The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (78 page)

Yet the view from Washington, as noted above, was that a master plan for world Communist domination was unfolding, step by step, and needed to be “contained.” The proffered guarantees to Greece and Turkey in 1947 were the first sign of this change of course, and the 1949 NATO treaty was its most spectacular exemplar. With the further additions to NATO’s membership in the 1950s, this meant that the United States was pledged “to the defense of most of Europe and even parts of the Near East—from Spitzbergen to the Berlin Wall and beyond to the Asian borders of Turkey.”
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But that was only the beginning of the American overstretch. The Rio Pact and the special arrangement with Canada meant that it was responsible for the defense of the entire western hemisphere. The ANZUS treaty created obligations in the southwestern Pacific. The confrontations in East Asia during the early 1950s had led to the signing of various bilateral treaties, whereby the United States was pledged to aid countries along the “rim”—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as the Philippines. In 1954, this was buttressed further by the establishment of SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), whereby the United States joined Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand in promising mutual support to combat aggression in that vast region. In the Middle East, it was the chief sponsor of another regional grouping, the 1955 Baghdad Pact (later, the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO), in which Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan stood against subversion and attack. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the United States had evolved or was soon to evolve special agreements with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, either because of the strong Jewish-American ties or in consequence of the 1957 “Eisenhower Doctrine,” which proffered American aid to Arab states. Early in 1970, one observer noted,

This was an array of commitments about which Louis XIV or Palmerston would have felt a little nervous. Yet in a world which seemed to be swiftly shrinking in size and in which each part appeared to relate to another, these step-by-step pledges all had their logic. Where, in a bipolar system, could Washington draw the line—especially after it was claimed that its earlier definition that Korea was
not
vital had been an invitation to the Communist attack of the following year?
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“This has become a very small planet,” Dean Rusk argued in May 1965. “We have to be concerned with all of it—with all of its land, waters, atmosphere, and with surrounding space.”
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If the projection of Soviet power and influence into the world outside was far less extensive, the years after Stalin’s death nonetheless saw noteworthy advances. Khrushchev, it is clear, wanted the Soviet Union to be admired, even loved, rather than feared; he also wanted to redirect resources from the military to agricultural investment and consumer goods. His general foreign-policy ideas reflected his hope for a “thaw” in the Cold War. Overruling Molotov, he removed Soviet troops from Austria; he handed back the Porkkala naval base to Finland and Port Arthur to China; and he improved relations with Yugoslavia, arguing that there were “separate roads to socialism” (a position as upsetting to many of his Presidium colleagues as it was to Mao Tse-tung). Although 1955 saw the formal establishment of the Warsaw Pact, in response to West Germany’s joining of NATO, Khrushchev was willing to open diplomatic relations with Bonn. He was also keen to improve relations with the United States, although his own volatility of manner and the by now chronic distrust with which Washington interpreted all Russian moves made a real
détente
impossible. In that same year, Khrushchev traveled to India, Burma, and Afghanistan. The Third World was from now on going to be taken seriously by the Soviet Union, just when more and more Afro-Asian states were gaining independence.
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Little of this was as complete or smooth-going a transformation as the ebullient Khrushchev would have liked. In April 1956, that instrument of Stalinist control the Cominform had been dissolved. Embarrassingly, two months later the Hungarian uprising—a “separate road” away from socialism—had to be put down with Stalinist resolve. Quarrels with China multiplied and, as will be discussed below, produced a deep cleft in the Communist world.
Détente
foundered on the rocks of the U-2 incident (1960), the Berlin Wall crisis (1961), and then the confrontation with the United States over Soviet missiles in Cuba
(1962). None of this, however, could turn back the Russian move toward world policy; the mere establishment of diplomatic relations with newly emergent countries and contact with their representatives at the United Nations made the growth of Soviet ties with the outside world inevitable. In addition, Khrushchev, eager to demonstrate the innate superiority of the Soviet system over capitalism, was bound to look for new friends abroad; his more pragmatic successors, after 1964, were interested in breaking the American cordon which had been placed around the USSR,
and
in checking Chinese influence. There were, moreover, many Third World countries eager to escape from what they termed “neocolonialism” and to institute a planned economy rather than a laissez-faire one—a preference which usually caused a cessation of western aid. All this fused to give Russian foreign policy a distinct “outward thrust.”

