The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (74 page)

Table 36. Total GNP and per Capita GNP of the Powers in 1950
⁷⁷
(in 1964 dollars)

This eclipse of the European powers was reflected even more markedly in military personnel and expenditures. In 1950, for example, the United States spent $14.5 billion on defense and had 1.38 million military personnel, while the USSR spent slightly more ($15.5 billion) on its far larger armed forces of 4.3 million men. In both respects, the superpowers were far ahead of Britain ($2.3 billion; 680,000 personnel), France ($1.4 billion; 590,000 personnel), and Italy ($0.5 billion; 230,000 personnel), and of course Germany and Japan were still demilitarized. The Korean War tensions saw quite significant increases in the defense spending of the middleweight European powers in 1951, but they paled by comparison with the expenditures of the United States ($33.3 billion) and USSR ($20.1 billion). In that year alone, the defense expenditures of Britain, France, and Italy
combined
were less than one-fifth of the United States’ and less than one third of the USSR’s; and their
combined
military personnel was one-half of the United States’ and one-third of Russia’s.
⁷⁸
In both relative economic strength and in military power, the European states seemed decidedly eclipsed.

Such an impression was, if anything, heightened by the coming of nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems. It is clear from the record that many of the scientists working on the A-bomb were acutely aware that they were reaching toward a watershed in the entire history of warfare, weapon systems, and man’s capacity for destruction; the successful test at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, confirmed to the observers that “there had been brought into being something big and something new that would prove to be immeasurably more important than the discovery of electricity or any of the other great discoveries which have affected our existence.” When the “strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday”
⁷⁹
was repeated in the actu£;
carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there could be no further doubt of the weapon’s power. Its creation left American decision-makers wrestling with the many practical consequences for the future. How did it affect conventional warfare? Should it be used immediately at the outset of war, or as a weapon of last resort? What were the implications, and potentialities, of developing bigger (H-bombs) and smaller (tactical) forms of nuclear weapons? Should the knowledge be shared with others?
⁸⁰
It also undoubtedly gave a boost to the already existing Soviet development of nuclear weapons, since Stalin put his formidable security chief, Beria, in charge of the atomic program on the day after Hiroshima.
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Although the Russians were clearly behind at this time, in the creation of both bombs and delivery systems, they caught up much faster than the Americans estimated they would. For some years after 1945, it seems fair to assume that the American nuclear advantage helped to “balance out” the Russian preponderance in conventional forces. But it was not long, certainly in the history of international relations, before Moscow began to catch up and thus to prove its own claim that the United States’ monopoly of this weapon had been only a passing phase.
⁸²

The coming of atomic weapons transformed the “strategical landscape,” since they gave to any state possessing them the capability of mass indiscriminate destruction, even of mankind itself. Much more narrowly, and immediately, the advent of this new level in weapons technology put increased pressure upon the traditional European states to catch up—or admit that they were indeed relegated to second-class status. Of course, in the case of Germany and Japan, and the economically and technologically weakened Italy, there was no prospect of joining the nuclear club. But to the government in London, even when Attlee replaced Churchill, it was inconceivable that the country should not possess those weapons, both as a deterrent and because they “were a manifestation of the scientific and technological superiority on which Britain’s strength, so deficient if measured in sheer numbers of men, must depend.”
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They were seen, in other words, as a relatively
cheap
way of retaining independent Great Power influence—a calculation which, shortly afterward, appealed equally to the French.
⁸⁴
Yet, however attractive that logic appeared to be, it was weakened by practical factors: that neither state would possess the weapons, and delivery systems, for some years; and that their nuclear arsenals would be minor compared with those of the superpowers, and might indeed be made obsolete by a further leap in technology. For all the ambitions of London and Paris (and, later on, China) to join the nuclear club, this striving during the early post-1945 decades was somewhat similar to the Austro-Hungarian and Italian efforts to possess their own
Dreadnought-type
battleships prior to 1914. It was, in other words, a reflection of weakness rather than strength.

The final element which seemed to emphasize that the world must now be viewed, strategically and politically, as bipolar rather than in its traditional multipolar form was the heightened role of
ideology
. To be sure, even in the age of classical nineteenth-century diplomacy, ideological factors had played a part in policy—as the actions of Metternich, Nicholas I, Bismarck, and Gladstone amply testified. This seemed much more the case in the interwar years, when a “radical right” and a “radical left” arose to challenge the prevailing assumptions of the “bourgeois-liberal center.” Nonetheless, the complex dynamics of multipolar rivalries by the late 1930s (with British Tories like Churchill wanting an alliance with Communist Russia against Nazi Germany, and with liberal Americans wanting to support Anglo-French diplomacy in Europe but to dismantle the British and French empires outside Europe) made difficult all attempts to explain world affairs in ideological terms. During the war itself, moreover, differences on political and social principles could be subsumed under the overriding need to combat fascism. Stalin’s suppression of the Communist International in 1943 and the West’s admiration for the Russian resistance to Operation Barbarossa also seemed to blur earlier suspicions—especially in the United States, where
Life
magazine in 1943 airily claimed that the Russians “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans,” and the
New York Times
a year later declared that “Marxian thinking in Soviet Russia is out.”
⁸⁵
Such sentiments, however naive, help to explain the widespread American reluctance to accept that the postwar world was not living up to their vision of international harmony—hence, for example, the pained and angry reactions of many to Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech of March 1946.
⁸⁶

