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FOREIGNPOLICYAGENDA
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE / APRIL 2006 / VOLUME 11 / NUMBER 1
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS IN U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS
Introduction SECRETARY OF STATE C ONDOLEEZZA RICE The United States: Inextricably Linked with Nations Across the Globe WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, THE HENRY A. KISSINGER SENIOR FELLOW FOR U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, AND SCOTT ERWIN AND EITAN GOLDSTEIN, RESEARCH ASSOCIATES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS American diplomacy in the 20th century is largely the story of how policy-makers have sought to strike the right equilibrium between national interests and ultimate ideals. The Panama Canal: A Vital Maritime Link for the World Building the Canal and Transferring Control The Cold War: A Test of American Power and a Trial of Ideals MICHAEL JAY FRIEDMAN, A U.S. DIPLOMATIC HISTORIAN AND WASHINGTON FILE STAFF WRITER, BUREAU OF INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION PROGRAMS , U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE With the defeat of Germany in 1945 and the widespread destruction the war had wrought throughout Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union represented competing and incompatible philosophies, objectives, and plans for rebuilding and reorganizing the continent.
The Marshall Plan: A Strategy That Worked DAVID W. ELLWOOD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA, ITALY, AND PROFESSIONAL LECTURER AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BOLOGNA CENTER. It didn’t start as a plan, and some of the veterans said it never did become a plan. Yet the European Recovery Program–better known as the Marshall Plan–has entered into history as the most successful American foreign policy project of all since World War II. The Marshall Plan: A Story in Pictures The Suez Crisis: A Crisis That Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East PETER L. HAHN, PROFESSOR OF U.S. DIPLOMATIC HISTORY, T HE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE SOCIETY FOR HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, when a major regional war nearly erupted between Egypt, Israel, Britain, and France that may have drawn in the Soviet Union and the United States. Brussels Universal and International Exposition (Expo 1958) The Expo provided the backdrop for the cultural Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union.
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Nixon In China: A Turning Point in World History WARREN I. COHEN, DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND PRESIDENTIAL RESEARCH PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY The 1949 victory of the Chinese communists in the Chinese civil war had a shattering impact upon the United States, but by 1972 tensions had eased and each found the need to resume normalization. Ping-Pong Diplomacy Spearheaded U.S.-Chinese Relations Unlikely diplomats went to play table tennis and changed history along the way. Trade and Economics as a Force in U.S. Foreign Relations MAARTEN L. PEREBOOM, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND CHAIRMAN, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, SALISBURY UNIVERSITY Emerging as a world leader in the 20th century, the United States, while certainly continuing to pursue its own economic interests abroad, drew upon its Enlightenment roots and promoted the ideals of freedom, democracy, and open markets in the belief that “free nations trading freely” would result in the worldwide improvement of the human condition. After the Cold War WALTER LAQUEUR, CO-CHAIR, INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL, C ENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES When the Cold War came to an end in 1989 with the dismantling of the Berlin wall, when the countries of Eastern Europe regained independence, and when finally the Soviet Union disintegrated, there was widespread feeling throughout the world that at long last universal peace had descended on Earth.
ADDITIONAL READING
Bibliography Additional Readings on Significant Events in U.S. Foreign Relations. Internet Resources Online Resources on Significant Events in U.S. Foreign Relations.
