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Two years later, Churchill made the same plea in the House of Commons: the democracies were quite strong enough to negotiate, and would only weaken themselves by waiting. In a speech defending NATO rearmament on November 30, 1950, he warned that arming the West would not by itself change its bargaining position, which, in the end, depended on America's atomic monopoly:

> [W]hile it is right to build up our forces as fast as we can, nothing in this process, in the period I have mentioned, will deprive Russia of effective superiority in what are now called the conventional arms. All that it will do is to give us increasing unity in Europe and magnify the deterrents against aggression. . . . Therefore I am in favour of efforts to reach a settlement with Soviet Russia as soon as a suitable opportunity presents itself, and of making those efforts while the immense and measureless superiority of the United States atomic bomb organization offsets the Soviet predominance in every other military respect.

For Churchill, a position of strength was already in place; for American leaders, it had yet to be created. Churchill thought of negotiations as a way of relating power to diplomacy. And though he was never specific, his public statements strongly suggest that he envisaged some kind of diplomatic ultimatum by the Western democracies. American leaders recoiled before employing their atomic monopoly, even as a threat. Churchill wanted to shrink the area of Soviet influence, but was prepared to coexist with Soviet power within reduced limits. The American

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leaders had a nearly visceral dislike of spheres of influence. They wanted to destroy and not to shrink their adversary's sphere. Their preference was to wait for total victory and for the collapse of communism, however far off, to bring about a Wilsonian solution to the problem of world order.

The disagreement came down to a difference between the historical experiences of Great Britain and America. Churchill's society was all too familiar with imperfect outcomes; Truman and his advisers came from a tradition in which, once a problem had been recognized, it was usually overcome by the deployment of vast resources. Hence America's preference for final resolutions and its distrust of the sort of compromise that had become a British specialty. The American view prevailed, because America was stronger than Great Britain, and because Churchill, as the leader of the British Opposition, was in no position to press his strategy.

## Henry Wallace and the Radical Tradition

In the end, the most vocal and persistent challenge to American policy came from neither the realist school of Lippmann nor Churchill's balance-of-power thinking, but from a tradition with roots deep within American radical thought. Whereas Lippmann and Churchill accepted the Truman Administration's premise that Soviet expansionism represented a serious challenge and only contested the strategy for resisting it, the radical critics rejected every aspect of Containment. Henry Wallace, Vice

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Soviet postwar repression was becoming increasingly obvious and the brutality of collectivization was widely recognized, Wallace declared that "the Russians today have more of the political freedoms than they ever had." He also discovered "increasingly the signs of religious toleration" in the U.S.S.R. and claimed that there was a "basic lack of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union." Wallace thought that Soviet policy was driven less by expansionism than by fear. In his speech at Madison Square Garden in August 1946, Wallace laid down a direct challenge to Truman, which caused the president to demand Wallace's resignation:

> We may not like what Russia does in Eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation, and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. But whether we like it or not the Russians will try to socialize their sphere of influence just as we try to democratize our sphere of influence. . . . Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free enterprise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance.

In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe on practical grounds, while the administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet

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sphere on moral grounds.

Wallace's challenge collapsed after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea. As a presidential candidate in 1948, he gained only 1 million votes —most of them in New York— against more than 24 million for Truman, placing him fourth. Nevertheless, Wallace managed to develop themes that would remain staples of the American radical critique throughout the Cold War and move to center stage during the Vietnam War. These emphasized America's moral inadequacies and those of the friends it was supporting; a basic moral equivalence between America and its communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. When aid to Greece and Turkey was first being proposed, Wallace urged the Truman administration to put the issue before the United Nations. If "the Russians exercised their veto, the moral burden would be on them... When we act independently ... the moral burden is on us." Seizing the moral high ground meant more than whether America's geopolitical interests were being safeguarded.

Though Wallace's radical critique of American postwar foreign policy was defeated in the 1940s, its basic tenets reflected a deep strain of American idealism that continued to tug at the nation's soul. The same moral convictions that had conferred such energy on America's international commitments also had the

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direct threats to American security were difficult to demonstrate.

America found itself drawn into wars in areas not protected by alliances and on behalf of ambiguous causes and inconclusive outcomes. From Korea to Vietnam, these enterprises kept alive the radical critique, which continued to question the moral validity of Containment. Thus surfaced a new variant of American exceptionalism. With all of its imperfections, the America of the nineteenth century had thought of itself as the beacon of liberty; in the 1960s and 1970s, the torch was said to be flickering and would need to be relit before America could return to its historical role as an inspiration to the cause of freedom. The debate over Containment turned into a struggle for the very soul of America. As early as 1957, even George Kennan had come to reinterpret Containment in this light when he wrote: "To my own countrymen who have often asked me where best to apply the hand to counter the Soviet threat, I have accordingly had to reply: to our American failings, to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes, or that worry us; to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding."

A decade earlier, before he had become disillusioned by what he considered the militarization of his invention, George Kennan would have recognized that no such choice existed. A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security. It was a measure of

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Kennan's achievement that, by 1957, all of the free world's parapets had been manned, his own views having made a decisive contribution to this effort. The parapets were in fact being manned so effectively that America permitted itself to indulge in a hefty dose of self-criticism.

Containment was an extraordinary theory--at once hardheaded and idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet motivations yet curiously abstract in its prescriptions. Thoroughly American in its utopianism, it assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in an essentially benign way. Although this doctrine was formulated at the height of America's absolute power, it preached America's relative weakness. Postulating a grand diplomatic encounter at the moment of its culmination, Containment allowed no role for diplomacy until the climactic final scene in which the men in the white hats accepted the conversion of the men in the black hats. With all of these qualifications, Containment was a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of construction, struggle and, ultimately, triumph. The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the peoples America had set out to defend--on the whole successfully--but the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do.

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Chapter for comparison

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Success and the Pain
of Containment

In late 1945, American policymakers were at a loss. Potsdam and the ensuing foreign ministers' conferences had come to naught. Stalin seemed to be imposing his will on Eastern Europe without any regard for American pieties about democracy. In Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, American diplomats were consistently being met with Soviet intransigence. In a defeated Germany and Italy, Moscow seemed to have forgotten the meaning of the word "partnership." What were American policymakers to make of all this?

In the spring of 1946, Truman began to resolve this question when he launched a "get-tough" policy by successfully demanding the Soviet evacuation of Azerbaijan. But he did so within the Wilsonian mold. Like Roosevelt, Truman rejected the balance of power, disdained justifying American actions in terms of security, and sought whenever possible to

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THE SUCCESS AND THE PAIN OF CONTAINMENT

attach them to general principles applicable to all mankind and in keeping with the new United Nations Charter. Truman perceived the emerging struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as a contest between good and evil, not as having to do with spheres of political influence.

