Colossus (19 page)

FIGURE
2
Percentage Shares of American Exports, 1946–61

Source:
Historical Statistics of the United States
, p. 903.

At last, it seemed, the elusive virtuous circle had been established. American idealism could be assuaged because an imperial policy was being pursued in the name of anti-imperialism. But American self-interest could also be satisfied because the occupation of foreign countries turned out— after a remarkably short time—to pay a dividend. On this basis, it was possible to transform West Germany and Japan successfully from rogue regimes of the very worst type into paragons of capitalist economics and democratic politics.

Only one puzzle remains. Why, if the combination of long-term occupation and mutual economic benefit proved so successful in these two cases, was it so seldom repeated elsewhere?

MACARTHUR’S RUBICON

In 1948, as the era of containment began, the United States was at the zenith of its relative economic power. In the preceding decade the output of the American economy had grown in real terms by two-thirds. It now accounted for roughly a third of total world output, three times the share of its rival empire, the Soviet Union.
¹⁰⁷
Despite accounting for just 6 percent of the world’s population, the United States produced nearly half the world’s total electrical power and held roughly the same proportion of the world’s monetary gold and gold-equivalent bank reserves. American firms controlled nearly three-fifths of the world’s total oil reserves. They dominated the international production of automobiles.
¹⁰⁸
Truman spoke with pardonable exaggeration when he declared: “We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends on us. The world is watching to see what we shall do. The choice is ours.”
¹⁰⁹

That choice took a distinctive and novel form. The United States embarked on a sustained push to reduce international trade barriers through multilateral negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Barriers to international capital movements were given less priority; it was thought preferable to revert to the pre-Depression system of fixed exchange rates, though with the dollar rather than gold bullion as the anchor. Two new international institutions were brought into being to manage the world’s financial system: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But the essence of American “hegemony” was the preferential treatment of American allies when it came to the allocation of loans and grants of aid (whether for development or military purposes).
¹¹⁰
Given the size of the American economy relative to those of even its wealthiest allies, sums that were, from an American viewpoint, relatively modest (see
figure 3
) could appear very large to the recipients. Total economic aid for the period 1946 to 1952 amounted to nearly 2 percent of U.S. GNP, half of it accounted for by the Marshall Plan. Over the ensuing decade—including the heady years when John F. Kennedy pledged to “pay any price, bear any burden [and] meet any hardship … to assure the survival and the success of liberty”—it dropped to below 1 percent.

FIGURE 3
United States Foreign Aid as a Percentage of GNP, 1946–73

Source:
Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1974
.

Far more important were American military expenditures. Having been slashed in the immediate aftermath of victory over Germany and Japan, these began to climb steeply after 1948, from under 4 percent of GDP to a peak of 14 percent in 1953, more than a fivefold increase in cash terms.
¹¹¹
Part of what this purchased of course was increased stocks of atomic bombs: in 1947 the United States had possessed just fourteen, but by the end of 1950 the number had risen to nearly three hundred and by 1952 to more than eight hundred.
¹¹²
There was a smaller but still substantial increase in the country’s conventional forces. Between 1948 and 1952 American military manpower rose by a factor of two and a half, reaching what was to prove the postwar peak of 3.4 million. Even after the Korean War, military readiness remained well above the level of the late 1940s. As late as 1973 the defense budget was still close to 6 percent of GDP, and the armed forces numbered 2.2 million.
¹¹³
A substantial minority of these troops were stationed abroad in a network of old and new bases, some in territory directly controlled by the United States but most
in politically independent countries that were American allies. By 1967 American service personnel were stationed in sixty-four countries: nineteen of them in Latin America, thirteen in Europe, eleven in Africa, eleven in the Near East and South Asia and ten in East Asia.
¹¹⁴
The United States had treaties of alliance with no fewer than forty-eight different countries, ranging from Britain and West Germany to Australia and New Zealand, from Turkey and Iran to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, from South Vietnam and South Korea to Taiwan and Japan.
¹¹⁵
This has justly been called an empire by invitation. But what is striking is that the United States accepted so many of the invitations it received. According to one estimate, there were 168 separate instances of American armed intervention overseas between 1946 and 1965.
¹¹⁶

Yet there is a puzzle. Mighty though the United States was in economic, in military and indeed in diplomatic terms, its interventions had very mixed results. According to one assessment of nine post-1945 interventions that could be characterized retrospectively as attempts at nation building, only four can be judged successful, in the sense of establishing stable democratic systems. Two of these have already been discussed; the other two—Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989—came only in the closing stages of the cold war, after much more serious failures. It has been suggested that American interventions were more likely to be successful when they were undertaken multilaterally (that is, in partnership with allies) and supported democratic forces in the country in question, rather than military elites.
¹¹⁷
This argument, however, applies anachronistic criteria to a period when the containment of Communist expansion, rather than democratic nation building, was the objective of policy. A more pertinent question might be why the United States failed to achieve containment in so many of the countries the Soviets or the Chinese sought forcibly to penetrate. To be precise, why was it that the vastly richer Americans had to settle for such a high proportion of “ties” (notably Korea) and outright defeats (notably Cuba and Vietnam) in a contest they might have been expected nearly always to win?