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Video Online
Video Clips of Selected Significant Events in U.S. Foreign Relations:
- Roosevelt: Panama Canal Statement
- Churchill: “Iron Curtain”
- Truman: Soviet Union
- Kennedy: Cuban Missile Crisis
- Nixon at the Great Wall
- Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0406/ijpe/ ijpe0406.htm
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THE UNITED STATES
Inextricably Linked with Nations Across
the Globe
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, SCOTT ERWIN, AND EITAN GOLDSTEIN
It is therefore manifest that an enduring idealism shapes the character of American foreign policy. But it is only part of a dynamic and complex process. It must constantly be balanced against cold-blooded strategic imperatives. Walter Russell MeadWalter Russell MeadWalter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senioris the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, and Scott Erwin and Eitan Goldstein are Research Associates at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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ormer Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has written that American foreign policy is defined by its oscillations between crusading idealism and blinkered isolationism. This familiar dichotomy—a nation alternately tilting at windmills or cynically interring its collective heads in the sand while tidy, ultimately obscures the currents that have long guided U.S. foreign policy. The belief that the United States is uniquely destined to serve as an engine for the spread of democracy, free markets, and individual liberty has been an abiding element of America’s encounter with the world. Policymakers have, of course, disagreed on the means by which to promote these goals, or the ability of the United States to affect such change. But American leaders from across the political spectrum have long held that the success of the American project in no small measure hinges on developments in the rest of the world. That such bitter rivals as Presidents Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) shared similarly expansive views of America’s interests in the world, marked by a belief that the United States’ fortunes were inextricably linked with the character and conduct of nations across the globe, underscores the broad-base of this worldview. While Wilson argued that “We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world…What affects mankind is inevitably our affair….” Roosevelt’s idea of America’s global role was no less far- reaching: “There is such a thing as international morality. I take this position as an American…who endeavors
loyally to serve the interests of his own country, but who also endeavors to do what he can for justice and decency as regards mankind at large, and who therefore feels obliged to judge all other nations by their conduct on any given occasion.” It is therefore manifest that an enduring idealism shapes the character of American foreign policy. But it is only part of a dynamic and complex process. It must constantly be balanced against cold-blooded strategic imperatives. Roosevelt justified these exigencies and the compromises that would necessarily follow, by cautioning that “in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.” Thus rather than veering between isolationism and engagement, America’s foreign affairs can better be understood as a reflection of the constant tension between its conflicting ideals and interests. American diplomacy in the 20th century, then, is largely the story of how policymakers have sought to strike the right equilibrium of interests and ideals. Articulating this balancing act, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently observed that: “American foreign policy has always had…a streak of idealism…It’s not just getting to whatever solution is available, but it’s doing that within the context of principles and values. The responsibility, then, of all of us is to take policies that are rooted in those values and make them work on a day-to-day basis so that you’re always moving forward toward a goal…So it’s the connection, the day-to-day operational policy connection between those ideals and policy outcomes.” Terming the administration’s approach ‘practical idealism,’ Rice, as clearly as any of her predecessors, identified the crux of the challenge that has confronted the United States’ interaction with the world in the 20th century. At critical junctures in the last century, the conflict between America’s interests and ideals has appeared in stark relief. And during these
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times, American foreign policy has manifested both utopian optimism and ruthless pragmatism, often simultaneously. Woodrow Wilson’s very name has become synonymous with American idealism. His determination to “make the world safe for democracy” galvanized the American public, as an erstwhile isolationist nation entered the First World War. The former professor’s advocacy for self-determination profoundly resonated with nationalists around the globe, and Wilson himself was regarded as an almost messianic figure. A Washington PostWashington PostWashington Post reporterreporter chronicling Egypt’s revolt against British rule in the spring of 1919, noted that the Egyptian nationalists were “fired by Wilsonian ideals” and observed that “as the rioters march and riot, they shout the Wilsonian precepts.” Egyptian nationalists, invoking Wilson’s credo, beseeched the U.S. Senate to support Egyptian independence. Wilson, however, rebuffed their pleas and affirmed the United States’ support for British rule in Egypt. Though American support for liberty during and after the war remained largely rhetorical, Wilson’s doctrine proved pivotal in the spread of democracy in the 20th century. Wilson’s crusading was, however, coupled with hardnosed realism. For example, while he deplored the Turks’ reported harsh treatment of the Armenians, Wilson resisted noisy demands to declare war against the Turks for fear of jeopardizing the American missionary presence in the Middle East. Indeed, the United States’ unwillingness to deploy American troops to bolster the nascent Armenian state in the wake of the First World War contributed to Armenia’s hasty demise. Wilson’s prosecution of the war also belied any hint of starry-eyed idealism. The full might of America’s war machine was to be brought to bear, as the president averred “force without stint or measure.” Thus in America’s part in the First World War we see a strategy animated by a hybrid
of narrowly defined interests and deep-seated American principles. The United States’ experience in World War II would even more conspicuously demonstrate the conflict between American values and geopolitical exigencies. Almost a year prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) (1933-1945) delivered his famous Four Freedoms address in which he declared that humans “everywhere in the world” were entitled to freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These principles would become a rallying cry for the United States upon its entrance into World War II and provided average Americans with an ideological framework for the fight. Yet while artist Norman Rockwell was immortalizing the Four Freedoms in a series of paintings in The Saturday Evening PostThe Saturday Evening PostThe Saturday Evening Post , Roosevelt was negotiating, Roosevelt was negotiating a partnership with the totalitarian Soviet Union. Josef Stalin’s Russia, beset by bloody purges, show trials, and state-orchestrated famines, made for a dubious ally in advancing the principles championed by Roosevelt.
