Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957
601
Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957
601eBook
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Overview
A new understanding of the post World War II era, showing what occurred when the British Empire wouldn’t step aside for the rising American superpower—with global insights for today.
An enduring myth of the twentieth century is that the United States rapidly became a superpower in the years after World War II, when the British Empire—the greatest in history—was too wounded to maintain a global presence. In fact, Derek Leebaert argues in Grand Improvisation, the idea that a traditionally insular United States suddenly transformed itself into the leader of the free world is illusory, as is the notion that the British colossus was compelled to retreat. The United States and the U.K. had a dozen abrasive years until Washington issued a “declaration of independence” from British influence. Only then did America explicitly assume leadership of the world order just taking shape.
Leebaert’s character-driven narrative shows such figures as Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennan in an entirely new light, while unveiling players of at least equal weight on pivotal events. Little unfolded as historians believe: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan; the Korean War; America’s descent into Vietnam. Instead, we see nonstop U.S. improvisation until America finally lost all caution and embraced obligations worldwide, a burden we bear today.
Understanding all of this properly is vital to understanding the rise and fall of superpowers, why we’re now skeptical of commitments overseas, how the Middle East plunged into disorder, why Europe is fracturing, what China intends—and the ongoing perils to the U.S. world role.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374714062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 601 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE THREE IN 1945
Britain, who thinks she saved the world, is mute in the bonds of austerity; Russia, who thinks she saved the world, sits back, enormous, suspicious, watching; and America, who thinks she saved the world, makes one think of a nervous, hysterical girl holding a hand grenade, not knowing what to do with it or when it will go off.
— Nat Gubbins, 1946, British philosopher-humorist and Daily Express columnist
At 10:30 p.m. on May 1, Radio Hamburg reported that Hitler lay dead in the Reich Chancellery. World War II was at last coming to an end, at least in Europe, and by then over 36 million people had been consumed in that charnel house alone. There were more refugees on the move than at any time until today, some 13 million altogether, including 5 million starting to arrive in western Germany from within the nation's prewar frontiers. But Winston Churchill made no statement in the House of Commons that night. Speaking to a member of Parliament earlier in the day, he'd merely observed that the situation was "more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago," when the Nazi war machine had cornered for slaughter some 400,000 Allied soldiers on the beaches of Dunkirk. Just a few days before Churchill spoke, Russian and American infantrymen had embraced along the river Elbe in northeastern Germany, cutting the Reich in two. This entailed more than Hitler's downfall. The encounter also signaled the end of Europe's primacy in world affairs.
Victory had been certain by late 1944. To decide the political division of the postwar world, the great Allied powers — the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire, or "the Three," as Harry Truman would later call them — gathered early in February 1945 for seven days at Yalta, a czarist-era resort on the Black Sea in the Crimea. Churchill was then seventy, having all the demeanor of a bulldog, as the famous photographs showed. He led a British delegation of around 350 that included the lean and elegant foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, forty-seven, who was Churchill's closest political ally. General Hastings "Pug" Ismay, the prime minister's personal military assistant, was there, as were key economic advisers and half a dozen of Britain's top commanders.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sixty-three, arrived bundled in a wheelchair despite the mild climate, which was due to the sheltering mountains to the north. His big frame looked frail, and he indeed had just two months to live. Accompanying him were some 350 Americans as well. They included his senior White House staff officer, Fleet Admiral William Leahy; the austere army chief of staff, George Marshall; and Edward Stettinius, the silver-haired forty-four-year-old secretary of state, who was in the third month of his seven-month tenure. Joseph Stalin, five years younger than Churchill, was the host — and around him were V. M. Molotov, people's commissar for foreign affairs; Molotov's deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky; and three of the Soviet armed forces' most senior commanders. On the fifth day, the sadistic torturer Lavrenti Beria appeared. Stalin playfully described him as "our Himmler," referencing the Reichsführer-SS, and it was Beria's NKVD, the dreaded People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, that handled arrangements for the conference.