Yet spheres of influence were in fact emerging, no matter what American statesmen called them, and they were to remain in place until the collapse of communism four decades later. Under United States leadership, the Western occupation zones of Germany were consolidated, while the Soviet Union turned the countries of Eastern Europe into its appendages. The erstwhile Axis Powers—Italy, Japan, and, after 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany—gradually moved toward alliance with the United States. Although the Soviet Union cemented its dominance over Eastern Europe by means of the Warsaw Pact, this nominal alliance was obviously being held together by coercion. At the same time, the Kremlin tried its utmost to interrupt the process of Western consolidation by fostering a guerrilla war in Greece and by encouraging mass demonstrations by West European Communist parties, especially in France and Italy.

American leaders knew that they had to resist further Soviet expansion. But their national tradition caused them to seek to justify this resistance on nearly any basis other than as an appeal to the traditional balance of power. In doing this, American leaders were not being hypocritical. When they finally came to recognize that Roosevelt's vision of the Four Policemen could not be implemented, they preferred to interpret this development as a temporary setback on the way to an essentially harmonious world order. Here they faced a philosophical challenge. Was Soviet intransigence merely a passing phase which Washington could wait out? Were the Americans, as former Vice-President Henry Wallace and his followers suggested, unwittingly causing the Soviets to feel paranoid by not adequately communicating their pacific intentions to Stalin? Did Stalin really reject postwar cooperation with the strongest nation in the world? Did he not want to be America's friend?

As the highest policymaking circles in Washington considered these questions, a document arrived from an expert on Russia, one George Kennan, a relatively junior diplomat at the American embassy in Moscow, that was to provide the philosophical and conceptual framework for interpreting Stalin's foreign policy. One of those rare embassy reports that would by itself reshape Washington's view of the world, it became known as the "Long Telegram."¹ Kennan maintained that the United States should stop blaming itself for Soviet intransigence; the sources of Soviet foreign policy lay deep within the Soviet system itself. In essence, he

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struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.³

Such, argued Kennan, were Soviet purposes, and no amount of American cajoling was going to change them. America, Kennan argued, had to hunker down for a long struggle; the goals and philosophies of the United States and of the Soviet Union were irreconcilable.

The first systematic exposition of the new approach appeared in a State Department memorandum submitted to an interagency committee on April 1, 1946. Drafted by State Department official H. Freeman Matthews, it attempted to translate Kennan's essentially philosophical observations into operational foreign policy. For the first time, an American policy paper treated disputes with the Soviet Union as an endemic feature of the Soviet system. Moscow had to be convinced "in the first instance by diplomatic means and in the last analysis by military force if necessary that the present course of its foreign policy can only lead to disaster for the Soviet Union."⁴

Did these bold words, put forward less than a year after the end of the Second World War, imply that the United States would defend every threatened area around the vast Soviet periphery? Matthews recoiled before his own daring and added two qualifications. America, he argued, dominated the sea and the air; the Soviet Union was supreme on land. Calling attention to "our military ineffectiveness within the land mass of Eurasia," the Matthews memorandum limited the use of force to those areas where the power of "Soviet armies can be countered defensively by the naval, amphibious and air power of the U.S. and its potential allies."⁵ The second qualification warned against unilateral action: "The Charter of the United Nations affords the best and most unassailable means through which the U.S. can implement its opposition to Soviet physical expansion."⁶

But where could these two conditions be fulfilled? The Matthews paper stipulated the following countries or territories as being at risk: "Finland, Scandinavia, Eastern, Central and South Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Sinkiang, and Manchuria." The trouble was that none of them was within range of relevant American power. Illustrating America's continued overestimation of Great Britain's capabilities, the memorandum appealed to it to perform the very role of balancer which American leaders had so strenuously opposed only a few years earlier (see chapter 16):

> If Soviet Russia is to be denied the hegemony of Europe, the United Kingdom must continue in existence as the principal power in Western

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Europe economically and militarily. The U.S. should, therefore... give all feasible political, economic, and if necessary military support within the framework of the United Nations, to the United Kingdom...

The Matthews memorandum did not explain in what way Great Britain's strategic reach exceeded that of the United States.

The second qualification was no easier to fulfill. In its short and futile lifespan, the League of Nations had shown the near-impossibility of organizing collective action against a major power. Yet the country designated by the Matthews paper as posing the principal security threat was a member of the United Nations and had a veto. If the United Nations would not act and the United States could not act, Great Britain's purported role was only a stopgap.

Clark Clifford, in one of his first assignments in a long and distinguished career as a presidential adviser, removed the ambiguities and limitations of the Matthews memorandum. In a Top Secret study dated September 24, 1946, Clifford fell in with the view that the Kremlin's policies could only be reversed if Soviet power was counterbalanced: "The main deterrent to Soviet attack on the United States, or to attack on areas of the world which are vital to our security, will be the military power of this country."

By now, this had become conventional wisdom. But Clifford used it as a springboard from which to proclaim a global American security mission, embracing "all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R."¹⁰ It was not clear what was meant by "democratic." Did this qualification limit America's defense to Western Europe, or was it a courtesy that extended to any threatened area and thus required the United States to defend simultaneously the jungles of Southeast Asia, the deserts of the Middle East, and densely populated Central Europe? In time, the latter interpretation became dominant.

Clifford rejected any similarity between the emerging policy of containment and traditional diplomacy. In his view, the Soviet-American conflict was not caused by clashing national interests—which by definition might be negotiated—but by the moral shortcomings of the Soviet leadership. Therefore, the goal of American policy was not so much to restore the balance of power as to transform Soviet society. Just as in 1917 Wilson had blamed the need for a declaration of war on the Kaiser rather than on the threat Germany posed to American security, so Clifford now ascribed Soviet-American tensions to "a small ruling clique and not the Soviet people."¹¹ A significant Soviet change of heart, and probably a new set of Soviet leaders, was required before an overall Soviet-American

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agreement would be possible. At some dramatic moment, these new
leaders would "work out with us a fair and equitable settlement when
they realize that we are too strong to be beaten and too determined to
be frightened."¹²

Neither Clifford nor any subsequent American statesman involved in
the discussion of the Cold War ever put forward specific terms to end the
confrontation or to initiate a process that would bring about negotiations
to do so. So long as the Soviet Union maintained its ideology, negotiations
were treated as pointless. After a Soviet change of heart, a settlement
would become nearly automatic. In either case, spelling out the terms of
such a settlement in advance was deemed to inhibit America's freedom
of action—the same argument that had been used during World War II
to avoid discussion of the postwar world.

America now had the conceptual framework to justify practical resistance to Soviet expansionism. Since the end of the war, Soviet pressures had followed historic Russian patterns. The Soviet Union controlled the Balkans (except for Yugoslavia) and a guerrilla war was raging in Greece, supported from bases in communist Yugoslavia and the Bulgarian Soviet satellite. Territorial demands were being made against Turkey, along with a request for Soviet bases in the Straits—very much along the lines of the demands Stalin had made to Hitler on November 25, 1940 (see chapter 14).

