Nothing in Harry S. Truman’s career would have suggested that he would become President, even less that he would preside over the creation of a structure of international order that would last through the Cold War and help decide it. Yet this quintessentially American “common man” would emerge as one of the seminal American presidents. No president has faced a more daunting task. The war had ended without any attempt by the powers to redefine international order as in the Westphalian settlement of 1648 and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Truman’s Odyssey
Therefore, Truman’s first task was to make concrete Roosevelt’s vision of a realistically conceived international organization, named the United Nations. Signed in San Francisco in 1945, its charter merged two forms of international decision-making. The General Assembly would be universal in membership and based upon the doctrine of the equality of states—“one state, one vote.” At the same time, the United Nations would implement collective security via a global concert, the Security Council, designating five major powers (the United States, Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., and China) as “permanent members” wielding veto power. (Britain, France, and China were included as much in homage to their record of great achievements as in reflection of their current capacities.) Together with a rotating group of nine additional countries, the Security Council was vested with special responsibility “to maintain international peace and security.” The United Nations could achieve its designated purpose only if the permanent members shared a conception of world order. On issues where they disagreed, the world organization might enshrine, rather than assuage, their differences.
The last summit meeting of the wartime allies at Potsdam in July and August 1945 of Truman, Winston Churchill, and Stalin established the zones of occupation of Germany. (Churchill was replaced as the result of electoral defeat halfway through by Clement Attlee, his wartime deputy.) It also put Berlin under joint administration by the four victorious powers, with guaranteed access to the Western zones of occupation through Soviet-occupied territory. It turned out to be the last significant agreement between the wartime allies. In the negotiations to implement the accords, the Western allies and the Soviet Union found themselves in mounting deadlock. The Soviet Union insisted on shaping a new international, social, and political structure of Eastern Europe on a principle laid down by Stalin in 1945: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” Abandoning any notion of Westphalian principles in favor of “objective factors,” Stalin now imposed Moscow’s Marxist-Leninist system ruthlessly, though gradually, across Eastern Europe. The first direct military confrontation between the wartime allies occurred over access routes to the capital of the erstwhile enemy, Berlin.
In 1948, Stalin, in response to the merging of the three occupation zones of the Western allies, cut the access routes to Berlin, which until the end of the blockade was sustained by a largely American airlift. How Stalin analyzed “objective” factors is illustrated by a conversation in 1989 I had with Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for twenty-eight years until he was kicked upstairs by the newly installed Mikhail Gorbachev into the largely ceremonial office of President. He therefore had much time for discussions about what he had observed of Russian history and no future to protect by discretion
. I raised a question of how, in light of the vast casualties and devastation it had suffered in the war, the Soviet Union could have dealt with an American military response to the Berlin blockade. Gromyko replied that Stalin had answered similar questions from subordinates to this effect: he doubted the United States would use nuclear weapons on so local an issue. If the Western allies undertook a conventional ground force probe along the access routes to Berlin, Soviet forces were ordered to resist without referring the decision to Stalin. If American forces were mobilizing along the entire front, Stalin said, “Come to me.” In other words, Stalin felt strong enough for a local war but would not risk general war with the United States. Henceforth two power blocs were seeking to stare each other down, without resolving the causes of the underlying crisis. Europe, liberated from Nazism, stood in danger of falling under the sway of a new hegemonic power.
The newly independent states in Asia, with fragile institutions and deep domestic and often ethnic divisions, might be delivered to self-government only to be confronted by a doctrine hostile to the West and inimical to pluralism domestically or internationally. At this juncture, Truman made a strategic choice fundamental for American history and the evolution of the international order. He put an end to the historical temptation of “going it alone” by committing America to the permanent shaping of a new international order. He advanced a series of crucial initiatives. The Greek-Turkish aid program of 1947 replaced the subsidies with which Britain had sustained these pivotal Mediterranean countries and which Britain could no longer afford; the Marshall Plan in 1948 put forward a recovery plan that in time restored Europe’s economic health. In 1949, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, presided over a ceremony marking the creation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) as the capstone of the American-sponsored new international order. NATO was a new departure in the establishment of European security. The international order no longer was characterized by the traditional European balance of power distilled from shifting coalitions of multiple states. Rather, whatever equilibrium prevailed had been reduced to that existing between the two nuclear superpowers. If either disappeared or failed to engage, the equilibrium would be lost, and its opponent would become dominant. The first was what happened in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the second was the perennial fear of America’s allies during the Cold War that America might lose interest in the defense of Europe.
The nations joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided some military forces but more in the nature of an admission ticket for a shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella than as an instrument of local defense. What America was constructing in the Truman era was a unilateral guarantee in the form of a traditional alliance. With the structure in place, the historical debates about the ultimate purpose of American foreign policy reemerged. Were the goals of the new alliance moral or strategic? Coexistence or the adversary’s collapse? Did America seek conversion of the adversary or evolution? Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue ultimate foreign policy goals in imperfect stages and to deal with the adversary as a reality while this process is going on. What course would America choose? Exhibiting its historical ambivalence on the subject, America chose both.
