Abstract
The United States entered the first phase of the cold war with a reputation that both friends and adversaries probably regarded with some degree of puzzlement. One aspect of American foreign policy in the past three decades must have given considerable encouragement to Joseph Stalin and excited great anxiety among all those who hoped to resist him and the totalitarian system he embodied. In 1919, after intervening in Europe militarily for the first time, the Americans had repudiated the commitment urged on them by President Wilson and retreated into their traditional isolation. In the following years, at a time when ‘the world depended on the United States’ they acted, in the harsh words of one historian, like ‘a nation of Tom Sawyers turning a shrewd nickel, thumbing noses at the effete lords of the universe, protected by their oceans and their canny know-how from the consequences of their sassiness.’1 The effects of this abdication of responsibility were felt long afterwards. To cite only one example, when the Czechoslovaks deliberated in the summer of 1947 on whether to accept Marshall Plan assistance, one member of the parliament asked his colleagues ‘Is it worthwhile to [undermine] the certainty of the Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance, which we need against Germany, for such an uncertainty as is a proposition by Mr. Marshall, made at some American university which, similar to Wilson’s League, may not even be approved by the Senate?’2
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Notes
Laurence Lafore, The End of Glory: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War II (New York: Lippincott, 1970) pp. 40–1, 77.
This observation and the quotation following are taken from Ivo Duchacek, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Stephen Kertesz (ed.), The Fate of East Central Europe (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956) p. 198.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part III, chapters 22 and 24, Anchor Books edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969) pp. 645–6, 657.
Dana Adams Schmidt, Anatomy of a Satellite (Boston: Little Brown, 1952) p. 100–1. Stalin’s strategy appears to have changed shortly after this point and the greatest victims of that change were the Czechoslovaks.
Geir Lundestad, The American Non-Policy towards Eastern Europe 1943–1947 (Tromsoe: Universitetsforlaget, 1978) p. 185;
Richard Lukas, The Strange Allies: The United States and Poland, 1941–1945 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978) p. 38.
Roosevelt told Stalin that he ‘personally agreed’ that the Polish-Soviet boundary ought to be moved westward but could not make a formal statement of this because of domestic political considerations, that is, the Polish vote in the 1944 election. Martin Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966) p. 52.
Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) pp. 130–32;
Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence (New York: Praeger, 1974) pp. 352ff.
Quotation from Jan Novak in Michael Charlton (ed.), The Eagle and the Small Birds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 39.
Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953) pp. 122–7; Mastny, Russia’s Road, pp. 182–6; Charlton, Eagle and Small Birds pp. 41, 49; Lukas, Strange Allies, pp. 79–84. George Kennan would have gone farther than Churchill. He was prepared to cut off assistance to the USSR over this issue.
George Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (New York: Bantam, 1969) pp. 221–2.
Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War, p. 84; Mastny, Russia’s Road, pp. 245–48; Russell Buhite, Decision at Yalta: An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1986) p. 51.
Lynn Davis, The Cold War Begins (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974) pp. 183–4;
Andre Fontaine, History of the Cold War (New York: Random House, 1968) p. 228; Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War, pp. 82–5; Lukas, Strange Allies, p. 140.
Andre Fontaine, History of the Cold War (New York: Random House, 1968) p. 256. Kennan viewed the agreement on Poland as ‘the shabbiest sort of equivocation, certainly not calculated to pull the wool over the eyes of the Western public, but bound to have this effect.’ Memoirs, p. 222.
Bennet Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) p. 38; Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War, p. 86; Davis, Cold War Begins, pp. 202–3; Mastny, Russia’s Road, p. 257.
Susanne Lotarski, ‘The Communist Takeover in Poland’, in Thomas Hammond (ed.), The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975) p. 351; Mastny, Russia’s Road, pp. 260, 264; Davis, Cold War Begins, p. 213; Herz, Beginnings of Cold War, p. 94 and quotation on pp. 89–90; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp. 199, 212; Lukas, Strange Alliance, pp. 156–9. In Yugoslavia, Tito had nominated 21 members of the cabinet; Subasic, the non-communist exile leader, only 6. Herz, Beginnings of Cold War, pp. 91–2.
