The US foreign policy from 1945-1991 - Case Study Example

 The US FOREIGN POLICY FROM 1945-1991 WAS OVERWHELMINGLY CONCERNED WITH THE the USSR The term Cold War was coined by Pulitzer prize-winning publicist Herbert Bayard Swope (Safire 2008,p.134) and refers to the intense feelings of hostility and the profound international tension and struggle for power between the the USA and the the USSR, both of which headed formidable alliances i.e. Allies and Russian satellites, respectively. It started in 1945 and ended in 1989. It was ‘cold’ because the relations between the two superpowers were icy but never came to a flashpoint verging on a shooting war. The conflict involved political rivalry and advantage as well as an upper hand in the balance of power. The conflict was replete with clashes of competing ideologies i.e. between the democratic capitalist system of America and its allies and the socialist/communist system of the the USSR and the satellite nations comprising the nations of the Warsaw Pact (Byrne 2000,p.12). The rivalry consisted of propaganda, military alliances, atomic arms development, reconstruction programs and the rivalry to win the hearts and minds of the neutral countries, most especially the third world countries which might provide military bases, natural resources and markets. As early as 1929, the USA and the USSR had kept each other at bay and at arms’ length despite differences in political ideologies. This estrangement was intensified by the the USA’s policy of isolationism in the 1930’s which muted whatever feelings of mistrust they had for each other (Bartlett 1974,p.ix). But relations were improved when the USA and Soviet Union unexpectedly found themselves fighting side by side against fascist Germany in World War II. The warm relations, however, rapidly dissolved when midway through the war, the USA realised that the USSR was determined to retrieve all the territories in Eastern Europe that it lost prior to World War I and these are eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and parts of Romania and Finland (Risjord 1985,p.778). It became clear to USA that Stalin in his paranoidal fear of Germany and its military might want all of Eastern Europe to serve as its buffer states and shields from German aggression. President Roosevelt stressed that USA as adherent of the principle of self-determination wanted these states to choose for themselves the kind of government they want (Risjord 1985,p.779). The other western allies looked at Poland as strategically the bulwark of Europe which when falling into the hands of the Soviets would open the floodgates of Russians invading Western Europe (Risjord 1985,p.779). The US fears were vindicated during the 1943 Teheran Conference when Stalin finally laid his cards on the table: that he expected territorial concessions in the form of the states of Eastern Europe. Justice, to Stalin demanded that Russia be recompensed from the deaths of 16 million Russians and the massive destruction and damage to Soviet properties and machinery during the first three years of war (Risjord 1985,p.779). It dawned on President Roosevelt that reality, tradition and history dictated that self-determination among the eastern European states would be anathema to Russia as any freely elected government in Eastern Europe would be hostile to Soviet ideology (Bromke 1985,p.113). Both the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference in 1945 further strained the relations almost to the breaking point as Russia treacherously set up a communist government in Lublin, Poland followed by its undermining of elected non-communist governments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It was inevitable that the Cold War ensued in early 1946 after Berlin and Germany were divided into 4 factions i.e. Russian, American, British and French (Isaacs & Downing 1998,p.63). What is worse is the inevitability of the bitter split between the the US-led Allies and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact nations which comprised the Iron Curtain. Students of history cannot fail to notice that practically all events from 1945 to 1991 that emanate from foreign policies of the the USA are somehow connected with the Cold War if not the direct outcomes of such foreign policies. There are only a few exceptions to events that were not Cold War motivated. One such was the overthrow of Mohammed Mosadegh’s regime in Iran in 1953. the US utilising its CIA caused Mosadegh’s downfall and the eventual return to power of the Shah of Iran who promised to grant the US oil companies a 40% interest in a new petroleum consortium (Norton et al 1988, p.519) . Another example was President Carter’s brokering of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. Israel had always been a close ally of the the USA but the 1973 OPEC oil embargo crippled USA and that was done to punish the USA for its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. USA then wanted to help Egypt recover the Sinai Peninsula to endear itself to the Arab world without losing Israel as an ally (Carter 