largely political and ideological and that containment
should rest mainly on political and economic
means to a more militant form based on military
power. NSC-68 saw growing Soviet military power
and its willingness to use it as part of a systematic
global strategy to destroy the West. Without military
power, containment would be a “bluff.” Where
Kennan’s version of containment was largely passive,
awaiting changes in Soviet domestic society,
NSC-68 advocated an active version of containment
to encourage such changes and advised
against any return to isolationism.
28
According to NSC-68, the United States and
Soviet Union were engaged in a zero-sum conflict
in which cooperation was impossible. Thus, “the
Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony,”
was moved “by a new fanatic faith,” that
leads it to try to “impose its absolute authority
over the rest of the world.”29 NSC-68 declared that
Soviet leaders regarded the United States as the
principal threat to their ambitions and as such
had to be defeated. The report predicted that the
USSR would stockpile hundreds of atom bombs
by 1954 and that a surprise nuclear attack on the
United States would then become possible, even
as the Red Army continued to threaten Western
Europe. “Only if we had overwhelming atomic
superiority and obtained command of the
air,” the report continued “might the USSR be
deterred from employing its atomic weapons as
we progressed toward the attainment of our
objectives.”30 President Truman only added his
signature to NSC-68 when North Korean forces
swept across the 38th Parallel into South Korea on
June 25, 1950, seeming to validate the report (see
Map 4.2).

THE “LOSS OF CHINA” The Cold War spread
beyond Europe to Asia when communists under
Mao Zedong took power in China in 1949, uniting
the country under a single government for the
first time since the end of the Manchu dynasty in
1911. China’s turn toward communism was a
result of a drawn-out civil war between communist
forces and its opponents. This conflict
reinforced Western fears that communism was
inherently expansionist and that communists
would use military means to spread their ideology.
It also hardened Western resolve to contain
communism’s spread.
China increasingly became an arena of conflict
among quarreling warlords despite the efforts
of Sun Yat-sen, provisional president of China’s
new republic and founder of China’s Nationalist
Party or Kuomintang (KMT), to unify the country.
Seeking allies, Sun recruited a young officer
named Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) as his military
aide. Sun also accepted assistance from
the Communist International (Comintern) beginning
in 1921 and sent Chiang to study in the
Soviet Union in 1923. After Sun’s death in 1925,
Chiang became leader of the Nationalists and
expanded their control over large areas of China.
Chiang also continued cooperating with China’s
Communist Party (CCP) until 1927 when he
turned upon his former allies, arresting and murdering
hundreds of them in Shanghai, and
starting a civil war that lasted over two decades.
Shortly thereafter, Chiang became the recognized
leader of China’s government. Those communists
who survived fled the cities into the countryside.
Chiang’s forces pursued the communists, and
in 1933, after four unsuccessful military operaPART
2 T HE PAST AS PROLOGUE TO THE PRESENT
118
with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power
increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants
to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its
absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is
waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or nonviolent methods in accordance with the
dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass
destruction, every individual faces the ever present possibility of annihilation should the conflic
enter the phase of total war.
The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery
of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their
replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To
that end, Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The
United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of
opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be
subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental
design.
. . . [T]he Soviet Union is seeking to create overwhelming military force, in order to back up
infiltration with intimidation. In the only terms in which it understands strength, it is seeking to
demonstrate to the free world that force and the will to use it are on the side of the Kremlin, that
those who lack it are decadent and doomed . . . The possession of atomic weapons at each of the
opposite poles of power, and the inability (for different reasons) of either side to place any trust
in the other, puts a premium on a surprise attack against us. It equally puts a premium on a more
violent and ruthless prosecution of its design by cold war, especially if the Kremlin is sufficientl
objective to realize the improbability of our prosecuting a preventive war.