Kovrig, Myth of Liberation, pp. 24–5; Robert Wolff, The Balkans in our Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974) p. 286.
Stephan Fischer-Galati, Twentieth Century Rumania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) pp. 80–2; Wolff, Balkans in our Time, pp. 280–1; Kovrig, Myth of Liberation, p. 28.
Quotation from Stephen Fischer-Galati, The New Rumania (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967) pp. 28–9;
Mark Ethridge and C. E. Black, ‘Negotiating on the Balkans, 1945–1947,’ in Raymond Dennett and Joseph E. Johnson (eds), Negotiating with the Russians (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1951) p. 199; Davis, Cold War Begins, pp. 256, 261; Mastny, Russia’s Road, p. 256; see also Fischer-Galati, Twentieth Century Rumania, pp. 87–9.
For a different interpretation, see Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce (New York: Atheneum, 1987) pp. 283–5.
Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 369; Davis, Cold War Begins pp. 262–3; James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper & Row, 1947) p. 53; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp. 233–4, 238.
Wolff, Balkans in our Time, pp. 293–5; Davis, Cold War Begins, pp. 266–71; Mastny, Russia’s Road, pp. 197–202; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, p. 262; Robert Wolff, ‘Bulgaria,’ in Stephen Kertesz (ed.), The Fate of East-Central Europe (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956) p. 279; Ethridge and Black, ‘Negotiating on the Balkans’, pp. 189–90.
Davis, Cold War Begins, pp. 288–97; Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War, p. 140; William Taubman, Stalin’s American Policy (New York: Norton, 1982) p. 109; quotation from Taubman, p. 114.
Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp. 237–8, 268; Robert Wolff, ‘Rumania,’ in Stephen Kertesz (ed.), The Fate of East Central Europe (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956) p. 258.
Davis, Cold War Begins, pp. 320–1, 327–31; Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1951) pp. 207–8, 214–5; Robert Wolff, The Balkans in Our Time, p. 287–9; Kovrig, Myth of Liberation, pp. 58–9.
Jean Laloy, Yalta: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, William R. Tyler, translator (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) pp. 11–12, 26–7; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp. 183, 194, 437, 450; Wolff, Balkans in our Time, p. 286; Kennan, Memoirs, pp. 210–15.
Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962) p. 114.
After Yalta, when William Leahy expressed concern about the elasticity of the accords, Roosevelt responded: ‘I know Bill; I know it. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.’ Kovrig, Myth of Liberation, pp. 31–3; quotation p. 33. For a succinct defences of a fatalistic view, see Philip Mosely, The Kremlin and World Politics (New York: Vintage, 1960) pp. 203–4, 210–13
and Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973) pp. 177, 192.
Thomas, Armed Truce, p. 282; Paul Lendvai, Eagles in Cobwebs: Nationalism and Communism in the Balkans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) pp. 282–4; Kovrig, Myth of Liberation, pp. 31, 43.
David Alan Rosenberg, ‘The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy 1945–60’, International Security 7 (Spring 1983), p. 14.
Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) pp. 17–18, 260, 266 Foreign Relations of the United States 1946, volume VII (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1969) pp. 821–2, 837.
Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950) p. 53.
Alvin Rubinstein, Soviet Policy toward Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan (New York: Praeger, 1982) p. 3. Stalin’s interest in the straits had been restated in the discussions with the Germans shortly before Hitler’s invasion of Russia.
See William Hyland, The Cold War is Over (New York: Random House, 1990) pp. 28–9.
Mark Lytle, The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1941–1953 (London: Holmes & Meier, 1987) pp. 139–40, 143–5, 151, 162, 174–8, 181; ; Kuniholm, Cold War in Near East, p. 377
Ferenc Vali, The Turkish Straits and NATO (Stanford, Cal.: Hoover Institution, 1972) pp. 68–9.
George S. Harris, Troubled Alliance: Turkish-American Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945–1971 (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1972) pp. 15–17; Vali, Turkish Straits, pp. 68–70.
Rouhollah Ramazani, Iran’s Foreign Policy, 1941–1973 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975) pp. 138–9.
