At the banquet which closed the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin all offered toasts. When it came Churchill’s turn, he
addressed himself to the years ahead. He felt, he said, that all were standing on the crest of a hill with the glories of great future possibilities stretching before them; that in the modern world the function of leadership was to lead the people out from the forests into the broad sunlit plains of peace and happiness. He felt that this prize was nearer their grasp than at any time in history, and that it would be a great tragedy if they, through inertia or carelessness, let it slip from their grasp. History would never forgive them if they did.1
We live today amid the ruins of that hope. Any responsible inquiry into the present controversies between the United States and the Soviet Union must find its way back, from the U-2 to Hungary and Suez, thence to Korea, Czechoslovakia, the Marshall Plan, and the Truman Doctrine, and so, finally, to that time and that failure. In those months of early 1945 which Herbert Feis, in his new book,2 has called “between war and peace,” the hard core of difference between East and West is to be found.
None of us can presume to discuss this question without anxiety or passion. One finds it peculiarly difficult to bring to bear on the problem of the cold war the intellectual discipline which, say, the Spanish-American or even the First World War can now readily call forth. The shrill and strained atmosphere, the partisan interpretions of war and quasi-war have been with us for an uninterrupted quarter of a century. We live, move, and have our intellectual being in a habitually clamorous climate of opinion.
Yet how precious would be the gift of seeing the cold war, now, with the kind of perspective which commonly comes only after the passage of much time. There are very few international crises which in the historian’s retrospect altogether justify the ideology or behavior of any of the participants. We know today that the War of 1812 began days after, on the other side of the Atlantic, the English Orders in Council which occasioned it had been revoked. Today many of us would be ready to join Henry Thoreau in his Concord jail to protest the war against Mexico. Years after the Spanish-American War, experts examined the torn hull of the battleship Maine and concluded that the explosion had taken place not outside the boat but within. The blundering or hypocrisy or chicanery which brought on these wars seems to us today inadmissible. In short, if we could only approximate the historians’ collective judgment, a generation hence, concerning the cold war, we might be helped in our understanding of the practical alternatives that are presently before us.
In search of objectivity the American student may attempt to balance the work of Westerners by consulting Soviet accounts. He will be disappointed. It is true that Soviet historians are far more familiar with English, French, and German sources than Westerners are with publications in Russian. For example, V. L. Israelyan’s Diplomatic History of the Great Patriotic War (Moscow, 1959; in Russian) cites ten American collections of documents and over sixty memoirs and historical works in English. It is also true that the skeleton of events narrated by a work like Israelyan’s is full and accurate. But time after time crucial interpretations are woodenly self-justificatory. Human blundering and groping on both sides of the Iron Curtain are underestimated. Thus Stalin’s attitude toward the treatment of postwar Germany is made to seem consistent at all times; and he is said to have refused Churchill’s famous proposal in October 1944 to divide Eastern Europe into British and Soviet spheres of influence because “the Soviet Union in correspondence with its policy of non-interference in the inner affairs of other nations rejected all plans for the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.” Inversely, the Soviets tend to portray American policy as changing from white to black after the death of Roosevelt, whereas among Western scholars even those who are most sympathetic to Soviet behavior in the cold war have stressed the vacillations and ambiguities in Roosevelt’s dealing with the USSR3
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One turns back, perforce, to Western scholarship. Here two first-class scholars have been at work: Feis, in the two books already cited, and William McNeill of the University of Chicago, in his brilliant earlier account, America, Britain and Russia: Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941—1946 (London, 1953). These works have a quasi-official character. Feis’s books were, so he tells the reader, in part inspired by Averill Harriman, America’s wartime ambassador to the Soviet Union. They draw both on unpublished papers of Harriman’s and on the unpublished papers of the State Department (these have just been closed to scholars). McNeill’s volume, similarly, was commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs and scrutinized before publication “by a number of individuals familiar with the events narrated.” Thus the works of Feis and McNeill are something more than individual interpretations. To a degree they represent the collective memory of British and American officialdom about their wartime alliance with Soviet Russia and how it broke down.
