A History of the World (84 page)

A Cold War with Tropical Interruptions

For many countries, and many brave people, the Cold War was not cold. It was hot enough in Korea and Vietnam, in Angola and Somalia, on the borders of China, across swathes of Latin America and in the Middle East. For rebels in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Afghanistan, it was a pulse-racing, lethal fight. It underpinned the deadly politics of the postwar Middle East, where America’s ally Israel
fought Arabs backed by the Russians, and Iranians fought Iraqis. It might have started as a struggle between two models of civilization, two leaderships, two capitals, but it sprawled so far and wide that for forty years there was hardly anywhere on earth unaffected. Because the central drama of nuclear bluff and escalation, a game of poker with the planet, was played out between small groups of men in offices in the United States and the USSR, it is easy to forget that the actual blood was being spilled almost everywhere else.

It had begun as a competition between two recent allies who were confused about just what they were doing. How great were their territorial claims to be? Was this an existential conflict about mankind’s future, and if so how far would each side go? Because of this confusion, the fifteen years from 1948 to 1963 were the Cold War’s most dangerous phase. After that, though America’s bloody and embarrassing Vietnam War was still to come, the fundamental military stalemate underlying the ‘balance of terror’ was clearly understood in Washington and Moscow, and the initial cautious steps towards nuclear treaties began. After the first explosions of thermonuclear devices – by the US in 1952, by the USSR nine months later, then again far more lethally by the Americans in 1954 – it was obvious that war between the two powers would probably end the human race. Their confrontation, therefore, had to be carried on by proxies, as well as in the slower, but ultimately decisive, field of economics.

This pattern became apparent even before the USSR, at least, had any real ability to launch nuclear attacks on its capitalist enemies. The Marshall Plan, under which the Americans funded Western European postwar reconstruction, had started in 1947 with help for Greece, where Communists and monarchists were fighting a civil war, and for Turkey, threatened by Stalin, who wanted Soviet bases for a Mediterranean fleet. The US deepened its involvement in Europe far beyond aid, when its Central Intelligence Agency, authorized afresh to engage in a huge range of subversion, sabotage and propaganda, intervened in the Italian elections of 1948 to frustrate a Communist victory there. In the same year, Stalin’s men showed themselves even more determined to hang onto their territorial gains of 1945 by authorizing a violent putsch against Czechoslovak democrats.

Both sides were forming wider alliances against the other. In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) formalized US
military protection for Western Europe, a huge relief for Europeans becoming fixated by the aggressive rhetoric and the tank divisions to the east of what Churchill called ‘the iron curtain’. The sheer size of Red Army forces meant no immediate response was needed, but the Warsaw Pact followed in 1955. Yet neither side was ready to contemplate direction military action against the other. This was less the residual sentiment between wartime allies than fear of the US atom bomb and exhaustion on the Russian side – they had lost something like ninety times as many people as the Americans – together with a brief period of optimism in Washington that a new United Nations might make war something for historians alone to study.

The first great test of this mutual wariness came with Stalin’s attempt to provoke a change in divided Germany. He tried to throttle the small enclave of West Berlin, deep inside the Communist ‘German Democratic Republic’, by blockading it of all supplies. His aim was probably to reopen the division of Germany and perhaps create a neutral buffer country, though he remained oddly convinced that Germans would eventually choose to come over to the Communist side. It did not work, however, thanks to a massive and long-sustained airlift. This brought the one-time allies nose to nose, but the USSR backed down in the spring of 1949 and West Berlin continued open for business, a magnet for democratic values, to which embarrassingly large numbers of people from the East fled.

It was on the other side of the world that the real fighting began. Europe was, for once, saved from being the front line and the zone of maximum danger. At the end of the war Korea, however, had both Red Army forces in the north and US forces, part of the anti-Japanese push, in the south. Though both superpowers pulled their troops out and agreed a division of the peninsula halfway down it, this left a right-wing regime in the south and an aggressive Communist one, led by Kim Il Sung, in the north. In 1950 he persuaded Stalin that he could seize the whole country very quickly. He nearly succeeded, and it was only thanks to a US-led landing behind the Communist front line that the tide of battle turned.