This thrust began in a very decisive fashion in December 1953, by the signing of a trade agreement with India (neatly coinciding with Vice-President Nixon’s visit to New Delhi), followed up by the 1955 offer to construct the Bhilai steel plant, and then by lots of military aid; this was a connection to the most important of the Third World powers, it simultaneously annoyed the Americans and the Chinese, and it punished Pakistan for its membership in the Baghdad Pact. Almost at the same time, in 1955–1956, the USSR and Czechoslovakia began giving aid to Egypt, replacing Washington in the funding of the Aswan Dam. Soviet loans also went to Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Yemen. Pronounced anti-imperialist states in Africa, such as Ghana, Mali, and Guinea, were also encouraged by Moscow. In 1960, the great breakthrough occurred in Latin America, when the USSR signed its first trade agreement with Castro’s Cuba, then already becoming embroiled with an irritated United States. All this set a pattern which was not reversed by Khrushchev’s fall. Having waged a strident propaganda campaign against imperialism, the USSR quite naturally offered “friendship treaties,” trade credits, military advisers, and the rest to any newly decolonized nation. Russia could also benefit, in the Middle East, from the U.S. support of Israel (hence, for example, Moscow’s increasing aid to Syria and Iraq as well as Egypt in the 1960s); it could gain kudos by offering military and economic assistance to North Vietnam; even in distant Latin America, it could proclaim its commitment to national-liberation movements. In this struggle for world influence, the USSR had now come a long way from Stalin’s paranoid caution.
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But did this competition by Washington and Moscow for the affections of the rest of the globe, this mutual jostling for influence with the aid of treaties, credits, and weapons exports, mean that a bipolar world had indeed come into being, with everything significant in international affairs gravitating around the two opposing
Schwerpunkte
of the
United States and the USSR? From the viewpoint of a Dulles or a Molotov, that indeed was how the world was ordered. And yet, even as these two blocs competed across the globe, and in areas unknown to both in 1941, they were meeting up with a quite different trend. For a Third World was just at this time coming of age, and many of its members, having at last thrown off the controls of the traditional European empires, were in no mood to become mere satellites of a distant superpower, even if the latter could provide useful economic and military aid.