Global Politics-part 2-c 16/11/11 12:48 Page 118
tions aimed at destroying the communists in
China’s western Jiangxi Province, Chiang succeeded
in encircling his communist foes. Facing
the possibility of annihilation, the communists
broke out of the trap in October 1934 and led by
Mao began the legendary year-long “Long March,”
crossing 6000 miles of mountains and marshes
until reaching northern Shaanxi Province, deep in
the heart of China, in October 1935. Only 10
percent of Mao’s original force remained.
The KMT and communists were forced into an
uneasy alliance following Japan’s 1937 invasion
of China. Their cooperation during World War
Two was virtually non-existent, each side weighing
its moves with an eye to gaining territorial and
other advantages over its domestic foe when their
civil war resumed. As early as 1940, Chiang was
using his best troops to fight the communists, and
his refusal to risk his forces against Japan infuriated
his American advisers, notably General
Joseph W. Stilwell (1883–1946) who referred to
Chiang derogatorily as “the peanut.” It was hardly
surprising that, after World War Two, civil war
again engulfed China.
With Japan’s surrender, the USSR, which had
entered the Pacific war only days earlier, seized
control of Manchuria and provided the communists
with large amounts of Japanese arms. Stalin,
however, did little to encourage Mao to seize
power. Between December 1945 and January
1947, General Marshall sought unsuccessfully
to foster a ceasefire between Chiang and Mao. A
series of campaigns followed in which Chiang’s
armies, weakened by corruption and confined
to the cities, began to collapse, culminating in
Chiang’s flight to the island of Taiwan (called
Formosa by Japan) and Mao’s establishment of the
People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949,
bringing about what Americans called the “loss”
of China. On Taiwan, Chiang continued to call
himself the legitimate ruler of the Republic of
China, and until his death repeatedly threatened
to re-conquer the mainland. Sino-American hostility
escalated when Mao turned to the USSR for
diplomatic and military assistance. In 1971, the
UN expelled the nationalist delegation and
accepted a communist delegation as legitimate
representatives of China. The island, which both
Mao and Chiang agreed was part of China,
remains a bone of contention to this day.
THE KOREAN WAR The Cold War in Asia
became a hot war and the wave of anti-communist
hysteria in the United States intensified when
communist North Korea invaded South Korea on
June 25, 1950. Like Berlin, divided Korea was an
anomaly – fully neither in the Western nor Eastern
camp. In a January 1950 speech, US Secretary of
State Dean Acheson (1893–1971) declared that
South Korea was outside the US defense perimeter
in East Asia. This speech, indicating that the US
had no wish to get involved in a war on the Asian
mainland or interfere in China’s civil war, may
have suggested to Stalin that North Korean aggression
would be left unanswered.
On learning of the North’s attack, Truman
reversed the position outlined by Acheson and
dispatched to South Korea US troops based in
Japan as occupation forces. American intervention
was authorized by the United Nations and,
although most allied forces were American and
South Korean, the Korean War was waged in the
name of the UN. In ordering US intervention,
Truman recalled the failure of the policy of
appeasement that the British and French had
pursued in the 1930s. He believed that this strategy
had made the allies look weak and had
provoked additional aggression. Truman wrote:
In my generation, this was not the first occasion
when the strong had attacked the weak.
I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria,
Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each
time the democracies had failed to act it had
encouraged the aggressors to keep going
ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just
as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had
acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I
felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to
fall Communist leaders would be emboldT
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ened to override nations closer to our own
shores.32
US leaders believed the communists had invaded
South Korea to probe America’s willingness to
resist aggression and that the invasion was a
prelude to possible Soviet military action in
Europe. Stalin was, in fact, behind the invasion.
“In the Soviet archives,” writes one historian, “are
a number of documents, including this telegram,
sent to Stalin by his ambassador in North Korea,
General Shtykov, two days after the start of the
war, which conclusively show that the North
attacked the South with Stalin’s full knowledge.”33
With the Korean invasion, American leaders
feared that, if the United States allowed one
country to “fall” to communism, others would
follow and that this must not be allowed to
happen. Despite American involvement, the
bloody struggle continued for three more years,
enlarged by the intervention, at Stalin’s urging, of
200,000 Chinese “volunteers” in October 1950,
just as UN forces under American General Douglas
MacArthur (1880–1964) seemed on the verge of
uniting the entire Korean peninsula.