Ever since the end of the war, Great Britain had supported both Greece and Turkey, economically as well as militarily. In the winter of 1946-47, the Attlee government informed Washington that it could no longer shoulder the burden. Truman was prepared to take over Great Britain's historic role of blocking a Russian advance toward the Mediterranean, but neither the American public nor the Congress could countenance the traditional British geopolitical rationale. Resistance to Soviet expansionism had to spring from principles based strictly on the American approach to foreign policy.

This imperative became apparent at a key meeting held on February 27, 1947, in the Oval Office. Truman, Secretary of State Marshall, and Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson sought to persuade a Congressional delegation led by Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of the importance of aid to Greece and Turkey—a formidable assignment, since the traditionally isolationist Republicans controlled both houses of the Congress.

Marshall led off with a dispassionate analysis setting forth the relationship between the proposed aid program and American interests. He elicited stereotypic grumblings about "pulling Britain's chestnuts out of the

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fire," the iniquities of the balance of power, and the burdens of foreign aid. Recognizing that the Administration was about to lose its case, Acheson asked Marshall in a whisper whether this was a private fight or whether anyone could join in. Given the floor, Acheson proceeded, in the words of one aide, "to pull out all the stops." Acheson boldly presented the group with visions of a bleak future in which the forces of communism stood to gain the upper hand:

> Only two great powers remained in the world. . . . United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth. . . . For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion. . . . was to protect the security of the United States—it was to protect freedom itself.¹³

When it became evident that Acheson had roused the delegation, the Administration stuck to his basic approach. From that point on, the Greek-Turkish aid program was portrayed as part of the global struggle between democracy and dictatorship. When, on March 12, 1947, Truman announced the doctrine that would later be named after him, he dropped the strategic aspect of Acheson's analysis and spoke in traditional Wilsonian terms of a struggle between two 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, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.¹⁴

Moreover, in defending independent countries, the United States was acting on behalf of democracy and the world community, even though a Soviet veto would prevent formal endorsement by the United Nations: "In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."¹⁵

Had Soviet leaders been more aware of American history, they would have understood the ominous nature of what the President was saying. The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of *Realpolitik* Stalin under-

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stood best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the Soviet system, or both.

Truman had proclaimed his doctrine as "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."¹⁶ Inevitably, criticism of the objective of defending democracy appeared at both ends of the intellectual spectrum: some protested that America was defending countries which, however important, were morally unworthy; others objected that America was committing itself to the defense of societies which, whether free or not, were not vital to American security. It was an ambiguity which refused to go away, generating debates about American purposes in nearly every crisis that have not ended to this day. Ever since, American foreign policy has been obliged to navigate between those who assail it for being amoral and those who criticize it for going beyond the national interest through crusading moralism.

Once the challenge had been defined as the very future of democracy, America could not wait until a civil war actually occurred, as it had in Greece; it was in the national character to attempt the cure. On June 5, less than three months after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, Secretary Marshall, in a commencement address at Harvard, did just that when he committed America to the task of eradicating the social and economic conditions that tempted aggression. America would aid European recovery, announced Marshall, to avoid "political disturbances" and "desperation," to restore the world economy, and to nurture free institutions. Therefore, "any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government."¹⁷ In other words, participation in the Marshall Plan was open even to governments in the Soviet orbit—a hint taken up in Warsaw and Prague and just as quickly squelched by Stalin.

Anchored to a platform of social and economic reform, the United States announced that it would oppose not only any government but any organization that impeded the process of European recovery. Marshall defined these as the Communist Party and its front organizations: "... governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States."¹⁸

Only a country as idealistic, as pioneering, and as relatively inexperienced as the United States could have advanced a plan for global economic recovery based solely on its own resources. And yet the very sweep

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of that vision elicited a national commitment which would sustain the generation of the Cold War through its final victory. The program of economic recovery, said Secretary Marshall, would be "directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos."¹⁹ Just as when the Atlantic Charter had been proclaimed, a global crusade against hunger and despair was found to be more persuasive to Americans than appeals to immediate self-interest or the balance of power.

At the end of all of these more or less random initiatives, there emerged a document which would, for over a generation, serve as the bible of the containment policy, indeed which supplied it with its very name. All the various strands of American postwar thought were brought together in an extraordinary article published in July 1947 in *Foreign Affairs*. Though it was anonymously signed by "X," the author was later identified as George F. Kennan, by then head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. Of the thousands of articles written since the end of the Second World War, Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" stands in a class by itself. In this lucidly written, passionately argued, and literary adaptation of his "Long Telegram," Kennan raised the Soviet challenge to the level of philosophy of history.

By the time Kennan's article appeared, Soviet intransigence had become the staple of policy documents. Kennan's distinctive contribution was to explain the ways in which hostility to the democracies was inherent in the Soviet domestic structure, and why that structure would prove impervious to conciliatory Western policies.

Tension with the outside world was inherent in the very nature of communist philosophy and, above all, in the way the Soviet system was being run domestically. Internally, the Party was the only organized group, with the rest of society fragmented into an inchoate mass. Thus the Soviet Union's implacable hostility to the outside world was an attempt to gear international affairs to its own internal rhythm. The main concern of Soviet policy was

to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them.... There is no trace of any feeling in Soviet psychology that that goal must be reached at any given time.²⁰

The way to defeat Soviet strategy was by "a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every

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point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a
peaceful and stable world."

Like almost every other contemporary foreign policy document, Kennan's "X" article disdained the elaboration of a precise diplomatic goal. What he sketched was the age-old American dream of a peace achieved by the conversion of the adversary, albeit in language more elevated and far more trenchant in its perception than that of any contemporary. But where Kennan differed from other experts was that he described the mechanism by which, sooner or later, through one power struggle or another, the Soviet system would be fundamentally transformed. Since that system had never managed a "legitimate" transfer of power, Kennan thought it likely that, at some point, various contestants for authority might

reach down into these politically immature and inexperienced masses
in order to find support for their respective claims. If this were ever to
happen, strange consequences could flow for the Communist Party: for
the membership at large has been exercised only in the practices of
iron discipline and obedience and not in the arts of compromise and
accommodation. . . . If, consequently, anything were ever to occur to
disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument,
Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to
one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.²²

No other document forecast quite so accurately what would in fact take
place after the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. And in the aftermath of so
total a collapse of the Soviet Union, it may seem carping to point out just
how back-breaking an assignment Kennan had prescribed for his people.
For he had charged America with combatting Soviet pressures for the
indefinite future all around a vast periphery that embraced the cultures
of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Kremlin was, moreover, free to
select its point of attack, presumably only where it calculated it would
have the greatest advantage. Throughout subsequent crises, the American
political objective was deemed to be the preservation of the status quo,
with the overall effort producing communism's final collapse only after a
protracted series of ostensibly inconclusive conflicts. It was surely the
ultimate expression of America's national optimism and unimpaired
sense of self-confidence that as sophisticated an observer as George Ken-
nan could have assigned his society a role so global, so stern, and, at the
same time, so reactive.