Perhaps because of their quasi-official character the Feis and McNeill books display the same defect as their Soviet counterparts. They narrate, but they do not really interpret. They do not face squarely the childlike and penetrating question, Why did the cold war start? Some of McNeill’s sharpest observations are buried in footnotes. Feis concludes Between War and Peace with the moving sentence: “To choose life, the great nations must one and all live and act more maturely and trustfully than they did during the months that followed the end of the war against Germany.” Moving, but also banal. Feis does not go beneath the surface of events in search of the specific men and motives that obstructed the choice for life, the inarticulate major premises which led each side to a point from which further retreat seemed inadmissible.
To go beneath the surface means, as I have said, going back. The climactic events of the six months after Yalta—the defeat of Germany, the San Francisco and Potsdam conferences, the testing and use of the atom bomb, all shadowed and confused by the death of Roosevelt and the political defeat of Churchill—brought into the open the conflict in objectives between England and America and the Soviet Union. But this conflict had existed in embryo from the first tentative discussions in 1941 of postwar aims among the three military partners. While the war lasted, each side, intensely needful of the other’s military aid, tended to avoid direct confrontation of the latent political tensions. Even at Teheran (1943), perhaps the high point of Big Three harmony, McNeill comments that “Allied co-operation could be and was founded upon agreement on military strategy. Agreement on post-war issues was not genuinely achieved. All important decisions were left for the future after only vague exploration of the issues involved.” Victory over Germany, together with the decision of the Truman cabinet that Soviet military assistance was not essential to the defeat of Japan, lifted the lid of a Pandora’s box.
The characteristic, continuing objectives of each of the three powers had in fact become quite clear within a year of the German attack on the Soviet Union. When the Red Army, to the surprise of the highest military personnel in both England and America, survived into the winter of 1941—42, serious negotiation as to postwar goals began. Then as later Stalin underscored the fact that twice in thirty years Russia had been invaded through Poland, and insisted on a more westerly frontier (incorporation of the Baltic nations and the Curzon Line in Poland) and a friendly postwar Polish government. Then as later Churchill, also thinking in terms of his nation’s security, showed himself ready to bargain with the Soviet Union on a quid pro quo basis but equally ready to invoke the threat of force if negotiation seemed inadequate; it was at this time that Churchill, having just signed the Atlantic Charter with its promise of democracy for “all the men in all the lands,” told Parliament that the phrase was not meant to apply to the British Empire. In December 1941, Foreign Secretary Eden went to Moscow to seek an accommodation of Soviet and British diplomatic objectives.
Here American diplomacy intervened in a way which foreshadowed future Soviet-American tension. That December, and again in May 1942 when Molotov visited London and Washington, Secretary of State Hull brought strong pressure on the English government to avoid territorial commitments until a postwar peace conference. On the latter occasion, indeed, he threatened to issue a public statement dissociating the United States from any such agreement reached between Britain and the Soviet Union. The American objective, for Roosevelt and Hull as for Woodrow Wilson years before, was to prevent dictation to small nations so that they might determine their own destinies through democratic processes; and to substitute for the balance-of-power arrangements which seemed inevitable and natural to America’s European partners, an international organization to keep the peace. Thus in the Second as in the First World War, American diplomacy sought nothing less than a diplomatic new deal, an altogether new start in the conduct of international relations.
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Not only in objectives but in ways and means American diplomatic behavior in this first year of the war was symptomatic of much that was to follow. Avoiding hard bargaining on specific issues, America sought—in the words of a Hopkins memo—to “take the heat off” the Soviet territorial demands by pushing hard for a second front (as well as by talking of a postwar international organization in terms which were, as Feis says, “vaguely magnificent rather than sturdy”). The United States of course had other substantial reasons for desiring a second front. But both Feis and McNeill make it clear that the Americans found it a “happy coincidence” that the military strategy which they favored, a direct assault on Germany through France, was at the same time the form of assistance which the Soviet Union desired above all others. The American hope, Feis writes, was that “the Soviet government was to be lured away from one boon by a choicer one, away from its absorption in frontiers by the attraction of quick military relief.”
