The Lost Peace
ROBERT DALLEK
THE LOST PEACE
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* * *
LEADERSHIP IN A TIME
OF HORROR AND HOPE,
1945-1953
To John W. Wright
For his wise counsel and friendship
An assembly of great men is the greatest fool upon earth.
—Benjamin Franklin
There are in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.
—Samuel Johnson
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
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PART I: A WILDERNESS CALLED PEACE
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1 LONDON, MOSCOW, AND WASHINGTON: FRIENDS IN NEED
2 FROM TEHRAN TO ROOSEVELT’S DEATH
3 COLLAPSE AND RENEWAL
4 HOPE AND DESPAIR
5 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICTS?
6 THE TRIUMPH OF FEAR
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PART II: STATE OF WAR
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7 COLD WAR ILLUSIONS—AND REALITIES
8 WAR BY OTHER MEANS
9 THE MILITARY SOLUTION
10 LIMITED WAR
11 ELUSIVE PEACE
EPILOGUE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Also by Robert Dallek
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
This is a book about the generation of leaders in the years of upheaval between the close of World War II and the early Cold War. It is not a comprehensive history about why and how the Cold War began. Rather, it is an attempt to underscore the misjudgments and unwise actions that caused so much continuing strife and suffering, and suggest alternatives that might have made for greater international harmony.
While I highlight the failings of the notable men who dominated the scene during this time, I am not intent on denying them their due, or in the case of the greatest villains of the day, revising their reputations for wrongdoing. My greatest interest is in revisiting the decision making and events of the period as a cautionary tale—a reprise of what went wrong as a call for future improvement in world affairs, or an educator’s lesson of what might have been done to avoid the difficulties that beset strong and weak nations around the globe.
Such an exercise in finger-pointing and advice-giving is bound to provoke debate. The what-ifs of history are always risky propositions, more the product of speculation than persuasive evidence. I would be the first to grant that my suggested remedies for the missteps of the period reflect the historian’s advantage over leaders who could not know how things would turn out. During his presidency, John F. Kennedy told the historian David Herbert Donald, “No one has a right to grade a President—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made decisions.” Yet it is the historian’s job not only to examine the record as fully as possible but also to render judgments on how past officeholders performed. Otherwise, we are no more than chroniclers telling a story without meaning.
I hope my retrospective suggestions on how world leaders might have done better for the millions of people they governed are seen as a constructive exercise that encourages reflection on their limitations. The fact that men and women gain governing power—whether by democratic elections or extraconstitutional means—is no guarantee of wise leadership.
The success of this book depends less on whether I stimulate a chorus of approving nods on the alternatives I see to some of their actions than on renewed discussion of how the most powerful men of the 1940s and early ‘50s performed, and—more importantly—what their mistakes tell us about crafting more considered actions in the future. That most of the book’s focus is on leaders’ shortcomings is not meant as a lament about the limits of governments to act more wisely. The post-1945 era had its share of sensible actions between nations. I hope my discussion of wrong turns, then, is seen not as a cry of despair but as a reminder that we can do better in resolving conflicts and promoting international cooperation.
R.D.
Washington, D.C.
September 2009
INTRODUCTION
I have no high opinion of human beings: they are always going to fight and do nasty things to each other.
—George F. Kennan, 1976
At the start of 1945, total war had absorbed the world’s energies for almost ten of the century’s first forty-four years. Winston Churchill thought of the period between 1914 and 1945 as “another Thirty Years’ War.” And in 1948 he lamented “the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security.” It was, in his words, “the human tragedy.”
So much of what happened throughout the twentieth century, Churchill believed, was preventable. World War II, he told Franklin Roosevelt, should have been called “The Unnecessary War,” as many said of the century’s first great war. And could also be said of much of the post-1945 international strife.
It may well be that a human affinity for struggle and conflict make war—whether among tribes, religions, or nations—inevitable. But heads of state have always had the power to influence events, especially at the end of World War II, when the defeat of Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism presented an uncommon opportunity for more rational, humane governance.
