Air University Review, January-February 1978

One observes among colleagues a growing sense of uneasiness regarding the burgeoning offensive strength of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact. This fear is also seen in the press and heard from commentators on the radio. Americans might expect that they had purchased security by spending an enormous share of their national wealth on defense, deferring spending on urgent social needs, and losing tens of thousands in the swamps, seas, and air over, in, and around Vietnam and Korea. Yet Americans are told that they are becoming less secure and that the Soviets changed directions in the 1960s and are now no longer defensively oriented. Americans are told that NATO is outnumbered and outgunned in every major category of land and air weaponry. We are warned that the Soviets do not seek parity with the West; rather, they are trying to gain numerical arid firepower superiority. That is cause enough for concern, but why is this problem still here? Why does the United States continue to need to spend so much of its national budget on defense? Why is there still a cold war?

Has the United States erred in its foreign policy since 1945 in its dealings with the Soviet Union? Three recently published books argue that America has made fundamental mistakes in its approach to the Soviets, but the authors do not agree on the nature of the error. Richard J. Walton argues that America, and more specifically Harry Truman, provoked the Russians into permanently challenging the United States in the Cold War. James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver as co-authors assert that both sides are to be blamed for the continuance of the Cold War, but the evidence they marshal puts them in Walton's revisionist camp. Al! three authors see the United States as being too tough and forcing the Russians to try to be tougher yet. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, however, does not believe that America has been staunch enough in dealing with the Russians and has invited Soviet expansion through its weakness. He fears for the survival of Western civilization. All three books are valuable for one's professional reading, but all have faults, some of which are not minor.

Richard Walton writes* that Truman must have known in 1945 that the Soviet Union was no threat to America and should have acted more moderately. Convincingly he argues that "given America's enormous strength when World War II ended, given Russia's terrible devastation. . and its need to devote itself to reconstruction, and given Russia's fear and suspicion of the West. . the major responsibility for a peaceful world rested with the United States." Walton believes that Henry Wallace, former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President, understood the correct path but was tragically ignored.

*Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (New York: Viking, 1976, $12.95), 387 pages.

While Wallace was still in Truman's cabinet, he asked the President to look objectively at America's actions since 1945: "I mean by actions," he wrote, "the concrete things like $13 billion for the War and Navy Departments, the Bikini tests of the Atomic Bomb and continued production of bombs... production of B-29s and planned production of B-36s, and the effort to secure air bases spread over half the globe from which the other half of the globe can be bombed." Wallace asked: "How would it look if Russia had 10,000 mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles of our coast lines, and we did not?" Wallace saw clearly that our "interest in establishing democracy in Eastern Europe, where democracy has by and large never existed," seems to Russia to be an "attempt to re-establish the encirclement of unfriendly neighbors which was created" after World War I and which could "serve as a springboard of still another effort to destroy her."¹ Wallace understood that the Soviet Union had legitimate security interests in Eastern Europe, something formally unrecognized until President Gerald Ford did so in Helsinki in 1975.

Wallace realized that compromise was not surrender, that an adversary could be viewed as a nation seeking to serve its national interests rather than as a mortal foe, and that problems with the Russians could be solved without sacrifice of American vital interests. Wallace realized the need for deténte. Walton loses few opportunities to show that much Wallace called for in the late 1940s is policy today, and he outlines Wallace's foresight:

Henry Wallace said . . . that the United States would end up supporting corrupt, incompetent and repressive dictators all over the world.... He said that the effort to contain communism would be costly in American blood and treasure. He said that a crusade against communism would lead to the repression of civil liberties at home. He said that American foreign policy would lead to militarism. . . Henry Wallace was right….Henry Wallace has been vindicated by history.

That last point is certainly debatable, but Walton's point is well taken. Truman had an opportunity, before the Russians developed the atom bomb, to give peace a chance and stop the arms race before it began. Instead he confronted the Russians with an "iron fist and strong language,"² and helped provoke the Cold War.