What was happening, in fact, was that one major trend in twentieth-century power politics, the rise of the superpowers, was beginning to interact with another, newer trend—the political fragmentation of the globe. In the Social Darwinistic and imperialistic atmosphere that had prevailed around 1900, it was easy to think that all power was being concentrated in fewer and fewer capitals of the world (see above, pp. 195–96) Yet the very arrogance and ambitiousness of western imperialism brought with it the seeds of its own destruction; the exaggerated nationalism of Cecil Rhodes, or the Panslavs, or the Austro-Hungarian military, provoked reactions among Boers, the Poles, the Serbs, the Finns; ideas of national self-determination, propagated to justify the unification of Germany and Italy, or the 1914 Allied decision to assist Belgium, seeped relentlessly eastward and southward, to Egypt, to India, to Indochina. Because the empires of Britain, France, Italy, and Japan had triumphed over the Central Powers in 1918 and had checked Wilson’s ideas for a new world order in 1919, these stirrings of nationalism were only selectively encouraged: it was fine to grant self-determination to the peoples of eastern Europe, because they were European and thus regarded as “civilized”; but it was
not
fine to extend these principles to the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, where the imperialist powers extended their territories and held down independence movements. The shattering of those empires in the Far East after 1941, the mobilization of the economies and recruitment of the manpower of the other dependent territories as the war developed, the ideological influences of the Atlantic Charter, and the decline of Europe all combined to release the forces for change in what by the 1950s was being called the Third World.
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But it was described as a “third” world precisely because it insisted on its distinction both from the American- and the Russian-dominated blocs. This did not mean that the countries which met at the original Bandung conference in April 1955 were free of all ties and obligations to the superpowers—Turkey, China, Japan, and the Philippines, for example, were among those attending the conference for whom the term “nonaligned” would have been inappropriate.
¹⁴⁰
On the other hand, they all pressed for increased decolonization, for the United Nations to focus upon issues other than the Cold War tensions, and for
measures to change a world which was still economically dominated by white men. When the second major phase of decolonization occurred, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the original members of the Third World movement could be joined by a large number of new recruits, smarting at the decades (or centuries) of foreign rule and grappling with the hard fact that independence had left them with a host of economic problems. Given the vast swelling of their numbers, they could now begin to dominate the United Nations General Assembly; originally a body of fifty (overwhelmingly European and Latin American) countries, the UN steadily changed into an organization of well over one hundred states with many new Afro-Asian members. This did not restrict the actions of the larger Powers that were permanent members of the Security Council and that possessed a veto—conditions insisted upon by a cautious Stalin. But it did mean that if either of the superpowers wished to appeal to “world opinion” (as the United States had done in getting the United Nations to aid South Korea in 1950), it had to gain the agreement of a body whose membership did not share the preoccupations of Washington and Moscow. Chiefly because the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by issues of decolonization, and by increasing calls to end “underdevelopment,” causes which the Russians adroitly espoused, this Third World opinion had a distinctly anti-western flavor, from the Suez crisis of 1956 to the later issues of Vietnam, the Middle East wars, Latin America, and South Africa. Even at the formal summits of the nonaligned countries, the emphasis was increasingly placed upon anticolonialism; and the geographical sitings of those meetings (Belgrade in 1961, Cairo in 1964, and Lusaka in 1970) symbolized this shift away from Eurocentered issues. The agenda of world politics was no longer exclusively in the hands of those powers possessing the greatest military and economic muscle.
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The most prominent of the early advocates of nonalignment—Tito, Nasser, Nehru—symbolized this transformation. Yugoslavia was remarkable in breaking with Stalin (it was expelled from the Cominform as early as 1948) and yet maintaining its independence without a Russian invasion occurring. It was a policy firmly maintained after Sfalin’s death; not for nothing was the first nonaligned summit held in Belgrade.
¹⁴²
Nasser had risen to fame throughout the Arab world after his 1956 clash with Britain, France, and Israel, was a fierce critic of western imperialism, and willingly accepted Soviet aid; yet he was not a puppet of Moscow—he “treated his home-grown communists badly and between 1959 and 1961 a vigorous anti-Soviet radio and press campaign was launched.”
¹⁴³
Pan-Arabism, and especially Muslim fundamentalism, were not natural partners for atheistic materialism, even if local Marxist intellectuals strove to produce a fusion of the two. As for India, long the symbolic leader of the “moderate” nonaligned
states, the repeated infusions of Soviet economic and military aid, which rose to new heights following Sino-Indian and Pakistani-Indian clashes, did not stop Nehru from criticizing Russian actions elsewhere and being very suspicious of the Communist party of India. His condemnations of British policy at Suez was due to his dislike of
all
Great Power interventions abroad.

The very fact that so many new states were entering the international community in these years, and that Russia was eager to wean them away from the West without itself having much knowledge of local conditions, also meant that its diplomatic “gains” were frequently attended by “losses.” The most spectacular example of this was China itself, which will be discussed further below; but there were many others. The 1958 change of regime in Iraq allowed Russia to pose as the friend of that Arab state and to offer it loans; four years later, a Ba’athist coup led to the bloody suppression of the Communist party there. Moscow’s continued aid to India inevitably angered Pakistan; there was no way it could please the one without losing the other. In Burma, an early promising start foundered when that country banned
all
foreigners. In Indonesia, things were worse; after receiving masses of Russian and eastern-European aid, Sukarno’s government had turned from Moscow to Peking by 1963. Two years later, the Indonesian army wiped out the Communist party with great ferocity. Sékou Touré in Guinea sent home the Russian ambassador in 1961 for involving himself in a local strike, and during the Cuban missile crisis he refused to let Soviet planes refuel at the airport they had specially extended at Conakry.
¹⁴⁴
Russia’s support of Lumumba in the Congo crisis of 1960 undermined his prospects, and his successor Mobutu closed down the Soviet embassy. The most spectacular instance of that sort of setback—and a major blow to Soviet influence—came in 1972, when Sadat ordered 21,000 Russian advisers out of Egypt.