Now, however, Mao – whose story we shall come to later – intervened and three hundred thousand Chinese ‘volunteers’ poured over the border and shoved the Americans back, into a humiliating retreat. Fighting under the new, unfamiliar flag of the United Nations, US,
British and Australian troops eventually repulsed the Maoist forces. Washington could, of course, have used atomic bombs, but chose not to, and suffered a bloody and prolonged period of trench warfare instead.

Why? It could hardly have been the threat of a swift Soviet reprisal. We know now that Russian pilots were present over the skies of Korea; and the Russians had had a bomb of their own (thanks to their spies in the West) since the previous year, though they were not yet in a position to effectively challenge in a nuclear exchange. It was rather because the US did not want to set a precedent; the bomb was not to be used lightly, or merely to even the score in a conflict that did not touch America’s future. If it
were
to be used in this way, the Russians would eventually do the same. So the Korean War, bloody enough, ended in a stalemate close to the line where it had begun, and in the establishment of two regimes that would become caricatures of their sponsors – one, dourly and violently Stalinist, the other rampagingly capitalist.

From now on, the US and the USSR competed in a frantic arms race, involving not just nuclear warheads but submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, satellites, spy planes and hidden silos. But at the same time they searched restlessly around the world for allies to prop up and countries to bring over to their side, fomenting and supporting wars and dictatorships across Africa, Asia and South America. The United States intervened aggressively in Latin and South America, and supported the Shah of Iran and the southern part of former French Indochina, by now called Vietnam, as well as trying – mostly unsuccessfully – to court Arab countries. The USSR concentrated on her European satellites and two increasingly difficult relationships. The more important one was with her impetuous Communist ally, China; and the other was with the most independent-minded Communist country in Europe, Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, which had liberated itself from the Nazis without Soviet help and considered it had no need to kowtow to Moscow.

Both these countries became part of a wider movement which showed that, despite the appearance of world-threatening, globe-encircling superpower dominance, neither the United States nor the USSR was quite as strong as it looked. Countries whose leaders had sufficient self-confidence could dodge quite successfully between the
Bear and the Eagle; and even play them off against each other. In Indonesia in 1955, Yugoslavia and China had been among the countries meeting to form the Non-Aligned Group. There was India too, now a socialist republic but still within the British Commonwealth, determined to have good relations with Russia as well as with the West; and Egypt, whose nationalist leader Nasser would soon humiliate the old imperial powers, France and Britain, but would also spurn US aid in favour of Russian. When France left the military command structure of NATO in 1966, having recognized Maoist China, she too became more like a non-aligned power than a full part of the Western bloc.

In Africa, a long and often tragic struggle began for the fealty of former colonies. Would these new republics retain fond links with their European colonizers or declare themselves people’s republics and send their brightest and best to study Marxism-Leninism in Moscow?

Among the anticolonial parties across the continent, Africanists fought Marxists, while Western governments chose to turn a blind eye to one-party despotism, corruption and worse – the local dictator might be a bastard, but he was ‘our’ bastard. This allowed the rule of dictators such as Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire – the former Belgian Congo – Hastings Banda in Malawi and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya. On the Soviet side, the monstrous Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia and the weird, incompetent Marxists of Angola’s MPLA and of Mozambique’s Frelimo were backed by Moscow – without any great enthusiasm, but merely because the Cold War had to be fought everywhere, for every slab of baked soil and every hungry, wary child. In Angola, the United States had backed a rival nationalist guerrilla force, Unita, but as the African observer Richard Dowden mordantly put it, ‘It was hard to see what Angola gave the Soviet Union apart from bad debts and sun in winter for its generals.’
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The speed of decolonization, which catapulted into power across Africa groups and individuals who had not had the time or support to prepare for it, was also part of the Cold War story. This was not simply about European governments, from Lisbon to Brussels and London to Paris, scuttling because they no longer had the will to hold their old colonies against black liberation movements. It was as much because, focusing on the Communist threat, they had no stomach for wars against Soviet proxies and preferred to cut a deal early on with ‘pro-Western’
new rulers, in the hope that trade would continue, while the politics of the new country took second place.