The rise of new international conflicts or the failure to secure a stable, more durable peace can be blamed on a blundering generation of leaders around the world. If this had been a period when American, European, and Asian rulers were notable for their limitations, the lost opportunity might be more understandable. But the sitting and emerging chiefs of state were as able and effective a group of executives as we have seen in any one generation in modern times. This is not to suggest that they were so superior in understanding and judgment to most other preceding and subsequent heads of government that they could do no wrong; they were as vulnerable to human miscalculation as all of us. Still, they were impressively talented politicians blessed by circumstances favorable to changing international relations for the better. But they didn’t, or at least fell well short of what they might have accomplished. Why and how the world’s leaders blundered is the focus of this book.
At the start of the twentieth century, some European thinkers saw the state of war as essential to a nation’s survival. Not only did external threats from other countries that coveted territory and resources beyond their borders encourage national militancy between states, but the discipline of a command system also seemed likely to make citizens more productive and the nation more prosperous. And even more than any material benefits generated by a country at war were the intangibles—national pride in disciplined forces performing heroic deeds has had enduring universal appeal. Being “too proud to fight” has never been a match for courageous warriors ready to give their lives for some larger good.
Yet while national leaders have always justified war by invoking the nobility of patriotic sacrifice, they have also made the case for war as a prerequisite for lasting peace. How many in the aggressor nations in 1914 or 1939, however, especially the mass of Germans who rallied to Adolf Hitler’s marching orders, would have chosen war if they knew what costs in suffering these conflicts would produce without the promised respite from bloodshed? The horrors of the years between 1914 and 1945 undermined the belief of even the most confident advocates of military action that they could turn the world toward long-term peace. The brutal trench warfare and strains on civilian populations of 1914–18 that destroyed
18 million lives convinced some observers in the 1920s and ‘30s that total war between advanced industrial societies was too destructive to victors and vanquished alike to let countries ever fight again. As French premier Georges Clemenceau said after 1918, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”
Although a formidable pacifist movement sprang up in Europe and America after 1918, millions of people, especially in the defeated nations, turned the war into a holy crusade. They prided themselves on having fought for a larger good, believing the sacrifice of so much blood and treasure a noble enterprise. This pride, combined with the losers’ passion for revenge and the economic collapse of the 1930s, renewed millions of people’s faith in the regenerative powers of violence: it allowed Hitler to launch Germany, and ultimately all Europe and the world, into the second great war in a generation. The savagery of the conflict, however, makes it difficult to understand how anyone in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, the aggressor nations, could have justified it as worthy of moral support. The image of the Soviet Union as a victim of aggression should be balanced against its attacks on Finland and Poland.
World War II consumed as many as 50 million lives, giving warfare an unprecedented claim on merciless brutality. War had always produced terrible acts of inhumane violence, but never on a scale like that of 1939–45.
The war may be recalled not just as an all-out conflict between belligerents but also as the collapse of civilized behavior. The combined German-Italian air attacks on Republican-controlled cities in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, most notably the assault on the Basque town of Guernica, which Pablo Picasso memorialized in his universally recognized painting; the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” in 1937, in which as many as 300,000 Chinese were brutally killed; and the Nazi air raids on London that launched the round of devastating bombardments against innocent civilians, which eventually led to the Allied firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the slaughter of over 100,000 Japanese in the atomic decimations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all were calculated acts of destruction in the service of what the belligerents justified as self-defense and deserved punishment of ruthless enemies.
The Nazi scorched-earth devastation of Russia, which took over 25 million military and civilian lives, aimed to destroy Stalin’s Communist regime and subjugate what the Nazis considered Russia’s subhuman Slavs. An orgy of rape and killing by invading Soviet troops in Germany in 1945 was accepted by most people in the West as understandable, if not justifiable, acts of revenge. By contrast, the massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) on orders from Stalin and the Politburo was seen in the West as an act of Soviet ruthlessness to eliminate competitors for the future control of Poland. For the sake of wartime unity, however, London and Washington accepted Soviet assertions of German culpability.
The Bataan Death March in the Japanese-American conflict was one of the most infamous episodes in the Pacific War. More than 70,000 already undernourished U.S. and Filipino troops were forced to walk without food and water some eighty miles to prison camps, while being beaten and bayoneted along the way. The Japanese cruelty to surrendering forces, which they viewed as unworthy of honorable treatment, stirred passions for revenge against an enemy seen as undeserving of regard as fellow human beings. Images of Japanese as bloodthirsty fanatics committing atrocities—and metaphors about exterminating vermin, usually yellow rats—abounded in the United States during the war.