Kuross Samii, Involvement by Invitation: American Strategies of Containment in Iran (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987) pp. 81–2; Ramazani, Iran’s Foreign Policy, p. 139; Ramazani, ‘Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan’, pp. 465–7; Foreign Relations of the Unites States 1946, volume VII, pp. 348–9.
This is the interpretation of Lewis Thomas and Richard Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951) pp. 239–41.
Kuniholm, Cold War in Near East, pp. 335–6, 362–5; George Harris, Troubled Alliance, pp. 20–2; John Spanier, American Foreign Policy since World War II, 10th edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985) pp. 22–3;
quotation from Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror (New York: Norton, 1970) p. 182.
William Hyland, The Cold War Is Over (New York: Random House, 1990) pp. 41–3.
Robert Jervis, ‘Deterrence and Perception’, in Steven E. Miller (ed.), Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) pp. 78–81.
Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) pp. 231, 238–9;
C. M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History, fourth edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1986) p. 259.
Quoted in Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986) pp. 29–32.
Kovrig, Communism in Hungary (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1979) p. 185.
Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc, p. 21, also pp. 37, 108–9; Stephen Kertesz, ‘Hungary’, in Stephen Kertesz (ed.), The Fate of East Central Europe (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956) pp. 228–9; Bennet Kovrig, Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kadar, pp. 159–61; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp. 117–21.
Fontaine, History of the Cold War, pp. 342–3; Schmidt, Anatomy of a Satellite, pp. 109–10; Josef Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959) pp. 213–4, 224–5;
Paul Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovkia, 1918–48 (New York: Praeger, 1963) pp. 198–207.
Edward Taborsky, Communism in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961) pp. 13–15; Korbel, Communist Subversion, pp. 133–37; Schmidt, Anatomy of a Satellite, pp. 93, 97; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, p. 161.
Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia1945–1948 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987) p. 3.
R. V. Burks, ‘Eastern Europe’, in Cyril Black and Thomas Thornton (eds), Communism and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) pp. 107–8; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp, 450, 461–2,465.
Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics, p. 231; Taborsky, Communism in Czechoslovakia, pp. 15–16; Ivo Duchacek, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Stephen Kertesz (ed.), The Fate of East-Central Europe (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956) pp. 210–11; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, pp. 460–1; Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc, pp. 81–2.
Pavel Tigrid, ‘The Prague Coup of 1948: The Elegant Takeover’, in The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers, p. 429. See also Hubert Ripka, Czechoslovakia Enslaved (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950) p. 307.
Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) p. 662.
Tigrid, ‘Prague Coup’, pp. 408–9; Walter Ullmann, The United States in Prague 1945–48 (Boulder, Colorado: Eastern European Quarterly, 1978) pp. 136–7.
W. Phillips Davison, The Berlin Blockade: A Study in Cold War Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958) pp. 18–20.
Philip Windsor, City on Leave: A History of Berlin 1945–1962 (New York: Praeger, 1963) pp. 78, 87–8, 96–8; Davison, Berlin Blockade, pp. 22–26, 144–5, with quotation by Clay on p. 75; Schmidt, Anatomy of a Satellite, p. 101.
Hannes Adomeit, Soviet Risk-Taking and Crisis Behavior (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982) pp. 162–71.
John Gaddis, ‘The Origins of Self-Deterrence’, in John Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) p. 109;
Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945–50 (New York: Knopf, 1980) pp. 246–7, 260; Adomeit, Soviet Risk-Taking, pp. 142–4, 159 (footnotes 156 and 157), 181.
Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1950) p. 354.
Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 210–11; Davison, Berlin Blockade, pp. 126, 150–1, 157; quotation from Shlaim, p. 210.
Richard Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington: Brookings, 1987) pp. 24–9; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945–50, pp. 256–62.
Orjan Berner, Soviet Policies toward the Nordic Countries (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986) pp. 37–8, 46, 47–9;
Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962) p. 155; Thomas, Armed Truce, pp. 312–15;
John Vloyantes, Silk Glove Hegemony (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1975) p. 42;
Kevin Devlin, ‘Finland in 1948: The Lessons of a Crisis’, in Thomas Hammond (ed.), The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) p. 441;
John Wuorinen, ‘Finland’, in Stephen Kertesz (ed.), The Fate of East Central Europe, (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956) pp. 330–1.
