed somewhere between the
three-power conference in February 1945 and the formation of hostile blocs in
Europe between 1947 and 1949.3
The view of the Cold War as primarily an ideological dispute is strengthened
by two constant elements. First, Soviet leaders assumed that ‘all other political
life-forms were inherently and immutably hostile’ – an assumption which was as
true for Switzerland, which could present no material threat to the Soviet Union,
as it was for the United States, with all its immense power. Second, the Cold War
was a conflict within countries as well as between them. For communists, fellow
travellers and other left-wingers, the constant enemy was American imperialism.
For example, ideologically motivated traitors like the so-called Cambridge
Comintern betrayed their country, not for material gain but for their beliefs.4
Sympathy for the Soviet Union ran wide and deep, drawing strength from many
currents of opinion – anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-
Americanism. The same was true of the opposite camp. Opposition to
communism ran deep in much of Eastern Europe, especially in the countryside,
and there was a suppressed desire among both the intelligentsia and factory
workers for greater freedom. At the same time, the belief in the moral superiority
of socialism over capitalism ran deep.
This general outline of the origins of the Cold War may be filled in by
examining the period of 1945–62 in some detail. It is best looked at under the
headings of ‘diplomacy’ and ‘arms races’. The years between 1945 and the end
of 1947 formed a period in which the wartime alliance continued to function,
though under increasingly difficult circumstances. The foreign ministers of the
United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France continued to meet, until their
session in Moscow, during November–December 1947, proved to be the end of
the road, breaking up without even setting a date for the next meeting. Then for a
period of six years, until the death of Stalin, there was a period in which the
United States and Soviet Union maintained only the most formal relations. It
was inconceivable that the leaders of the superpowers should dine together to do
business informally. This was the time when the Cold War was at its chilliest.
Yet in the event, this period of deep frost lasted only six years. As early as
January 1954 the four foreign ministers (Soviet, American, British and French)
met to discuss the German Question. They made no progress, because the
underlying difficulties had not changed; but instead of giving up, they agreed to
switch their attention to East Asia. They agreed to meet again to talk about
Korea and Indo-China; and they moved their meeting place to the neutral ground
of Geneva and included the Chinese foreign minister in their deliberations –
despite the fact that the United States and communist China still did not
recognize one another. In July 1955 the first post-war meeting of heads of
government took place at Geneva – Khrushchev for the Soviet Union,
Eisenhower for the United States, Eden for Britain and Mendès-France for
France. Practical results were slight, but all were agreed that a marked change in
the international climate had occurred. ‘The spirit of Geneva’ thawed the frost of
the Cold War.
The new spirit was most obvious in a willingness to travel and make personal
contacts. In 1956 Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, prime minister of the
Soviet Union, visited Britain, including a social trip to Oxford; and in February
1959 Macmillan, the British prime minister, almost invited himself to Moscow
in return. Then in September 1959 what would have been the unthinkable came
about. Khrushchev paid a visit to the United States in which the formal aspects
were accompanied by a visit to Eisenhower’s country retreat at Camp David, and
‘the spirit of Geneva’ was followed by the ‘spirit of Camp David’, with
encouraging effects.
The next two summit meetings dampened these hopes and showed that the
Cold War was still alive. A four-power meeting in Paris in May 1960 broke up
before it began over the U-2 spy plane incident, even though either the Soviets
or the Americans could have salvaged it if they had really wished to do so.
About a year later a meeting between Khrushchev and President Kennedy
foundered amid harsh words on both sides. Then in 1962 the Cuba crisis brought
both the Soviets and the Americans to look over the brink of war and awaken to
the full horror of what lay over there. Both superpowers showed a renewed
determination to keep in touch and forestall crises at an early stage. The ‘secret
channel’ between the two governments, through the Soviet Embassy in
Washington, was formalized, and in 1963 a so-called hot line between the White
House and the Kremlin was installed. Personal visits resumed. In 1967 Kosygin
(Khrushchev’s successor) took the initiative by going to the United States, and
by the early 1970s summit meetings between the leaders of the two superpowers
had become annual events.
 So it came about that the deepest frost of the Cold War did not last long –
1948–53 covered the worst of it. But there were other aspects of the Cold War
which comprised different dates. In the 1950s the two superpowers were
engaged in three different arms races: in nuclear weapons, in conventional land
forces and in maritime forces.