This stark, even heroic, doctrine of perpetual struggle committed the

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American people to endless contests with rules which left the initiative to the adversary and confined America's role to strengthening the countries already on its side of the dividing line—a classic policy of spheres of interest. By abjuring negotiations, the containment policy wasted precious time during the period of America's greatest relative strength—while it still had the atomic monopoly. Indeed, given the premise of containment—that positions of strength had yet to be built—the Cold War became both militarized and imbued with an inaccurate impression of the West's relative weakness.

The redemption of the Soviet Union thus became the ultimate goal of policy; stability could emerge only after evil had been exorcised. It was no accident that Kennan's article concluded with a peroration instructing his impatient, peace-loving compatriots about the virtues of patience and interpreting their international role as a test of their country's worthiness:

> The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations...[T]he thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by provid-ing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political lead-ership that history plainly intended them to bear.²³

One of the outstanding features of these noble sentiments was their peculiar ambivalence. They rallied America to a global mission but made the task so complex that America would nearly tear itself apart trying to fulfill it. Yet the very ambivalence of containment seemed to lend an extraordinary impetus to American policy. Though essentially passive with respect to diplomacy with the Soviet Union, containment evoked tenacious creativity when it came to building "positions of strength" in the military and economic realms. This was because merged in contain-ment were the lessons and beliefs derived from the two most important American experiences of the previous generation: from the New Deal came the belief that threats to political stability arise primarily from gaps between economic and social expectations and reality, hence the Marshall Plan; from the Second World War America learned that the best protec-tion against aggression is having overwhelming power and the willing-ness to use it, hence the Atlantic Alliance. The Marshall Plan was designed to get Europe on its feet economically. The North Atlantic Treaty Organi-zation (NATO) was to look after its security.

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NATO was the first peacetime military alliance in American history. The
immediate impetus for it was the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in
February 1948. After the Marshall Plan was announced, Stalin accelerated
communist control over Eastern Europe. He became rigid, if not para-
noid, about the East European countries' fealty to Moscow. Lifelong com-
munist leaders suspected of harboring the slightest national feelings were
purged. In Czechoslovakia, the communists had emerged as the strongest
party in free elections and controlled the government. Even that was
not enough for Stalin. The elected government was overthrown and the
noncommunist Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of
the Czechoslovak Republic, fell to his death from his office window after
being almost certainly pushed by communist thugs. A communist dicta-
torship was established in Prague.

For the second time within a decade, Prague became the symbol
around which resistance to totalitarianism was organized. Just as the Nazi
occupation of Prague had been the final straw that caused Great Britain
to draw the line in 1939, the communist coup nine years later led the
United States and the democracies of Western Europe to unite in resisting
the imposition of a similar fate on any other European country.

The brutality of the Czech coup reawakened fears that the Soviets might sponsor other, similar takeovers—for example, by fostering a communist *coup d'état* recognizing a new communist government and using military muscle to prop it up. Thus, in April 1948, several Western European countries formed the Pact of Brussels—a defensive pact designed to repel any forcible attempts to topple democratic governments. However, every analysis of the relative power positions indicated that Western Europe simply did not have sufficient strength to repel a Soviet attack. Thus, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into being as a way of tying America to the defense of Western Europe. NATO provided for an unprecedented departure in American foreign policy: American, along with Canadian, forces joined Western European armies under an international NATO command. The result was a confrontation between two military alliances, and two spheres of influence along the entire length of the dividing line in Central Europe.

This was not, however, the way the process was perceived in America.
Wilsonianism was too powerful to permit America to call any arrange-
ment protecting the territorial *status quo* in Europe an alliance. Every
spokesman of the Truman Administration therefore went to great lengths
to distinguish NATO from anything resembling a traditional coalition to
protect the balance of power. Considering their oft-repeated goal of creat-
ing "positions of strength," this required a good deal of ingenuity. Admin-

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istration spokesmen proved equal to the task. When Warren Austin, a former senator who became Ambassador to the United Nations, testified on behalf of NATO before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1949, he took care of the problem by pronouncing the balance of power dead:

> The old veteran, balance of power, was given a blue discharge when the United Nations was formed. The undertaking of the peoples of the United Nations to combine their efforts through the international organization to maintain international peace and security, and to that end, to take effective collective measures, introduced formally the element of preponderance of power for peace. And out went old man balance of power.²⁴

The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations happily accepted this concept. Most of the witnesses testifying on behalf of the Atlantic Alliance borrowed heavily from a State Department document entitled "Difference Between the North Atlantic Treaty and Traditional Military Alliances."²⁵ This extraordinary document purported to be a historical survey of seven alliances dating back to the early nineteenth century, from the Holy Alliance of 1815 to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Its conclusion was that the North Atlantic Treaty differed from them all, "both in letter and in spirit." Whereas "most" traditional alliances "piously" denied "aggressive or expansionist intentions," they frequently had other than defensive ends.

Amazingly, the State Department document asserted that NATO was not designed to defend the *status quo* in Europe, which was surely news to America's allies. The Atlantic Alliance upheld principle, it was said, not territory; it did not resist change, only the use of force to bring about change. The State Department analysis concluded that the North Atlantic Treaty "is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting 'balance of power' but to strengthen the 'balance of principle.'" The document hailed both the Atlantic Treaty and its contemporary, the Rio Pact for defense of the Western Hemisphere, as "developments in the concept of collective security" and endorsed the pronouncement of the chairman of the Senate Committee, Tom Connally, that the Treaty constituted not a military alliance but "an alliance against war itself."²⁶

No history graduate student would have received a passing grade for such an analysis. Historically, alliances rarely named the countries against which they were aimed. Instead, they described the conditions which had

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to be met to bring the alliance into play—just as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did. Since in 1949 the Soviet Union was the sole potential aggressor in Europe, it was even less necessary to name names than it had been in the past. The insistence that the United States was defending principle and not territory was quintessentially American, though hardly reassuring to countries whose greatest fear was Soviet territorial expansion. The argument that America was resisting change incurred by force and not change as such was equally boilerplate and equally disquieting; in all of Europe's long history, it was not possible to enumerate many, if any, territorial changes which had been the result of anything other than force.