In July 1941, Roosevelt sent his trusted advisor, Harry Hopkins, on a long trek to Russia to judge Stalin’s commitment and viability as a strategic partner. Hopkins pointed to the ideological quandary posed by allying with the Soviet Union; the visit highlighted “the difference between democracy and dictatorship,” he reported to
President Woodrow Wilson^ (AP/WWP) President Theodore Roosevelt^ (AP/WWP)
The Navy battleship Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941. USS West Virginia shortly after the attack on Pearl^ (AP/WWP)
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The demise of the Soviet Union and apparent triumph of liberal democracy did not augur an end to the conflict between American interests and ideals. The United States’ relationship with China during the 1990s proved that this ineluctable tension remained. President Bill Clinton (1993-2001) entered office at a low-ebb in Sino- American relations following the first [George H.W.] Bush administration’s 1992 sale of F-16 strike fighters to Taiwan. Sanctions from the Tiananmen Square massacre and calls from members of his own party to take a stiffer line against China’s continuing human rights abuses further exacerbated the relationship, and impelled the president to sign a 1993 executive order linking human rights conditions to the renewal of China’s most-favored- nation status. With the Dalai Lama and Chai Ling, a leader of the Tiananmen uprising, in attendance at the signing ceremony, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell triumphantly proclaimed, “For the first time since the events of Tiananmen Square, nearly four years ago, we have a president who is willing to act in order to bring about positive change.” This high-minded idealism quickly fell victim to a confluence of factors—American business interests in China, pressures from the Pentagon in light of a looming crisis with North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing and a series of acrimonious public confrontations with Beijing —leading Clinton to reverse his trade policy toward China. Arguing that American ideals could be best advanced by integrating China into the global economy; the president adopted a policy of engagement and in May 1994 delinked China’s trade status from its human rights
record. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin justified this about face explaining that it was in America’s interest “to help speed the integration of the Chinese economy into the world economy… Make no mistake: we have serious disagreements with China on human rights, religious freedom, security issues, as well as economic issues…The question is what is the best way to advance our interests and beliefs. We believe that the process of engagement is the most likely means to make progress on all of the issues we have with China.” In the fall of 1996, President Clinton commenced a three-year campaign to secure China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. China’s eventual entry into the global economy—widely considered Clinton’s greatest foreign policy achievement—was not without difficulty and signified another instance of American ideals and interests at loggerheads. President George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech demonstrated the degree to which the longstanding tension between American ideals and interests has defined U.S. foreign policy. Proclaiming “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” the president’s vision aims to effectively harmonize competing forces. But the conflict between American values and strategic imperatives is not always so readily resolved; the president’s rhetoric notwithstanding, key American allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia often rule in a manner counter to the American ethos. Just as in the past, balancing vital interests and fidelity to American ideals will remain the central challenge for American leaders through the 21st^ century.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush (left) and Bill Clinton at the White House in 2005.^ (AP/WWP)
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hen the SS Ancon sailed across the Isthmus of Panama on August 15, 1914, it ushered in the transformation of the American continent and the creation of a vital sea link for the entire world. The American historical writer David McCullough said that the construction of the canal that linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was more than a vast, unprecedented feat of engineering. Its construction was of sweeping historic importance not unlike that of a war, he wrote in his book about the canal, and it has impacted the lives of tens of thousands of people, regardless of class, of virtually every race and nationality. The earliest concept for the canal dates to the early 16th century when Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, suggested it might shorten travel to and from Ecuador and Peru. However, the first attempt to build it began in 1880 under a French- led consortium, similar to one created to build the Suez Canal. The effort ultimately collapsed and the United States stepped in to finish construction. In 1902, the U.S. Senate considered legislation to build a canal in Nicaragua instead of Panama, but an amendment offered by Senator John Spooner of Wisconsin won over the Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives easily approved the legislation that President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) signed into law. After considerable problems negotiating a treaty with Colombia, which at the time controlled Panama, the United States finally won approval to build the canal with the newly independent government of Panama in 1904.
