From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (98 page)

As it had been central to the beginnings of Soviet-American conflict, so also Eastern Europe played a critical role in the postwar transformation of American attitudes toward the USSR. Haunted by memories of the depression and World War II, U.S. officials fervently believed that the Wilsonian principles of self-determination of peoples and an open world economy were essential for peace and prosperity. The United States had negligible economic interests in Eastern Europe, and U.S. officials understood poorly if at all the determination of some of its indigenous leaders to nationalize major industries. They saw the trend toward nationalization as a threat to capitalism and a healthy world economy and attributed it to the imposition of Communism from the outside. They vaguely understood Soviet concern for friendly governments but continued to call for free elections even where they might result in anti-Soviet regimes.

Those Americans who accepted some degree of Soviet influence called for Soviet restraint and for an open sphere that allowed access for Western capital and journalists. From across Eastern Europe, U.S. diplomats reported with alarm the political oppression imposed by Soviet proconsuls
backed by the Red Army, especially in the former Nazi satellites Romania and Bulgaria. Eastern Europe provided a litmus test of Soviet postwar behavior. It was seized upon by U.S. officials to raise fears about Stalin's aggressive methods and expansionist designs.
¹⁵

As they looked out across an unsettled world, Americans saw other alarming signs. In the tense postwar atmosphere, they tended to ignore cases where the Soviet Union had kept its agreements and acted in a conciliatory manner and fastened on examples of uncooperative and threatening behavior. They viewed demands for a role in negotiating a peace treaty with Italy and for reparations not as a response to U.S. protests about Eastern Europe but as manifestations of Soviet designs on Western Europe and the Mediterranean region. Soviet requests for a trusteeship over Tripolitania in North Africa suggested the broadening scope of the USSR's ambitions. Over Western protests, it kept troops in Iran and Manchuria. The fiercely independent Yugoslav leader Tito's seizure of Trieste, fulfilling long-standing Serbian ambitions, was viewed in Washington as confirmation of Soviet expansionism.

The first clash of the postwar era took place at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London in September 1945. Now in charge of U.S. diplomacy, Byrnes went abroad naively confident of success. A skilled political broker at home, he was certain that these same talents could produce solutions for international disputes. He also believed that the awesome power so dramatically manifested at Hiroshima and Nagasaki would enable him to dictate settlements. He crossed the Atlantic, in his own words, with the atom bomb in his hip pocket. He was quickly disillusioned. If anything, America's atomic monopoly complicated postwar negotiations by forcing the Soviets to demonstrate they could not be intimidated. Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov repeatedly joked about the bomb, on one occasion offering a drunken toast to its power. He refused to make concessions. While Byrnes and British foreign minister Ernest Bevin joined in acrimonious exchanges with their Soviet counterpart, the two sides remained deadlocked. Molotov refused Byrnes's demands to reorganize the governments of Romania and Bulgaria; the secretary withheld recognition. The British and Americans rejected Soviet efforts to exclude China and France from discussion of the Balkan treaties. To Byrnes's dismay, the conference broke up without resolving anything, the Russians protesting that the secretary of state, although reputedly a practical man,
"acted like a professor," Byrnes damning Molotov as a " 'semi-colon' figure [who] could not see the big picture." "The outlook is very dark," Byrnes gloomily confided to friends.
¹⁶

Apparently more interested in achieving agreements than in their substance, Byrnes focused on the next Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, set for Moscow in December, where he hoped to get around the obstructionist Molotov and deal directly with Stalin. Once there, he failed to move his hosts on the Balkans, eventually agreeing to recognize the existing governments after token Soviet concessions. In other ways, the Moscow conference looked more like Yalta than London, with Byrnes's old-fashioned horse-trading based on sphere-of-influence principles producing significant results. The ministers resolved the procedural differences that had stymied negotiation of European peace treaties. The Soviets acquiesced in U.S. domination of occupation policy in Japan and its preeminent influence in China. They accepted without significant modification Byrnes's proposals for international control of atomic energy.
¹⁷

Ironically, Byrnes's conciliatory diplomacy at Moscow marked a major turning point in the evolution of U.S. Cold War policies. The imperious secretary failed to keep his boss informed about what he was doing. When the Moscow deal proved a political liability, Truman turned on him with a vengeance. Byrnes's pragmatic—and generally realistic—efforts to resolve postwar issues proved out of fashion in a Washington increasingly caught up in Cold War anxieties. Critics seized upon his concessions to denounce any compromise with Moscow and push for a get-tough approach. The U.S. chargé d'affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan, privately condemned Byrnes's Balkans concessions as adding "some fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship."
¹⁸
Truman's military chief of staff, the crusty, hard-core anti-Communist Adm. William Leahy, denounced the Moscow communiqué as an "appeasement document."
¹⁹
Journalists and politicians joined in the criticism. When Truman subsequently received a report condemning Soviet repression in the Balkans and warning of a Soviet threat to the eastern Mediterranean, he flew into a rage.

