Ideas Shaping U.S. Involvement in the Cold War

Mark, Welcome back.

Thank you very much, Harry.

In our last interview, we talked about writing about foreign policy and your works on Haiti, and a little on your work on Bosnia, which we will talk about more. Let's talk more about foreign policy, because you have written about NATO and made some telling observations about U.S. foreign policy. Among other things, ideas play a role in the making of foreign policy. In our history, what ideas have mattered?

The United States, of course, is a country founded on idea. An idea of equality. Not only equality in the Americas, but universal equality. One can identify two phases in the history of the United States in foreign policy and ideas. The first is the notion of the United States as an example for the world; what Daniel Webster called "the shining example for the world to view." I would call that a period of self-sufficiency. The United States -- many of its leaders, in any event -- thought that the United States should not go off and "seek out monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams wrote most famously, but should, by its own system, by its own behavior, by the perfection of the government that it had created, serve as an example to other nations, and also affect their own development.

This lasted roughly until this century, until what's known as the Spanish-American war. Then you begin to have the period of the United States as a world power: the U.S. actually taking its role in the world and having a material effect on other countries. You have Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, and the interventions in Spain, as I mentioned, and World War I, in which the United States was absolutely determinative on the Continent in ending the war. But after which, the U.S., following an enormous struggle between Wilson and the Senate, withdrew from the Continent.

Then finally [came] the stage that we remain in now, despite all the discussion about the post - Cold War world, and that is the U.S. as ideological power in the world, as power advancing democracy. Power advancing liberty. The implications of those ideas are very real, because they link to and dovetail with the great problem that has dominated the history of this century: How does a democracy behave as a world power?

And in the second manifestation, Woodrow Wilson is an important figure in, some might say, overstating the case for remaking the world in our image.

I think you've summarized that perfectly. When you look at the history of this century, Wilson's project, of course, was a failure. He failed to integrate the United States into the League of Nations, which was the first large multilateral institution, and in so doing, in retrospect, he really made World War II inevitable. He withdrew American power from Europe, and the power vacuum in the East eventually was filled by the Nazis and the Soviets. The men (and they were entirely a group of men) who put together the postwar system that in many ways we still live under (or perhaps I should say we see it crumbling now), included Dean Acheson; Harry Truman, obviously the key president of the time; George Marshall; George Kennan. All of these men were young men after World War I -- Franklin Roosevelt also -- who remembered very well the failure of Wilson, and were determined not to repeat it. The question for them came down to: How do we convince the American public?

The United States had a worldwide role to play. Not only because the U.S. reached a point where it was obvious, because of its power and its might, that it must take its role in the world stage, but also to ensure the peace, to prevent another war. They took this for granted. The key question for them was: How do we convince the American public? FDR in particular had great suspicions that the American public was inherently isolationist, and feared that the response after the Second World War would be a return to America. You see this between the years 1945 and 1950, this effort to develop an ideology that would both convince the public and put forward a rationale for U.S. action in the world.

In your article on NATO you focus on this very period, and find the historical turning point in Truman's speech to the Congress in which he asks for aid for Southern Europe, especially Greece. Tell us a little about that and your elucidation of the way he articulated the need for America to respond to these world events.

To sketch out the actual situation, which is familiar: There were wars going on, particularly in Greece, a communist insurgency, instability in Turkey. The British ambassador came to Dean Acheson and said, to paraphrase: You know this has been our sphere of influence; we have kept control of these things but we're paid out, we have no more money, we have no more will, we can not take responsibility for this. And this was during a very, very compressed period in the beginning of 1947.

The United Stated could have responded in at least one of two ways. One way was to take on the burden of Greece and Turkey and to give them aid and to try to see to it that they remained in the Western camp. The other way was to do what eventually happened, which was to use the example of Greece and Turkey to set forth a worldwide mission, an ideological mission. And, indeed, when Harry Truman came to the Congress in March of 1947 and made his famous speech, which we now know as the Truman Doctrine, he did precisely that. He set forth a worldwide mission. I'll read you the quotation, which is rather famous -- what Clark Clifford, his advisor who wrote it, called the credo of the speech, speaking in religious language. This is what Truman said:

I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Now, it's important to realize that this was a universalist project. He spoke much more broadly. And I'll read a couple of other sentences, if I may:

At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections. The second way of life is based upon the will of the minority, forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and etc. I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

This reaction by Truman was very controversial at the time. George Kennan, for example, Walter Lippmann, and other very famous thinkers in foreign affairs opposed it. They felt it would saddle the United States with a worldwide burden. Essentially, there are no limits imposed at all.