By championing the second front and postponing to a later day the inherent conflict between the American concern for worldwide democracy and the Soviet preoccupation with the security of its borders, Roosevelt established himself, by the middle of 1942, as a mediator between Churchill and Stalin. As McNeill observes in a remarkable footnote, this relationship was a personal tour de force which rested on a peculiar and indeed artificial basis of fact:
The British public was perceptibly warmer in its feeling toward Russia than was the American public, among whom repugnance to socialism and consciousness of Russia’s failure to join in the war against Japan were far greater than in Britain. On the other hand, the American Government in general assumed a more indulgent attitude towards Russia on current questions (for instance Lend-Lease), combined with a more rigid attitude on long-range issues (for instance, the question of the Baltic states) than did the British Government. The secret of this curious contradiction lay mainly in the fact that Churchill and Eden thinking largely in terms of a balance of power, wanted to bargain with Stalin, whereas Roosevelt and Hull thought in terms of abstract principles to which they hoped Stalin could, if treated indulgently enough by his wartime allies, be committed.
When in 1942 and.again in 1943 Roosevelt failed to deliver on a second front, a foundation was laid for future ill-will.
Viewed in this way, Roosevelt’s approach to the Soviet Union appears fundamentally similar to that of Wilson and to that of Eisenhower: personalities fall away, and the thread of a shared tradition stands forth. All three Presidents attempted to eschew diplomatic settlements based on a balance of power. Like Wilson at Versailles, and indeed in conscious recoil from Wilson’s entanglement in secret wartime agreements, Roosevelt and Hull during World War II sought to brush aside concrete, immediate points of difference in order to establish agreement on general principles of world organization. Feis says of Hull in 1943:
Over each disjointed problem the interested and rival powers were poised—ready to contest, bargain and threaten. This had been the customary way in the past by which questions of frontiers, political affiliations and the like got settled. He wanted to bring it about that all such exercises of national power and diplomacy would in the future be subordinated to rules of principle.
The Americans, McNeill agrees,
tended to think of the establishment of an international organization as a sort of talisman which would possess a powerful virtue to heal disputes among the nations. Instead of regarding international politics as essentially and necessarily an affair of clashing interests and struggle for power, Americans, both officials and the general public, tended to think that international politics were, or at least should be, a matter of legal right and wrong, and that the common interest of all men and nations in the maintenance of peace was so obvious and so compelling that only hardened criminals would think of transgressing against it.
Alike in placing too much reliance on the forms of international organization, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower also have shared a tendency to evolve simplistic solutions to the internal problems of foreign nations. For all three men the sovereign nostrum for the domestic ills of other countries has been, “When in doubt, hold a free election.” Roosevelt grasped the awakening of the colonial world but conceived it one-sidedly in formal political terms; less than Wendell Willkie did he perceive the universal challenge to the big house on the hill. Land reform, for example, was as germane to the emergence of democracy in Eastern Europe as were free elections. Indeed land reform was a principal bone of contention between the Soviet-sponsored Lublin government and the Polish government-in-exile. Yet the Big Three paid it scant attention in their interminable discussions of the Polish question.
