From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (103 page)

Marshall's skill and prestige ultimately could not bridge the vast chasm separating the two Chinese parties. His departure from China at a critical point removed the tie that temporarily held them together. As the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria, Communist and Nationalist forces again vied for position, provoking armed clashes. After the general returned, the contradictions in his mission were blatantly exposed. The two sides regarded each other as deadly enemies and feared the implications of a coalition government.
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Hotheads from both camps sabotaged negotiations. Confident of U.S. support, Chiang chose war over substantive concessions. The Communists perceived that Marshall was not in fact an impartial mediator and the United States was pursuing what delegate Zhou En-lai called a "double policy." Negotiations broke down, fighting resumed, and both sides vented their anger with the United States. In January 1947, after a year of frustration, Marshall came home to serve as secretary of state.
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Over the next three years, the Chinese civil war ground to a conclusion. The Nationalists began with a two-to-one advantage in manpower, three-to-one in firepower, but quickly squandered their edge. A corrupt and incompetent government provided a flimsy base upon which to wage a military campaign. Runaway inflation, malnutrition, and disease in Nationalist-occupied areas eroded already limited popular support. The army suffered from abysmal morale and what a U.S. officer called the "world's worst leadership."
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Rather than attacking the enemy when it had the advantage, it stuck to its garrisons. The Communists skillfully exploited Nationalist lethargy, mobilizing the peasants and seizing the
initiative. When the tide of battle shifted in 1948, Nationalist armies simply melted away, surrendering en masse or fleeing the battlefield without their equipment. During four months of 1948, Chiang lost nearly 50 percent of his manpower and 75 percent of his weapons. In October alone, three hundred thousand Nationalists surrendered.

The Nationalist collapse began precisely when the Cold War in Europe was entering a crucial stage, posing difficult choices for the Truman administration. Having committed itself to contain Communism, should it use any means necessary to prevent a Communist victory in China? Should it at least make a good faith effort by continuing to support an embattled ally? Or, given the Nationalists' obvious deficiencies, should it cut its losses, abandon Chiang to his fate, and prepare for accommodation with the victors?

As it so often did when facing such choices, the administration took a cautious—in this case fateful—middle-of-the-road course. Truman and Marshall flatly rejected recommendations from some military advisers to send U.S. troops to save the Nationalists. China remained in their eyes a secondary theater. In any event, the troops were not available, and Marshall wisely questioned whether full-scale U.S. intervention could salvage the hapless Chiang. They declined even to send a military advisory group for fear of getting sucked deeper into a quagmire. On the other hand, although Truman viewed Chiang and his entourage as "thieves" and additional aid as "pouring sand in a rat hole," his administration refused to abandon them.
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Chiang had vocal and deeply emotional support in the United States, especially from Henry Luce's Time-Life media empire and congressional Republicans who viewed Asia as the most important Cold War arena and China its key. Ill informed about China and zealous in their support of Chiang, they threatened to condition Marshall Plan aid to Europe on continued assistance to China. In any event, the president recognized that simply to abandon Chiang in an election year would give the opposition a whip to flog him with. United States officials also found a broader strategic rationale for continuing to aid the Nationalists. To drop Nationalist China at a critical juncture, they reasoned, would raise doubts about the credibility of U.S. commitments at home and especially in Europe, while continued aid might reassure Europeans of U.S. good faith. Miscalculating the rapidity of Chiang's collapse, they also hoped that limited aid might delay the international impact of his defeat until Europe was stabilized. In April 1948, the administration agreed to an additional $338 million in economic aid and $125 million in military aid,
hoping, in the words of one official, to "sweat it out and try to prevent the military situation from changing too drastically to the advantage of the communist forces."
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It thus maintained its ties to a losing cause and compounded its error by not explaining to Americans why it had not done more. These decisions would have catastrophic consequences at home and abroad.