Construction on the canal was completed in 1914. It is approximately 77 kilometers (48 miles) in length and consists of two artificial lakes, several improved and artificial channels, and three sets of locks. An additional artificial lake, Alajuela Lake, acts as a reservoir for the canal. The canal is a key conduit for international shipping, accommodating more than 14,000 ships annually, carrying more than 203 million metric tons of cargo. The S-shaped canal connects the Gulf of Panama in the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. During construction, approximately 27,500 workers died out of the more than 80,000 total workers employed by the French and the American companies, in particular from two tropical diseases—malaria and yellow fever. Work by Army surgeon Walter Reed led to the creation of a yellow fever vaccine that, along with new preventive medicine techniques, eradicated the disease in the area. The key value of the canal is the reduced time needed to reach one ocean from the other. Prior to its construction, ships had to sail around Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of the American continent with a distance of 22, kilometers (14,000 miles) from New York to San Francisco. Today, travel from New York to San Francisco through the canal is a distance of 9,500 kilometers (6,000 miles). Negotiations to settle Panamanian claims, after World War II, that the canal rightfully belonged to Panama began in 1974 and resulted in the Torrijos-Carter Treaty. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and Panamanian President Omar Torrijos signed the treaty on September 7, 1977. Final handover of the canal was completed on December 31,
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THE PANAMA CANAL A Vital Maritime Link for the World
million metric tons of cargo. The S-shaped canal connects the Gulf of Panama in the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. approximately 27,500 workers died out of the more than 80,000 total workers employed by the French and the American companies, in particular from two tropical diseases—malaria and yellow fever. Work by Army surgeon Walter Reed led to the creation of a yellow fever vaccine that, along with new preventive medicine techniques, eradicated the disease in the area. the reduced time needed to reach one ocean from the other. Prior to its construction, ships had to sail around Cape Horn at the President Theodore Roosevelt, center, tests a steam shovel at the^ southernmost tip of the American Culebra Cut during construction of the Panama Canal, a project he championed, November 1906. Roosevelt’s visit to Panama made him the first sitting U.S. president to travel abroad.
AP/WWP
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A cargo ship passes through the Miraflores Locks on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal, December 13,
- Then President Jimmy Carter represented the United States in a ceremony transferring the canal to Panamanian control, which took effect on December 31, 1999.
AP/WWP
Then President Jimmy Carter (left) and Panamanian President Omar Torrijos at the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty September 7, 1977. The United States agreed in the treaty to transfer control of the canal to Panama by December 31,
AP/WWP
Transferring Control
Courtesy: Jimmy Carter Library
Panamanian Foreign Minister Jose Miguel Aleman, from left, Minister of the Panama Canal Ricardo Marinelli, Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, U.S. Secretary of the Army and chairman of the Panama Canal Commission Louis Caldera, and U.S. Ambassador Simon Ferro stand during ceremonies transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian control December 31, 1999. The United States had controlled the canal since it opened in August 1914.
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THE COLD WAR A Test of American Power and a Trial of Ideals
MICHAEL JAY FRIEDMAN
The Cold War was first and foremost a war of ideas, a struggle over the organizing principle of human society, a contest between liberalism and forced collectivism. For the United States, the Cold War was the nation’s first truly sustained engagement in Great Power politics, and it required Americans to confront, not always successfully, their contradictory impulses toward the outside world: the desire to stand apart and to champion liberty for other peoples—for reasons of both altruism and self-interest. Michael Jay Friedman is a Washington File Staff Writer and a diplomatic historian.