Japanese troops, who died by the tens of thousands rather than surrender to the Americans in their Pacific Island campaigns, saw capture as too frightening and death as more honorable than giving up. Indoctrinated with propaganda that U.S. Marines had gained admission to the corps by killing their parents, the Japanese believed that American captors would reciprocate the ferocity that they themselves used against their prisoners. And there was some basis for their fear: inflamed by stories of Japanese brutality toward captives, eagerness to die for their emperor, and booby traps on surrendering troops, American soldiers killed combatants trying to surrender, mutilated their bodies, and turned body parts into souvenirs.
Although Germany’s Nazis were regarded with deep animus in the United States during the war, the Germans were not seen as barbaric as the Japanese. Ernie Pyle, America’s most famous wartime correspondent, said that “in Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here [in the Pacific] I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” Though Germany was “a heretic” or lapsed sinner from universal standards, these were standards “the Japanese never knew.”
The perception about the Nazis and Germany changed, however, in 1945 with revelations about the Holocaust, the greatest organized slaughter of the entire war: Hitler’s campaign of extermination against the Jews. The Nazi obsession with the Final Solution, Judenrein, ridding Europe of all of its 8.8 million Jews, came close to realization. The destruction of 90 percent of the Jewish populations of Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Baltic countries as well as 75 percent of Holland’s, 60 percent of Belgium’s, and 26 percent of France’s Jews largely achieved Hitler’s design.
Allied victory in 1945 against so malign a force as Nazism and Japanese militarism was an extraordinary moment—not simply because the most destructive war in history, which had left many of the world’s major cities in rubble, had ended, but also because the mood of cynicism about human behavior made it difficult for even the most optimistic among the victors to imagine a future without war. U.S. general George C. Marshall, Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff, declared, “If man does find the solution for world peace, it will be the most extraordinary reversal of his record we have ever known.” While 81 percent of Americans in 1945 believed that the United States should “join a world organization with power to maintain world peace,” only 15 percent was confident that a United Nations could prevent future wars.
And yet leaders among the victors, buoyed by their success in such a deadly struggle, believed that their triumph was bound to bring more tranquil times, if not permanently, at least for a while. War and defense preparations would not disappear entirely, but the appetite for anything resembling the global conflicts of the first half of the century had been sated. The world’s leaders saw peace or an aversion to large-scale combat as a reflection of what their masses insisted on. “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” one nineteenth-century French politician declared. Woodrow Wilson similarly remarked that “statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their people or be broken.”
Alexis de Tocqueville made the same point about the world’s emerging democracies in the first half of the nineteenth century when he wrote, “No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires.”
Winston Churchill was never willing to be so self-effacing about his or anyone else’s leadership of a democratic nation. He decried the “part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom.” (He might have had in mind a February 1945 survey in America asking whether Washington or Lincoln was the greater president: some of those choosing Lincoln thought he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, the discoverer of America, or the first one to say the world was round. One man chose Washington, because his picture was on the one-dollar bill.) Churchill belittled those who were so ready to take the nation’s pulse and temperature and “keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that ungainly posture,” he declared. The leader’s work, he believed, was to goad the mass public into a greater realism about the issues and possible solutions before it.
Churchill understood that however beholden a head of gover
nment might be to the people, he could not deny responsibility for the actions of his administration, especially in a tyrannical system where a dictator, relying on terror tactics, encouraged murderous passions. To be sure, Hitler’s crimes against humanity could not have occurred without the help of German and foreign collaborators. Still, at the heart of Germany’s malign deeds were Hitler and his Nazi chiefs—Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Göring, to mention the most prominent members of the Nazi inner circle, and the Wehrmacht generals who enthusiastically implemented their war plans.
The failure by the most powerful and influential leaders of the twentieth century to attain the elusive goal of world peace at a time when their citizens were thirsting for tranquillity, deepens the puzzle about the failed search for international concord, especially when it was so transparent that modern weaponry made militarism and war a prescription for economic and social disintegration that did more to destroy nations than to save them. After the development of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, the atomic bombings of Japan were seen as a small instance of how advanced societies could be devastated in a total nuclear war. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” Albert Einstein said.
How then to evaluate the leadership of the period between the closing months of World War II and the first years of the Cold War, the time frame of this book, which shaped international relations for years to come? It was a moment when the most talented and memorable government chiefs in modern history ruled or vied for power in their respective countries—America, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia, and Vietnam—and were making indelible marks on their nations and the world.