There are four answers to this question. The first is geographical: the United States had to reach much farther than the Soviet Union in all the major theaters of strategic competition except Latin America and the Caribbean. The second is a matter of military technology: once the Soviets acquired just a single atomic bomb they could pose a more serious
threat to the United States than had ever before been conceivable. It then transpired that they were prepared to build an even bigger arsenal than the Americans, so that the balance of nuclear advantage—as well as the balance in conventional forces—swung against the United States. Thirdly, as an empire based on consent, the United States had much less power over its allies than the Soviet Union did over its satellites, most obviously in Europe, where the Russians did not shrink from putting tanks in the streets to enforce their will, at a time when West European leaders expected to be treated as near equals by Washington.
¹¹⁸
Finally, and perhaps most important, American policy makers had to take much more notice of their own citizens’ views than did their Soviet counterparts. Unfortunately, when put to the test of electoral popularity, containment fared disappointingly. Much as they abhorred and feared the “Red menace,” Americans were not prepared to wage prolonged conventional wars to defeat it. Once this was apparent, the credibility of American pledges “to support any friend [and] oppose any foe” rapidly waned.

There is an important inference to be drawn from all this. Arguably, the United States might have been able to win a “hot” war against communism had it made full use of its economic and military capabilities in the early 1950s. But this would have been possible only if there had been a decisive shift in the nature of American domestic politics, one that might have tipped the constitutional balance from republic to empire proper. In 1951, as we shall see, this possibility momentarily presented itself. Americans spurned it. An empire by invitation overseas was one thing. Nobody, it turned out, wanted to invite an emperor home.

The Korean War was a direct consequence of Communist aggression. First, the Russians refused to allow free, UN-supervised elections to go ahead in their zone of occupation.
¹¹⁹
Then, in April 1950, Stalin authorized the North Korean leader Kim II Sung to invade the Republic of Korea and overthrow its democratically elected (though not very liberal) government.
¹²⁰
It is easy to see why Stalin decided to gamble on war by proxy. The United States had previously indicated that it was content to acquiesce in a division of the peninsula analogous to the division of Germany; indeed, since 1948 it had been withdrawing American troops from
the country. In January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson had indicated that he did not regard South Korea as vital to American security. That same month the House of Representatives actually rejected the administration’s Korean aid bill, though this decision was later overturned.
¹²¹
Even so, Truman had every right to call the invasion an act of “unprovoked aggression,” and in the absence of Russian representation on the UN Security Council he had no difficulty in obtaining a resolution calling on member states to “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore peace and security in the area.” With fifteen other nations contributing troops to the ensuing war effort, the United States appeared to have might as well as right on its side.
¹²²
Moreover, American public opinion was at first overwhelmingly in favor of intervention. Three-quarters of voters polled in July 1950 approved of Truman’s action; significantly, more than half of those in favor regarded it as necessary “to stop Russia.”
¹²³
MacArthur’s decision to attack the North Koreans from the rear by landing forces at In-chon gave the public a taste of victory. There was strong popular support for his decision to chase the invaders back across the thirty-eighth parallel, raising the possibility of a regime change in the North and the unification of Korea.
¹²⁴
Shortly before the first American troops crossed the parallel, public support for the war reached 81 percent.

It was not the Chinese counterattack in November 1950 in itself that prevented the destruction of North Korea. Though the initial impact of the Chinese intervention was dramatic, briefly turning the U.S.-led coalition temporarily into “a leaderless horde,”
¹²⁵
the Americans unquestionably had the capability to defeat Mao’s fledgling People’s Republic. Three things stopped this from happening. The first was the noisy opposition of America’s allies to the possibility of an atomic strike against China.
¹²⁶
The second was the Truman government’s own anxiety that such a strike would precipitate a Soviet counterstrike against Western Europe.
¹²⁷
Although the United States had roughly seventeen times the number of atomic bombs the Russians had, American policy was to do nothing that might increase the risk of “World War Three.”
¹²⁸
The third and most important reason, however, was that the man who might have overcome both these obstacles was politically outmaneuvered.