2007, p.450). Another non-Cold War project was the establishment of the Peace Corps by President Kennedy whose aim was “to encourage world peace and friendship” and consisted of sending young teachers, engineers,agriculturists, medical personnel etc. so that they can share their skills to the locals and help them help themselves (Anderson & Cosgrove 2005,p.66). This project had the effect of endearing USA to these nations and was part of the strategy to win the hearts and minds of people and influence them to American cause. The 1977 US –Panama Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal was conceptualised by USA in order to diffuse the tension emanating from Panama’s displeasure over the restrictions on its sovereignty in the area (Boczek 2005,p.308). This further boosted the image of USA as good Uncle Sam who cares deeply for the needs of all. The USA had also been ostracized for its military intervention and for its role in the overthrow of democratic but left-leaning governments in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Guatemala in 1954 and in Chile in 1973 as well as its support of military juntas and dictators such as that in Pakistan and that of Somoza in Nicaragua (Moreno 1990,p.21). These at first glance seemed to be motivated by the US displeasure or approval of the regimes in question but at closer inspection, it revealed the US trepidation that these governments mutate themselves to become another Communist-backed Cuba and thus Cold War inspired ( Booth 2005,p.169). Realizing that both Greece and Turkey were in the throes of resisting Russian attempts to annex them inside the Iron Curtain, the USA believing in the Domino Theory which enunciates that when one part falls down the rest of them will all fall down, made giant steps to save both and thus the Truman Doctrine was formulated (Medhurst & Brands 2000,p.25). President Truman announced that “it must be the policy of the USA to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (Risjord 1985,p.787)). In effect, Truman petitioned for a long-term policy of containment whereby the USA would act to restrain the expansion of Communism. Confrontation to contain Communism therefore became “the American way”.(Ambrose & Brinkley 2005,p.75). To give substance to the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan came to the rescue to the Western countries’ virtually destroyed economies by pumping in an appropriation of $17 billion to be distributed to 16 Western European countries and over a 4-year period (Malsberger 2000,p.179). The goal was to stymie all Soviet attempts to sow discontent and to reconstruct and hasten post-war recovery of Western Europe. Soviet Union quickly responded with its own Cominform, which were bilateral trade agreements linking the USSR with its satellites in the Iron Curtain (Whitcomb 1998,p.87). In June 1948, the two opposing factions threatened to convert Germany into an arena of bloodshed when the Soviets in East Germany attempted to throttle and blockade West Berlin by cutting off all road and rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany. To Stalin’s consternation, the allies refused to evacuate Berlin. Instead a mammoth airlift ensued wherein as much as 5,600 tons of foodstuff, commodities and fuel per day were transported by the the US Air Force from airfields in Hannover and Frankfurt, West Germany to Berlin’s Templehof Airport (Friedman 2007,p.77). The Soviet blockade fostered the formation of NATO or North Atlantic Treaty Organization . It was inked in April 1949 by the USA, Canada and Western Europe with the declaration that an attack on one was attack on all and with a commitment for the creation of joint military forces. Britain, the USA and France then brought to an end their zones of occupation to create the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany. USSR retaliated by setting up the German Democratic Republic or East Germany (Ambrose & Brinkley 1997, p.101). With the admission of West Germany to NATO in 1955, the Warsaw Pact consisting of Russia and the Iron Curtain countries came into being. The Truman Doctrine was formulated with the Russian expansionism ambitions in mind but its first big test happened to be not in Europe but in the Far East with the Soviets hiding behind other Communist allies. USA found itself faced with the spectre of Communism wildly raging like cancer cells and its policy of containment demanded that it faced them head-on. Communist forces both in China and Korea were headed for untrammelled victory. USA firmly believed that it had to destroy these forces to teach Soviet Russia a lesson i.e. that if it can contain Chinese or Korean communism, it can also contain Russian communism. The nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek despite the the US aid were no match to that of the communist forces of Mao Tse-tung and eventually sought refuge in the island of Formosa, which is today Taiwan. USA was left with no recourse but watch the fall of China to Communist hands as McCarthyism and the China lobbyists placed the blame on Truman’s foreign