At Yalta, the principals addressed those nations and regions that would become flash points in the years ahead: a divided Germany, Iran, Greece, Turkey and the Balkans, the Middle East, Indochina, and Korea. Also discussed were swaths of the Bloodlands — the conquered and reconquered terrain between the Baltic and the Black Sea in which Hitler and Stalin, from 1933 to 1945, killed some fourteen million civilians.
Historians have long contended that Yalta demonstrated Britain's waning stature among "the Three," but that's not how Churchill and the men around him saw it. They had reasons to expect the British Empire to be the presiding power over much of the postwar world. Churchill, ever the romantic, codenamed the conference "Argonaut," a reference to the ancient Greek myth of Jason and his Argonauts, a band of heroes who had sailed on the beautiful vessel Argo into hostile lands to retrieve the Golden Fleece — a symbol of power and rightful kingship.
The British knew that their empire had neither the industrial heft of the United States nor the hordes of Red Army soldiers and flaming Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Soviet Union. Still, they believed they had other advantages, and the shock of FDR's appearance added to their confidence. General Ismay concluded Roosevelt "was more than half gaga," which was untrue, but the president looked so ill that right after the conference U.S. press officers tried to explain away the photographs in which he wanly appeared. He was having trouble with his dentures, they claimed, which affected his speech and caused his face to fall in. Men who were there, however, could see for themselves. With a dying president in office — who'd sooner or later be succeeded by an obscure vice president untutored in foreign affairs — the United States would likely play only a marginal role in the months and maybe the years ahead. Moreover, as Roosevelt emphasized on the conference's second day, America's three million troops would be gone from Europe within two years of Germany's defeat.
Russia was known to have been bled terribly by the war, though the figure of 26.6 million dead was yet to be calculated by the Soviet General Staff. Yalta itself had been liberated only the previous April from the Germans, and FDR was shocked by the Crimea's war-torn landscape. He witnessed it up close during the eighty-five-mile drive over rough and winding roads from the airfield in Saki, where the American and British delegations had landed, to Yalta. Though he remained in London, Tommy Lascelles, King George VI's shrewd and influential private secretary, predicted that the Russians "will be greatly dependent on us and the USA for their financial and industrial rehabilitation."
The territory of the empire and commonwealth was half again as large as that of the Soviet Union, and its population at least double. But there was another factor to consider. Most of all, Churchill was convinced that the British Empire possessed "superior statecraft and experience" in its officials and institutions, and no one around him, certainly not Lascelles or Eden, disagreed. Nor, as it turned out, did the Americans. Along with other advantages, it therefore seemed plausible that the men at the center of a postwar world would be speaking in crisp British tones.
As the conference got under way, the British began sending news home via a diplomatic pouch that was couriered to London daily. The more urgent messages were sent through a secure electronic communications station aboard the Cunard Line's RMS Franconia anchored nearby. And one of those was a cable Churchill sent to Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, saying that he'd come upon a different Russia than he'd known previously. His own private secretary, John Martin of the Dominions Office, reported home that Stalin and the prime minister were getting on swimmingly.
The once-enigmatic dictator now appeared to see the funny side of everything. He'd taken up smoking cigars, just like Churchill, rather than cigarettes. To be sure, Roosevelt joked with Stalin at Churchill's expense, observing that the British were peculiar people who wanted to "have their cake and eat it too." But when Churchill heard such digs, he responded by just playing quietly with his cigar while Foreign Secretary Eden stared off into the distance. In the end, Eden concluded that at Yalta "the Americans had been very weak." That was Lascelles's sense as well, though he wasn't as harsh. After reading all the conference telegrams, he wrote in his diary that "the Americans have supported us loyally."
Roosevelt's priorities included persuading Stalin to join the final battle against Japan and establishing direct communication between Red Army headquarters and those of General Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the assault into Germany from the west. He accomplished both, and he also got Stalin's agreement to participate in the United Nations Organization, or "Uno," as sardonic British diplomats tended to call it, until corrected by earnest Americans who preferred a more respectful term, "the UN."