The East–West confrontation allowed apartheid South Africa to keep both Britain and the US for a long time as unhappy ‘neutral friends’ because of its vehement anti-Communism. The Cold War permitted Robert Mugabe, the destroyer of Zimbabwe, to be tutored in Marxism even though he first thrust aside his overtly pro-Moscow rival Joshua Nkomo. As we tot up the sad history of misrule, corruption, racism, torture and waste in Africa’s twentieth century, many of the uncountable millions of African lives blighted during this period must also be added to the real cost of the Cold War.

Both sides, by the mid-1950s, had new leaderships struggling to find ways to cope with the balance of terror. In the US, Harry Truman, a tough-minded President who had nevertheless been heavily influenced by Roosevelt’s idealism, was replaced by Roosevelt’s old military commander, ‘Ike’ Eisenhower. To start with, at least, he held a more aggressive view of the possible use of nuclear weapons. And after Eisenhower, in 1961, would come a young Democrat, John F. Kennedy, who used soaring rhetoric about America’s global destiny as the champion of free people, and who would be pitched almost immediately into confrontation with Moscow.

Both these leaders faced in Nikita Khrushchev a bullfrog-like new Soviet leader, a genuine worker who had risen under Stalin and who acted with impetuosity (and some personal coarseness). At the beginning of Khrushchev’s rule, the USSR was still behind the West in missiles but was starting to catch up. The launch into space of Russia’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, and its Sputnik earth-orbiter, in 1957, was a terrible shock to Western politicians. Khrushchev believed that Soviet methods in science and economics could lead to the USSR overtaking the United States; meanwhile, he wanted a less terror-drenched atmosphere at home, denouncing the crimes and personality cult of Stalin in a secret speech to the ruling Communist Congress – though it didn’t stay secret for long.

But anyone who thought a slightly more liberal atmosphere implied any lessening of Moscow’s determination to hang onto its ‘socialist’ satellites was brutally disabused in 1956, when Soviet tanks crushed rebellion, and some twenty thousand people died.

In 1962, it was Khrushchev and Kennedy who brought the world
closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before – or, so far, since. The cause was Cuba, whose Marxist revolution under Fidel Castro the Americans had tried, and failed, to overthrow in a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev thought that shipping and installing Russian missiles on the island would be a good way to both protect his new Caribbean ally and to threaten America, which also had medium-range missiles aimed at the USSR, mostly in Turkey. This was a very ‘hot’ time in the Cold War; the Russians had tested a bigger bomb, had sent Yuri Gagarin aloft as the first man in space, while their East German allies had sealed off West Berlin with the notorious Wall, designed to stop a flood of emigrants. (The East German state had shrunk by two million citizens.)

These acts suggested that Communism was better-armed than ever, and more determined. The determination was real enough, but in fact the USSR was still far behind the Americans in missile capability; in Cuba, Khrushchev hoped to bolster Soviet prestige and encourage Latin American revolutionaries. Kennedy, too, expected this effect. He warned the Russians that if their supply ships carrying extra rockets to Cuba strayed beyond a certain line, he would attack them. He also insisted that the current sites be demolished. Torpedoing Russian ships would mean full-scale war. After Kennedy’s ultimatum, the world held its breath.

In the nick of time, Khrushchev backed down and the missile bases were dismantled, which seemed a great victory for the US President. It was – but his opposite number in the Kremlin ended up getting a lot of what he wanted, notably the removal of US missiles in Turkey and the acceptance that Castro’s Marxist regime was there to stay. A ‘hotline’ to connect the US and Soviet leaders was installed. There were still some very dangerous moments to come. They included the outbreak of fighting in 1969 between Chinese and Russian troops on their border, and the bloodiest, most painful US Cold War failure, the war to repel Communism in Vietnam. The conflict spread to Laos and Cambodia too, lasted from 1965 until 1975, and demonstrated conclusively that aerial bombardment cannot destroy guerrilla forces.