The most dangerous of these competitions was the one in nuclear weapons. The
Americans held an early lead, but this changed when the Soviet Union fired its
first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in August 1957,
followed by the Americans in December of the same year. There followed a
period of intense development by both countries. The Americans brought Titan
and Atlas ICBMs into service in 1959, and then built Polaris submarines capable
of launching missiles from under water. At the same time, the Soviet Union held
a series of nuclear tests, culminating in 1961 with the explosion of powerful
hydrogen bombs. In 1963 the improvement in diplomatic relations following the
Cuban crisis showed results in limiting the nuclear competition. The Soviet
Union, United States and Britain concluded a test-ban treaty ending nuclear
explosions in the atmosphere (but not underground) on 5 August 1963. This
treaty did not put an end to nuclear competition, which continued in the
development of antiballistic missiles, and of rockets which could carry several
warheads on one missile – multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles
(MIRVs). Even so, the test-ban treaty was an important symbol of cooperation
rather than competition.
Nuclear weapons and rockets represented the most modern aspects of the arms
races between the superpowers. Competition in conventional land forces – tanks,
guns and infantry – was mostly a one-horse race. The NATO powers, meaning
for the most part the United States, made no serious effort to match the Warsaw
Pact forces soldier for soldier or tank for tank. Instead the Americans developed
so-called tactical atomic weapons to counter Soviet superiority on the ground,
offering a choice of weaponry which neither side chose to use – fortunately,
since NATO wargames gave a bleak portrayal of the massive destruction that
tactical weapons would have vested upon Central Europe, had they ever been
employed in battle.
Naval rivalry between the superpowers began only late in the post-war period.
From 1945 to about 1960 the United States possessed overwhelming strength at
sea, and Moscow made no serious attempt to compete. This changed in 1961,
when the Soviet Union began to build an ocean-going fleet. This was partly to
counter the American Polaris submarines and partly to support Soviet policy in
the Third World, to show the Red Flag. It so happened that a new naval rivalry
got under way just at the time when diplomatic relations between the
superpowers were improving.
The term ‘Cold War, is a necessity – we cannot do without it. Yet it is
misleading, because it gives the impression of a single entity, solid and
congealed like an iceberg. The best we can do is to remember that the phrase has
different meanings in different circumstances. We must also remember that the
Cold War produced positive effects as well as risks and waste. Notably it settled,
even if it did not solve, the German Question, which had played havoc in
European politics since 1870. The Franco-German dispute, which had brought
about three great wars (the Franco-Prussian War and the two World Wars), came
to an end, partly because France and West Germany themselves, led by de
Gaulle and Adenauer, embarked on the path of reconciliation; but also because
the United States, in the context of the Cold War, insisted that the former
antagonists must work together. In East Asia, Japan, whose incessant conquests
had brought years of conflict, was firmly brought into the American sphere of
influence in the Cold War. The Japanese allowed the Americans to defend them,
and directed their energies towards industry and commerce. It so happened that
Germany and Japan, the aggressor states of the 1930s, settled down to cultivate
their gardens and thrived within the framework of the Cold War.
In a similar way, the Cold War offered opportunities for newly independent
countries to play on the rivalries of the superpowers to secure economic and
military advantages for themselves. It is true that the Cold War caused
unnecessary damage in the Third World, but it also brought advantages to
countries which were able to exploit them.
Above, all, the antagonists in the Cold War recognized their own limits. In the
Berlin blockade, the Soviets allowed the airlift to get through. In the Korean
War, the Americans preferred to turn a blind eye to the missions flown by Soviet
aircraft. The fear of mutual destruction prevented the superpowers from taking
the fatal step into war. But there was more at work than fear. Both sides were
satisfied with the status quo, especially in Europe. Western Europe enjoyed
rapidly increasing prosperity, accompanied by a high degree of political stability.
The people of Eastern Europe were not content with the status quo, as was
shown by revolts in 1953 and 1956, yet in some countries at least they attained a
degree of political stability and of crude economic growth that at least promised
hope for the future. Indeed, while the Cold War was not the Golden Age that had
been promised by propagandists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it was better
than the terrible decades that people had endured since the century began.

Notes
1 Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy (New York, 1947).
2 See, for example, André Fontaine, Histoire de la guerre froide (Paris, 1956 and 1967); D. F. Fleming,
The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917–1960 (New York, 1961).
