THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (13 page)

Bearing this in mind, is not the answer to the tedious controversy over who is responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, that “responsibility” lay in simply continuing to assert the claims of legitimacy that preceded the Second World War? These claims conflicted because they were asserted beyond the sovereignties of the democracies and the socialist states, over divided states—like Germany, Korea, and Viet Nam—and over emerging new states—chiefly in the Third World, where the legitimacy of the constitutional order was in play.

T
HE
L
ONG
W
AR
now continued because it had not truly been ended. In the closing months of World War II the Red Army advanced over 1,500 miles west from Stalingrad to Berlin and beyond. Agreements reached at the Yalta Conference provided that the states thus overrun by the Soviet Army would be permitted to organize themselves according to free elections. The Soviet Union, however, relying on local communist parties in these states, set about creating regimes that would be exclusively communist in character, and that did not depend on—indeed, would not permit—the legitimacy conferred by an open electoral process. This was most dramatically demonstrated in Poland where, in January of 1945, Stalin recognized the communist-dominated Lublin Committee as the rightful government of Poland and then promised at Yalta the following February to include representatives of the government-in-exile in London in the new Polish government. Stalin continued to work for a purely communist constitutional arrangement on the basis of which, rather than through parliamentary elections, the legitimacy of the state was to be assured.

At the time of the Potsdam Conference in August, the Allies made two decisions that, though not explicitly connected, interacted so as to ensure that the Long War would not be ended at this stage. First, detailed arrangements were made for the temporary occupation of Germany according to four zones of authority, corresponding to the four great powers of the United Nations alliance (the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and the USSR). Berlin lay deep within the eastern zone that was to be governed by the Soviet Union but the city itself was also divided into four zones, each allocated to one of the Allied powers. All parties agreed that a peace settlement would follow, uniting Germany as a whole; in the interim, Germany was to be treated as a single economic unit.

Second, the British, French, and American powers agreed to a substantial extension of Polish borders westward into what had been Germany, on
condition that the Soviet Union renew its pledge to provide a role for noncommunist groups in the new interim Polish government, and to permit free elections, universal suffrage, and secret ballots for the selection of the permanent government. These elections were never held, and the noncommunist elements in Poland were liquidated. In February 1946, Stalin gave a widely publicized address saying that the Soviet Union had to remain prepared for war with the capitalist nations. The intentions behind this speech are still a matter of dispute, but its effect was to send shock waves through Washington. The next month, Churchill delivered his celebrated Fulton, Missouri, speech declaring that

By 1947, communist governments had indeed been set up, under strict control by the Soviet Union, in Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and in the Soviet zone in Germany, and where noncommunist parties had been included in the governing coalitions of these states, they were removed. The next year a murderous coup d'état brought communists to power in Czechoslovakia. In none of these states thereafter were parliamentary-style elections ever conducted. State terror, state-controlled media of expression, and single-party politics became the pattern for each of these states. In reaction the Western allies refused to proceed toward the unification of Germany and instead set up parliamentary constitutional institutions in the western zones of Germany, virtually creating a new German state.

This familiar chronology accounts for there being no peace treaty ending World War II among all the Allies: the Western states did not wish to ratify the subjugation and deformation of the states of Central and Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union was unwilling to risk independent states in the region, a real possibility any time free elections might have been held to constitute a government. Yet these two steps were linked: unless the USSR held free elections, the West would never recognize the governments that held power in these states. Therefore there was no formula for compromise on a unified German state. The Second World War had stopped with an invitation to contend further.

That a Cold War followed therefore poses two questions: Even if there was to be no peace, was there really war? In other words, how can
war
be
cold? And if there was war, why was it
cold
, that is, why wasn't it fought across the plains of Europe with the million-man armies that had contested two prior episodes? In my opinion, decisions taken by the United States are responsible for both these outcomes, ensuring that the Long War would be continued and that it would be “cold.” First, on March 12, 1947, President Truman stated in a speech to Congress:

The immediately precipitating event for this statement was communist assistance to guerilla movements in Greece and Turkey and the continued Russian occupation of northern Iran. The immediate consequence of the Truman Doctrine, as it came shortly to be called, was a grant of about $400 million (or the equivalent of $2 billion in current dollars) to the governments of Greece and Turkey.

Three months later, in another act of resistance, the American secretary of state, George Marshall, announced a plan for European recovery. Altogether about $12.5 billion (or roughly $60 billion in current dollars) was sent on Western countries over the next three years.

