The notion of “logical illogicality” is another useful tool in the ideological kit, which merits wider use.
The severity of the danger had been underscored a month earlier by William Donovan, director of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA). In a Europe “racked by war and suffering widespread misery,” he warned, the Soviets have “a strong drawing card in the proletarian philosophy of Communism.” The US and its allies have “no political or social philosophy equally dynamic or alluring.” As noted, the same problem was deplored by Eisenhower and Dulles ten years later, and regularly by the US in Indochina.
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The reasoning outlined in 1945 prevailed throughout the Cold War period, and follows naturally from the general logic of the North-South conflict. The same reasoning has often been applied at home, for example, after World War I, when “there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws” and “no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty” (Attorney-General Palmer and the
Washington Post
, during Wilson's Red Scare). The same doctrine was invoked to justify the bombing of Libyan cities in 1986 in “self-defense against future attack,” as the government announced to much acclaim among devoted advocates of international law.
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“Clear and present dangers” cannot be tolerated, however clouded the clarity and remote the present.
The logic is simple: the rich men rule by right the world they own, and cannot be expected to tolerate potential criminal action that might interfere with “stability.” The threat has to be cut off at the pass. And if it takes form, we are entitled to do what we must to set things right.
It was not Stalin's crimes that troubled Western leaders. Truman noted in his diary, “I can deal with Stalin,” who is “honestâbut smart as hell.” Others agreed, among them Eisenhower, Leahy, Harriman, and Byrnes. What went on in Russia was not his concern, Truman declared. Stalin's death would be a “real catastrophe,” he felt. But cooperation was contingent on the US getting its way 85 percent of the time, Truman made clear. Melvyn Lefflerâwho has examined the record in close detail and has much respect for the achievements and foresight of the early postwar leadershipâremarks that “Truman liked” Stalin. He comments on the lack of any “sense of real compassion and/or moral fervor” in the documentary record. “These men were concerned primarily with power and self-interest, not with real people facing real problems in the world that had just gone through fifteen years of economic strife, Stalinist terror, and Nazi genocide.”
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The animating concern was not Stalin's awesome crimes, but the apparent successes in development with their broad appeal, and the possibility that the Russians might be “flirting with the thought” of lending support to “aspirations of the common man” in the West, and subjugated and oppressed people everywhere. The failure of East Europe to resume its traditional role as a supplier of food and raw materials to the West compounded these concerns. The problem is not crimes, but insubordination, a fact illustrated by a host of gangsters from Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin to Saddam Hussein.
Though US planners did not expect a Soviet attack on the West, they were concerned about Soviet military power, for two fundamental reasons. First, they feared that the USSR might respond to the US takeover of the world, not recognizing the “logic” in our “illogicality.” Particularly ominous from the Soviet point of view was the reconstruction and rearmament of Germany and Japan, two powerful traditional enemies, and their incorporation within the US system of power, which was intent on exterminating the Soviet virus. That these developments posed a major threat to Soviet security was well-understood by US planners, who therefore feared a possible reaction.
Second, Soviet power served to deter US violence, impeding US actions to ensure that the “periphery'” fulfills its service function. What is more, for its own cynical reasons the Kremlin often lent support to targets of US attack and subversion, and sought to gain advantage where it could. The very existence of Soviet power provided a certain space for maneuver in the South. As a counterweight to US power, it opened the way toward nonalignment, which, US planners feared, would deprive the West of control over the domains required to maintain traditional privilege and power. Exploiting these openings, Third World leaders sought to carve out an independent role in world affairs. By the 1960s, the UN, previously a docile instrument and hence much admired, fell under “the tyranny of the majority.” The growing influence of undeserving elements set off intensive US efforts to destroy the errant organization, which continue under a different guise with the UN, at last, safely back under control.
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In short, the USSR was not only guilty of ultranationalism and undermining “stability” through the rotten apple effect. It was committing yet another crime: interfering with US designs and helping the victims resist, an intolerable affront that few in the South could match, though Cuba did as it blocked US-backed South African aggression in Angola. Accordingly, there could be no accommodation, no détente. Even as the Soviet Union collapsed through the 1980s, the test of Gorbachev's “New Thinking” put forth in the liberal press was his willingness to allow US violence to proceed without impediment; failing that criterion, his gestures are meaningless, more Communist aggressiveness.
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For such reasons, the US had no serious interest in resolving the Cold War conflict except on terms of Soviet submission. Though we lack Soviet records, and therefore can only speculate on what internal thinking may have been, what is available suggests that Stalin and his successors would have been willing to accept the role of junior managers in the US-dominated world system, running their own dungeon without external interference, and cooperating in joint efforts to maintain global “stability,” much as they did in the 1930s, when Communist armies spearheaded the onslaught against the popular social revolution in Spain.
The view from Washington was spelled out clearly by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he explained the US negotiating position on Germany for the forthcoming May 1949 meeting of foreign ministers. Acheson's stance was “so uncompromising,” Leffler writes, that members of the Committee “were stunned.” In response to Arthur Vandenberg's concern that the US position would institutionalize a permanent Cold War, Acheson responded that the goal was not to avoid Cold War but to consolidate Western power, under US control of course. “When Senator Claude Pepper urged Acheson to consider the possibility of treating the Soviets fairly,” Acheson “scorned the idea,” informing the Committee that “he aimed to integrate west German strength into Western Europe and establish a flourishing Western community that would serve as a magnet to the Kremlin's eastern satellites”: the result would be not only to undermine Soviet power but also to restore quasi-colonial relations with the East. When the foreign ministers meeting broke down in a predictable stalemate, “Acheson was elated,” Leffler continues. The Soviets “are back on the defensive,” Acheson declared: “They are visibly concerned and afraid of the fact that they have lost Germany.”