3 For the interpretations referred to here, see, for example: Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World
and United States Policy, 1943–1945 (New York, 1968), who identifies 1943 as the start; Adam B.
Ulam, Expansion and Co-existence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973 (New York, 1974), who opts for
1943–5; Daniel Colard, Les relations internationales de 1945 a nos jours (6th ed., Paris, 1996), p. 195,
opts for Yalta; two Russian writers, Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s
Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 1996), argue for 1946. Most scholars identify 1947 as being crucial; see
especially John Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War (New York, 1996). The quotation putting the
start of the Cold War in 1948 is from Lawrence Aronson and Martin Kitchen, The Origins of the Cold
War in Historical Perspective (London, 1988), p. 211.
4 This is a reference to Robert Cecil, ‘The Cambridge Comintern’, in The Missing Dimension:
Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century, ed. Christopher Andrew and
David Dilks (London, 1984), pp. 169–98.
 PART TWO

Decolonization and Wars of

Succession, 1945–62
PHOTO 4 Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, addresses the Bandung
Conference of Afro-Asian states in April 1955 (Getty Images. Credit: Keystone-France).

While the Cold War was developing, another fundamental change in

international relations took place. Most of the European empires that had
controlled Africa and much of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century came
to an end. This process was ragged and hardly uniform. Sometimes the imperial
powers fought long and hard before withdrawing, as the French did in Indo-
China and Algeria. In other cases, the powers set their own deadlines for
departure, and left in haste, as the British did in India, Palestine and much of
Africa. Some countries did not give up their empires until much later. Portugal,
to all appearances the weakest of the colonial powers, held on to its African
colonies with remarkable tenacity. The Soviet Union, which had inherited the
Tsarist conquests in the Caucasus and Central Asia, made no retreat from empire
at all and held on until the collapse of the Soviet state itself in 1991.
The process of European expansion, extending over four and a half centuries
from about 1500 onwards, had been complicated. The European powers imposed
direct or indirect political control over their colonial territories. They promoted
trade and investment. They sometimes brought about large-scale European
settlement (e.g. by the French in Algeria, and the Dutch and British in South
Africa). Almost always empire brought the extension of European culture,
education and medicine – but usually only for a small proportion of the
subjected peoples. It was often accompanied by egregious economic and racial
injustice: the case of the Congo is a paradigmatic example of the violence and
exploitation that Europeans employed in Africa. The end of empire proved
equally messy. Political control was lost or handed over, but economic and
military influence often remained, as did important legacies in law, culture and
religion. The presence of European settlers produced a series of situations – war
in Algeria, apartheid in South Africa, torture and massacre against the Kikuyu
people in Kenya – that had serious repercussions on domestic politics in Europe.
‘Decolonization’ is a shorthand term covering all these changes. Like many
shorthand terms it is misleading but indispensable: misleading because it lumps
together all kinds of different events and movements; indispensable because it
would be impossibly clumsy to refer to these differences whenever we mention
the process as a whole.
Decolonization had profound effects on international relations. The former
imperial powers had to change their policies to adapt to the new circumstances.
The British, for example, sought a substitute for the empire in the
Commonwealth. The French turned to European integration as a new enterprise
to replace the distinctly anachronistic-sounding ‘civilizing mission’ of French
imperialism – though they also contrived to retain a substantial influence in
many of their former French colonies. In general, all the former colonial powers
were weakened, to the advantage of the superpowers.
On the other side, the newly independent states had to make their way in the
world. Almost at once they sought some form of cooperation with their fellows.
The Arabs talked of pan-Arab unity and formed the Arab League. The new
African governments set up the Organization of African Unity in 1963. The
Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states in 1955 aspired to bring together
countries across two continents, whether former colonies or not. Yet at the same
time the new states often came into conflict with one another, in wars of
succession to decide who should inherit the old imperial domains. India and
Pakistan, the successor states of British India, embarked on war with each other
as soon as they became independent, and have continued the struggle from time
to time ever since. In the Middle East, Israel and its Arab neighbours fought
bitter wars of succession over the old British mandate in Palestine. In Africa
there were frequent civil wars to decide who should replace the imperial powers;
one of the first was in the former Belgian Congo in 1960–2.