Hans Peter Krosby, ‘The Communist Bid for Power in Finland’, Political Science Quarterly 75 (June 1960) p. 241; Vloyantes, Silk Glove Hegemony, p. 42.
Roy Allison, Finland’s Relations with the Soviet Union1944–1984 (London: Macmillan, 1985) p. 27.
George Maude, The Finnish Dilemma: Neutrality in the Shadow of Power (London: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 11; Foreign Relations of the United States 1948, Volume IV (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1974) pp. 759, 765, 769–70. Krosby, ‘Communist Bid for Power’, pp. 232–5; Allison, Finland’s Relations with the Soviet Union, pp. 21, 29.
Max Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality: A Study of Finnish Foreign Policy since the Second World War (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1968) pp. 38, 42; Maude, Finnish Dilemma, p. 12; Berner, Soviet Policies toward Nordic Countries, pp. 49–50.
James Billington, ‘Finland’, in Cyril Black and Thomas Thornton (eds), Communism and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) pp. 127–8; Krosby, ‘Communist Bid for Power’, p. 236.
Krosby, ‘Communist Bid for Power’, pp. 236–8; Billington, ‘Finland’, p. 129; Bengt Matti, ‘Finland’, in William Griffith (ed.), Communism in Europe, vol. 2 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966) p. 386.
See below. This is corroborated by the evidence presented by the former Polish military attache in North Korea, Pawel Monat. Chong-Sik Lee and Robert Scalopino, Communism in Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) pp. 394–5.
Lee and Scalopino, Communism in Korea, pp. 383, 393, 401–4, 923; Gye-Dong Kim, ‘Who Initiated the Korean War?’ in James Cotton and Ian Neary (eds), The Korean War in History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989) p. 34.
Chong-Sik Lee, ‘The Origins of the Korean War: A Reflection’, unpublished paper, pp. 30–2; Robert Slusser, ‘Soviet Far Eastern Policy, 1945–50’, in Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye (eds), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) pp. 141–2;
Max Beloff, Soviet Policy in the Far East, 1944–51 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953) pp. 71, 74–5.
William Stueck, The Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward China and Korea 1947–50 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) pp. 154–5.
John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989) p. 49; Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, pp. 519–20.
Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence (New York: Praeger, 1974) pp. 410, 519–20. These factors would appear to offset the presumably positive effects of earlier signs of resolve: the dispatch of B-29 bombers to England during the Berlin crisis and the steps toward the formation of NATO in 1949. Gaddis, ‘Origins of Self-Deterrence’, p. 110.
Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Harper, 1967) pp. 204–6;
Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) pp. 537–8;
Richard Whelan, Drawing the Line: The Korean War, 1950–1953 (Boston: Little Brown, 1990) pp. 89–94.
Strobe Talbott, translator and editor, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston; Little Brown, 1970) pp. 367–73.
Charlton (ed.), Eagle and the Small Birds, pp. 9, 78; Bela Kiraly, ‘The Aborted Soviet Military Plans against Tito’s Yugoslavia’, in Wayne Vucinich (ed.), At the Brink of War and Peace: The Tito-Stalin Split in Historical Perspective (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1982) pp. 286–8;
Vladimir Dedijer, The Battle Stalin Lost: Memoirs of Yugoslavia 1948–53 (New York: Viking Press, 1971) pp. 278–9.
Philip Windsor, ‘Yugoslavia, 1951, and Czechoslovakia, 1968’, in Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan (eds), Force without War: U. S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington: Brookings, 1978) p. 446;
John C. Campbell, Tito’s Separate Road (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) pp. 19–20, 24.
Campbell, Tito’s Separate Road, pp. 22–4; Windsor, ‘Yugoslavia, 1951’, pp. 453–7. Quotation from Josef Korbel, Tito’s Communism (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1951) p. 340.
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Orme, J.D. (1992). The Pearl Harbor Reaction. In: Deterrence, Reputation and Cold-War Cycles. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12794-8_2
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