The difficulty with Walton's thesis is that it presumes that the Soviets were not expansionist (a dangerous assumption if wrong), and it lacks balance. Very little mention is given of the Soviet rhetoric or actions that might have caused Truman's bellicose actions. Lenin had warned that the two systems could not live in harmony side by side, and Stalin believed and said the same; and yet Walton gives no weight to such statements. He also fails to acknowledge the effect of the Russian military conquest and occupation of Eastern Europe. It is all well and good to point out that the Russians had security interests in the area, but objectivity requires comment on the effect on the President and his advisers of the communizing of an unwilling Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the rest of the satellites. Walton is also ungenerous when he compares Truman's "intervention" in the Italian election of 1948 with the Soviet take-over of Czechoslovakia that same year. All he can dredge up is Truman's campaign to have Italian-Americans write to relatives in Italy and George Marshall's unsubtle threat that American aid was tied to a non-Communist electoral victory. Even Walton admits that the Russian army conquered Czechoslovakia in 1948. He also chokes over the death of Czech leader Jan Masaryk. Writing in 1976, Walton says that the type of death--murder or suicide—"is still in dispute. , . .." There was no dispute in 1976 because the Czech government in 1968 released indisputable evidence from witnesses that Masaryk was thrown out of a window and murdered.⁵ Walton's book, therefore, lacks balance. Other defects are its political hyperbole and naiveté.

Walton states more than once that "it seems that everyone you meet now (except Republicans) who was old enough to vote in 1948 says he voted for Wallace." (p.180) Walton must confine himself to select circles. He also has difficulty trying to justify to himself Wallace's acceptance of American Communist Party (ACP) indorsement in 1948. In that election year the ACP did not run its own candidate, as was customary, but indorsed and campaigned ardently for Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate. Wallace permitted key ACP leaders to be his most important advisers, e.g., John Abt as number two man in the campaign and Lee Pressman as secretary of the platform committee. Walton admits Abt's and Pressman's critical positions and says that there were communists "at various levels at Progressive national headquarters and in the field," (pp.249-50) but sees nothing wrong with this because Communists have rights, too. Walton, however, is mystified and angered by the hostility Communists provoked in the voting public and the weak vote Wallace received because of this Communist support. Yet Walton acknowledges that there is "no doubt that many Communists had a deep and abiding, often blind, loyalty to the Soviet Union." But he asks: "Does this mean that they were disloyal to the United States? I do not know." (p. 266) Walton knows that the American Communists were always trying to "ape Russian communism," and "they closed their eyes to the ugly repression within the Soviet Union and were guilty of a mental agility that would have done credit to medieval theologians, as they sought to justify each twist. and turn of the Soviet line even when yesterday's truth became today's heresy." (p.251) Who might Walton expect to support a Henry Wallace with Communist support American-Poles, Czechs, Germans, or Lithuanians with relatives behind the Iron Curtain? American farmers who had seen the ACP justify the murderous farm collectivization in Russia in the 1920s and '30s? American Jews who observed constant Russian anti-Semitism? American Christians and Jews who agonized over official state atheism? The ACP had tried to justify the Stalin purges in the 1930s and also the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939, and yet Walton is unable to understand the antipathy American voters had for Wallace with Communist support. Walton really expected a great deal from voters in 1948.

Walton's arguments about the causes of the Cold War are expanded on by professors Nathan and Oliver, who manufacture a whole cloth out of foreign policy thread.* The authors see American domestic and international politics corrupted by foreign policy. Their book sees a connection between the Cold War and Watergate, believing that the Nixon excesses, the defeat in Vietnam, the imperial presidency, and the decline of Congress in foreign policy matters are all consequences of the manner in which presidents from Truman to Ford have viewed international politics. These presidents, the authors assert, identified foreign policy with security policy: "Foreign policy is to protect national interests against the dangerous and hostile forces at loose in a world where there are no international police and no courts with binding authority …." In this society, force is the "common medium of exchange; and power is the only means of gaining interest." The diplomacy of violence, they write, "has been one of the dominant instrumentalities of American foreign policy for the last three decades."