The complicated process of decolonization also became a theatre of conflict in
the Cold War. In part this was because the superpowers tried to win supporters
among the new states, and in part because the newly independent governments
themselves joined one or other of the opposing camps, whether out of conviction
or in pursuit of gain. The new states all joined the United Nations where the
former colonial countries rapidly attained a majority in the General Assembly,
transforming its character and role in world politics.
These vast changes, with their widespread consequences for international
affairs, began at the end of the Second World War and reached a climax in the
early 1960s, when many African colonies attained independence and the long
war in Algeria came to an end. The following chapters look at various aspects of
decolonization and wars of succession in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa
during that period; and also at the emergence of the Afro-Asian movement and
the Third World, which changed the nature and conduct of world affairs.
 8

The Middle East, 1945–62

The Middle East at the end of the Second World War – The end of the Palestine
mandate: Israel and the Arabs, 1947–9 – The Arab states and Arab nationalism
– The Suez crisis, 1956 – The Middle East after the Suez crisis.

The term ‘Middle East’ requires definition. In the first part of the twentieth
century, it was used in Britain and in France to denote a broad area between the
Near East and the Far East – which allowed a good deal of latitude, but at least
explained the use of the word ‘Middle’. ‘Near East’ has now largely fallen out of
use; and in common usage the Middle East comprises the south-east
Mediterranean countries, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt; then Jordan, Iraq,
Saudi Arabia and Yemen; and finally the Persian Gulf states of Kuwait, Bahrain,
the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Iran.1
The Middle East is inhabited by peoples who are mostly Arabic-speaking in
language and Islamic in religion. Language and religion do not necessarily
coincide, however. Iran is Islamic in religion, but Persian in language. There are
other, quite different elements. Lebanon comprises a mixture of Muslims and
Christians, speaking both Arabic and French. Israel has a mixed population of
Jews and Arabs; and in the early years of its existence the Jewish element was
very largely made up of European immigrants. The Kurds are mainly Muslim,
having their own language; they do not possess their own state, but many aspire
to create one.
In these varied circumstances, the term ‘nationalism’, which dominates much
political discussion, is usually difficult to define. Nationalism based on language
(often used as the basic criterion for nationality) would imply an Arab nation
covering most of the Middle East and perhaps extending along the whole North
African coast as far as Morocco. There has indeed been much talk of Arab unity
and pan-Arab nationalism; but in practice individual Arab countries have
maintained their own identity and developed a national consciousness based on
the unity of the state. Attempts to break away from this pattern – for example,
the formation of a union between Egypt and Syria (the United Arab Republic) –
have proved short-lived.
The states of the Middle East are recent in their formation, mostly dating back
to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. (Iran,
with its continuous independent existence, forms an important exception.) On
the other hand, the Middle Eastern peoples have a long history. The area was the
home of ancient civilizations along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, at a time
when Europe was the home of primitive cultures. It was the birthplace of the
great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and the city of
Jerusalem is in different ways sacred to all three faiths. In an important sense,
the origins of the state of Israel can be traced back to the promise made to
Abraham in the Book of Genesis, which is a far cry from modern notions of
national self-determination.2 The Middle East is an area where the present can
never be separated from the past.
The Middle East has long exercised a magnetic effect on outside peoples and
states, partly for religious reasons, partly as a result of geography, strategy and
economics. Geographically, the area is a crossroads, the meeting point of
Europe, Asia and Africa. In the nineteenth century, the Suez Canal made Egypt a
nodal point in the maritime communications of the world, and particularly for
the British Empire. Early in the twentieth century, oil was discovered in Iran,
Iraq and Saudi Arabia; the Middle East thus became vital to a civilization
increasingly dependent on petroleum and its products.
For all these reasons, outside powers have repeatedly intervened in the Middle
East. Between the two world wars, Britain and France effectively dominated the
area. Britain controlled Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan (later Jordan), and Iraq and
exercised considerable influence in Iran; France ruled Syria and Lebanon.
During the Second World War the French occupation of Syria and Lebanon came
to an end. Britain and the Soviet Union jointly occupied Iran. American oil
companies, with support from the US government, moved into Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait. The Middle East was no longer a European preserve, and the pattern of
outside intervention was changed. At the same time, the question of creating a
Jewish state in Palestine acquired a new urgency and an intense emotional
impetus from the Nazi death camps and the massacre of European Jews in
German-occupied Europe.