A free people struggling anywhere in the world.

Anywhere. In other words, there was no statement of the zone of influence. No statement that Europe is somewhere we regard as our own backyard, and so on. Nothing. Simply a universalist mission. We can talk about how this had implications and consequences that I think were dangerous for American foreign policy, but at the time, the reason for it was fairly clear. The United States and the Truman administration, officials of the Truman administration in particular, wanted to engage the American public in a mission, to convince the public that the United States had a role to play in the world.

Arthur Vandenberg, a very powerful Republican Senator from Michigan, [met with] the president and Dean Acheson, and Acheson [talked about] a theory of "rotten apples" (this is the early domino theory). He talked about Greece, Turkey, and how they'd infect the whole barrel. All of Europe would be infected. Then Vandenberg said, "You know, Mr. President, you say this to the American people and we'll get you your money." Acheson later talked about this speech as making the world situation for Americans "clearer than truth." Clearer than truth. In other words, it was an attempt to convince people by overstating the case.

This was a very large idea which took the idealism of Woodrow Wilson, which saw America on a worldwide mission to change the world -- and also took a bit of what I've identified as the nineteenth century's idea of America as a shining example -- and melded it to a geopolitical realist mission to oppose the Soviet Union. So, it actually was perfect. These two things were brought together, knitted together, and worked very well in building a consensus for half a century. Vietnam helped to split it, needless to say.

So Truman, at least in the short term, successfully solved a problem that political leaders have when they make foreign policy in a democracy. He embedded his policy in domestic politics in order to gain public consensus and support for his goals.

Absolutely. I think you've summarized it perfectly. Sometimes I call this the Athenian problem, because it certainly goes back at least as far as Thucidides' account of the Peloponnesian War: How do you reconcile a city-state like Athens, a democratic state which also has an empire? It presents very obvious problems. And the solution here was, in part, the Truman Doctrine: to engage the citizenry in a particular mission. It was very, very successful as a rhetorical argument. Of course, I want to underline the fact that the Soviet Union did exist. A struggle was going on between the United States and the Soviets, [and not simply] a rhetorical struggle. But we are talking here about ideas, and this a certainly the key one.

You write in your article on NATO in World Policy: "In a democracy, words should serve as instruments that people apply to explain and promote interest, not empty slogans that saddle and imprison those that use them." At some point, down the road, that began to happen, even with the containment policy.

An interesting problem was set up that probably people like Walter Lippmann and George Kennan anticipated: if you set yourself a universal burden to defend peace, to defend democracy wherever it may be threatened, you are guaranteeing that you are going to fail. You are setting yourself obligations that the country cannot fulfill. And it was only two years before the largest, most brutal, and most dramatic example of this came crashing into the American political consciousness: the so-called loss of China. Now, the United States did not "lose" China. The China revolution was an enormous struggle, a phenomenon that the United States could do very little to affect. But partly because the Democrats, in particular, had set forth their worldwide mission to protect democracies, this became a political defeat which could be hung around the neck of the Democrats.

I want to emphasize this is not simply the Truman Doctrine, but it made it much, much worse. It became a political nightmare that was very much in the minds of Democratic presidents in the early sixties, both Kennedy and Johnson, when they confronted Vietnam. This isn't a supposition; they said it. Kennedy said, shortly before he was assassinated, that if he tried to withdraw now, he'd have a full-scale "McCarthy thing" on his hands, meaning he'd be attacked as "losing China" once again. Johnson said, "If I tried to withdraw, they'd impeach." They'd impeach a president who tried to withdraw, wouldn't they? Both of them were very aware, as politicians who'd grown up during the McCarthy period, of the implications of moving backward and seeming to lose, or seeming to throw off the obligations of America's worldwide mission. So, it's almost as if this obligation that was put forward by Harry Truman so eloquently came back and bit his successors.

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