*James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver, United States Foreign Policy and World Order (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1976, $10.95), 598 pages.

All presidents since World War II, they claim, have seen the world as anarchic and the Soviet Union as the major threat to world order. Presidents from Truman to Ford reacted to this perceived threat with activism and interventionism. Although all these presidents saw the value of negotiations, they insisted (taking a page from Munich in 1938) that they must negotiate from a position of strength. No one seems to have asked how the Soviets might be expected to react to what they perceived as a hostile, capitalist West that always insisted on negotiating from a position of strength.

This presidential view of a permanently threatening, anarchic world society profoundly affected domestic institutions. It led to presidential demands for enormous discretionary powers and allocation of a third to more than half of the national budget to the tools of war rather than domestic needs. Nathan and Oliver believe--and given the example of Watergate, it would be difficult to debate them--that this domination of domestic politics by foreign policy has had "dismal domestic repercussions."

Nathan and Oliver also provide the intellectual underpinnings of American foreign policy. They cite George Kennan's alarmist telegram to the President in 1946 in which Kennan described the Russian leadership as a "political force committed 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 he destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken if Soviet power is to he secure." Kennan also wrote that the Soviets were "highly sensitive to the logic of force."⁴ Although Kennan repudiated these ideas 25 years later, these views were critical to the Truman approach. This advice, which was similar to most that Truman received, resulted in a get tough policy with the Russians when the United States could have afforded to appear moderate. A year later Kennan wrote his famous "X" article in Foreign Affairs, which suggested that the Soviet leadership will fall from power because of internal weaknesses, but until then, "it is clear that the main element in any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."⁵

Three years after containment became the policy, Paul Nitze directed a staff of foreign and defense policy experts in the development of the landmark National Security Council Policy Paper 68 (NSC 68) titled "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security." Nitze's staff, writing in January 1950, described a bipolar world in which "conflict had become endemic." They believed that the Soviet Union desired the "complete abolition or forcible destruction" of power centers opposed to Soviet hegemony. NSC 68 called on the United States to organize its energies and those of the free world to "frustrate the Kremlin design for world domination." They believed the Soviets would be able, by the end of 1950, to overrun Western Europe and bomb America with atomic weapons. They called for a rapid buildup of American and Western power, and the "reduction of federal expenditures for purposes other than defense or foreign assistance. . . . "⁶ This program was not accepted without debate in January 1950, but the outbreak of hostilities in Korea six months later ended the discussion.

Nathan and Oliver describe the Korean War as the "seminal event of the Cold War." It expanded containment to Asia, increased military spending (it was 67 percent of the 1952 budget), unbalanced budgets, fueled inflation, released a whirlwind of domestic tensions, and provoked a civil-military crisis. Nathan and Oliver write that the "decision to go into Korea was predicated on the perception that American will was being tested. Although the arena was peripheral, the United States…must respond... to establish a reputation for action and to deter probes at the center." Once taking up the gauntlet in Korea, the authors draw a straight line to Vietnam. President Eisenhower, they assert, had no argument with NSC 68 and piled on commitments by forging alliances all over the world. Eisenhower had the strength, the authors declare, to negotiate the Cold War, but he failed to do so and institutionalized the Cold War and the military-industrial complex.

When Eisenhower passed the torch to John Kennedy, he yielded office to a man who advocated negotiating from strength and who had no qualms about post-World War II security policy. Kennedy's advisers saw the need for a flexible response to Soviet threats across the whole war spectrum so Kennedy built missiles at one end of the line and counterinsurgency schools at the other. In a year he produced a missile gap overwhelmingly favorable to the United States, and to counter Khrushche’s publicly announced support of wars of national liberation, Kennedy offered "nation-building," with the help of Green Berets. The authors say that Kennedy activism predisposed the administration to interventionism and sent it down the slippery slope to Vietnam. And everybody knows how that turned out.