As the Cold War intensified in Europe and the Chinese civil war turned in favor of the Communists, attention shifted toward the erstwhile enemy, Japan. United States officials decided early in the war that Japanese society must be radically restructured, and they determined to act without interference from allies. Responsibility for the occupation fell upon Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), who brought to the task a combination of imperial majesty, political populism, and missionary zeal. In the first years, the "blue-eyed shogun" and his entourage ruled Japan as "neo-colonial overlords," brooking little interference from Washington and civilians in Tokyo and issuing "edicts with imperious panache."
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They took advantage of a shattered and compliant society to impose sweeping reforms designed to democratize Japan and thereby convert it into a "Switzerland of the Pacific."
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While retaining the emperor, MacArthur modified his godlike status and allied him with the occupation. Americans drafted a new constitution creating a parliamentary democracy, established basic civil and legal rights, permitted women to vote and own property, demobilized the military, and renounced war. SCAP drew up plans for breaking up the great industrial combines (
zaibatsu
), encouraged labor unions, implemented land reform, recast the educational system, and even legalized the Communist Party. The occupation did not always energetically implement its plans, especially with the
zaibatsu,
and the conservative Japanese bureaucrats upon whom it relied managed to preserve continuity amidst drastic change. Still, the imposition of such profound reforms by an outside power was unprecedented. Satisfied with his handiwork, MacArthur in early 1947 proposed to negotiate a peace treaty.
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Washington thought otherwise. Alarmed by the Soviet threat in Europe and a possible Communist victory in China, U.S. officials feared that the economic stagnation and political disarray that accompanied
MacArthur's reforms would produce chaos in Japan, leaving the United States isolated in East Asia. Thus, while launching the containment policy in Europe, they joined with conservative Japanese leaders in 1948 to effect a "reverse course" emphasizing economic reconstruction and political stability over reform. As in Germany, the United States removed limits on Japanese industrial growth, encouraged the regrowth of the
zaibatsu,
and stopped reparations. To meet the growing "dollar gap," U.S. officials promoted the expansion of Japanese exports—even to Southeast Asia, the center of the old Co-Prosperity Sphere. The reverse course curbed the growing power of labor unions and suppressed the radical groups that had formed early in MacArthur's tenure. With economic recovery now the "prime objective," Detroit banker and economic czar Joseph Dodge implemented an austerity program to control inflation, balance the budget, and boost exports. The reverse course imposed huge hardships on Japanese workers. The economy remained stagnant until the outbreak of war in Korea brought relief in the form of massive U.S. purchases.
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The reverse course in Japan was paralleled by a major shift in policies toward Southeast Asia. In both French Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies, the end of the war set off potent nationalist revolutions against colonial authority. Roosevelt's anti-colonialism had ebbed in his last months and passed altogether with his death and the rise of the Cold War. United States officials sympathized with nationalism in principle. On July 4, 1946, the Philippines was granted its independence, although the retention of military bases and close economic ties gave it a sort of neo-colonial status.
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Americans doubted whether "backward" Asians were ready for independence. Focused in the immediate postwar years on the welfare of European allies and Japan, they took a hands-off approach that favored the colonial nations.

As Cold War tensions increased, however, the Truman administration attached growing importance to Southeast Asia. The triangular trade between the United States, Western Europe, and the Southeast Asian colonies was deemed vital to ease the dollar gap that retarded European economic recovery. Southeast Asia lay astride strategic water routes between the Pacific and the Middle East. Nervous about possible Communist gains there, U.S. officials threatened to terminate Marshall Plan aid to extract Dutch promises of independence for an anti-Communist nationalist group in Indonesia headed by Achmed Sukarno. "Money
talked," a U.S. diplomat later observed.
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Because of France's volatile politics and its crucial position in Europe, the Americans dealt with it much differently. In any event, the Vietnamese independence movement was headed by longtime Communist operative Ho Chi Minh. Primarily concerned with France and mistakenly viewing the fiercely nationalist Ho as a puppet of the Kremlin, the Truman administration with little enthusiasm and less optimism recognized in 1949 the French puppet government headed by the playboy emperor Bao Dai. In February 1950, it extended direct military aid to France for its war against Ho's Vietminh, a seemingly innocuous commitment with enormous unforeseen consequences.
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The tumultuous years 1949 and 1950 were crucial in the evolution of U.S. Cold War policies in Asia and indeed globally. A series of stunning events sharply escalated Soviet-American tensions, aroused grave fears for U.S. security, and set off nasty internal debates that poisoned the political atmosphere. Responding to a crisis situation not unlike that of 1941, Truman administration officials globalized the containment policy, assumed manifold commitments in the worldwide struggle against Communism, and through National Security Council document number 68 embarked on full-scale, peacetime rearmament. With Truman's full confidence, Acheson, appointed secretary of state in January 1949, took the lead in implementing these radically new policies.

Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in September 1949 spread dismay and anxiety across the country. Although not unexpected, it came sooner than most Americans had anticipated. It eliminated the U.S. nuclear monopoly, raised fears that Stalin might be emboldened to take greater risks, drastically heightened Americans' sense of their vulnerability, and in time produced a sweeping reassessment of Cold War strategy and the place of nuclear weapons in it.
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In light of this shock, some Truman advisers, fearing a nuclear arms race, continued to press for international control of atomic energy. Others urged the production of a much more powerful hydrogen bomb to ensure that the United States maintained nuclear supremacy. Truman sided with the latter group, in February 1950 approving
production of a superbomb and significantly escalating an arms race that would continue for the next forty years and at times threaten to spiral out of control. "Can the Russians do it?" he asked at a crucial top-level meeting. When told the answer was yes, he quickly responded, "In that case we have no choice. We'll go ahead."
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The Communist triumph in China had an even more profound impact. For years, Americans had cherished the illusion that China was a special protégé who, with proper guidance, would become a modern democratic nation and close friend of the United States. The "loss" of China to Communism at a pivotal moment in the early Cold War had especially unsettling consequences. It extended to East Asia a conflict that had been centered in Europe. In one stroke, it seemed to shift the global balance of power against the United States. It created the appearance that Communism was on the move and the West on the defensive. It left frustrated and fearful Americans asking the portentous—and pretentious—question: Who lost China?

Vainly hoping for reason to prevail, Acheson released in August 1949 the richly documented "China White Paper" absolving the United States of blame for the Communist triumph. This "ominous result" was "beyond the control of the United States . . . ," the paper stoutly proclaimed. "It was the product of internal Chinese forces . . . which this country tried to influence but could not."
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Such conclusions have stood the test of time, but they offered cold comfort to already rattled Americans in 1949. For right-wing Republicans, Chiang's most ardent supporters, who were deeply frustrated by Truman's shocking victory in 1948, the fall of China provided a political windfall. The administration had not taken the opposition into its confidence on China as with Europe. Republicans, joined by some Democrats, now charged that the administration had favored Europe at the expense of China and callously abandoned a faithful ally to its dreadful fate.

Revelations of Soviet espionage in the United States seemed to nervous Americans to explain otherwise unanswerable questions. Victim from a history of unbroken success of what British scholar D. W. Brogan called "the illusion of American omnipotence," the nation confronted failure at this critical time in its history by finding scapegoats at home.
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Soviet spies had speeded Stalin's nuclear timetable by stealing U.S. secrets, it
was alleged, a charge technically accurate, as it turned out, but grossly overstated. Repeating in a more susceptible milieu accusations first raised by Ambassador Patrick Hurley in 1945, critics like the ambitious young California congressman Richard M. Nixon charged that Communist sympathizers within the U.S. government had undermined support for Chiang, thus ensuring an eventual enemy triump.
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With the postwar Red Scare already under way, in February 1950, a heretofore obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, in a major speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claimed to have the names of some 206 Communists working in the State Department, accelerating the witch hunt that would bear his name. Stunned from their complacency, a people who through much of their history had enjoyed relatively cost-free security reacted with panic. A Cold War culture of near hysterical fear, paranoiac suspiciousness, and stifling conformity began to take shape. Militant anti-communism increasingly poisoned the political atmosphere at home and made negotiations with the Soviet Union unthinkable.