policy of concentrating on Europe while allowing Asia to go down the drain (Conn 1996,p.316). USA then directed all its energies to barring the entry of Communist China in the UN with the effect that Mao Tse Tung was forced to seek solace in the arms of Soviet Union. Thus, Red China and the USSR made a formidable amity treaty in February 1950 with the signing of a Sino-Soviet friendship treaty in Moscow (Gittings 1968,p.43). USSR passionately sided with Red China in the halls of UN. While American aid was lackadaisical in China, it was speedy and all-out in the case of South Korea. Buoyed by an American public intimidated by the Red scare perpetrated by Truman and McCarthy and infuriated by the foreign policy that allowed China to be handed over to the Communists, USA immediately filed a resolution in the UN Security Council branding North Korea, an ally and protégé of the USSR, as aggressors. In the absence by boycott of the USSR, it was approved thus giving USA a blank check to resist the aggressors (Steel 2004,p.470). MacArthur’s forces drove back the North Koreans who were on the verge of running over the whole Korean Peninsula to the 38th parallel and should have demolished the North Koreans were it not for the intervention of China. To the USA, a victory against North Korea was also a victory against its Communist mentor and ally, the the USSR who was expected to clash with USA. The China fiasco necessitated a change in the the US foreign policy. The line of containment was now extended all over the world and US air power and massive retaliation was to be reserved as the ultimate answer to Communist aggression. US foreign policymakers were already deeply concerned with Soviet influence slowly getting entrenched in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and Asia specifically in Ethiopia, North Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Nicaragua where the Soviets were exerting direct or indirect control of such governments. USA was aware that USSR desired to achieve international equality and standing with USA globally and thus USA had to formulate new foreign policies to stymie these Russian incursions (Bialer & Mandelbaum 1989,p.65). In reaction to these, USA decided to review its posture of detente or relaxation of relations with the Soviets that was formulated by Nixon and Kissinger and decided to expand its budget for military and defense spending to rival that of Soviet buildup in nuclear and conventional arms. President Reagan also initiated “a policy of support for all freedom fighters anywhere in the world where they sought to overthrow Communist regimes” (Gorman 2001,p.21). Thus, USA set a strenuous policy of “American interventions” under the Eisenhower Doctrine in which the aim was to help countries topple Marxist governments in Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Grenada, El Salvador, Chile and Guatemala. The formulated Eisenhower-Dulles strategy was immediately tested in the Vietnam War where the French were battling Communist Vietminhs for almost 10 years while USA sent token aid to the French. When USA refused to come to the aid of the embattled French in Dienbienphu, the result was the French surrender and the division of Vietnam into North and South Vietnam (Medhurst 1994,p.102). Realising that South Vietnam teetered to communist domination and that Russia was exerting influence over North Vietnam and its leaders particularly Ho Chi Minh, Eisenhower formulated the Domino Theory by which South Vietnam must be defended at all cost because like dominoes if it fell, the rest of Asia would also fall down. USA was also scared of possible Russian hegemony in Vietnam especially after the Hanoi visit of Premier Kosygin in February 1965 where Kosygin accompanied by Kremlin missile experts promised massive aid to Hanoi and “concluded formal military and economic agreements on February 10” with Hanoi (Hershberg 1996,p.240). Despite public antagonism against participation in the Vietnam War, the Russian or Red Scare and Russia’s influence in Asia shoved the USA into the Vietnam War but without British support, Eisenhower had to organise SEATO or Southeast Asia Treaty Organization , an anti-communist pact that he expected would provide South Vietnam the needed support as well as contain communism in Asia (Tuchman 1984,p.270). The Eisenhower-Dulles massive retaliation strategy was continued to the brink by President Johnson who bombarded North Vietnam with a total of 15 million tons of bombs, more than that used during the entire World War II. Calling this Operation Rolling Thunder, he flooded Vietnam with 543,400 American troops in 1969 (Bradley et al 1993,p.131). Despite all the carnage, the massacres i.e. My Lai massacre, the atrocities committed, the Vietcongs employing guerilla tactics and massively supported by Russian aid and training refused to be pulverised. After the American withdrawal, South Vietnam fell into communist hands tilting the balance of power in favor of the communists and the scary possibility of Russian entry into Vietnam. The 1950’s saw the Cold War rivalry