To what extent was American foreign policy successful in containing communism between the years 1945-1970?
The United States was a phenomenal success at containing communism after 1945, as
long as one considers success as not falling to communism itself. I maintain,
however, that the measure of success we should expect is the quarantine of
communism to its’ component initial member, the Soviet Union. But in the years
after World War II to the age of the Nixon presidency, the US failed to stop the
expansion of communism to any efficiency. The whole of Eastern Europe fell to
communism. The most populous nation on Earth, China, also went communist
indirectly taking with it N. Korea and Vietnam, and making the countries of Cambodia and
Laos quasi-communist. The United States even gained a communist
satellite 90 miles out of its’ boundaries, Cuba. It is clear that American
foreign policy with its’ banner of containment was a miserable failure.
Soviet aggression in Greece and Turkey was the first major event that
would force America to react to Soviet activity. In 1947, Truman met this
aggression with the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine, delivered to a joint
session of Congress, was basically an open pact to any group willing to stand
against communism, guaranteeing them military and financial aid. This was the beginning of American efforts at
containment, a concept dreamed up by State Dept. member George Frost Kennan.
This is also the beginning of an embarrassing an unprecedented series of foreign
policy blunders on the part of the United States. The Truman Doctrine would
later be used to “justify” shady actions in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba.
American containment was backed up by earlier efforts to consolidate the
Western democratic powers against the spread of Red. The United Nations was the
first materialization of this in 1945. The second, and perhaps most dramatic,
was the call to arms by Britain’s moral saint, Winston Churchill. He gave a
speech in 1946 encouraging active endeavors to curb communism, and avoid a third
world war. He spoke of an “Iron Curtain,”
the dangerous separation of East and West Europe where no one could see in or
out. This mentality contributed greatly to the paranoia of the Cold War. The
United States also promoted and joined NATO; a big step toward deterring
communist expansion came in 1949. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as it
stood for, was comprised of the major W. European powers and the United States.
The treaty provided for collective defense of the member nations, and considered
an attack against one an attack against all. This
also provided a presidential loophole for military intervention by America in
any foreign struggle without Congress declaring war (i.e. Korea, Vietnam, Bay of
Pigs). Unfortunately, this backfired, and instead of deterring communist
expansion, forced a paranoid Soviet Union to flex its’ muscles. In 1955, to
counter the NATO buildup, the USSR formed an equally conglomerate alliance with
Eastern European nations. The Warsaw Pact, as it was known, shrouded virtually
all of Eastern Europe in the Iron Curtain. Poland, Bulgaria, E. Germany, Romania, and many others were now no more than puppet nations held by the Grand
Puppeteer, Russia. In one fell swoop the Soviet Union gained almost as much land
as Napoleon or Hitler; but without a war. America’s idea of a united effort at
the containment of Communism had boomeranged into a united expansion of
communism.
The end of World War II brought the redrawing of boundaries all over the
world. Korea, conquered by Japan during the war, was divided at the 38th
parallel then given to the USSR in the north and the US in the south. The
Soviets pulled out of N. Korea in 1950, leaving a communist regime behind. That
regime, funded and equipped by The Peoples Republic of China, invaded S. Korea.
The United Nations (led, of course, by the United States) raised an army to
restore peace and expel the aggressors. The
“conflict” lasted three years and victory changed hands twice before the
bloodied United States established a cease-fire zone on the familiar 38th
parallel. Some might say that communism in this case was successfully contained, however, the loss of 53,000 American lives in
a fruitless attempt to topple a regime is hardly a victory.