Nor were the Russians deceived as to the import of these steps: it was war. At the refounding conference of the Comintern in September, Malenkov—who would later briefly succeed Stalin—replied:

In Chapter
5
, I will venture some guesses as to why the United States decided to contest the issue of what system—parliamentary and capitalist or communist and socialist—would prevail in Europe. In Germany, the contest had begun as a domestic one; it couldn't be avoided in 1914 or in 1933. The same was true of other states—Russia, Spain, Italy—that were drawn into the Long War. But the United States was not threatened with a change in its own system, as were the states that chose to resist in the various campaigns of the Long War—France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. For the moment, let us take as given that the United States did decide to resist, and that this converted the mere absence of peace into war.

The second issue is why this war remained “cold.” Like the decision to contest the unconsummated outcome of the Second World War, the decision to refrain from an armed conflict in Europe also required the commitment of two parties. On the American side, war meant (i) extending nuclear deterrence to Europe and Japan; (2) restoring conventional force levels in Western Europe to credible size so that this extension of nuclear deterrence could function; (3) refraining from initiating the use of force in Europe; and (4) accepting the challenge in “hot” campaigns outside Europe. If the war remained “cold,” the United States believed it stood a good chance to win it because the issues, moral and political and economic, that kept the Long War going were thought to favor the West. Because the Long War was essentially constitutional in nature, only a profound change in the Russian polity was certain to resolve it. The leadership of the United States believed such a change would ultimately come about (just as their adversaries not implausibly believed the reverse).

This attitude on the part of the Americans is clearly reflected in NSC 68, the strategic planning document that was drafted to govern U.S. policy from 1950 onward:

In Germany and Japan total defeat had allowed such a remaking of the basis of constitutional norms. After the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, however, that sort of victory was never an option because a total defeat requires a total war. The United States could not afford to risk such a conflict with a nuclear power capable of striking the U.S. homeland and destroying it. What was needed was a change of heart on the part of the persons enabling the Communist system to continue.

For the Soviet Union the commitment to contend with the West in the face of enormous hostile force (including nuclear weapons) meant: (1) developing a nuclear threat against the U.S. homeland; (2) maintaining force levels sufficient to prevent successful uprisings in the Eastern European client states and to deter any Western assistance to such uprisings; (3) refraining from any threat to the U.S. of sufficient imminence to overcome the American commitment to containment and risk the actual outbreak of hostilities in a central theatre; and (4) pressing the West wherever possible in Third World theatres.

The necessity of these particular elements of the Cold War strategies of the United States and the USSR may not be obvious, and so a little time can be spent on briefly explaining them. The important point, however, is that they can be seen to operate in each of the major crises of the Cold War, crises that took the place of battles in the various campaigns in this phase of the Long War.

To the extent that American and Soviet policy makers confronted a symmetrical set of problems in a bipolar world, their policies can be discussed in this paired, complementary way. First, with regard to the role of nuclear weapons: for the United States to maintain the conflict but avoid battle, it had to deploy a force sufficient to deter attacks by the Red Army and also sufficient to prevent the development of a West German nuclear force that would otherwise be inevitably raised to defend the Federal Republic of Germany from Soviet coercion. This deterrence was impossible to accomplish with U.S. ground forces alone, owing to the large numbers of troops required. The American public would not, in the decades-long struggle that evolved, have stationed such a vast armed force abroad. Only by developing and deploying nuclear weapons to defend American allies, rather than just the American homeland, could the United States field a force that would accomplish its strategic objectives. By the same token, the Soviet Union could not permit the United States to enjoy a continental sanctuary in case of a European conflict. Long-range nuclear weapons were the only way for the Soviet Union to take the threat of a hot war to the American continent and thus be assured of a cold war in Europe.

Second, with respect to force levels in Europe: once the U.S. homeland became vulnerable, the United States could not make its nuclear threat credible on behalf of Europe unless there were also ground forces under U.S. command in Europe that could both parry modest conventional threats (without forcing the United States to commit to a nuclear attack in political circumstances that would not justify such devastation) while at the same time serving as hostages whose destruction by a large-scale Soviet ground attack would immediately create the political will to ensure a nuclear American response.
⁵
On the Soviet side, the USSR had to maintain forces large enough both to deter national uprisings—a mission that did not require vast manpower—and to check any temptation by the West to assist such uprisings—which might require large forces—and to exercise some coercive political influence over Western European states, espe-cially West Germany. To do less imposed enormous risks, because if the satellite states were to spin out of the Russian orbit, only a force of World War II proportions could bring them back in.