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he Cold War can be said to have begun in 1917, with the emergence in Russia of a revolutionary Bolshevik regime devoted to spreading communism throughout the industrialized world. For Vladimir Lenin, the leader of that revolution, such gains were imperative. As he wrote in his August 1918 Open Letter to the American Workers, “We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief.” Western governments generally understood communism to be an international movement whose adherents foreswore all national allegiance in favor of transnational communism, but in practice received their orders from and were loyal to Moscow. In 1918, the United States joined briefly and unenthusiastically in an unsuccessful Allied attempt to topple the revolutionary Soviet regime. Suspicion and hostility thus characterized relations between the Soviets and the West long before the Second World War made
The U.S. Navy destroyer November 10, 1962, to inspect cargo as a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane flies overhead. BarryBarryBarry pulls alongside the Russian freighterpulls alongside the Russian freighter AnosovAnosovAnosov in the Atlantic Ocean,in the Atlantic Ocean, The Soviet ship was carrying a cargo of missiles being withdrawn from Cuba at the conclusion of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
AP/WWP
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whether America would defend them against a Soviet attack if Moscow could, in turn, unleash a nuclear holocaust on American cities. Would Washington sacrifice New York to defend Paris, London, or Bonn? Much of the Cold War in Europe revolved around this question. Soviet pressure on West Berlin—a Western enclave inside communist East Germany and hence militarily indefensible—was aimed to impress on West Europeans the precariousness of their situation. America’s responses to that pressure—including the 1948 Berlin Airlift, in which the U.S. Air Force delivered food and other necessities to the Soviet-blockaded city; President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 promise, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.... Ich bin ein Berliner;” and President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—all attest to American recognition of Berlin as an important symbol of the transatlantic link and of American determination to defend its European allies. The last great European Cold War crisis reflected another Soviet effort to split the Western allies. In 1975, Moscow introduced SS-20 missiles, highly accurate intermediate range weapons capable of hitting targets in Western Europe but not of reaching the United States. These invited West Europeans again to question whether America would retaliate for an attack on Europe and thus initiate a mutually destructive Soviet-U.S. nuclear war. The NATO alliance resolved to redress the balance by negotiating with the Soviets for the removal of all intermediate range weapons, but also by vowing to introduce into Europe U.S. Pershing
II and ground-launched cruise missiles if Moscow would not remove the SS-20s. Many West Europeans opposed these countermeasures. They acted out of a variety of motives and beliefs, but the international communist movement also helped organize and encourage elements within this “peace movement,” hoping to force West Europeans to accommodate politically Soviet military superiority. After a climactic November 1983 vote in the West German Parliament, the new U.S. missiles were deployed. In December 1987, President Ronald Reagan (1981-
- and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-
- signed the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate- Range and Shorter-Range Missiles. The inability of the Soviet Union to split the United States and its West European allies was one decisive factor in how the Cold War ended. THE C OLD WAR ON THE “P ERIPHERY” In 1947, the American diplomat George Kennan enunciated the basic U.S. Cold War strategy: “a policy of containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” This policy in many instances conflicted with, and over time often trumped, Washington’s real desire to support decolonization and to align with the newly independent states emerging in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, an area that strategists sometimes referred to as the “periphery,” Europe remaining the central Cold War arena. At the end of the Second World War, U.S. policymakers anticipated the breakup of the old European colonial empires and hoped to win the friendship of these new countries. The United States thus worked hard to prevent the reassertion of Dutch authority over Indonesia, even threatening in 1949 to withhold Marshall Plan aid until The Netherlands recognized Indonesian independence. For similar reasons, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 forced Britain, France, and Israel to end their respective occupations of the Suez Canal and Sinai Peninsula. There was no consistent pattern to U.S. policy on the periphery, though. In some cases, as in the Philippines in 1986, Washington sided with popular forces, even against pro-U.S. regimes. In others, American leaders were quick to see communist influence behind nationalist movements and to view nations as “dominoes”: were one to “fall” under Soviet influence, its neighbors were presumed at risk to follow.
Germans from East and West stand on the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate on November 10, 1989. This moment symbolized the beginning of the end of the Cold War in Europe.
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This “domino theory” lay behind America’s most catastrophic periphery intervention—Vietnam. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, French efforts to reassert colonial authority in Vietnam met with great resistance. U.S. policymakers were tempted to urge Paris to quit Indochina, much as they had helped push the Dutch out of Indonesia. But French leaders warned that the loss of their empire could result in the loss of France to communism. Washington was unwilling to take that risk. Step by step, beginning with support of the French, then gradually introducing American trainers and then troops—nearly 550,000 of them by mid-1969—the United States expended blood and treasure in the ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent the communist regime in North Vietnam from absorbing the rest of that nation. While the American record on the Cold War periphery was not above criticism, its Soviet rival was similarly active in efforts to spread its influence throughout the Third World, supporting dictators and interfering in local matters.