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One cannot avoid the suspicion that Roosevelt’s intermittent demand for freedom in Eastern Europe did not altogether escape the tragi-comic quality of Wilson’s insistence that the revolutionary Huerta regime in Mexico conduct a plebiscite on its own legitimacy, or—reductio ad absurdum—President Eisenhower’s recent proposal for a worldwide referendum on communism and democracy. In each of these instances, the American President expressed a sincere and idealistic concern, but a concern which did not really represent a practical alternative in the given situation. McNeill points out that “neither Roosevelt nor Churchill seems frankly to have faced the fact that, in Poland at least, genuinely free democratic elections would return governments unfriendly to Russia.” Therefore, he continues,
the democratic process upon which so many eulogies were expended could not produce governments in Eastern Europe (or in many other parts of the world) that would further the harmony of the Great Powers and prove acceptable to all of them. Men were not so uniform, so rational, nor possessed of such good will, as the democratic theory presupposed; and in talking of Eastern European governments which would be both democratic and friendly to Russia the Western Powers were in large part deluding themselves.
George Kennan has written in much the same vein of the American Open Door policy in the Far East. “Our constant return to these ideas,” Kennan says, “would not serve really to prevent the conflict of interests in China from living themselves out pretty much in accordance with their own strategic, political, and economic necessities.” Just so the State Department policy toward Europe during World War II, according to Feis, “tried to arrest the march of armies, the clash of civil wars, the forays of diplomacy by repeated affirmations of the view that principle should govern European postwar settlements.”
This syndrome of American attitudes—a syndrome which Walter Lippman has called “Wilsonian” and E. H. Carr “Utopian,” and which has been best characterized by Kennan—threw up significant obstacles to the making of a peace. To say this is not to belittle the American dream of democracy and world organization. It is not so much the American goals in World War II but the lack of realism with which they were elaborated in specific circumstances that is disturbingly prophetic of much which liberals now like to think of as uniquely Eisenhowerian. How similar to latter-day criticisms of American diplomacy’s lack of “initiative” are these words of McNeill describing Roosevelt’s passivity as the need for postwar decisions bore down on him:
From early in 1942 the American Government had repeatedly proclaimed the principle that no final decisions on matters of post-war frontiers or systems of government should be made until the end of the war. The theory that a political vacuum could be maintained in Europe was absurd on its face; but this principle helped to hide from American officials the daily necessity of making decisions.
American indecision in the closing years of the war diminished the chances for postwar settlements in both Poland and Germany. Long before Hungary, United States foreign policy was encouraging hopes in Eastern Europe which it had no concrete plans to support. Thus, early in 1944 Roosevelt refused to “back in an unambiguous manner” the proposals for Poland agreed on at Teheran, instead
contenting himself with amiable sentiments about “freely negotiated” and “friendly” settlement of the Soviet-Polish dispute. Clearly Roosevelt did not wish to grasp the nettle, hoping that Stalin and the Poles would come to terms of their own accord. But his attitude only confirmed the Poles in their obstinate disregard of the realities of their situation, and allowed them to cling to the belief that Roosevelt would come to their rescue.
“In this instance,” McNeill continues, “and throughout the following year, Roosevelt tried to avoid the responsibilities of the new American power, and by not making himself clear to the Poles he stored up trouble for the future.” Thus in October 1944, when Mikolajczyk went to Moscow to consult with Churchill and Stalin about Poland, he was astonished to learn that everyone but himself had thought that Roosevelt at Teheran essentially accepted the Curzon Line. At Yalta, Admiral Leahy warned Roosevelt that the vagueness of the accord reached on reorganizing the Polish government would permit the Russians to make their own interpretation: the President could only wearily reply, “I know, Bill, I know.”
Of Germany, McNeill writes that “the American Government, because of its internal disputes and indecision, prevented even the discussion of a common Allied policy for Germany.” Alarmed by the furor occasioned by the Morgenthau Plan, Roosevelt put a stop to all American efforts to make postwar plans for Germany from late 1944 until his death. “This ostrich attitude towards the future,” says McNeill, “prevented whatever chance there may have been for arriving at Allied agreement upon policy towards Germany through the European Advisory Commission or in any other way, and left the subordinate American officials who were charged with the task completely at sea.”