Nevertheless, few State Department documents have ever been greeted with such unreserved approval by the normally wary Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as this one was. Senator Connally was relentless in his promotion of the Administration's theme that the intent of NATO was to resist the concept of aggression, not any specific nation. An excerpt from the testimony of Secretary of State Dean Acheson attests to Connally's unquenchable enthusiasm:

THE CHAIRMAN [Senator Connally]: Now, Mr. Secretary, you brought out rather clearly—it won't hurt to reiterate it a little—that this treaty is not aimed at any nation particularly. It is aimed only at any nation or any country that contemplates or undertakes armed aggression against the members of the signatory powers. Is that true?

SECRETARY ACHESON: That is correct, Senator Connally. It is not aimed at any country; it is aimed solely at armed aggression.

THE CHAIRMAN: In other words, unless a nation other than the signatories contemplates, meditates or makes plans looking toward, aggression or armed attack on another nation, it has no cause to fear this treaty.

SECRETARY ACHESON: That is correct, Senator Connally, and it seems to me that any nation which claims that this treaty is directed against it should be reminded of the Biblical admonition that "The guilty flee when no man pursueth."²⁷

Once the Committee got into the spirit of the subject, it practically testified on behalf of all of the other witnesses—as, for example, during this exchange with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson:

THE CHAIRMAN: As a matter of fact, this treaty is not a general military alliance in any sense. It is limited to defense against armed attack.

SECRETARY JOHNSON: That is right, sir.

THE CHAIRMAN: It is the very opposite of the military alliance.

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DIPLOMACY

SENATOR TYDINGS: Defensive entirely.

THE CHAIRMAN: Defensive entirely. It is an alliance of peace, if you want to call it an alliance.

SECRETARY JOHNSON: I like your language.

THE CHAIRMAN: It is an alliance against armed attack, it is an alliance against war, and does not partake of the essentials of the primary obligations of a military alliance as we know military alliances at all; is that true?

SECRETARY JOHNSON: That is right, sir.²⁸

In short, the Atlantic Alliance, not really being an alliance, possessed a claim to moral universality. It represented the majority of the world against the minority of troublemakers. In a sense, the role of the Atlantic Alliance was to act until such time as the United Nations Security Council "has taken the measures necessary to restore peace and security."²⁹

Dean Acheson was a uniquely sophisticated Secretary of State who knew his history. One can imagine the sardonic gleam in his eye as he let the chairman of the Committee put him through his catechism. Acheson had a clear sense of the requirements of the balance of power, as evidenced by many subtle analyses of geostrategic issues.³⁰ But he was also sufficiently American in his approach to diplomacy to be convinced that, left to its own devices, Europe had made a mess of the balance of power, and that, for the concept of equilibrium to have meaning for Americans, it needed to be embedded in some loftier ideal. In a speech to the Harvard Alumni Association well after the ratification of the treaty, Acheson was still defending the Atlantic Alliance in characteristically American fashion—as a novel approach to international affairs:

> ... it has advanced international cooperation to maintain the peace, to advance human rights, to raise standards of living, and to promote respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.³¹

In short, America would do anything for the Atlantic Alliance except call it an alliance. It would practice a historic policy of coalition so long as its actions could be justified by the doctrine of collective security, which Wilson had first put forward as the alternative to the alliance system. Thus the European balance of power was being resurrected in uniquely American rhetoric.

As important as the Atlantic Alliance, though less noticed by the American public, was the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany by

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merging the American, British, and French zones of occupation. On the
one hand, this new state meant that the handiwork of Bismarck was
being undone, because, for the indefinite future, Germany would remain
divided. On the other hand, the existence of the Federal Republic implied
a continuing challenge to the Soviet presence in Central Europe since the
Federal Republic would never accept the communist East German Soviet
state (which the Soviets had created out of their zone of occupation). For
two decades, the Federal Republic refused to recognize what came to be
called the German Democratic Republic and threatened to break diplo-
matic relations with any country that did recognize it. After 1970, the
Federal Republic abandoned the so-called Hallstein Doctrine and estab-
lished diplomatic relations with the East German satellite, though without
ever giving up its claim to speak on behalf of the entire German popula-
tion.

The decisiveness with which America threw itself into filling the power
vacuum in Europe surprised even the most earnest supporters of the
containment policy. "I little thought," Churchill later reflected, "at the end
of 1944 that the State Department, supported by overwhelming American
opinion, would in little more than two years not only adopt and carry on
the course we had opened, but would make vehement and costly exer-
tions, even of a military character, to bring it to fruition."³²

Four years after the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers, the international order contained many similarities to that of the period just before the First World War: two rigid alliances with very little diplomatic maneuvering room between them faced each other, this time all around the globe. There was, however, at least one crucial difference: the pre-World War I alliances had been held together by each side's fear that a switch in alliances by one of the partners could unravel the edifice with which they had identified their security. In effect, the most bellicose partner was permitted to pull the others toward the abyss. During the Cold War, each side was dominated by a superpower sufficiently indispensable and sufficiently reluctant to run risks to keep every ally from plunging the world into war. And the presence of nuclear weapons prevented the illusion of July 1914—that war could be short and painless.

American leadership of the Alliance guaranteed that the new interna-
tional order would be justified in moral, and occasionally even messianic,
terms. America's leaders made exertions and sacrifices unprecedented in
peacetime coalitions on behalf of appeals to fundamental values and
comprehensive solutions, instead of the calculations of national security
and equilibrium that had characterized European diplomacy.

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Later, critics would emphasize the alleged cynicism of that moral rheto-
ric. But no one acquainted with the authors of the containment policy
could doubt their sincerity. Nor could America have sustained four
decades of grueling exertion on behalf of a policy which did not reflect
its deepest values and ideals. This is amply demonstrated by the degree
to which moral values suffused even the most highly classified govern-
ment documents, which were never intended for release to the general
public.

A case in point is a National Security Council document (NSC-68) pro-
duced in April 1950, which was to serve as America's official statement on
Cold War strategy. NSC-68 defined the national interest largely in terms
of moral principle. In its view, moral setbacks were even more dangerous
than material ones:

... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere. The shock we sustained in the destruction of Czechoslovakia was not in the measure of Czechoslovakia's material importance to us. In a material sense, her capabilities were already at Soviet disposal. But when the integrity of Czechoslovak institutions was destroyed, it was in the intangible scale of values that we registered a loss more damaging than the material loss we had already suffered.³³

Once vital interests had been equated with moral principle, America's strategic objectives were cast in terms of worthiness rather than of power —to “make ourselves strong, both in the way we affirm our values in the conduct of our national life, and in the development of our political and economic strength.”³⁴ The doctrine of America's Founding Fathers, that their nation was a beacon of liberty for all mankind, permeated American Cold War philosophy. Rejecting the strand of American thinking expressed in John Quincy Adams' warning against “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” the drafters of NSC-68 opted for the alternative vision of America as crusader: “It is only by practical affirmation, abroad as well as at home, of our essential values, that we can preserve our own integrity, in which lies the real frustration of the Kremlin design.”³⁵

In these terms, the purpose of the Cold War was the conversion of the adversary: “to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system,” which was defined as “Soviet acceptance of the specific and limited conditions requisite to an international environment in which free institutions can flourish, and in which the Russian peoples will have a new chance to work out their own destiny.”³⁶

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Though NSC-68 went on to describe various military and economic measures vital to building situations of strength, its central theme was neither the give-and-take of traditional diplomacy nor an apocalyptic final showdown. The reluctance to use or to threaten to use nuclear weapons during the period of America's atomic monopoly was rationalized in a uniquely American way: victory in any such war would produce a transitional, hence an unsatisfactory, outcome. As for a negotiated solution, "... the only conceivable basis for a general settlement would be spheres of influence and of no influence—a 'settlement' which the Kremlin could readily exploit to its great advantage."37 In other words, America refused to consider winning a war or even a comprehensive solution which would leave the adversary unconverted.