centered on nuclear arms race and missile race. Although the reason USA and UK in the top secret Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb was to protect the Allies from Nazi Germany, yet “the eventual US decision to use the atomic bomb” included “fears in Washington about the Soviet Union’s possible advance into East Asia if the war continued another several months” (Diehl & Moltz 2002,p.5)). Russia had been unmasked as having interest on “Japanese territory, and possibly parts of Japanese-controlled China and Korea” (Diehl & Moltz, 2002, p.5). After World War II, the knowledge that Russia was secretly reinforcing its nuclear arm weaponry and in fact had spied on the Manhattan Project and stole nuclear bomb formulas accelerated the US drive to reinforce its own nuclear weapon program with development of new military technology and nuclear delivery systems. The US insecurity was further bolstered when Russia tested their first H-bomb in 1953 (Baker 1978,p.100). The USA retaliated by testing a 15 megaton H-bomb in the Bikini Island, which razed the Pacific island(Del Tredici 1987,p.22). The nuclear arms race was later reined in by the signing of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) in November 1969 in Helsinki, Finland (Diehl & Moltz 2002 ,94). In the ‘50s too, the USA concentrated its energies on the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons because Russia in 1957 launched Sputnik, an artificial satellite that circled the outer space and fired the first intercontinental ballistic missile. This dented American pride and Eisenhower was pelted with denunciations for causing the ‘missile gap’ and opening America to the vulnerability of Russian air attack (Risjord 1985,p.842). This propelled USA to test its own ICBMs, enlarge its fleet of long-range bombers, develop the Polaris missile –bearing submarines, deploy intermediate- range missiles pointed at Russia (Hadden & Luce 1962,p.10) and the setting up of the Star Wars project or installations in space under the Reagan regime. The arms and missile race also spawned espionage. While Russia sent KGB spies to the USA, the US also trained its own spies and reinforced espionage through the CIA and reached almost boiling point when Russia shot down a US U2 spy plane bearing high-powered cameras flying over Sverdlovsk and presented the captured CIA pilot Francis Powers and his photos of Soviet military installations. (Ryan 1988, p.137). The election of John F. Kennedy as new US President signalled a more intense rivalry with Russia. In his inaugural speech, he proclaimed that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty” (Kennedy, 1963, p.3). This was obviously in retaliation to Khruschev’s 1959 declaration, “We will bury you” (Gati 1974,p.59). Kennedy then wasted no time flexing American muscles against Russian efforts to implant Marxist ideology in the whole world by committing a massive military buildup based on the principle of flexible response. Kennedy’s rhetorics of meeting any kind of warfare whether of the guerilla combat type or nuclear showdown only inspired Khruschev into a more intense and accelerated arms race and rivalry to implant influence globally. This rivalry was emphasised and reached its culmination in Cuba. That the Soviet-allied Cuba was too close to American shores and that the the US-backed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs was a dismal failure and more importantly that the USSR had installed Soviet missiles in Cuba, increased Kennedy’s resolve to ward off Soviet presence in Cuba. And his solution was naval blockade in order to hinder the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba (Chayes, 1974, p.15). Meanwhile, the whole of America was on its toes with the possibility that a nuclear war would break out. Khruschev, realising the enormity, of the outcome of a nuclear war, capitulated and withdrew the missiles (Best & Hanhimaki 2004,p.268). The Cuban missile crisis made both sides appreciate the perils of confrontation and the importance of efforts to avert it. The ascendancy of the pragmatic Mikhail Gorbachev who realised that Russia burdened by crippling debts caused by defence spending must be transformed from a foe to be fought to a friend who must be aided, signaled the advent of the closure of the Cold War. Thus, in December 1989, Gorbachev and George Bush Sr. jointly announced the termination of the Cold War (Van Dijk 2008,p.565). Conclusion Practically all the events emanating from US foreign policies weresomehow connected directly or indirectly to US-Soviet rivalry or the Cold War. Thus, the the US foreign policy from 1945 to 1991 was overwhelmingly concerned with the the USSR whether directly or indirectly. The foreign policies might be directed to decimate China, North Korea or Vietnam hostile aspirations but indirectly it was also to ensure extermination of Soviet ambitions to rule the world. I therefore agree 90 % to the statement that the US foreign policy from 1945 to 1991 was overwhelmingly concerned with the the USSR. 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