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In default of an American initiative, what planning for peace took place in 1943—44 consisted chiefly of British and Soviet attempts to divide Europe between them into spheres of influence. The story of these attempts is an important one, for it suggests that the Soviets, like the West, felt in 1945 that past understandings between the Big Three concerning Eastern Europe were betrayed.
The pattern for postwar spheres of influence in the liberated European countries was established in Italy, however, not in Eastern Europe, and by England and America rather than by Russia. In theory the three military partners were committed to joint decision-making and to democratic self-determination within every European country, regardless of whose armies were occupying it. But in fact, the Big Three tacitly recognized and accepted spheres of influence all over the world. In China, Feis writes, “Stalin and Churchill seemed willing to have the American government take the lead in directing the political evolution of that country; and the American government was assuming it. Similarly, it was understood that Brittain could be to the fore in dealing with Southeast Asia.” And Churchill said of South America: “We follow the lead of the United States in South America as far as possible, as long it is not a question of our beef and mutton.” The habits twined about these long-standing arrangements proved too strong to be offset in meeting the challenge of liberated Europe when it first presented itself in Italy.
England took the lead. Churchill wanted to keep the monarchy in Italy, and deprecated any statement about self-determination. Russia’s desire to take an
active role through a tripartite militarypolitical commission was deflected by the fact that Western commanders retained power, and when Russia established independent diplomatic relations with the Italian government, its move was strongly resented and protested by the West. The powers which Russia wanted, however, were the very ones which England and America were later to demand in Eastern Europe and which the Soviets denied, pointing persistently to Italian precedents. Some Westerners foresaw the result of the West’s behavior in Italy; thus Ambassador Winant wrote in July 1943, that “when the tide turns and the Russian armies are able to advance we might well want to influence their terms of capitulation and occupancy in Allied and enemy territory.” But this view did not prevail and the outcome was, in McNeill’s words, that “in Italy, Russia had effectually been excluded from participation in Allied decision-making, and the Western Allies could hardly expect to be treated differently by the Russians in Rumania.”
As German resistance began to crumple and the Allied armies poured into Festung Europa, the volume and pace of political decision-making in occupied territory necessarily increased. England began to make independent approaches to the Soviet Union looking toward an agreement on spheres of influence which would safeguard the Mediterranean lifeline and put some limit to the Red Army’s advance. “Experience,” Feis comments,
was showing how hard it was to apply the rule of common consent in each of these unstable situations. And decision could not always wait. In brief, the diplomatic methods in use began to seem defective or unsuitable—awkward for war, ineffective for peace. Hence both diplomats and soldiers began to wonder whether an arrangement which made one or the other Allies the dominant authority in each of these situations was not the sensible way to end the discussion.
Churchill, more tersely, stated that in each of the occupied countries someone had to play the hand, and with this in mind he journeyed to Moscow in October 1944 to make his division of Eastern Europe with Stalin, and thus safeguard British predominance in Greece.
As in 1941—42, so in these negotiations of 1943—44 the United States preferred to remain, in the words of the Monroe Doctrine, an “anxious and interested spectator.” Harry Hopkins intervened to change the text of Roosevelt’s cable to Churchill referring to the latter’s Moscow trip, so that the American President, rather than empowering Churchill to speak for him, insisted on retaining “complete freedom of action.” The reserved American veto imparted a provisional character to the Churchill-Stalin agreement. Thus it was that Western policy toward Eastern Europe in 1945 wavered because England and America had not reached full agreement, but the Russians, as in the similar case of the second front, interpreted the wavering as simple bad faith. Stalin protested that he had no idea whether the governments of Belgium and France, created under Western aegis, were democratic; he simply accepted them. Did not the accord of October 1944, although expressly limited to provisional arrangements until German surrender, give him by implication a similar free hand in Eastern Europe?