The Korean War ended in a ceasefire in 1953,
but a treaty officially ending the war has never
been signed, and Korea remains one of the world’s
most dangerous flashpoints. Although the military
outcome was inconclusive, the war’s impact
was profound. The Korean War, thousands of
miles from Europe, globalized the Cold War. For
Americans, the war ended what political scientist
Robert Jervis calls “the incoherence which characterized
US foreign and defense efforts in the
period 1946–1950”34 and propelled the United
States in the direction of militarizing the containment
doctrine. To this end, events in Asia
brought about a dramatic increase in US military
spending and transformed NATO from a political
into a military alliance, with growing numbers
of American troops based in Europe, especially
West Germany, a permanent headquarters and
staff in Brussels, Belgium, and a Supreme Allied
Commander Europe (SACEUR) who has traditionally
been a US officer. By 1953, US defense
expenditures had soared to over 13 percent of
gross national product and remained above 8
percent during much of the 1960s.35 These expenditures
began to decrease in the 1970s, only to rise
again in the 1980s as the Reagan defense build-up
began. Estimates of Soviet defense expenditures
during the Cold War range from 10 to 20 percent
of GNP (and higher). These expenditures fueled
conventional and nuclear arms races.
The Korean War also had important domestic
consequences for the United States. In 1952,
General Eisenhower, hero of D-Day and the first
commander of NATO, was overwhelmingly
elected President of the United States partly
because of dissatisfaction with Truman’s failure to
either end or win the war in Korea. Apparently
threatening the possible use of nuclear weapons
in Korea, Eisenhower swiftly concluded a ceasefire
with China and North Korea.
MCCARTHYISM AT HOME The “loss” of
China and the Korean War intensified a climate
of fear and hysteria about alleged communist
infiltration of American institutions in an era
called McCarthyism after Senator Joseph McCarthy
(1908–57) of Wisconsin. Confrontations with the
Soviet Union such as the Berlin blockade and
the USSR’s explosion of an atomic bomb before
Americans had expected, had produced fear
of a “Red Menace.” Demagogic politicians like
McCarthy exploited sensational allegations of
espionage by Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss
(1904–96), president of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, and physicist Klaus Fuchs
(1911–88), a participant in the Manhattan Project.
On February 9, 1950, McCarthy declared that he
had in his hand “a list of 205, a list of names that
were made known to the Secretary of State as being
members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless
are still working and shaping policy in the
State Department.”36
Mao’s victory in China provided McCarthy and
other “red baiters” with additional fodder. Who,
they wanted to know, had “lost China”? The
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answer, they claimed, lay in treason by the
State Department Foreign Service officers and
China specialists such as John Carter Vincent
(1900–72), John Stewart Service (1909–99), John
Paton Davies, Jr. (1908–99), and Owen Lattimore
(1900– 89) whose only crime had been to predict
that Mao’s forces would triumph over the corrupt
nationalists. Such individuals, critics reasoned,
must have worked to undermine America’s wartime
ally, Chiang Kai-shek. Lattimore, who
had given the Chinese communists “credit for
having a more nearly democratic structure than
the Kuomintang, despite their doctrinaire base”
and were not, he argued, “mere tools of the
Kremlin,”37 was a special target. Writes historian
Robert Newman, “by the end of March 1950 every
scoundrel in the country, and some abroad, knew
that Lattimore had been targeted as another Hiss.
Would-be informants came crawling out of the
woodwork, drawn to McCarthy as moths to light,
each peddling a new version of Lattimore’s evil
deeds.”38 Lattimore and the others were disgraced
and hounded out of the State Department, which
was deprived of China experts for years afterwards.