A L ONG-TERM C ONTEST The containment strategy prescribed a long-term contest, what President Kennedy (1961-1963) called a “long, twilight struggle.” This was something new for a nation whose previous international engagements had been geared to overcoming specific, immediate challenges. U.S. reaction to three early crises established that the Cold War was unlikely to end with a smashing military victory. President Truman’s 1951 decision to sack General Douglas MacArthur amounted to a decision to wage the Korean War to preserve South Korea and not, as the general wished, to liberate the North. Five years later, President Eisenhower (1953-1961) pointedly offered no tangible support when the Hungarian people rose up against their Soviet-imposed government and the Red Army troops that suppressed their revolution. Finally, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 established even more starkly the limits of direct conflict in a nuclear age. The Soviets sought to secretly introduce intermediate range missiles into Cuba, clearly posing a threat to the U.S. mainland. Even though the United States at this point still enjoyed overwhelming superiority in nuclear weaponry, outright war posed the threat of unacceptable damage. President Kennedy therefore concluded a secret trade, whose terms did not become known until many years later. In return for the extraction of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, the United States agreed not to move against Fidel Castro’s communist regime there and, also, to retire, after a
decent interval, “obsolete” U.S. missiles based in Turkey. The two “superpowers,” it appeared, learned different lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Whereas, by 1980, the United States had mostly deferred further increases in nuclear weapons, the Soviets had launched a substantial buildup and offered no indication that they intended to slow the pace. Meanwhile, the introduction during the 1970s of Cuban armed forces into African conflicts and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—the first direct use of the Red Army outside Eastern Europe —convinced many Americans that the Cold War was not over yet. THE C OLD WAR E NDS The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union remain hotly debated today. Nevertheless, a few observations are possible. One is that the substantial military buildup ordered by President Reagan raised the Soviets’ cost for maintaining their relative military power. Another is that Reagan’s proposed “Star Wars” missile defense shield threatened to shift the competition to the mastery of new technologies, an arena in which the Soviet Union—a closed society—was not well-suited to compete. The Soviet command economy was already faltering. Whatever the ability of the communist model to successfully industrialize, the budding new world of information technologies posed insurmountable challenges to a society that closely monitored its citizens and supervised even their use of photocopying machines. Far-sighted leaders like General Secretary Gorbachev understood this. The reforms he introduced, but ultimately could not control, led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. From an American perspective, the 40-year conflict represented a victory of ideas. The United States paid a price, indeed a number of very substantial ones, for its victory. Most obviously, there were the huge expenditures of irreplaceable lives lost on battlefields and money spent on weapons of unimaginable force rather than on perceived more noble and equally pressing causes at home and abroad. There were political costs as well. The Cold War at times obliged Americans to align their nation with unsavory regimes in the name of geopolitical expediency. There were, however, very real achievements of Cold War America. Most obviously, Western Europe and, no doubt, much of the world were rescued from the boot of Joseph Stalin, a murderous dictator barely distinguishable from the vanquished Adolf Hitler. Equally significant in an age of thermonuclear weaponry, the captive nations of the
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THE MARSHALL PLAN
A Strategy That Worked
DAVID W. ELLWOOD
The myth of the Marshall Plan has become as forceful as its true historical legacy. In 1955, the plan’s official historian noted how, from a one-paragraph “suggestion” by Secretary of State George Marshall at a Harvard graduation ceremony, had sprung a program that “evolved swiftly into a vast, spirited, international adventure: as the enterprise unfolded, it became many things to many men.” Fifty years later, such was the fame of the project, that the same could still be said. David W. EllwoodDavid W. EllwoodDavid W. Ellwood is an associate professor ofis an associate professor of international history at the University of Bologna, Italy, and a professional lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Bologna Center.
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t didn’t start as a plan, and some of the veterans said it never did become a plan. Its own second- in-command, Harlan Cleveland, called it “a series of improvisations … a continuous international happening.” Yet the European Recovery Program (ERP)—better known as the Marshall Plan—has entered into history as the most successful American foreign policy project of all since World War II. After the fall of apartheid, South Africans called for a Marshall Plan. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Europeans and Russians demanded the Marshall Plan they had been denied by the Soviet Union in
- Fearful of disintegration in Africa, the British government in 2005 proposed coordinated international intervention on the lines of the Marshall Plan. The myth of the Marshall Plan has become as forceful as its true historical legacy. In 1955, the plan’s official historian noted how, from a one-paragraph “suggestion” by Secretary of State George Marshall at a Harvard graduation ceremony, had sprung a program
A 1947 portrait of George C. Marshall, the first U.S. secretary of state of the postwar era. He oversaw the creation of the successful European Reconstruction Program bearing his name.