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The first test of the new arrangement came in Greece. In his effort to make the agreement with Churchill stick, Stalin stood aside while British troops crushed Communist-led Greek guerillas: in Churchill’s words, Stalin “adhered very strictly to this understanding.” At the same time—as Feis, McNeill, and Williams all agree—he attempted to curb the Communist parties in Western Europe, Yugoslavia, and China from bidding for power, lest such an attempt spark off armed conflict between the great powers. It was therefore something of an irony when the Chinese revolution seemed to the West to confirm its image of the insatiable expansionism of Russian Communism.
In the absence of firm tripartite agreements, particularly about Poland, the British government, hitherto the advocate of realistic acceptance of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, at war’s end found itself imploring American military assistance to contain the expansion of Soviet power. The upshot was as paradoxical as it was tragic. A sequence of events familiar in Anglo-American diplomatic history then took place. As in the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, as in the formulation of the Open Door policy, the British government suggested to America a joint declaration of policy for reasons altogether in the realm of Realpolitik. As in the two preceding instances, so in 1945—47 the United States government proclaimed the policy as its own and lent it the panoply of a moral crusade. Ten years later, in consequence, England was in the position of trying to restrain the partner which but yesterday it had to prod.
Looking back, it is still difficult to assign responsibility with any sureness for this critical turn of events. America, which realized the importance of creating the United Nations before the bonds of wartime partnership were relaxed, failed to see the comparable importance of more humble agreements about governments and frontiers, and this failure complicated the already inherent difficulty where two men so different in their points of view as Churchill and Stalin had to reach firm agreements. A number of prominent Americans, including Roosevelt and Hopkins, were deeply impressed by England’s determination to retain its empire: this made them slow to accept Churchill’s growing fear of Russian expansion, just as it blinded them to the truth that, in actual hard fact, America had always depended on the English empire to shield it from potential aggressors. Had the Soviet leaders been less suspicious and dogmatic than they were, they might well have been confused in responding to an England which did not have the strength to enforce its realism, and an America which did not seem to realize that idealism must be supported by something more than documents.
For the Soviets, such indecision on the part of the West must have encouraged the hope, championed by Trotsky after World War I, of carrying revolution westward on the bayonets of the Red Army. Advocates of the Russian interpretation of these events have quoted the Forrestal diaries to show that military leaders in the West did not really fear Soviet attack:4 but these quotations begin no earlier than 1946, when the readiness to mobilize military force to deter such attack had already shown itself. Feis and McNeill reiterate that we possess very little material with which to interpret Soviet intentions in the spring of 1945. But there seems no good reason to doubt that the Russians were ready to carry their influence as far westward as they could safely go without risking the danger of war.
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The inertia acquired by supposedly temporary military arrangements, their tendency then to turn into a political status quo unless deflected by new agreements for which, after Yalta, the Big Three alliance suddenly seemed no longer capable, posed for the West a genuinely “agonizing reappraisal.” It seemed that to keep on a friendly footing with Russia it was necessary to betray (as it appeared to the West) the Polish people on whose behalf England had gone to war. Roosevelt and Truman were not as different in their reactions to this problem as extremists of both the right and the left would have one think: the President who sent the two most pro-Soviet men in American governmental circles (Davies and Hopkins) as his first envoys to Churchill and Stalin cannot have been, initially, bitterly anti-Soviet.
The course ultimately adopted was, of course, containment, and its error lay, surely, in making such a “posture” the whole of one’s foreign policy. In itself, containment was simply the normal practice of diplomacy which sought to maintain a balance of power, and supported this effort with the threat of force; England has certainly never practiced anything else, and when the United States has tried to follow another course—as between 1801 and 1812 in our dealings with England and France—it has altogether failed. Containment was startling only in contrast with the Wilsonian idealism, today almost hard to remember, which preceded it.
