James Carter
Spring 2000
Empire, War & Revolution
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. New York: Random House, 1968. 3-626 + notes & index.
The United States entered the Second World War not as a "reluctant belligerent" as has been suggested. Rather, it entered with real and specific interests in having some control over the world after the war ended. Having learned the lessons of World War I, FDR chose to remain neutral, issuing instead the "cash and carry,""destroyers for bases," and, ultimately, Lend/Lease programs whereby the United States supplied the Allies and officially stayed out of the fighting. After the Congress re-emphasized the Neutrality Act in September 1939, FDR admitted, "I regret the Congress passed the Act...I regret equally that I signed the Act."(1) Only after the Japanese attack on Pearly Harbor late in 1941 did the United States rescind its neutrality status and become an active belligerent. Not unlike Woodrow Wilson before him, Roosevelt moved to assure America's place in the post-war new world order even if that involved dictating terms to the Russians and the British. According to Gabriel Kolko in The Politics of War, what followed during 1943-1945 between the British, the Americans, and the Soviets is better characterized as the reluctant allies.
From at least 1943, the Americans and the British had begun to plan for the post-war world. At the same time, the Russians did most of the fighting on the eastern front, containing at one time around 181 German divisions. As early as spring 1942, both the British and the Americans began promising to open a second front to relieve the Russian ally. They repeatedly broke that promise for varying reasons: military preparation, tactical differences, timing differences and so on. The Americans, actually more eager to open the second front, moved to develop their own plan. The fear on the part of the Americans, and the British as well, was that Germany might collapse as they dickered over these issues and the Russians would suddenly have won WWII and have firm control of much of Europe as a result.
This fear was genuine. The author spends considerable ink detailing the extent to which anti-communist, anti-leftist feelings shaped policy over all of Europe. In France, Italy, Belgium, and other countries, the west feared the rise of leftist groups amid the chaos of war. Many of the various resistance groups within these countries were leftist oriented. In Belgium alone, the resistance, overwhelmingly communist-led, was over 80,000 strong. These partisan groups were, in several instances, used to tie down the Germans and then cajoled into giving up their arms, or, as in the Italian case, broken and divided with much effort in favor of the fascist old order.(2) In the interest of "law and order," the British and the Americans relied upon the old order following the end of active fighting in these areas.
At the same time, the Americans began to plan the post-war economy. The chief architect here was Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who firmly believed "that the collapse of the international economy had brought on the war."(3) Admittedly, American protectionism during the thirties had contributed in no small way toward this end. He and Undersecretary Sumner Welles articulated America's post-war economic aims in free-trade terms: tariff reduction, reciprocity agreements, non-discrimination agreements, and, much to the chagrin of the British, the elimination of trading blocs. The Americans eventually broke into the Sterling Bloc and largely created the new world economy through such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) out of the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. These entities ended favoring the United States as voting power was determined by money contributed. The World Bank, the power of which was determined by national capital invested, also favored the Americans and retained an American president.(4) According to Kolko, American policymakers sought (and largely succeeded) to create a world "based on economic liberalism and the Open Door, that assumed the general interest of the world was synonymous with that of the United States."(5)
The creation of the United Nations was a similarly ambitious undertaking that required cultivating support from all quarters. FDR's notion that the "Four Policemen," Russia, the United States, Great Britain, and China, would maintain world order seemed to many in Europe absurd. China was a peasant country without any "great power" status or clout before the war. Not that much had changed during the war. Russia, more than any other, recognized this move on the part of the Americans as potentially hostile. China had long been Russia's enemy. Further, and more important, China had not earned such a vaunted position. How could the voting strength of China equal that of Russia under any circumstances? Eventually, concessions in the organization of the UN concentrated power within the Security Council and among only a few nations whose membership was permanent. The Soviets even came to support this solution as "the best possible at present."(6)
The so-called Great Powers could sign off on this new body primarily because it promised stability amid chaos. As Kolko writes, "neither the Americans, British, nor Russians were willing to permit democracy to run its course anywhere in Europe at the cost of damaging their vital strategic and economic interests, perhaps also bringing about the triumph of the Left or the restoration of prewar clerical fascism."(7) Though not at all perfect, the UN could at least insure that a period of relative peace would follow war. Furthermore, the Americans could, to some extent, shove their plans at the Allies because, in very real terms, they had more power; more power economically, more power politically, etc. It has been said over and over that the United States emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world. That important reality greatly aided policy efforts. By 1945, the United States had indeed created a new world order; and, not accidentally, one that benefitted American interests first and foremost. But, no matter. American interests were the same as every other "Great Power" nation.
The Politics of War makes several important points very clear. The old notion that America fights wars without political objectives or motivations no longer satisfies. The Americans clearly were picking up the pieces of a shattered world system and reshaping them to reflect their specific interests. What emerged in the aftermath of war was indeed a new world order envisioned and crafted by the United States (certainly with at least begrudging support from the Allies). Kolko's study, even though a 1968 publication, should be a mandatory read for any student of American diplomacy. The research is impressive and the conclusions convincing and powerful. Historian Bruce Cumings has recently called the book "the best single account of the origins of the Cold War." And of Kolko, Cumings writes, "Merely to read Kolko's nine-page introduction is to behold a superior historian."(8) Though some of the specifics are now dated, the book is nevertheless a powerful and important contribution to the historical debate over the origins of the Cold War.
1. George Brown Tindall, America: A Narrative History, vol. II. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 1117.
2. Kolko, 56-57.
3. Ibid., 247.
4. Ibid., 257.
5. Ibid., 265.
6. Ibid., 479.
7. Ibid., 619.
8. Bruce Cumings, "'Revising Postrevisionism,' Or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History," in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, Michael J. Hogan, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36.