The Course of Empire

Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time's noblest offspring is the last
British Empiricist, Bishop George Berkeley, 1685-1753

Compare Berkeley's prose to the final painting in Thomas Cole’s 1836 series on empire, “The Course of Empire: Destruction”

http://www.pasleybrothers.com/jefferson/images/Cole_destruction.JPG

Certainly both Berkeley and Cole used their experience to visualize what they saw as an inevitable future for Empire, but the shape of things to come is not definite. Inventible as tomorrow is, the disaster or triumph of a society’s tomorrow is difficult to forecast. So in order to answer the question, ‘Was the Cold War an inevitable outcome of World War II?’ it is worthwhile to examine the wells from which the inevitable is drawn.

The following is a brief synopsis of the cultural biases that constrained the victorious armies of WWII. For a Cold War to be inevitable, one needs a few ingredients. For the US, as revisionist historians have amply noted, the US needs an economic impetus. America from its earliest inception through charters and joint stock companies has looked to the market as a means for security. Turner’s often cited thesis, The Significance of the Frontier in American History presented in 1893 provides a valid interpretation of American Expansion. However, America has not only looked west. After all, America’s first military foray was its expeditionary action against then called Barbary Coast nations of North Africa. They went to quell disturbances to American economic activity in that region.

Yet it is the combination of Turner’s Thesis, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s ideas on naval power and American tendencies toward Social Darwinism that provided justification for expansion into new markets, and the protection required to sustain such expansion that precipitated coaling stations abroad to ‘protect American interests.” Clearly, America’s conception of security required expansion.

For a moment now, turn to the cultural bias of the Soviets at the time of the end of WWII as summarized:
“the West had poured thousands of troops into Russia between 1917 and 1920, refused to cooperate with the Soviets during the 1930’s, tried to turn Hitler against Stalin in 1938, reneged on promises about a second front, and in 1945 tried to penetrate Stalin deemed crucial to Soviet security.” (LaFeber 1985)

It is little wonder then that the Soviets sought security in terms of land. They had been invaded by Western European powers several times since the 19th century, and with twenty million dead and twenty-five million homeless, it seems a perfectly natural response to want security in the post WWII era. (LaFeber 1985, Young & Kent 2004)

Note that these two views are drawn without identifying an individual to determine the inevitability of a Cold War post WWII. Orthodox historians however almost uniformly identify the Soviet Union and in particular, Josef Stalin as the paranoid responsible for the inevitability of the Cold War (see Gaddis 1997, 2005). In this vision, the US has little culpability for the Cold War. To say paranoia was a driver and it lay squarely on the Soviet’s leader is too simplistic. This view also neglects an interesting historical piece by a historian more noted for the American Colonial period. Hofstadter’s examination Yellow Journalism as the cause the Spanish American War rejects this and instead looks to other factors internal to the United States. Among these factors is the convergence of an economic depression and the psychological and emotional crisis that ensued that made that war inevitable even though Spain had acquiesced to American demands (Hofstadter 1965).

Post war, Stalin was committed to the idea of Spheres of influence (Gaddis 2005). This was something on which Stalin and Churchill could agree in 1944, as Churchill was an ardent and unrepentant imperialist. He did not desire to see the dissolution of the British Empire. He also hoped to maintain influence in Eastern Europe by carving it up in percentages (Churchill, 1953). To be fair, this idea is not foreign to the United States. Through the turn of the 19th to the 20th century it had also been an American objective, as noted with the Open Door Policy in China. But no longer - the US had a vision of a new World Order, which shall be addressed shortly.

It is possible to consider that domestic issues play a role in foreign policy as Hofstadter point out. As such there are other possibilities than Cold War. Yet, the view of Stalin through Gaddis’ eyes shows a man intransigent on the issue of consolidating and expanding the empire, as “a fusion of Marxism and Tsarist Russia” (Gaddis 1997). As such, his pathological insistence on a security buffer zone was at once unbending and unacceptable to the US. Churchill delivered a speech in 1946 giving this new Soviet zone of influence a name: the Iron Curtain. However, it should be noted that within that sphere manifold forms of experimentation were underway in Eastern Europe. Eventually, the heavy-handedness of the Soviet Union would crush these experiments, but in the case of Finland, it could be argued that the Soviets were more concerned with security and less with world conquests (Paterson 1988).

The various wartime correspondences and conferences to help determine the postwar peace presented the possibility of an alliance where conflict could be avoided. But where and how do such alliances diverge? The world vision for post 1917 Soviet Union and their ideal of Marxism ultimately was incompatible with the competing Wilsonian world vision, as reinterpreted by Roosevelt, embryonic though it was. By 1946, Kennan’s Long Telegram began the formulation of the US mode of containment. Whatever the alternate possibilities could have been post WWII had by now evaporated as Soviet Ambassador Novikov reciprocated in his long telegram the Soviet perspective, “The Foreign Policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy.” (Jensen 1991).

By 1946, the Soviet perceptions of American economic hegemony gave the Soviets reason to decline the terms of a $1billion loan that they had sought during the previous fifteen months. “Control of their border areas was worth more to them the Russians than $1billion or even $10 billion” (LaFeber 1985). Gaddis pronounced that Stalin did not administer his empire well (Gaddis 1997). We now know the outcome of the Soviet Empire. How well will the US manage its empire? Asked for his opinion of the French Revolution, the Mao’s Foreign Minister Chou En-Lai is reported to have replied to Henry Kissinger that it was "too soon to tell"... The same can be said for the American Experiment.
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Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, (New York: 1997) and The Cold War, A New History, (New York: 2005)

Jensen, Kenneth M. ed., The Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan and Roberts “Long Telegrams” of 1946, (Washington: 1991)

LaFeber, Walter, America Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1984, (New York: 1985)

Patterson, Thomas G., Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan, (Oxford: 1988)

Young, John & John Kent, International Relations Since 1945 – A Global History, (Oxford: 2004)