AP/National Portrait Gallery
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that “evolved swiftly into a vast, spirited, international adventure: as the enterprise unfolded, it became many things to many men.” Fifty years later, such was the fame of the project, that the same could still be said. THE I NCEPTION OF AN I DEA Three contingent developments led to the creation of a special new American project to help Western Europe in the spring of 1947. The first was the physical condition of the post-World War II continent after the setbacks caused by the extreme winter of 1946-1947. Second was the failure of the recent Truman Doctrine—an outspoken scheme to help Greece and Turkey fight Soviet pressures—to indicate a constructive way forward. Third was the grueling experience of Secretary of State George Marshall in the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, dedicated to the future of Germany, in March-April
Marshall had been recalled to become secretary of state by President Harry S Truman at the beginning of 1947, after retiring from the Pentagon at the end of the war as Army chief of staff. Marshall’s success in that
job—Churchill called him “the organizer of victory”— and his personal qualities of incisiveness, integrity, and self-abnegation made him the most authoritative public figure of the era. His patience and sense of duty were tested to the full in Moscow. A senior American diplomat, George Kennan, summarized Marshall’s pithy conclusion upon leaving the Soviet capital: “Europe was in a mess. Something would have to be done. If he (Marshall) did not take the initiative, others would.” Kennan and his new State Department Policy Planning Staff produced one of the master documents from which the Marshall Plan eventually flowed. In part, their thinking derived from Roosevelt-era understandings of the causes of two world wars and the Great Depression: class hatred, poverty, backwardness, and the lack of hope for change. These policymakers aimed to build a postwar world that supported the ordinary citizen’s demand for a share in the benefits of industrialism. Everywhere in the world, they believed, people with prosperity, or at least the prospect of it, did not turn to totalitarianism. But there was a specifically European dimension to the Marshall effort. Europe’s evil genie, said people like Kennan, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and future ERP Ambassador Averell Harriman, was nationalism. If that root of Nazi-fascism and other 20th- century rivalries could be bottled up in an integrated European economic framework, the resulting prosperity might dampen nationalist competition, prevent future armed conflicts, and obviate U.S. involvement in future European wars. In these ways, modernization and integration became the twin objectives of the ERP, and the arguments turned on how to achieve them. It was central to the method of the Marshall Plan that the Europeans should think and act for themselves within the vision: that was what made the plan not just another aid program.
The architects of the Marshall Plan discuss the progress of European reconstruction at the White House, November 1948 (from left to right): President Harry S Truman, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Paul G. Hoffman, former president of the Studebaker automobile corporation who headed the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration, and Ambassador Averell Harriman, also a former business executive and America’s senior representative in Europe for countries participating in the Marshall Plan.
AP/WWP
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as free, or as liquid, as the Europeans had imagined. It would instead normally be merchandise sent from the United States and sold to the highest bidder, public or private. Their payments would then go back, not to the United States, but into the new fund. From it would come the money to pay for national reconstruction and modernization efforts, as decided between the ECA mission and the government in each participating capital. At the same time the ERP was clearly a mighty weapon in the Cold War. Its senior representative in Europe, Ambassador Harriman, went so far in 1949 as to characterize the entire effort as a “fire-fighting operation.” Marshall’s successor as secretary of state, Dean Acheson, the individual who, in his own words, “probably made as many speeches and answered as many questions about the Marshall Plan as any man alive,” remembered that “what citizens and the representatives in Congress always wanted to learn in the last analysis was how Marshall Aid operated to block the extension of Soviet power and the acceptance of communist economic and political organization and alignment.”
SELLING THE P LAN TO I TS B ENEFICIARIES
Against the plan, indeed, stood the forces of the Cominform, an international organization set up in October 1947 by the Kremlin with the explicit purpose of combating the Marshall Plan, by coordinating the political efforts of national communist parties under Soviet direction and by directing propaganda efforts within each participating nation. At a time when communist forces were leading an armed insurgency in Greece, looked capable of taking power politically in Italy, seemed to threaten chaos in France, and knew what they wanted in Germany—unlike the West at this stage—the Cold War gave an urgency to the program that concentrated minds everywhere. Furthermore, from the very beginning, ECA planners knew that overcoming likely political obstacles would require speaking directly to the European publics over the heads of the local governing classes. Improvising swiftly, the teams of journalists and filmmakers who launched the ERP Information Program turned it, by the end of 1949, into the largest propaganda operation directed by one country to a group of others ever seen in peacetime. THE P LAN E VOLVES The Marshall Plan’s early years, from June 1948 to the start of the Korean War in June 1950, were remembered by all concerned as the golden epoch of pure economic action and rewards. Experts pointed to the rise of nearly a quarter in the total output of goods and services that the ERP countries enjoyed between 1947 and 1949. They asserted that the “over-all index of production, based on 1938, rose to 115 in 1949, as compared with 77 in 1946 and 87 in 1947.” Agriculture also recovered, and progress on the inflation front was considered “uneven but definitely encouraging.” The foreign trade of the member states was back to its prewar levels, but its most remarkable feature was a change in direction. No longer oriented toward the old European empires, trade was increasing most rapidly within Western Europe, among the ERP members themselves. Experience would show that this was a long-term structural shift in the continent’s economy, which within a few years would spur political demands for European integration. Meanwhile, by the end of 1949 it had become clear that the partner nations’ visions of the European Recovery Program differed significantly in certain key aspects from those of the American planners. Western European governments badly needed the ERP dollars,
One of 25 designs selected in a 1950 competition to create postersOne of 25 designs selected in a 1950 competition to create posters capturing the goals and spirit of the Marshall Plan. 10,000 entries were submitted by artists from 13 Marshall Plan countries.