The British believed they were getting much of what they wanted at Yalta. They convinced the Americans and the Russians that after an Allied victory, France should also control an occupation zone in Germany. This was a critical goal for the British, who couldn't risk being the only democracy on the scene when the GIs went home. They were additionally scoring successes in bilateral trade and commercial issues with the Americans, a neglected element of this conference. The industrialist Frederick Leathers, minister of war transport, reported his surprise that U.S. officials were finally adopting his views on global trade, including London's right to discriminate against foreign shipping and oil imports from non-British firms.
Churchill and his advisers didn't object when Roosevelt proposed that the Three issue a "Declaration on Liberated Europe" to close the conference. It was essentially a memorandum of good intentions to build a free and peace-loving world. Not least, it underlined each power's commitment to an early democratic vote in Poland for a new constitution and government — a salient point because Britain and France had declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 to uphold Poland's independence. Back in London, Tommy Lascelles came to believe, as did others, that the "Liberated Europe" declaration was a historically more important achievement than the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence.
Skeptics within the U.S. and British delegations, such as Admiral Leahy, knew the language behind all this to be as pliant as a rubber band. Nonetheless, Churchill was pleased, despite his having vowed for decades to see Bolshevism crushed. He regarded Stalin as one of the great figures of history, and he'd blurted out, "I like that man," while adding, "In spite of everything I'd like that man to like me." Anthony Eden had been horrified, but Churchill was a figure of prodigious emotions and had no vocabulary for a middle way.
Once home on February 19, and despite some early ambivalence, Churchill told his cabinet that Stalin was a man who could be trusted. On the twenty-seventh, he assured a cheering House of Commons in a two-hour speech that no government had ever kept its word more faithfully than the Soviet Union. Eden was more cautious, but implied his confidence in Stalin. The Argonauts had done well, and the empire's clout had been confirmed.
Or so it appeared. In fact, Stalin had already created a ready-to-be-installed puppet regime for Poland, which deemed the legal Polish government in exile (based in London) a usurper. Crack divisions of the conquering Red Army — the mightiest that ever existed — were sweeping through Poland's towns and villages to push deep within Germany's borders. Bridgeheads were being established 43 miles from Berlin, while Russia's allies in the west were still 370 miles away. No matter what had been said, prospects for democracy anywhere in Europe were slim once the Red Army and the NKVD arrived.
Churchill and Roosevelt knew this. But happiness can be defined as the perpetual state of being well deceived, and they were eager to come to terms with Stalin in any way possible.
Above all, the Americans and British needed events to be settled. For them, the war had to be final; it had to be followed by a just and enduring order. That meant accepting Stalin's assurances. The Americans enjoyed their own illusions, but nothing like the British, who were experiencing the hopes of despair. Self-deception within Britain's official circles arose from an ordeal of war that went back to August 1914. The second global war must have a conclusive settlement. The alternative of renewed war, or of a fully armed peace, was unthinkable.
Soon enough, however, Churchill found his faiths hard to justify. On February 23, as he learned more about Stalin's moves to impose Soviet-model police states on Eastern Europe, he mused to one of his staff that he might be trusting Stalin as Neville Chamberlain had trusted Hitler, and on the twenty-eighth he fumed — in private — that he was ready to go to the "verge of war" with Stalin over Poland. Distressed, Churchill sent long telegrams to Roosevelt, back in the United States, about Stalin behaving contrary to the understandings reached at Yalta. But the president, in his final weeks of life, could express only anxiety, concern, and disappointment.