For all of its ostensibly hardheaded realism, NSC-68 began with a per-
oration on democracy and concluded with the assertion that history
would ultimately work in America's favor. What was unique about this
document was its coupling of universal claims with the renunciation of
force. Never before had a Great Power expressed objectives quite so
demanding of its own resources without any expectation of reciprocity
other than the dissemination of its national values. And these would be
achieved through global reform, not global conquest, the usual path of
crusaders. It so happened that for this endeavor American strength was,
for a brief moment, unprecedentedly supreme, despite the fact that
America had convinced itself that it was relatively weak militarily.

In those early stages of America's journey into containment, no one
could have imagined the impending strain on the American psyche of
conflicts whose principal goal was the internal transformation of the ad-
versary, and which lacked any criteria that could be used to assess the
success of each intermediate step. It would have seemed incredible to all
those self-confident American leaders that their country would, within
two decades, have to navigate a passage of searing self-doubt and domes-
tic conflict before their prediction of the collapse of communism would
be fulfilled. For the time being, they were fully occupied with committing
America to its new international role while fending off criticisms of the
revolutionary turn America's foreign policy was taking.

As containment slowly took shape, the criticism it encountered
emerged from three different schools of thought. The first came from the
"realists" exemplified by Walter Lippmann, who argued that the contain-
ment policy led to psychological and geopolitical overextension while
draining American resources. The spokesman for the second school of
thought was Winston Churchill, who objected to the postponement of
negotiations until after positions of strength had been achieved.

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Churchill's argument was that the West's position would never again be as strong as it was at the beginning of what came to be known as the Cold War, and that its relative bargaining position could therefore only deteriorate. Finally, there was Henry Wallace, who denied America the moral right to undertake the policy of containment in the first place. Postulating a fundamental moral equivalence between both sides, Wallace argued that the Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe was legitimate and that America's resistance to it only intensified tension. He urged a return to what he viewed as Roosevelt's policy: to end the Cold War by a unilateral American decision.

As the most eloquent spokesman for the realists, Walter Lippmann rejected Kennan's proposition that Soviet society contained the seeds of its own decay. He considered the theory to be too speculative to serve as the foundation of American policy:

> In Mr. X's estimates there are no reserves for a rainy day. There is no margin of safety for bad luck, bad management, error and the unforeseen. He asks us to assume that the Soviet power is already decaying. He exhorts us to believe that our own highest hopes for ourselves will soon have been realized.³⁸

Containment, argued Lippmann, would draw America into the hinterlands of the Soviet Empire's extended periphery, which included, in his view, many countries that were not states to begin with in the modern sense. Military entanglements that far from home could not enhance American security and would weaken American resolve. Containment, according to Lippmann, permitted the Soviet Union to choose the points of maximum discomfiture for the United States while retaining the diplomatic, and even the military, initiative.

Lippmann stressed the importance of establishing criteria to define areas in which countering Soviet expansion was a vital American interest. Without such criteria, the United States would be forced to organize a "heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets," which would permit America's newfound allies to exploit containment for their own purposes. The United States would be trapped into prop-ping up nonviable regimes, leaving Washington with the sorry choice between "appeasement and defeat and the loss of face, or... supporting] them [U.S. allies] at incalculable cost."³⁹

It was indeed a prophetic analysis of what lay ahead for the United States, though the remedy Lippmann proposed was hardly congenial to the universalist American tradition, which was far closer to Kennan's

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expectation of an apocalyptic outcome. Lippmann asked that American foreign policy be guided by a case-by-case analysis of American interests rather than by general principles presumed to be universally applicable. In his view, American policy should have been aiming less at overthrowing the communist system than at restoring the balance of power in Europe, which had been destroyed by the war. Containment implied the indefinite division of Europe, whereas America's real interest should be to banish Soviet power from the center of the European Continent:

For more than a hundred years all Russian governments have sought to expand over eastern Europe. But only since the Red Army reached the Elbe River have the rulers of Russia been able to realize the ambitions of the Russian Empire and the ideological purposes of communism. A genuine policy would, therefore, have as its paramount objective a settlement which brought about the evacuation of Europe.... American power must be available, not to "contain" the Russians at scattered points, but to hold the whole Russian military machine in check, and to exert a mounting pressure in support of a diplomatic policy which has as its concrete objective a settlement that means withdrawal.⁴⁰

Destiny was surely profligate in the talent it bestowed on America in the immediate postwar period. American political leaders were distinguished and experienced men. And behind them stood a reservoir of such eminent personalities as John McCloy, Robert Lovett, David Bruce, Ellsworth Bunker, Averell Harriman, and John Foster Dulles, rotating in and out of government and always available to serve the president on a nonpartisan basis.

From among its intellectuals, America was able to draw on the thinking of both Lippmann and Kennan while they were at the height of their powers. Kennan correctly understood communism's underlying weakness; Lippmann accurately foretold the frustrations of an essentially reactive foreign policy based on containment. Kennan called for endurance to permit history to display its inevitable tendencies; Lippmann called for diplomatic initiative to produce a European settlement while America was still preponderant. Kennan had a better intuitive understanding of the mainsprings of American society; Lippmann, on the other hand, grasped the impending strain of enduring a seemingly endless stalemate and of the ambiguous causes which containment might lead America to support.

In the end, Lippmann's analysis found a substantial following, though mainly among the opponents of confrontation with the Soviet Union. And

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their approbation was based on only one aspect of Lippmann's argument, emphasizing as they did its critique while ignoring its prescriptions. They noted Lippmann's call for more limited objectives but overlooked his recommendation for a more offensive diplomacy. Thus it happened that in the 1940s the most compelling alternative strategy to the doctrine of containment came from none other than Winston Churchill, then the leader of the Opposition in Parliament.