The president responded to Byrnes's Moscow diplomacy with what has been aptly called a "personal declaration of Cold War."
²⁰
Angered at the secretary's independence—which at first he had encouraged—Truman
set out to reassert his control over foreign policy. Confused, indeed befuddled, over the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union and embattled on the home front, he found comfort in the certainty of a black-and-white assessment of Soviet intentions and a hard-line foreign policy consisting of tough talk and no concessions. In a private letter to Byrnes in early 1946, he affirmed he would not recognize the "police states" in Bulgaria and Romania until they radically reshaped their governments. He denounced Soviet "aggression" in Iran and warned of a threat to Turkey and the straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. There would be no compromise simply to achieve agreements. Stalin understood only an "iron fist" and "How many divisions have you?" the president concluded in ringing terms. "I'm tired [of] babying the Soviets."
²¹

It remains impossible to determine with certainty what Stalin actually sought at this time, but Truman's assessment appears much too simplistic. The Soviet dictator was a cruel tyrant who presided over a brutal police state. Neurotic in his suspicions and fears, he slaughtered without mercy millions of his own people during his long and bloody rule. He ruthlessly promoted his own power and the security of his state. He was determined to secure friendly—which meant compliant—governments in the crucial buffer zone between the USSR and Germany and to guard against a renewed German threat. He was also a clever opportunist who would exploit any opening given him by enemies—or friends. But he was acutely aware of Soviet weakness. And he was no Communist ideologue. Especially in the immediate postwar years, when he needed breathing space, he refrained from pushing revolution in a war-torn world. His diplomacy manifested a persistent streak of realism. He did not seek war. "He was devious yet cautious, opportunistic yet prudent, ideological yet pragmatic," historian Melvyn Leffler has written.
²²
Some of his ploys were intended to secure confirmation of great-power status for the Soviet Union, others merely to gain a bargaining edge. Some commentators have claimed that this "battle-scarred tiger," as Kennan called him, was as skilled at outwitting foes as he was evil. In truth, he made repeated mistakes that brought about the very circumstances he desperately sought to avoid.
²³

Americans could not or would not see this in early 1946, and Truman's hard-nosed assessment of what was now presumed to be a distinct Soviet
threat seemed validated from every direction. In a February 9 "election" speech, Stalin warned of the renewed threat of capitalist encirclement and called for huge boosts in Soviet industrial production. The speech was probably designed to rally an exhausted people to further sacrifice. Even Truman conceded that Stalin, like U.S. politicians, might "demagogue a bit before elections." But many Americans read into the Soviet dictator's words the most ominous implications. The hawkish Forrestal found confirmation of his belief that U.S.-Soviet differences were irreconcilable. Liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas labeled the speech "The Declaration of World War III."
²⁴

Less than two weeks later, Kennan unleashed on the State Department his famous and influential "Long Telegram," an eight-thousand-word missive that assessed Soviet policies in the most gloomy and ominous fashion. The namesake of a distant relative who in the late nineteenth century had documented for enthralled U.S. audiences the horrors of the Siberian exile system, the younger Kennan was one of a handful of men trained after World War I as experts on Bolshevik Russia. Conservative in his tastes and politics and scholarly in demeanor, he developed a deep admiration for traditional Russian literature and culture and, from service in the Moscow embassy after 1933, an even deeper antipathy for the Soviet state. Frustrated during the war when the Roosevelt administration ignored his cautionary recommendations, he eagerly responded when Truman's State Department requested his views. "They had asked for it," he later wrote. "Now, by God, they would get it."
²⁵
In highly alarmist tones, he delivered over the wires a lecture on Soviet behavior that decisively influenced the origins and nature of the Cold War.
²⁶
He conceded that the Soviet Union was weaker than the United States and acknowledged that it did not want war. But he ignored its legitimate postwar fears, and by showing how Communist ideology reinforced traditional Russian expansionism and portraying the Soviet leadership in near pathological terms, he helped destroy what little remained of American eagerness to understand its onetime ally and negotiate differences. He warned of a "political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life
be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure." By thus demonizing the Kremlin, he confirmed the futility and even danger of further negotiations and prepared the way for a policy he would label containment. The Long Telegram was exquisitely timed; arriving in Washington just as policymakers were edging toward similar conclusions, it gave expert confirmation to their views. Forrestal circulated it throughout the government. Kennan was brought home to head the State Department's recently created Policy Planning Staff.
²⁷

The hard line was publicly affirmed in early March by wartime hero Sir Winston Churchill. In a speech in Truman's home state of Missouri, the former prime minister warned that from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent," coining a phrase that would become a staple of Cold War rhetoric. Like Kennan, he conceded that the Soviets did not want war, but he insisted that they did want the "fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines." Like Truman, he insisted that they responded only to force. He called for an Anglo-American "fraternal association," an extension of the wartime alliance, to meet a new and ominous threat. This proposal provoked a furor in the United States, causing Truman to disavow prior knowledge of the speech (which he had) and even to invite Stalin to visit the United States (an invitation he knew would be declined). But the Iron Curtain speech, delivered with typical eloquence by a leader who had been right about Hitler, confirmed the administration's assessment of Soviet behavior and the need for a firm response backed by military force.
²⁸

From March to September 1946, tough rhetoric was matched by increasingly tough action. After extended debate, Congress finally approved in the summer a $3.75 billion loan for Britain at low interest. To be sure, the United States drove a hard bargain with a financially exhausted ally, demanding an end to preferential arrangements that discriminated against U.S. trade and insisting on sterling convertibility within a year. The administration also agreed to cancel the United Kingdom's $20 billion lend-lease "debt," not generous enough to satisfy some Britons, but a vast improvement over the 1920s. In Congress, Republicans who wanted drastic budget cuts and knee-jerk Anglophobes vigorously opposed the loan. Setting a precedent that would be used repeatedly in the Cold War, U.S. officials
employed anti-Soviet rhetoric to gain passage of the bill.
²⁹
Not surprisingly, Truman and his advisers took no similar steps to assist the Soviet Union. Whether Stalin would have accepted a loan even if it were offered on generous terms is doubtful. If he had, Congress likely would not have approved it. And a loan, even if provided, might have made no difference. But the administration's lame explanation that a wartime Soviet request had been lost in a records transfer after V-J Day fooled no one. When U.S. officials finally got around to offering a loan, they attached conditions they must have known the USSR would not accept. A loan would not have prevented the Cold War, but its denial certainly increased Soviet-American tensions and reflected mistaken U.S. views of Soviet dependency on external assistance.
³⁰