* * *
Since not long after Pearl Harbor, Churchill had been receiving acute insights on American politics from Isaiah Berlin, a Russian émigré and Oxford don in his mid-thirties who'd soon be recognized as one of the century's leading historians of ideas. In 1944, Berlin was serving as an analyst in the Special Survey Section of the British embassy in Washington, where his job was to harvest intelligence and compose clever weekly commentaries to be sent to London under the name of the busy ambassador, Lord Halifax. Churchill knew the original source of these stylish essays and paid attention. On December 10, he received a report that described a desire within Congress and the Roosevelt administration "for a brand new 100 per cent American foreign policy not tied to Britain's apron strings." It was a warning that Berlin had been pressing in his dispatches for two years. A hard-boiled, businesslike approach to foreign affairs was quickly emerging, he noted. Energetic U.S. technicians, industrialists, and traders were eyeing vast new markets, "eager to convert the world to the American pattern." He urged his superiors to pay attention to America's expansive aspirations, and in the last months of the war he stated that "the world had better get ready."
Influential men were indeed speaking of the need for a "Pax Americana" following the war, but what did they mean by this term that echoed Roman tyranny and British mythology? To some, such as Maine's Republican senator Owen Brewster, it entailed encouraging the nation's best businessmen and most businesslike officials to compete overseas with the savvy, well-organized British. The United States could shape the postwar world by playing to its strengths in trade and industry and by being an exemplar of democracy.
In the better drawing rooms of the northeast coast, however, other men were taking "Pax Americana" literally. Among them was Lewis Douglas, then serving at the War Shipping Administration; his brother-in-law John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war; and their friend James Conant, the president of Harvard. They envisioned an assertively dominant nation that would replace the British Empire, which they took, until just about now, to have been the world's foremost political and military force.
It's a common tendency for a country to blame its allies for doing nothing to win a war. During this war, however, it was also frequently claimed that one's allies were doing too much to win the peace. "Never absent from British minds," as President Roosevelt himself had suggested in a briefing note for his military chiefs, "are their post-war interests, commercial or military." At Yalta, one U.S. naval aide saw the British "losing a lot of sleep" in trying to outsmart the Americans at the conference table. Their goal was "not to cause us to lose the war," he allowed, "but just to lighten their burden and debt as much as they could without fighting."
In another of his Washington dispatches, Isaiah Berlin reported that the political, diplomatic, and military officials he met in the capital suspected that his government was poised to create a new balance of power in the postwar world by "driving a wedge" between America and Russia. As late as the spring of 1945, on the verge of victory, Tennessee's senator Kenneth McKellar, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and one of the best-informed people in Washington, would warn colleagues that Britain was ready to embark on a postwar buildup intended to make its Royal Navy dangerously larger than a demobilized U.S. fleet.
On the other hand, Admiral Leahy concluded after Yalta, in his usual snapping-turtle manner, that a weakened Britain was ruined beyond repair.
From whatever viewpoint, it was hard to evaluate the British Empire. State and the Pentagon, for instance, offered several conflicting analyses of their own. It was at least clear, by the time the Yalta Conference ended, that Churchill was growing troubled about economic prospects at home. World War II had cost Britain twice the amount of World War I. In its last terrible year, 10 million men and women out of a working population of 21.5 million were either carrying weapons or making them. Britain's economy had been stripped for the fight.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2018 Derek Leebaert.
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Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction 3
I: THEY THOUGHT IT WAS PEACE
1. The Three in 1945 11
2. Keynes&Co. 33
3. Entering the Middle East 56
4. False Starts 79
II: A CHILLING WORLD
5. Warfare States 111
6. Year of the Offensive 137
7. Defending the West 161
8. The Outer Fortress: Protecting the Middle East, Africa, and Asia 188
III: CHIPS ON THE TABLE
9. Auditing an Empire 213
10. Pivoting to Asia and into Vietnam 235
11. War on the Rim 256
12. Asia’s Three Fighting Fronts 280
IV: THE GROUND CHANGES
13. “Holding the Ring” in Iran and Egypt 305
14. Churchill Is Back 328
15. Stemming the Tide 352
16. Coronations and Crises 374
V: A NEW SUPREMACY
17. The Break Points of 1954 401
18. Ordering Chaos 426
19. No End of a Lesson 451
20. What Happened Next 480
Conclusion 505
NOTES 517
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 583
INDEX 587