Churchill had been widely credited with inaugurating the Cold War when he delivered his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. At every stage of the Second World War, Churchill had sought to limit Soviet expansionism in an effort to bolster the democracies' postwar bargaining position. Churchill supported containment, but for him it was never an end in itself. Unwilling to wait passively for the collapse of communism, he sought to shape history rather than to rely on it to do his work for him. What he was after was a negotiated settlement.

Churchill's Fulton speech had merely hinted at negotiations. On October 9, 1948, at Llandudno, Wales, Churchill returned to his argument that the West's bargaining position would never be better than it was at that moment. In a much-neglected speech, he said:

> The question is asked: What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have accumulated a large store? You can judge yourselves what will happen then by what is happening now. If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?...
> 
> No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement. We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to turn up. The Western Nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Communists have got it too.⁴¹

> ...while it is right to build up our forces as fast as we can, nothing in this process, in the period I have mentioned, will deprive Russia of

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effective superiority in what are called now the conventional arms. All
that it will do is to give us increasing unity in Europe and magnify the
deterrents against aggression.... Therefore I am in favour of efforts
to reach a settlement with Soviet Russia as soon as a suitable opportu-
nity presents itself, and of making those efforts while the immense
and measureless superiority of the United States atomic bomb organi-
zation offsets the Soviet predominance in every other military re-
spect.⁴²

For Churchill, a position of strength was already in place; for American leaders, it had yet to be created. Churchill thought of negotiations as a way of relating power to diplomacy. And though he was never specific, his public statements strongly suggest that he envisaged some kind of diplomatic ultimatum by the Western democracies. American leaders recoiled before employing their atomic monopoly, even as a threat. Churchill wanted to shrink the area of Soviet influence, but was prepared to coexist with Soviet power within reduced limits. The American leaders had a nearly visceral dislike of spheres of influence. They wanted to destroy and not to shrink their adversary's sphere. Their preference was to wait for total victory and for the collapse of communism, however far off, to bring about a Wilsonian solution to the problem of world order.

The disagreement came down to a difference between the historical experiences of Great Britain and America. Churchill's society was all too familiar with imperfect outcomes; Truman and his advisers came from a tradition in which, once a problem had been recognized, it was usually overcome by the deployment of vast resources. Hence America's preference for final resolutions and its distrust of the sort of compromise that had become a British specialty. Churchill had no conceptual difficulty combining the building of positions of strength with an active diplomacy pressing for a settlement. American leaders thought of these efforts as successive phases—just as they had in World War II and would again in Korea and Vietnam. The American view prevailed, because America was stronger than Great Britain, and because Churchill, as the leader of the British Opposition, was in no position to press his strategy.

In the end, the most vocal and persistent challenge to American policy came from neither the realist school of Lippmann nor Churchill's balance-of-power thinking, but from a tradition with roots deep within American radical thought. Whereas Lippmann and Churchill accepted the Truman Administration's premise that Soviet expansionism represented a serious challenge and only contested the strategy for resisting it, the radical critics rejected every aspect of containment. Henry Wallace, Vice-President dur-

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ing Roosevelt's third term, former Secretary of Agriculture, and Secretary of Commerce under Truman, was its principal spokesman.

A product of America's populist tradition, Wallace had an abiding Yankee distrust of Great Britain. Like most American liberals since Jefferson, he insisted that "the same moral principles which governed in private life also should govern in international affairs."⁴³ In Wallace's view, America had lost its moral compass and was practicing a foreign policy of "Machiaellian principles of deceit, force and distrust," as he told an audience in Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946.⁴⁴ Since prejudice, hatred, and fear were the root causes of international conflict, the United States had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had banished these scourges from its own society.

The new radicalism reaffirmed the historic vision of America as a beacon of liberty, but, in the process, turned it against itself. Postulating the moral equivalence of American and Soviet actions became a characteristic of the radical critique throughout the Cold War. The very idea of America's having international responsibilities was, in Wallace's eyes, an example of the arrogance of power. The British, he argued, were duping the gullible Americans into doing their bidding: "British policy clearly is to provoke distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III."⁴⁵

To Wallace, Truman's presentation of the conflict as between democracy and dictatorship was pure fiction. In 1945, a time when Soviet postwar repression was becoming increasingly obvious and the brutality of collectivization was widely recognized, Wallace declared that "the Russians today have more of the political freedoms than they ever had." He also discovered "increasingly the signs of religious toleration" in the U.S.S.R. and claimed that there was a "basic lack of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union."⁴⁶

Wallace thought that Soviet policy was driven less by expansionism than by fear. In March 1946, while still the Commerce Secretary, Wallace wrote to Truman:

> The events of the past few months have thrown the Soviets back to their pre-1939 fears of "capitalist encirclement" and to their erroneous belief that the Western World, including the U.S.A. is invariably and unaniously hostile.⁴⁷

> In his speech at Madison Square Garden six months later, Wallace laid down a direct challenge to Truman, which caused the President to demand his resignation:

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We may not like what Russia does in Eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation, and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. But whether we like it or not the Russians will try to socialize their sphere of influence just as we try to democratize our sphere of influence. ... Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free enterprise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance.⁴⁸

In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe on practical grounds, while the Administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds.

According to Wallace, America had no right to intervene unilaterally around the globe. Defense was legitimate only with the approval of the United Nations (regardless that the Soviet Union had a veto there), and economic assistance should be distributed through international institutions. Since the Marshall Plan did not meet this test, Wallace predicted that it would ultimately earn America the enmity of mankind.⁴⁹

Wallace's challenge collapsed after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, and the invasion of South Korea. As a presidential candidate in 1948, he gained only 1 million votes—most of them in New York—against more than 24 million for Truman, placing him fourth, behind the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond.

Nevertheless, Wallace managed to develop themes which would remain staples of the American radical critique throughout the Cold War, and move to center stage during the Vietnam War. These emphasized America's moral inadequacies and those of the friends it was supporting; a basic moral equivalence between America and its communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. When aid to Greece and Turkey was first being proposed, Wallace urged the Truman Administration to put the issue before the United Nations. If "the Russians exercised their veto, the moral burden would be on them...[W]hen we act independently... the moral burden is on us."⁵⁰ Seizing the moral high ground meant more than whether America's geopolitical interests were being safeguarded.

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Though Wallace's radical critique of American postwar foreign policy was defeated in the 1940s, its basic tenets reflected a deep strain of American idealism that continued to tug at the nation's soul. The same moral convictions which had conferred such energy on America's international commitments also had the potential to be turned inward by disillusionment with the outside world, or with America's own imperfections. In the 1920s, isolationism had caused America to withdraw on the ground that it was too good for the world; in the Wallace Movement, it revived itself in the proposition that America should withdraw because it was not good enough for the world.