At the end of the Second World War, there were three issues of immediate
international importance in the Middle East. First, the British were determined to
maintain their influence in the area, and to develop a new framework to protect
long-standing interests. Second, there was a difficult problem in Iran, where
Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union were in contention. Third, there
was an explosive situation in Palestine, which was predominantly Arab in
population but where the surviving European Jews now looked for their
salvation. The first two issues should be examined now; Palestine requires
separate treatment later.
Britain was determined to maintain its influence in the Middle East, for a
combination of strategic and economic reasons. The Suez Canal was still the
lifeline of the Empire, and cheap oil which could be paid for in sterling was a
vital economic asset. The British therefore set out to retain their military
presence in the area, under the cover of new diplomatic arrangements. In March
1945 the British helped to set up the Arab League, hoping to guide Arab
nationalist sentiment towards Arab unity for their own purposes. They
maintained their military base in the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt and concluded a
new treaty with Transjordan (March 1948) permitting British bases to be
maintained there. For a time these arrangements worked reasonably well; but
they came under increasing pressure from nationalist forces throughout the
Middle East.
In Iran three outside powers – Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States –
were involved in a muted power struggle that combined British–Russian rivalries
going back to the nineteenth century with early exchanges in the Cold War.
During the Second World War, the British and the Soviets had installed a new
shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in 1941. The Americans later set up a large-
scale supply organization in Iran to send war material to the Soviet Union; and
Roosevelt also wanted to demonstrate his anti-imperialism by saving Iran from
what he regarded as British exploitation. Iran itself was weak and divided. The
new shah was only twenty-one when he took the throne. There was a strong
Islamic fundamentalist movement that opposed all foreign influences. There was
also a sizeable pro-Soviet Communist party, the Tudeh Party. Popular sentiment
was anti-foreign and particularly hostile to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, even
though in practice a proportion of the company’s profits were being returned to
Iran in royalties.3
In January 1946 there was a trial of strength between the three outside powers
when the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan and two Northern provinces of
Iran declared independence, and the Soviet Union took them under its
protection. The British, as old hands in the area, were willing to negotiate a deal
with the Soviets on the basis of spheres of influence for each country, but the
Americans rejected such a compromise and demanded (6 March 1946) the
immediate withdrawal of Soviet forces from Iran. In April 1946 Stalin agreed to
withdraw his forces by May. But at the same time he sought to maintain
influence by setting up a joint Soviet–Iranian oil company, with a 51 per cent
Soviet holding. Iranian premier Ahmad Qavam also agreed to appoint three
members of the Tudeh Party as ministers in his government. This arrangement
did not last. By the end of 1946 the Tudeh ministers had been dismissed; and in
1947 the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, rejected the agreement for a Soviet–
Iranian oil company. Surprisingly, Stalin accepted this setback without demur.
This left the Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, temporarily victorious
in Iran; but for the British it was to be a dangerous victory. If Iran could defy the
Soviet Union and reject a Soviet–Iranian oil company, then the obvious next step
was to challenge the British and attack the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – which
was in fact what happened in the next few years.
The situation was very much a mixture of past and present, as the British tried
to maintain the position they had held since the nineteenth century, and the
Americans and Soviets played out moves in the nascent Cold War. In the next
ten years, from 1946 to 1956, the international situation in the Middle East was
to be drastically transformed, as old influences rapidly gave place to new and as
the Middle East’s significance increased in tandem with its growing share of
world oil output.

Oil in the Middle East, 1946–56

The Second World War and the following years saw an immense rise in world oil
production to meet increasing demand; and the share of the Middle East in this
production rose dramatically. Production figures, in millions of tonnes, are given
below:4
By 1960 the Middle East share thus rose to over a half of the total world
production.
About 1950, Middle East oil production was in the hands of American and
British oil companies. The Americans operated in Saudi Arabia (Aramco),
Kuwait (Gulf Oil) and Iraq (Mobil and Exxon). The British operated in Iran,
through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. These oil interests were of great
importance to both countries. The American oil companies made profits, and the
US government gained tax revenues and political influence. The British paid for
Iranian oil at an advantageous price in sterling – a crucial matter when dollars
were still scarce. Both countries wanted to keep Middle East oil out of Soviet
control. The Americans and the British both had much at stake, and they both
had their problems.
