The Cold War: a Short History
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THE COLD WAR: A SHORT HISTORY Vladimir Moss © Copyright, all rights reserved: Vladimir Moss, 2017 1 2 OPENING MOVES (1945-1949) 4 I. KOREA, HUNGARY AND THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD (1949-1961) 22 II. CUBA, VIETNAM AND THE BOMB (1961-1973) 37 III. CAMBODIA, AFRICA AND DÉTENTE (1973-1979) 69 IV. POLAND, AFGHANISTAN AND PERESTROIKA (1979-1989) 96 ENDGAME (1989-1991) 114 3 OPENING GAMBIT (1945-1949) The Cold War was the longest military conflict of modern times, and probably the bloodiest if we take into account all the battlefields across the world on which it was fought. According to conventional wisdom, it began almost immediately after the end of the world war in 1945 and continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, according to another theory that commands respect, the war resumed in 2007 with Putin’s Munich speech, and 1991-2007 was only a hiatus in a long war that is not yet over. This little book covers the war in the period 1945-1991… Yuval Noah Harari has summarized it thus: “The Soviet Union entered the [Second World] war as an isolated communist pariah. It emerged as one of the two global superpowers and the leader of an expanding international bloc. By 1949 eastern Europe became a Soviet satellite, the Chinese communist party had won the Chinese Civil War, and the United States was gripped by anti-communist hysteria. Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires. As these empires collapsed they were usually replaced by either military dictatorships or socialist regimes, not liberal democracies. In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, confidently boasted to the liberal West that ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!’ “Khrushchev sincerely believed this, as did increasing numbers of Third World leaders and First World intellectuals. In the 1960s and 1970s the word ‘liberal’ became a term of abuse in many Western universities. North America and western Europe experienced growing social unrest as radical left-wing movements strove to undermine the liberal order. Students in Cambridge, the Sorbonne and the People’s Republic of Berkeley thumbed through Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and hung Che Guevara’s heroic portrait over their beds. In 1968 the wave crested with the outbreak of protests and riots all over the Western world. Mexican security forces killed dozens of students in the notorious Tlatelolco Massacre, the students in Rome fought the Italian police in the so-called Battle of Valle Giulia, and the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked days of riots and protests in more than a hundred American cities. In May students took over the streets of Paris, President de Gaulle fled to a French military base in Germany, and well-to-do French citizens trembled in their beds, having guillotine nightmares. “By 1970 the world contained 130 independent countries, but only thirty of these were liberal democracies, most of which were crammed into the north- western corner of Europe. India was the only important Third World country that committed to the liberal path after securing its independence, but even India distanced itself from the Western bloc and leaned towards the Soviets. “In 1975 the liberal camp suffered its most humiliating defeat of all: the Vietnam War ended with the North Vietnamese David overcoming the 4 American Goliath. In quick succession communism took over South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. On 17 April 1975 the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the Khmer Rouge. Two weeks later people all over the world watched on TV as helicopters evacuated the last Yankees from the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon. Many were certain that the American Empire was falling. Before anyone could say ‘domino theory’, in June Indira Gandhi proclaimed the Emergency in India, and it seemed that the world’s largest democracy was on its way to becoming yet another socialist dictatorship. “Liberal democracy increasingly looked like an exclusive club for ageing white imperialists who had little to offer the rest of the world or even to their own youth. Washington hailed itself as the leader of the free world, but most of its allies were either authoritarian kings (such as King Khaled of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan of Morocco and the Persian shah) or military dictators (such as the Greek colonels, General Pinochet in Chile, General Franco in Spain, General Park in South Korea, General Geisel in Brazil and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan). “Despite the support of all these kings and generals, militarily the Warsaw Pact had a huge numerical superiority over NATO. In order to reach parity in conventional armaments, Western countries would probably have had to scrap liberal democracy and the free market, and become totalitarian states on a permanent war footing. Liberal democracy was saved only by nuclear weapons. NATO adopted the MAD doctrine (Mutual Assured Destruction), according to which even conventional Soviet attacks would be answered by an all-out nuclear strike. ‘If you attack us,’ threatened the liberals, ‘we will make sure nobody comes out alive.’ Behind this monstrous shield liberal democracy and the free market managed to hold out in their last bastions, and Westerners got to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll, as well as washing machines, refrigerators and televisions. Without nukes there would have been no Beatles, no Woodstock and no overflowing supermarkets. But in the mid- 1970s it seemed that nuclear weapons notwithstanding, the future belonged to socialism… “And then everything changed. Liberal democracy crawled out of history’s dustbin, cleaned itself up and conquered the world. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag. The blitz-krieg began in southern Europe where the authoritarian regimes in Greece, Spain and Portugal collapsed, giving way to democratic governments. In 1977 Indira Gandhi ended the Emergency, re-establishing democracy in India. During the 1980s military dictatorships in East Asia and Latin America were replaced by democratic governments in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and South Korea. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the liberal wave turned into a veritable tsunami, sweeping away the mighty Soviet empire and raising expectations of the coming end of history. After decades of defeats and setbacks, liberalism won a decisive victory in the Cold War…”1 1 Harari, Homo Deus, London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 307-311. 5 * The new American President in 1945, Harry S. Truman, represented both the strengths and the weaknesses of the American state and people. After a hesitant start at Potsdam at which he displayed his predecessor’s underestimation of Stalin2, and an unnecessarily passive acceptance of the decision to drop the atom bomb on the Japanese, he acted decisively to stop Soviet expansion in Western Europe, Iran, Turkey and Greece, where he took the place of the exhausted and bankrupt British, thereby winning “the war of the British succession”.3 Displaying imagination and generosity, he approved the Marshall Plan for Europe, which was almost as important as American troops in saving the West from Soviet tyranny. Again, he displayed firmness and courage in defending South Korea from invasion from the North. By the Providence of God, he played the decisive role in shoring up the Western world against Stalin, the most evil and powerful dictator in history, fulfilling the vital function, if not of “him who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist (for such a role could be played only by an Orthodox Autocrat), at any rate of “world policeman”. For that, the whole world should be grateful to him and to the American people. Indeed, there can be no doubt that in a secular sense America saved humanity in the immediate post-war era. It is sufficient to imagine what the world would have been like if Stalin had not had had in the Americans a powerful and determined opponent, or how many millions would have starved to death if America had not “fed the world” in accordance with the 1911 prophecy of St. Aristocles of Moscow. Indeed, the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan and other American-sponsored initiatives, formed the basis for the greatest rise in prosperity in the whole of world history. However, two flaws were to become increasingly evident in America’s behaviour in the following decades. The first was her Rousseauist tendency to force people to be free by means that betrayed her own liberal ideals. And the second was the tendency to choose corrupt allies – Masonic businessmen, oil- rich kings, the kingdom of Mammon in general – to help her attain her generally well-intentioned ends… This second tendency was reflected in the life of America’s chief executive, President… Truman owed his rise in politics before the war to “Boss” Tom Pendergast, who, as Victor Sebestyen writes, “controlled Kansas City business and the State of Missouri’s elected offices. The Pendergast ‘machine’ was sophisticated. It went beyond stuffing ballot boxes and other vote-rigging tactics. It turned politics, prohibition, prostitution and gambling into thriving 2 “In 1948, talking about the Potsdam conference, he told a reporter that he knew Stalin well and that ‘I like old Joe’; the dictator, he maintained, was a decent sort who could not do as he wished because he was the Politburo’s prisoner. Here we are, back to the hawks and doves, a notion that the Soviets would always know how to play on to extort one-way concessions” (Jean-François Revel, How Democracies Perish, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985, p. 220). 3 Norman Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies, London: Penguin, 2010, p.