What was novel and alarming was the exaltation of containment from one of many normal means to the entire substance of a policy. There was nothing in the idea of containment itself which would have precluded, for example, long-term credits for postwar reconstruction to the Soviet Union. Even if this had seemed impossible for domestic political reasons, such loans might have been offered to Eastern Europe. When in the Marshall Plan proposals the offer was finally made, the international atmosphere had become embittered, Communist parties had strengthened their hold throughout Eastern Europe, and it was too late. In a sense, Eastern Europe was the first underdeveloped area where we failed.
In its sudden, totalistic shift from a reliance on ideals alone to a reliance only on the threat of war, American policy after 1945 exhibited a characteristic tendency to go from one one-sided solution to its opposite, equally one-sided. The Darlan and Badoglio deals, the unconditional surrender formula, the dropping of the atom bomb, also suggest an extremism of expediency and violence which all too frequently was the sequel to the benevolent extremism of America’s first intentions.
George Kennan has shown how this tendency of American international behavior to oscillate between extremes of idealism and violence is magnified by our habitual self-righteousness.5 “It does look,” Kennan observes,
as though the real source of the emotional fervor which we Americans are able to put into a war lies less in any objective understanding of the wider issues involved than in a profound irritation over the fact that other people have finally provoked us to the point where we had no alternative but to take up arms. This lends to the democratic war effort a basically punitive note, rather than one of expediency.
Again Kennan says, commenting on the intrinsic connection between self-righteousness and total war:
Whoever says there is a law must of course be indignant against the lawbreaker and feel a moral superiority to him. And when such indignation spills over into military contest, it knows no bounds short of the reduction of the lawbreaker to the point of complete submissiveness—namely, unconditional surrender. It is a curious thing, but it is true, that the legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted as it unquestionably is in a desire to do away with war and violence, makes violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national self-interest. A war fought in the name of high moral principle finds no early end short of some form of total domination.
Instances of such behavior are legion. One recalls how the “peace without victory” position which Woodrow Wilson proclaimed in January 1917—which meant, if it meant anything, a negotiated peace—gave way in three short months to the complete conviction that autocratic governments could not be dealt with and must therefore be destroyed to “make the world safe for democracy.” Again, McNeill has caught this quality in Roosevelt’s attitude toward fascist Germany:
The conviction that Germany should be made to suffer for the wrongs done to the world by the Nazis was in a sense the obverse of Roosevelt’s belief in the goodness and rationality of mankind at large. If a nation somehow failed to exhibit goodness and rationality, thus challenging Roosevelt’s general belief about human nature, it endangered its claim to belong to humanity and deserved, Roosevelt came to feel, the severest sort of punishment.
It is as if, to sum up, the failure of reality to respond to innocent intentions (a lack of forethought as to means being itself considered a kind of innocence) calls forth a thirst for vengeance; then hope may give way to fear of an opaque reality which seems suddenly out of control; and reality be made to suffer for its intransigence.
This transition was the more inevitable after 1945 because English and American policy-makers had persistently underestimated Soviet strength, and the awakening to the real nature of the postwar balance of power came as something of a traumatic shock. One reason for the slow Anglo-American response to Soviet postwar demands in 1941 had been, as Churchill and Hull candidly confess in their memoirs, the conviction that Russia would grow weaker as the war went on. The colossal Red Army rolling east and west from Soviet borders in the spring and summer of 1945 caused latent anti-Communism to come quickly to the surface of opinion and seem sensible policy.
Only then did many sincere and thoughtful persons in the West recall that the Soviet ideology, pressed on to the heroic defensive as it had been since 1941, nonetheless envisaged the transformation of capitalism to socialism throughout the world. Revolution from within was the classical means toward this end; but Marx had never imagined a situation in which socialism and capitalism, represented by different groups of countries, would duel for the allegiance of the rest of the world; and it was a still more basic tenet in the Marxist tradition that means were, in any case, secondary. This underlying tension between opposing social systems facilitated the transformation of cautious cooperation into hostility at a time when public opinion still basked in the glow of victory, and even the leaders of the three victorious powers had far from lost hope in peaceful negotiation. As McNeil puts it: “Each of the Big Three wanted peace and security and recognized that only their continued cooperation could secure these goals. But what seemed an elementary precaution to safeguard the security of the Soviet Union to the one side seemed Communist duplicity and aggression to the other.”