The Americans had to conduct a delicate balancing act between their support
for Israel, which offended the Arab states, and their oil interests, which required
good relations with a number of Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia. As early
as 1948 King Ibn Saud warned the United States that he might cancel the
Aramco concession unless the Americans reduced their support for Israel. The
threat proved hollow, because Ibn Saud had no intention of cutting off his own
major source of income. Even so, the Americans were wary, and felt it necessary
to reassure the king. In 1950 President Truman wrote to Ibn Saud to assure him
that ‘no threat to your kingdom could occur which would not be a matter of
immediate concern to the United States’.5 Though phrased in cautious
diplomatic language, this was a far-reaching undertaking to support Saudi
Arabia. The Americans were thus committed to a double policy in the Middle
East, one pro-Israeli, the other pro-Saudi.
In 1950 the Americans found an ingenious method of increasing the oil
revenues of the Saudi government while not diminishing Aramco’s profits. On
30 December 1950 Aramco signed an agreement with the Saudi Arabian
government, providing for a 50–50 division of profits between the two. At the
same time, the US government agreed to treat Aramco’s payments to Saudi
Arabia as a tax, which could be set against tax liabilities in the United States.
The US government thus accepted a reduction in its tax revenues in order to
provide the Saudi government with a larger share of Aramco’s profits; and the
American taxpayer subsidized both Aramco and indirectly the Saudi government
in order to promote the United States’ influence in the Middle East. Similar deals
followed for the governments of Kuwait (1951) and Iraq (1952).6
In Iran events followed a very different course. In 1949 the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company agreed to pay higher royalties to the government; the Iranians
regarded the British offer as inadequate, however. In Saudi Arabia there was no
parliament, and effectively no public opinion, to obstruct deals of this kind. In
Iran nationalist feeling ran high, and the new agreement had to be submitted to
the Majlis, and first to its Oil Committee, under the chairmanship of Mohammed
Mossadeq. The committee rejected the agreement and demanded instead the
nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
At that stage, the Iranians were divided among themselves. The premier,
General Razmara, was in negotiation with Anglo-Iranian for a 50–50 agreement
on the same lines as that between Aramco and Saudi Arabia. But the national
mood was against him. On 7 March 1951 Razmara was assassinated four days
after he spoke in the Majlis against nationalization. The shah was compelled to
accept Mossadeq as his successor. Mossadeq was a striking figure – theatrical,
flamboyant and with an immense popular following. He combined the social
standing of being a member of an ancient landed family, claiming descent from a
former shah, with the intellectual kudos of having been a professor of political
science at Tehran University; and unlike most professors of political science he
was also a formidable politician. He took office on 28 April 1951, and at once
introduced a law nationalizing all the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s property and
assets in Iran, coming into effect on 1 May.
The British government and Anglo-Iranian countered by organizing an
international embargo on the purchase of Iranian oil, and Anglo-Iranian brought
legal actions against other companies which accepted Iranian oil (which was
described as ‘stolen’) for refinement. The boycott proved a great success. Sales
of Iranian oil fell drastically, and production dropped from over 30 million
tonnes in 1950 to a mere 1,360,000 tonnes in 1952. There was at this stage no
solidarity among the oil-producing countries against the oil companies, and
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had no hesitation in increasing their own production to
fill the gap.
Despite the success of the embargo, British prestige was badly shaken by
Mossadeq’s defiance. Moreover, while the American oil majors supported the
embargo, the US government continued its economic assistance to Iran and tried
to mediate in the dispute. In July 1951 the United States sent Averell Harriman, a
distinguished political figure and former ambassador in Moscow, to Tehran to
explore terms for an agreement; he stayed for two months, without result. The
British too sent an emissary to Iran to get a deal for Anglo-Iranian, without
success. They ran up against a brick wall, because Mossadeq was determined to
eliminate the Anglo-Iranian Company, not do a deal with it. Instead of
negotiating, Mossadeq, on 25 September 1951, gave the last remaining British
staff in the Abadan oilfields a week to pack their bags and go. They complied,
leaving what remained of British prestige in ruins.
The result was stalemate. The Iranians had nationalized their oil but could not
sell it. The British had blocked Iranian oil exports, but had lost all Anglo-
Iranian’s assets in Iran. This situation persisted until 1953, when the American
government, pressed by the British, lost patience. On instructions from President
Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (with cooperation with the British
intelligence services) organized a coup (‘Operation Ajax’) to overthrow
Mossadeq, restore the authority of the shah and install a new premier. The first
attempt proved a failure, and the shah had to leave the country; but then the
tables were turned, street demonstrations were organized in favour of the shah
and Mossadeq in turn took to flight.