Yet, within another year or two, the ideological nature of what was now admitted to be the Cold War between Russia and the West was all too evident. The increasing signs that Russia would not permit parliamentary-type democracy in eastern Europe, the sheer size of the Russian armed forces, the civil war raging between Communists and their opponents in Greece, China, and elsewhere, and—last but by no means least—the growing fears of “the Red menace,” spy rings, and internal subversion at home led to a massive swing in American sentiment, and one to which the Truman administration responded with alacrity. In his “Truman Doctrine” speech of March 1947, occasioned by the fear that Russia would enter into the power vacuum created by Britain’s withdrawal of guarantees to Greece and Turkey, the president portrayed a world faced with a choice between two different sets of ideological principles:

It would be the policy of the United States, Truman continued, “to help free people to maintain their institutions and their integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.” Henceforward, international affairs would be presented, in even more emotional terms, as a Manichean struggle; in Eisenhower’s words, “Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery, lightness against dark.”
⁸⁸

No doubt much of this rhetoric had a domestic purpose—and not just in the United States, but also in Britain, Italy, France, and wherever it was useful for conservative forces to invoke such language to discredit their rivals, or to attack their own governments for being “soft on Communism.” What was also true was that it must have deepened Stalin’s suspicions of the West, which was swiftly portrayed in the Soviet press as contesting the Russian “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe, surrounding the Soviet Union with new foes on all sides, establishing forward bases, supporting reactionary regimes against any Communist influences, and deliberately “packing” the United Nations. “The new course of American foreign policy,” Moscow claimed, “meant a return to the old anti-Soviet course, designed to unloose war and forcibly to institute world domination by Britain and the United States.”
⁸⁹
This explanation, in turn, could help the Soviet regime to justify its crackdown upon internal dissidents, its tightening grip upon eastern Europe, its forced industrialization, its heavy spending upon armaments. Thus, the foreign and domestic requirements of the Cold War could feed off each other, mutually covered by an appeal to ideological principles. Liberalism and Communism, being both universal ideas, were “mutually exclusive”;
⁹⁰
this permitted each side to understand, and to portray, the whole world as an arena in which the ideological quarrel could not be separated from power-political advantage. One was either in the American-led bloc or the Soviet one. There was to be no middle way; in an age of Stalin and Joe McCarthy, it was imprudent to think that there could be. This was the new strategical reality, to which not merely the peoples of a divided Europe but also those in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere would have to adjust.

As it turned out, a large part of international politics over the following two decades
was
to concern itself with adjusting to that Soviet-American rivalry, and then with its partial rejection. In the beginning, the Cold War was centered upon remaking the boundaries of Europe. Underneath, therefore, it was still to do with the “German problem,” since the resolution of that issue would in turn determine the amount of influence which the victorious Powers of 1945 would exert over Europe. The Russians had undoubtedly suffered more than any other country from German aggressions in the first half of the twentieth century, and, reinforced by Stalin’s own paranoid demand for security, they were determined to permit no repetitions in the second half. Promoting the Communist world revolution was a secondary but not unconnected consideration, since Russia’s strategic and political position was most likely to be enhanced if it could create other Marxist-led states which looked to Moscow for guidance. Such considerations, much more than any centuries-old drive toward warm-water ports, probably ordered the Soviet policy in the post-1945 world, even if it left open the detailed solution of the various issues. There was, in the first place, therefore, a determination to undo the territorial settlements of 1918–1922, with “roundings-off” for strategical purposes; as noted above, this meant the reassertion of Russian control over the Baltic states, the pushing westward of the Polish-Russian border, the elimination of East Prussia, and the acquisition of territories from Finland, Hungary, and Rumania. Little of this worried the West; indeed, much of it had been agreed to during the war. What was more perturbing was the Russian indications of how they intended to ensure that the formerly independent countries of east-central Europe would contain regimes “friendly to Moscow.”

In this respect, the fate of Poland was a harbinger of what would occur elsewhere, although it was the more poignant because of Britain’s 1939 decision to fight for that country’s integrity, and because of the Polish contingents (and government in exile) which had operated in the West. The discovery of the mass grave of Polish officers at Katyn, the Russian disapproval of the Warsaw uprising, Stalin’s insistence on altering Poland’s boundaries, and the appearance of a pro-Moscow faction of Poles at Lublin made Churchill in particular suspicious of Russia’s intentions; within another few years, with the installation of a puppet regime and the virtual elimination of any pro-western Poles from positions of power, those fears were realized.
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Moscow’s handling of the Polish issue related to the “German problem” in all sorts of ways. Territorially, the westward adjustment of the boundaries not only reduced the size of German lands (as did the
swallowing-up of East Prussia), it also gave the Poles an incentive to oppose any future German revision of the Oder-Neisse line. Strategically, the Russian insistence upon making Poland a secure “buffer zone” was intended to ensure that there could be no repetition of Germany’s 1941 attack; it was logical, therefore, for Moscow to insist upon determining the fate of the German people as well. Politically, the support of the “Lublin” Poles was paralleled by the grooming of German Communists in exile to play a similar role when they returned to their homeland. Economically, Russia’s exploitation of Poland and its eastern European neighbors was a foretaste of the stripping of German assets. When, however, it became obvious to Moscow that it would be impossible to win the German people’s goodwill while systematically reducing them to penury, the asset-stripping ceased and Molotov’s tone became much more encouraging. But those tactical shifts were of less importance than the obvious message that Russia intended to have a, if not
the
, major say in deciding Germany’s future.
⁹²