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If then, we return to the question, Why did the cold war start? the most fundamental answer might be: Because for the first time the challenge of authoritarian socialism to democratic capitalism was backed by sufficient power to be an ever-present political and military threat. It is a far more complicated and potent challenge than that represented by Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941; it is the kind of challenge associated with the break-up of empires and the transformation of whole societies rather than with the ordinary jostling of diplomatic intercourse. In this sense, those who now speak of negotiation and disarmament as simple nostrums are being superficial, and those who invoke the American way of life are more nearly correct.
Yet containment, while recognizing the seriousness of the problem, would appear to be an inadequate response. Even before the possession of atomic weapons by both sides made reliance on military reprisal archaic, containment was a one-sidedly negative policy which could lead only to slow defeat, and, by way of the frustration and fear thereby engendered, to war. It involved and still involves an identification of the United States with governments whose only qualification for our friendship is their anti-Communism, and which in every other respect go against rather than with the grain of worldwide aspiration. Only a narrow and superficial realism can look to such alliances for strength in the long run.
Is there a moral to be drawn from this alternation between the extremes of Wilsonian idealism and military “realism”? Ten years after he formulated the containment policy, George Kennan saw a moral clearly. “I should like to raise today the question,” Kennan stated in 1957,
whether the positive goals of Western policy have really receded so far from the range of practical possibility as to be considered eclipsed by the military danger, whether we would not, in fact, be safer and better off today if we could put our military fixations aside and stake at least a part of our safety on the earnestness of our effort to do the constructive things, the things for which the conditions of our age cry out and for which the stage of our technological progress has fitted us.
“Surely everyone,” Kennan continued,
our adversary no less than ourselves, is tired of this blind and sterile competition in the ability to wreak indiscriminate destruction. The danger with which it confronts us is a common danger. The Russians breathe the same atmosphere as we do, they die in the same ways. . . . Their idea of peace is, of course, not the same as ours. . . . But I see no reason for believing that there are not, even in Moscow’s interpretation of this ambiguous word, elements more helpful to us all than the implications of the weapons race in which we are now caught up. And I refuse to believe that there is no way in which we could combine a search for those elements with the pursuit of a reasonable degree of military security in a world where absolute security has become an outmoded and dangerous dream.
These quotations are from Russia, the Atom and the West (1952).
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1 Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton, 1957).
2 Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, 1960).
3 See the final chapters of William Appleton Williams' American-Russian Relations, 1871—1947 (1952) and The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).
4 See Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends: Origins of the Cold War (1952) as well as the books of W. A. Williams previously cited.
5 These quotations are from American Diplomacy, 1900—1.950 (1952). In his writings of that date Kennan altogether failed to apply his general critique of American foreign policy to its dealings with the Soviet Union. Whereas he could say of American conduct toward Imperial Germany in World War I that “you could have refrained from moralistic slogans, refrained from picturing your effort as a crusade, kept open your line of negotiation to the enemy, declined to break up his empire and overthrow his political system . . .” yet these were the very goals Kennan advocated for our policy toward the USSR. Whereas in general he counseled America to “admit the validity and legitimacy of power realities and aspirations, to accept them without feeling the obligation of moral judgment, to take them as existing and inalterable human forces, neither good nor bad, and to seek their point of maximum equilibrium rather than their reform or their repression”—“reform or repression” of the Soviet system were the very goals which Kennan's influential writings of those years urged. Finally, whereas in treating America's relations with Japan before World War II Kennan noted how American policy tended to bring about “the final entrenchment of the power of the military extremists,” he notably failed to see that the policy of containment he then advocated would have the identical effect on Moscow.