Nathan and Oliver argue that the overwhelming concentration of the executive and his key advisers on the pursuit of world order undermined domestic institutions. The authors point out that the State Department was fatally weakened by Johnson and Nixon and was essentially replaced by a bloated extraconstitutional White House security apparatus. More significant, Nathan and Oliver believe that the Congress has been all but frozen out of foreign-policy making. Many key presidential appointments do not require Senate advice and consent. Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have turned more and more to executive agreements rather than treaties because the latter require Senate approval, and even the control of the purse has been effectively subverted. This last point is carefully drawn and studded with examples. Presidents from Truman to Ford through impoundment, budgetary discretion, transfer authority, reprogramming, diverting pipeline goods, selling excess stocks, and pure budgetary legerdemain have been able to spend unappropriated money for purposes the Congress has sometimes specifically forbidden. The bombing toward the end of the war in Southeast Asia is a case in point.

How did the constitutional subversion come about? By relentless bipartisanism. Presidents since Truman have argued that the external threat to the country is so all-pervasive that dissent is an unaffordable luxury. Bipartisan-ship has become a way of political life in America, stifling debate and letting the President alone fix the course. By cataloguing the excesses of the Nixon administration, all of which were made in the name of national security, Nathan and Oliver have provided food for thought.

Some of the nourishment, however, is indigestible. While the authors are critical of presidential foreign policy, they offer no reasonable alternative. They realize that interventionism and global containment have not been successful and have undermined the home front, but they offer a scenario that would be unacceptable to most Americans:

Even if the Soviets did have ambitions in Europe the worst that is normally forecast is a kind of "Finlandization.". . . Even if the Soviets moved on Europe and colonized the Common Market in the fashion that Stalin worked his will on Eastern Europe... it is not clear that it would present a security threat to the United States.... Even if the Soviets could gain such an empire by force, it is doubtful they could hold it.⁷

Given the 30-year record of the Soviets in Eastern Europe, it is doubtful that anything short of full-scale war could dislodge them once in power.

A greater problem than the authors' unacceptable alternative is the technical weakness of their manuscript: they do not footnote properly. This is more than a pedantic gripe. The book has more than a thousand footnotes, but many necessary footnotes are missing from controversial material. Space will not permit a full listing, but two examples should suffice. Nathan and Oliver suggest that Eisenhower advisers closely connected to United Fruit sent the CIA into Guatemala to upset a leftist regime. What follows from their book is completely unsubstantiated:

As a lawyer, John Foster Dulles had drawn up contracts between United Fruit and the Guatemalan Government by which whole provinces were turned over to the company; the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs at the time of the coup held a significant block of United Fruit stock; Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA had been President of the company; and Walter Bedell Smith, the Undersecretary of State, would join the board of directors of United Fruit upon leaving the State Department.⁸

The authors allege that President Johnson "gave thinly disguised approval to the 1968 invasion by Russia of Czechoslovakia." (p. 445) Perhaps, but Nathan and Oliver should cite their sources. Beyond the lack of footnotes in critical places, many footnotes do not present all the information they should. The authors depend too heavily on secondary sources and never tell readers how the secondary source may have arrived at the information they cite.

Regardless of these criticisms, the book has worth. It shows clearly the price Americans have paid for always talking tough and never considering its effect on adversaries and of desiring to negotiate only from strength. Nathan and Oliver also demonstrate how the domination of foreign over domestic affairs has weakened American institutions and threatened its democracy.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, however, would not agree with Nathan, Oliver, and Walton.* He believes the United States has not talked or acted firmly enough, and that American weakness has invited Soviet expansionism. He warns that deténte is one-sided because the Russians are abusing the West. He claims that deténte is " a respite before destruction" and warns that the Russians are preparing weapons that could kill America with "one single blow."

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous, 1976, $7.95), 145 pages. This is a collection of several speeches given to American and British audiences.