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As discussed, apparent Soviet interest in a peaceful European settlement in 1949 was regarded not as an opportunity but as a threat to “national security,” overcome by the establishment of NATO. On similar grounds, the US never even considered Stalin's proposals for a unified and demilitarized Germany with free elections in 1952, and did not pursue Khrushchev's call for reciprocal moves after his radical cutbacks in Soviet military forces and armaments in 1961-1963 (well-known to the Kennedy Administration, but dismissed). On the eve of his election, Kennedy had written that Russia was attempting to conquer Europe “by the indirect route of winning the vast outlying raw materials region,” the conventional reference to Soviet support for nonalignment and neutralism. Gorbachev's efforts to reduce Cold War confrontation in the mid-1980s (including unilateral force reductions and proposals to ban nuclear weapons tests, abolish the military pacts, and remove naval fleets from the Mediterranean) were ignored. Reduction of tension is of little value, short of the return of the miscreants to their service role.
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The Soviet Union reached the peak of its power by the late 1950s, always far behind the West. A 1980 study of the Center for Defense Information (CDI), tracing Russian influence on a country-by-country basis since World War II, concluded reasonably that Soviet power had declined from that peak to the point where by 1979, “the Soviets were influencing only 6 percent of the world's population and 5 percent of the world's GNP, exclusive of the Soviet Union.” By the mid-1960s, the Soviet economy was stagnating or even declining; there was an accompanying decline in housing, commerce, and life expectancy, while infant mortality increased by a third from 1970 to 1975.
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The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, revealing extreme Soviet vulnerability, led to a huge increase in military spending, levelling off by the late 1970s. The economy was then visibly stagnating and the autocracy unable to control rising dissidence. The command economy had carried out basic industrial development but was unable to proceed to more advanced stages, and also suffered from the global recession that devastated much of the South. By the 1980s, the system collapsed, and the core countries, always far richer and more powerful, “won the Cold War.” Much of the Soviet empire will probably return to its traditional Third World status, with the old CP privileged class (the
Nomenklatura
) taking on the role of the Third World elites linked to international business and financial interests.
14
A 1990 World Bank report describes the outcome in these terms: “The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China have until recently been among the most prominent examples of relatively successful countries that deliberately turned from the global economy,” relying on their “vast size” to make “inward-looking development more feasible than it would be for most countries,” but “they eventually decided to shift policies and take a more active part in the global economy.” A more accurate rendition would be that their “vast size” made it possible for them to withstand the refusal of the West to allow them to take part in the global economy on terms other than traditional subordination, the “active part in the global economy” dictated to the South by the world rulers.
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Throughout the period, great efforts have been undertaken to present the Soviet Union as larger than life, about to overwhelm us. The most important Cold War document, NSC 68 of April 1950, sought to conceal the Soviet weakness that was unmistakably revealed by analysis, so as to convey the required image of the “slave state” pursuing its “implacable purpose” of gaining “absolute authority” over the world, its way barred only by the United States, with its almost unimaginable nobility and perfection. So awesome was the threat that Americans must come to accept “the necessity for just suppression” as a crucial feature of “the democratic way.” They must accept “a large measure of sacrifice and discipline,” including thought control and a shift of government spending from social programs to “defense and foreign assistance” (in translation: subsidy for advanced industry and export promotion). In a 1948 book, liberal activist Cord Meyer, an influential figure in the CIA, wrote that the right to strike must be “denied” if it is not voluntarily restricted, given “the urgency of [the] defense plans” required. And “citizens of the United States will have to accustom themselves to the ubiquitous presence of the powerful secret police needed for protection against sabotage and espionage.” As under Wilson, fascist methods are needed to guard against the threat to “stability.”
By 1980, no one with eyes open could fall to perceive the “loss of hegemony and relative economic decline” of both superpowers “as the bipolar system of the postwar years has gradually evolved to something more complex,” and the corresponding decline of “the Cold War system that proved so useful for both superpowers as a device for controlling their allies and mobilizing domestic support for the ugly and often costly measures required to impose the desired form of order and stability on their respective domains.” Nor was there any doubt as to their relative strength and influence, as the CDI and other sane analysts were aware. Nevertheless, the period was marked by rising hysteria about the gargantuan Soviet system, leaping from strength to strength, straddling the globe, challenging the US and even threatening its survival, establishing positions of strength in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and other such crucial centers of strategic power.
16
These delusionary efforts were accompanied by much fantasy about Soviet military spending. Again, no little ingenuity was required, if only because the Pentagon's own figures in 1982 showed that NATO (including the US, facing no foreign threat) outspent the Warsaw Pact (including the USSR, deploying much of its force on the border with its Chinese enemy) by $250 billion from 1971 to 1980. But these figures, as economist Franklyn Holzman has been demonstrating for some years, are inaccurate, much overstating Soviet strength. When corrected, they reveal a total gap in NATO's favor of about $700 billion for the decade of the 1970s. The Carter military build-up, extended under Reagan, and pressures on the NATO powers to do the same, were “justified in part by the false claims of a steady increase in the Soviet rate of military spending,” Raymond Garthoff observes: “The ârelentless Soviet buildup' to an important extent reflected an American error in estimating Soviet outlays, rather than being a âdisquieting index of Soviet intentions',” as claimed during the late Carter years, and “the American lead in absolute numbers of strategic bombs and warheads actually widened between 1970 and 1980.” Holzman makes a strong case that the errors involved “deliberate [CIA] distortion” from the late 1970s, under intense political pressure.
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