A similar yet more gruesome failure of the United States would
materialize in Vietnam. Vietnam declared independence from France in 1945, which
the French did not recognize. A war broke and after 8 years of fighting the
decision came in 1954 to split the country in two, North Vietnam being Communist
and South Vietnam led by the Vietnamese who supported the French. Diem, the
South Vietnamese leader was assassinated in 1963, causing the U.S. to send over
American troops to try to support the non-Communist regime in the South, in
accordance with the Truman Doctrine. The consequent struggle would prove to be
the most agonizing and long defeat of the American military in history. Fighting
a traditional war in a guerrilla setting and the insistence that we could win
the war without popular support of the South Vietnamese were two key elements of
our failure. The
United States suffered 68,000 dead along with 400,000 S. Vietnamese allies. It
was 1973 when we first started to withdraw our troops, and in 1976, all of
Vietnam came under rule by the Communist North. Later, Vietnam would occupy Laos
and Cambodia in part of an Asian Soviet bloc.
The
expansion of communism to the chagrin of the United States was not over, even
after the Korean Conflict and the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. In 1959, the
government of Cuba fell to the charismatic Fidel Castro and his regime. The
establishment of communism less than 100 miles outside of the United States was
achieved by a rag-tag band of guerrilla warriors. The American machine of
democracy was unwilling or unprepared to stop this, either for fear of judgment
from the international community or of the shortsightedness caused by a general
distaste for Cuba’s previous Batista government. This would later come back to
haunt them, in both the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The United States government, realizing the problem Castro’s Cuba could
be, planned a literal exertion of the Truman Doctrine. The Bay of Pigs was
initiated and “organized” by the late Eisenhower administration. When JFK
came into office, the plan seemed rather an attractive display of power to the
new administration. Although the plans themselves were not fully organized and
the timeframe was horrible, JFK through the CIA ordered the execution of the
operation. On Apr. 17, 1961, an armed force of about 1,500 Cuban exiles landed
in the Bay of Pigs. The
plan backfired as the exiles were ambushed and gunned down mercilessly; American
air support never arrived. Containment was dashed once again.
A year later, the “chilliest” moment of the
Cold War broke out, again in
communist Cuba. The Soviet Union had made a deal with Fidel Castro to place
nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba. These missiles gave the Soviet Union the
chance to hit American targets without an air offensive. The range of these
missiles was 3,000 miles, enough to demolish all the eastern seaboard of the US,
Washington DC,
Dallas,
Miami, and
Houston. Only after a
U2 flight over the
island captured the Soviets in the midst of building silos was the United States
aware of these proceedings. On October 22, JFK announced a “
quarantine”
(blockade) of Cuba, and said that any further attempts to arm Cuba would be an
act of war requiring a full retaliatory strike of the US nuclear arsenal. This
was the closest the world had ever come to the much-speculated
Dooms Day. “
Assured Mutual
Annihilation,” as it was known formally by the
Pentagon, was
some say no more than 6 minutes from materialization at the height of the
Crisis. On October 28, Soviet dictator
Nikita Khrushchev “backed down” from
the crisis and removed the silos from Cuba. Later revelation revealed that
Khrushchev didn’t so much back down as he had made a deal. The United States
secretly agreed to take out similarly installed
Jupiter missiles from Turkey for
the exchanged removal of Cuban silos. The
Cuban Missile Crisis was a
propaganda victory for the United States and an
undisclosed blow to
containment.
Some may contend that since the Soviet Union ultimately fell, the policy
of containment was successful. This is an overly generous statement. The Soviet
Union fell under its own weight; its’ robust military expenditures, and the
cost of administering to such a large country could not be sustained, and the
Union was lost in bankruptcy. Even though 1989 marked the end of the Cold War,
the Soviet Union is still not completely dead. Russian “President” Putin has
strong socialist leanings and, today, most eastern European countries, (Albania,
Romania, Hungary, Germany, and others) have active and moderately strong
socialist/communist parties. As another symbol of the United States failures to
contain communism, nations aside from those under the Soviet bloc remain to this
day. Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba, and China (1.3 billion Red Chinese
strong) are still completely Communist nations. Not only was American
containment in the height of the Cold War a failure, but its’ failures can be
seen to this day.
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