Solzhenitsyn condemns the West for its lack of courage and is especially upset over the moral failure to condemn Russian and leftist repression while always vilifying rightist injustices. (He spoke and wrote before Jimmy Carter took office.) He openly asks how anyone could trust a Soviet government that has cost its own country tens of millions of lives between 1917 and 1959 and murders dissenters in insane asylums. Solzhenitsyn is pessimistically prophetic: The Soviet Union is a "concentration of world evil . . full of hatred for humanity. It is fully determined to destroy your society. Must you wait until it comes to smash through your borders, until the young men of America have to fall defending the borders of their continent?" He sees defeat everywhere-from Portugal, to Africa, to India, to Southeast Asia-and fears for the future: "The West is on the verge of a collapse created by its own hands."

If the West is to survive, it must deal firmly with the Soviet Union. "The Communist leaders respect only firmness and they have contempt for persons who continually give in to them." Only "firmness makes it possible to withstand the assaults of communist totalitarianism." He also claims that the Soviets are aiming at total arms superiority. Solzhenitsyn roundly condemns Western capitalists for trading with the Russians, believing that the Soviet regime would collapse or moderate if it were not able to purchase necessities from the West. He even condemns Western diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.

It is difficult to fault Solzhenitsyn's description of internal Russia. He describes the country as a despicable totalitarian system that feeds on its own, has monumental faults, a past bloody with repression, and a future not any better. One might argue, however, with Solzhenitsyn's interpretation of external events. Not all would agree that Portugal has been lost to the West or that it will soon be a member of the "Warsaw Pact." (p. 69) Some would disagree when he states that "freedom has been lost in Laos, China, Angola," and many other places he mentions, because freedom was not there in the first place. Solzhenitsyn accuses the United States of cowardice for leaving Vietnam with "three thousand Americans in captivity," (pp.31-82) but that is not true. Yet these are not major points.

Solzhenitsyn's small volume should be read by all those who are unconcerned with the Russian threat, or by anybody who believes that deténte has made the Soviets mellow, or by anyone who wishes to combat intellectually those who hold such beliefs. One wishes it would be possible to bring Walton and Solzhenitsyn together.

One cannot combat a vicious ideology, however, by ignoring it or the regime it controls, as Solzhenitsyn suggests, and one cannot advance the cause of peace by hyperbole. Solzhenitsyn's warning, however, at its lowest level should be sufficient to cause America to keep its powder dry and bayonets sharpened. The message of the other two books is different. America’s eyes must be focused on the goal of peace because war is insane and the burden of armaments is too severe to be continued indefinitely given domestic problems. The United States must also always regard the reaction of its adversaries to its rhetoric and must never again permit national security matters and foreign policy to corrupt internal politics.

Ramstein AFB, Germany

1. Letter, 23 July 1946, cited in Walton, pp. 88-89.

2. Memo, Truman to James Byrnes, 5 January 1946, cited in Walton, p. 72.

3. See New York Times, 7,8,16,17 April 1968 for the then newly released material. The Times articles pointed out that feces were found on the window ledge and floor beneath the window Masaryk fell from, indicating violence. Eyewitness accounts were also offered.

4. Message, Kennan to State Department, 22 February 1966, cited in Nathan and Oliver, pp. 66-67.

5. From July 1947, U.S. Foreign Affairs, cited in Nathan and Oliver, pp. 89-90.

6. Cited in Nathan and Oliver, pp.126-32.

7. Ibid., pp. 433-34, emphasis in original.

8. Ibid., p. 219.

Lieutenant Colonel Alan L. Gropman (Ph.D., Tufts University) was an air operations staff officer at Headquarters USAFE, Ramstein Air Base, Germany, before his present assignment to attend Air War College. He served eight years in the C-130 in TAC and PACAF and also taught military, European, and minority history at the USAF Academy, Colonel Gropman is author of numerous articles and book reviews, and his book on Air Force racial integration will be published in early 1978.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor