#66 Controlling the Peace: the Soviets and the USA’s Wish for a Cooperative Peace
Sign at Checkpoint Charlie on the way into West Berlin. Photo by Tanja Cotoaga on Unsplash.
The USA (green) and USSR (orange) and their spheres of influence.
The world in 1945 had three key components which were going to affect the future: the Chaos across Europe and Japan, the inability of Britain or France to come to terms with the loss of their colonies, and the new differences that the Americans reflected as the new world power.
It was in these conditions that we need to understand the peace. During the period of the war, peace between the USSR, Britain, and the USA had been continuously under discussion. The opportunity for mutual development was a Soviet goal. The Maisky Diaries, by the Soviet Ambassador to Britain from 1932 to 1943, was translated and published by Yale University Press in 2017. The diaries show that Maisky had been a popular figure among London high society in the late 1930s and early part of the war. Maisky had access to all the politicians including Churchill, as well as many well-known figures in London society at the time. Yet his work to create the conditions for Soviet co-operation with western powers fell on deaf ears.
Maisky, alongside Stalin and the USSR, were not alone in wishing to create a global cooperative world between the major powers. President Wilson, at the end of the first world war, had put forwards a 14-point plan for the basic principles of world peace. The plan was overruled by Britain and France. If President Roosevelt had survived after 1945, a similar cooperative way forward would appear to have been his intention. And when John Kennedy took the Presidency in the 1960s, his speeches make clear his wide-ranging goals over relations with the USSR, his willingness to make peace in Cuba with Fidel Castro, a joint program with the USSR over space exploration, his views over civil rights inside the USA, his plans to develop the resources of the Congo for the Congolese people, and more.
The Cold War Warriors in the USA
Kennedy faced implacable foes within the US established political order. There was Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA. During the war, Dulles had spent time in Switzerland from where he had spirited many top scientists into the USA after 1945, through his friends in Germany. His CIA role under President Truman, who had taken over from Roosevelt in 1945, was well established by 1960. The CIA had overthrown President Jacobo Arbenzi in Guatemala in Central America in 1954. Arbenzi had nationalised the United Fruit Company: a cardinal sin.
Dulles was a key leader who wished to see an all-out Cold War as the centrepiece of US foreign policy. General Lyman Lemnitzer was another warrior of the Cold War, Lemnitzer had been a senior general in Europe during the hot war against Germany. After 1945, he became head of the Pentagon. He had close connections to the political elites in London who favoured a close US/UK alliance. Along with John Foster Dulles, brother of Alan Dulles and Dean Acheson, these men provided a phalanx who wanted an all-out global struggle against socialism. As far as they were concerned the peace after 1945 was essentially a war against the USSR and all those who wished for an association with the Russians.
Building the Peace US Style
The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. February 1945.
The economies and politics of all nations at war were shattered; the only exceptions were the USA, the USSR, and the UK who all had maintained their political systems. The economies of the UK and USSR were in pieces. The USA had not only not been invaded, but she had also lost the least number of men. Throughout all of this, her economy had been strengthened. When we compare this with the loss suffered elsewhere:
The Russians had lost 20 million-plus, men women and children,
The British had lost 375,000 men
The USA had lost 405,000 men or 2.0% of the Soviet losses
The Japanese lost between 2 and 3 million people
The USA controlled 80% of the worlds gold supplies and every nation owed the USA large sums of money.
The Soviets had borne the brunt of the war against the Germans. Their homeland had been invaded: it was the only country that did not surrender. The Soviets lost more people to the war than any other people, by a large margin. They also suffered disease and starvation. By the end of the war, the Soviet expectation of life was 15.7 years. In return, they destroyed a huge volume of German military hardware. The war was won or lost on Russian soil.
Despite such huge USSR sacrifices, the Soviets in effect lost the peace to the USA. The British also lost the peace and at the same time their worldwide Empire. The USA had lost the least number of men but had gained the most. They took the spoils of the war. The Russians were made into 'the evil empire', while the British had the solace that they maintained their dignity, and retained a 'special relationship' with the new world power. These were the hard facts of global politics in 1945.
Everywhere, nation-states had to be rebuilt. The UK had been attacked from the air in the early part of the war, which had failed, but they had otherwise been free from further invasions. The USSR had been invaded and had, single-handed, fought off the German invasion and lost 20 million men, women and children. Numbers are so great that it is difficult to take in what such losses meant. By 1945, with its population decimated and its industry in ruins, the USSR was in no position to be a threat to US global ambitions. The USA’s navy had been attacked at Pearl Harbour in 1941, but otherwise, it was unscathed.
The peace was America’s for the taking; this time she took the opportunity to take world power with no hesitations.
Perry Anderson’s expression of America's movement on the world stage under the heading of Schurmann's The Logic of World Power is apposite:
"... This was the arrival of American imperialism, properly understood--- not a natural outgrowth of incremental expansion from below of the past, but the sudden crystallisation of a project from above to remake the world in the American image....(which) rested on the democratic foundations of the New Deal and the leader of genius who sought to extend it overseas in a global order of comparative popular welfare, assuring the US of a consensual hegemony over post war humanity at large.... the world was ripe for one of the most radical experiments in history: the unification of the entire world under a domination centered in America, (combining) nationalist pride and international ambition, joined and sublimated in the task of reorganizing the world along US lines to US advantage - and that of mankind."
- Perry Anderson New Left Review No 83, 2013, page 23
The USA seized its opportunity. By 1945 the USA had an economy three or four times the size of the USSR, five times that of Britain, commanded half the world’s output and controlled 80% of the world’s gold reserves. Never again would the USA stand so wealthy and powerful over the entire world.
And we need to understand one more important issue. The intellectuals in Washington DC had been thinking and planning world power for many years before 1945. Global Policy had been carefully thought through and planned as we will see. More than this, the USA was at its most creative, in the global sense, at his time. They not just set out the Cold War, as their primary policy goals, and in so doing attacked any nation and leaders who did not fall into line. Death and destruction to all those who failed to follow their lead was a policy the USA has followed through to this day.
Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash.
One of the numerous posters created to promote the Marshall Plan in Europe. Note the pivotal position of the American flag.
More importantly, however, the Marshall Plan provided the means for those countries that had been devasted by the war, namely Western Europe and Japan to recover. Never again would the USA provide the means to allow countries to transform themselves in a few short years. Over the years that followed the USA would lay waste countries in Central America, in the new Middle East and elsewhere. While they would provide generous financial support, they never did so in a manner that allowed the recipient elite to use the resources to transform their country into a new and powerful economy for a large number of the populations.
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.