A similar process unfolded in the USSR. Stalin
believed himself to be surrounded by traitors and
spies. Purges were conducted against Soviet citizens,
including world war veterans, who had had
contact with Westerners, and the number of
prisoners held in the Soviet “Gulag Archipelago”
(the network of Soviet forced-labor camps around
the country) grew dramatically.39
THE VIETNAM WAR The Asian dimension of
the Cold War again became inflamed during the
Vietnam War, in which the United States sought
to resist the unification of that country under a
communist government led by Ho Chi Minh
(1890–1969).
Vietnam had become a French protectorate in
1883 and was integrated into France’s colonial
empire in Indochina (which also encompassed
Laos and Cambodia) in 1887. Ho Chi Minh’s
vision for his country combined nationalism and
communism. During the 1919 Versailles Peace
Conference, he had tried to persuade President
Wilson that the Vietnamese should enjoy
national self-determination, but his proposal fell
on deaf ears.
Shortly before World War Two, French
Indochina was occupied by Japan. Following
Japan’s defeat, France sought to reoccupy
Indochina, and Ho warned the French that:
“You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill
of yours, yet even at those odds, you will lose and
I will win.”40 By the end of the French war in
Indochina, the US, convinced that the struggle
in Indochina was a case of communist expansion
rather than anti-colonialism, was underwriting
about 75 percent of the war’s costs, and Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles (1888–1959) was
determined to hold the line against the “falling
dominos” of Southeast Asia. Dulles and other
American leaders viewed events in Vietnam as
part of the larger Cold War, believed that the USSR
and Maoist China were behind Ho, and feared
that American failure to contain communism in
Vietnam would be seen by America’s foes as a sign
of weakness and an indication that the US would
not uphold its commitments elsewhere.
At a press conference shortly before the
climactic French defeat at Dienbienphu in North
Vietnam in 1954, President Eisenhower set forth
the assumption on which later US involvement in
Vietnam would be based: “You have broader considerations
that might follow what you might call
the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of
dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and
what will happen to the last one is that it will go
over very quickly. So you have a beginning of a
disintegration that would have the most profound
consequences.” The “domino theory” shaped
the way American leaders viewed the impending
French defeat and the prospective victory of
communist forces in Indochina. Indeed, the
United States briefly contemplated intervening to
prevent the imminent French defeat. Following
that defeat, a conference was held in Geneva,
Switzerland, that produced an agreement, temporarily
partitioning Vietnam, with a communist
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regime in the north and the anti-communist
Ngo Dinh Diem (1901–63) as first president of
South Vietnam. The agreement also stipulated
that internationally supervised elections be held
throughout Vietnam in July 1956 to determine
the country’s future. At American urging, Diem
refused to hold the elections, and a second
Indochina conflict began in 1959. The north
began to support violence to overthrow the
government in the south in Saigon and unite
Vietnam under communist rule. Thus began the
second Vietnam War which lasted until 1975.
Under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy,
the United States provided South Vietnam with
advisors, supplies, and training, but after Diem’s
overthrow and death in a 1963 military coup,
US involvement grew. In the 1964 Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution that resulted from claims of
an attack on US naval vessels that never took
place Congress gave President Lyndon B. Johnson
(1908–73) permission “to take all necessary
measures to repel any armed attack against the
forces of the United States and to prevent further
aggression.” Some 27,000 American troops were
in Vietnam at the time, but additional troops
began to arrive in March 1965 and, at its peak,
America’s military presence in South Vietnam
exceeded 500,000. Commanded by General
William Westmorland (1914–2005) in the crucial
years between 1964 and 1968, America’s conscript
soldiers suffered growing casualties confronting a
foe they little understood in a war in trackless
jungles in which there were no front lines and in
which they could not tell the difference between
innocent civilians and enemy combatants.
Throughout this period, Ho followed Mao’s
example in fighting a “people’s war.” Guerrillas
and their supplies were sent south along the
Ho Chi Minh Trail (Map 4.3) that ran through
Laos and Cambodia. With less well-armed troops