The German Marshall FundThe German Marshall Fund
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but at the same time they sought to avoid permanent dependence on the United States and more generally to obtain American aid on terms that accounted more fully for their own political objectives. The British went to extraordinary lengths to resist the Marshall Plan’s insistence on immediate economic integration with the rest of Europe, the great string attached to Marshall aid everywhere. The Dutch resisted pressure to start dismantling their empire in the name of free trade. The Austrians refused point blank to reform their railways and their banking system as the Americans desired. The Greek people rejected a new ERP-sponsored currency because they believed that gold sovereigns were the only truly reliable form of monetary exchange. The head of the Italian industrialists told the mission chief in Rome that no matter how cheap synthetic fibers became, Italian women would always prefer clothes made in the home with natural materials. Tinned food might be sold very cheaply, he said, but Italian traditions of cooking would always be preferred. Small firms and traditional artisan skills would be central to Italy’s future, just as they had been in the past. By the start of 1950, practical experience and extensive opinion polling had brought a significant shift in outlook. Obliged to recognize that Europeans often preferred noncommunist social welfare states to the American liberal capitalist model, Marshall planners concentrated their focus on an area of substantial Euro-American agreement: security. Administrators began to insist only that ERP benefits be equally available everywhere, their aim now being less to reorganize Europe than to cut the ground from under communist attacks on both the plan and the idea of welfare-based social democratic reform.
THE I MPACT OF K OREA The unexpected and fear-inspiring turn of events in Asia in 1950 soon put the very existence of the Marshall Plan in doubt. The sharply intensified Cold War confrontation that started with the North Korean invasion of the South in June shortened the project in time and radically transformed it, partially employing Marshall Aid as a tool to enable general West European rearmament in the name of “Mutual Security.” Congressional amendments of 1951 and 1952 to the original ERP Act provided $400 million more for a continuing drive to persuade European employers and workers to “accept the American definition of the social and economic desirabilities [sic] of productivity,” but now so that military output for national defense against
the Soviet threat could be increased at the same time as consumer goods. Everyone was expected to do more for the general effort (hence the strengthening of NATO), and so rebuild their armed forces, greatly run down since the end of World War II. The ECA teams on the ground quickly decided that there was no conflict between America’s demand for general rearmament and the traditional ERP objectives: it was just a matter of bending the existing policy goals to the new requirements. In such a context the successful ERP Information Program soon accelerated into something resembling “psychological warfare,” with the world of industry and organized labor identified as the key front in the ideological Cold War against communism. As one of the ERP’s most influential brains, Assistant Administrator (and later Acting Administrator) Richard M. Bissell explained in the April 1951 issue of Foreign Affairs , a leading U.S. journal of international relations, the United States could wage this war in Europe most effectively by the force of its economic example and the powerful appeal of its consumerist economy to Europeans of all regions and social classes: Coca-Cola and Hollywood movies may be regarded as two products of a shallow and crude civilization. But American machinery, American labor relations, and American management and engineering are everywhere respected…. What is needed is a peaceful revolution, which can incorporate into the European economic system certain established and attractive features of our own, ranging from high volumes to collective bargaining…. [This] will require a profound shift in social attitudes, attuning them to the mid-twentieth century. THE B ALANCE S HEET In the end, every participating nation succeeded in carrying out its own distinctive version of Bissell’s peaceful revolution. Economically, the Marshall Plan mattered far more in Greece, France, Austria, and The Netherlands than it did in Ireland, Norway, or Belgium. For some nations, such as Italy, it was perhaps truly decisive for one year only; for others, the benefits flowed for several years. Each nation made different use of the economic impetus provided by the plan. The Danes secured raw materials and energy supplies. Other peoples, such as those in the German occupation zones, appreciated most FFFOREIGNOREIGN PPPOLICYOLICY AGENDA / APRIL 2006