Yet when America launched its first permanent peacetime international involvement, systematic self-doubt still lay far in the future. The generation which had built the New Deal and won the Second World War had enormous faith in itself and in the vastness of the American enterprise. And the nation's idealism was well suited to managing a two-power world, for which the subtle combinations of the traditional balance-of-power diplomacy were not nearly so appropriate. Only a society with enormous confidence in its achievements and in its future could have mustered the dedication and the resources to strive for a world order in which defeated enemies would be conciliated, stricken allies restored, and adversaries converted. Great enterprises are often driven by a touch of naïveté.

One result of the containment policy was that the United States relegated itself to an essentially passive diplomacy during the period of its greatest power. That is why containment was increasingly challenged by yet another constituency, of which John Foster Dulles became the most vocal spokesman. They were the conservatives who accepted the premises of containment but questioned the absence of urgency with which it was being pursued. Even if containment did in the end succeed in undermining Soviet society, these critics argued, it would take too long and cost too much. Whatever containment might accomplish, a strategy of liberation would surely accelerate. By the end of Truman's presidency, the containment policy was caught in a crossfire between those who considered it too bellicose (the followers of Wallace) and those who thought it too passive (the conservative Republicans).

This controversy accelerated because, as Lippmann had predicted, international crises increasingly moved to peripheral regions of the globe, where the moral issues were confused and direct threats to American security were difficult to demonstrate. America found itself drawn into wars in areas not protected by alliances and on behalf of ambiguous causes and inconclusive outcomes. From Korea to Vietnam, these enter-

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prises kept alive the radical critique, which continued to question the
moral validity of containment.

Thus surfaced a new variant of American exceptionalism. With all of its imperfections, the America of the nineteenth century had thought of itself as the beacon of liberty; in the 1960s and 1970s, the torch was said to be flickering and would need to be relit before America could return to its historic role as an inspiration to the cause of freedom. The debate over containment turned into a struggle for the very soul of America.

As early as 1957, even George Kennan had come to reinterpret containment in this light when he wrote:

> To my own countrymen who have often asked me where best to apply the hand to counter the Soviet threat, I have accordingly had to reply: to our American failings, to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes, or that worry us; to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.⁵¹

A decade earlier, before he had become disillusioned by what he considered the militarization of his invention, George Kennan would have recognized that no such choice existed. A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security. It was a measure of Kennan's achievement that, by 1957, all of the free world's parapets had been manned, his own views having made a decisive contribution to this effort. The parapets were in fact being manned so effectively that America permitted itself to indulge in a hefty dose of self-criticism.

Containment was an extraordinary theory—at once hardheaded and idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet motivations yet curiously abstract in its prescriptions. Thoroughly American in its utopianism, it assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in an essentially benign way. Although this doctrine was formulated at the height of America's absolute power, it preached America's relative weakness. Postulating a grand diplomatic encounter at the moment of its culmination, containment allowed no role for diplomacy until the climactic final scene in which the men in the white hats accepted the conversion of the men in the black hats.

With all of these qualifications, containment was a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of construction, struggle, and, ultimately, triumph. The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the

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China. In fact, Asia today looks more like 19th century Europe, with all its deep-seated mutual suspicions, than a united community.

Such a delicate balance might suggest that United States should seek bilateral relations with each of the Asian nations that are at least as good as their relations with each other, in order to give us maximum flexibility in designing our Asian policy. But such a strategic concept has never been put forward-nor explicitly rejected.

In Bosnia, the Administration is confronted with two separate issues: the political issue of the future of Bosnia; and the offense to our moral values represented by the suffering inflicted on the civilian population. Yet if the issue is opposing aggression, the only remedy is to restore the prewar situation. Bosnia would have to be returned to its status as an independent state. On the other hand, if human rights violations are the issue, the war must be stopped.

And in practice, that means ratifying whatever dividing line has already been established by military operations.

It is debatable, in my view, whether Bosnia should have been recognized as a nation in the first place, given that it has no ethnic, historic or cultural identity other than as a subdivision of Yugoslavia. But leaving that question aside, the Clinton

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that represents a long process. The United States occupied the country for more than 30 years (and did not succeed in achieving it.)

Once more, however, the administration has failed to explain to the American public that we cannot merely go in and get out quickly. And nearly unanimous opposition to the nation's policy with America's immigration, especially if many of those immigrants are ``economic refugees.'' For by definition, those immigrants will still want to come to America as long as Haiti remains poor, whether we intervene or not. In practice, intervention would mean merely moving the point of interception to Haiti's shoreline rather than the open sea, which might appear less heartless but would not change the fundamental realities.

As distressing as they may be, however, Haiti and Bosnia represent peripheral crises. Over the long run, the lack of a strategic concept risks having much greater consequences for our relations with China and Russia. On China, I have consistently opposed the imposition of sanctions, not because I approve of what occured in Tienanmen Square, but because in today's world foreign policy must begin with an understanding of the limits of America's reach. The United States cannot solve every problem simultaneously. And while China is

MAY 25 '94 03:17PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.11

prepared to pay some price for our good will, it will not accept a restructuring of its domestic institutions, especially in response to overt pressure.

President Clinton made a wise decision in giving himself a year to decide about China's MFN status. But he boxed himself in by specifying the conditions that had to be met. And even though he has now taken what I believe to be the correct course, that only releases him from his self-imposed short-term dilemma and leaves him with a long-range quandary. If the current decision is justified on the grounds that it is the best way to change the Chinese system, he must build a stronger basis for a lasting dialogue with Beijing. The President must find a way of asserting our human rights convictions by appealing to China's growing economic strength and geopolitical importance, rather than seeking to weaken them, or else Sino-American relations will gradually drift into confrontation.

On Russia, the administration now seems committed to the idea of a Partnership for Peace. When the Kamak head of state was in Washington, President Clinton envisioned this partnership as bringing together NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the former republics of the Soviet Union and European neutrals in a structure that would engage in joint

P.12

military planning. Yet that raises the question: for what? What can Kazakhstan and Belgium plan together? Operationally, it can only imply a defensive alliance aimed at China and Japan, or an empty dill. And if Russia becomes a de facto participant in NATO, what meaning can the alliance itself have, since its fundamental purpose was to defend against the former Soviet Union?

The practical result of the Partnership for Peace will be to create two categories of borders in Europe: one protected by NATO, the other not protected by NATO. Yet the borders that NATO would not protect are precisely the ones that Europeans are most concerned about. The ones protected by NATO are in no danger. This can lead to a situation where countries that view themselves as threatened begin to make their own arrangements. In order to prevent Russia into this arrangement, Washington has also signalled that Moscow would be granted an undefined special status within NATO. But to Russia's neighbors, that can only be seen as a move toward resurrecting the historic Russian claim to a special veto over Eastern Europe and the new nation in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

I strongly favor including Russia in the economic Group of Seven, and I strongly support having Russia participate, even more intimately,