This drastic intervention could not restore the status quo; and indeed that was
not the American objective. Instead, the Americans arranged a new oil
settlement in 1954, by which the principle of nationalization was maintained and
the National Iranian Oil Company retained ownership of the oilfields and the
Abadan refineries. The purchasing and marketing of the oil, however, was placed
in the hands of a new international consortium, in which Anglo-Iranian (renamed
British Petroleum) took 40 per cent of the holdings, five American companies
shared another 40 per cent, Shell had 14 per cent and the Compagnie Française
des Pétroles 6 per cent.7 The newly named British Petroleum Company received
compensation for its losses, paid not by Iran but by the other companies in the
consortium.
The immediate results of this deal were advantageous to the Americans.
American oil companies took a large share of the Iranian oil market. Washington
became politically predominant in Iran. In November 1955 Iran joined the
Baghdad Pact, the Middle East alliance directed against the Soviet Union. The
Americans provided supplies of arms, and the shah became to a large degree an
American protégé. The United States thus took advantage of what had begun as
a British–Iranian crisis. But the foundations of this success proved shaky.
Hitherto, the Middle East oil producers had been divided, with Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait working against the Iranians. What would happen if they began to work
together? On 12 November 1953, the American ambassador in Tehran, Loy
Henderson, wrote that ‘it seems almost inevitable that at some time in the future
… the Middle Eastern countries … will come together and decide upon unified
policies which might have disastrous effects upon the operations of the
companies’.8 It was a prophetic observation. Only seven years later, in
September 1960, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
was formed. Thirteen years later again, in 1973, OPEC was to shake the world.

The end of the Palestine mandate: Israel and the

Arabs, 1947–9
At the end of the Second World War, the British government still held the
mandate for Palestine, which they had accepted from the League of Nations in
1920. The circumstances under which the mandate had to be exercised had been
utterly transformed by the massacre of European Jews by Nazi Germany, which
generated a renewed and intense determination by the Zionists to achieve a
Jewish state. Moreover, there was now a wave of sympathy for the Zionist cause
throughout the Western world, and particularly in the United States. The British
thus came under increasing pressure to permit more Jewish immigration into
Palestine and to advance the creation of a Jewish state. But at the same time
Arab opposition to Zionism was stiffening. Arab nationalism had been
stimulated by the Second World War, and Arab leaders saw no reason why
Western sympathy for the Jews (or guilt for not saving them from the death
camps) should be assuaged at Arab expense.
The British thus found themselves in an impossible position, caught between
Jews and Arabs on the ground in Palestine and assailed by international
(especially American) opinion from the outside. Failing to find any policy which
would reconcile these conflicting pressures, and wearying of its thankless, costly
and bloody task, the British government decided in February 1947 that it would
hand the problem over to the United Nations, and leave Palestine in May 1948.
The UN appointed a Special Committee on Palestine (known by its initials as
UNSCOP), which reported in August 1947 in favour of the partition of Palestine
into two states, Jewish and Arab, within a joint framework that would maintain
their economic unity. The United States and the Soviet Union both supported
these proposals, and on 29 November 1947 the General Assembly of the UN
passed Resolution 181 proposing partition.
The Jewish Agency (the coordinating body of the Jews in Palestine), on behalf
of the Zionist movement, accepted the proposal, believing that any Jewish state
was better than none. The Arab states, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
speaking for the Palestinians, rejected the partition plan outright, refusing to
accept any Jewish state, however small. On this fundamental issue of whether a
Jewish state should exist or not there was no room for compromise. All attempts
at diplomacy had now failed, and this basic question was to be decided by battle.
Fighting began in Palestine before the mandate came formally to an end and
the last British forces withdrew – or ‘scuttled’. Arab forces, organized from
outside by the countries of the Arab League, tried to cut Jerusalem off from other
areas of Jewish settlement. The Zionists prepared to set up their state and took
control of as much territory as they could. The British mandate ended at
midnight on 13–14 May 1948. On 14 May David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the
state of Israel. The following day troops from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon,
Transjordan and Iraq advanced into Palestine, ostensibly to protect the
Palestinian state as set out in the UN resolution