CHAPTER 3

      Provoking Confrontation: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War

      In his June 24, 2015, Times column, “Cold War Without the Fun,” Thomas L. Friedman lamented that the new confrontation between the United States and Russia has so far lacked some of the drama of the twentieth-century version, such as “Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging, a race to the moon or a debate between American and Soviet leaders over whose country has the best kitchen appliances.”

      According to Friedman, the new “post-post-Cold War has more of a W.W.E.—World Wrestling Entertainment—feel to it, and I don’t just mean President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s riding horses barechested, although that is an apt metaphor. It’s just a raw jostling for power for power’s sake—not a clash of influential ideas but rather of spheres of influence.”¹ Friedman’s remarks promote a nostalgic view of the twentieth-century Cold War characteristic of the U.S. political establishment. Cast aside is the horrific human costs that led Mikhail Gorbachev to conclude that the Cold War “made losers of us all.” These costs include the millions of deaths in Korea and Vietnam, the destabilization of Third World countries, the overmilitarization of the U.S. political economy, abuse of civil liberties, and wide inequality.

      Carl Marzani, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and State Department employee convicted of lying about involvement with the Communist Party, described in his 1952 book We Can be Friends how the United States became thrust into “semi-hysteria” amid a manufactured “war psychosis” with “dog tags on children, airplane spotters on twenty-four-hour duty … roads marked for quick evacuations, buildings designated as air raid shelters, air raid drills everywhere in streets, in stores, in schools.”² The twentieth-century Cold War was not really fun at all if we consider all this. Certainly not for victims like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple unjustly executed as atomic spies, thousands of Americans who lost their jobs because of left-leaning political views, or political activists around the world who experienced torture or were “disappeared.”

      The next four chapters will provide a pocket history of the Cold War, showing how Gorbachev was sounder in his assessment than Friedman, America’s “imperial messenger,” as he is named in a book by Belen Fernandez, and others of his ilk. We will begin by looking at the breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations following the Second World War, and the origins of a conflict that in hindsight we believe, like the current U.S.-Russian standoff, was avoidable.

      While derided by critics as naïve and a communist sympathizer, FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, had a sound vision for U.S. foreign policy after the Second World War, one in which the United States would promote the industrialization of newly decolonizing nations absent any military or economic imperialism, and would pursue peaceful rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Wallace was the target of political machinations that ousted him from any position of power and led to his being red-baited.³ This marked an important watershed in the origins of the Cold War, the history of which needs to be remembered as a cautionary lesson and not the object of nostalgia.

       “HOLDING THE LEG FOR STALIN TO KILL THE DEER”: U.S.-SOVIET RELATIONS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

      The seeds of the Cold War lay in the uneasy U.S-Soviet alliance during the Second World War. After withdrawing troops from Soviet Russia in 1920, the United States had promoted “Open Door” expansion as part of an effort to penetrate Russia economically, holding off on recognition until 1933. When the Nazis broke the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, a temporary alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany, and invaded the USSR in 1941, Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins was sent to meet with Stalin and the United States began extending Lend-Lease aid, amounting to over $10 billion during the war. In popular cultural depictions the treacherous “Reds” were transformed at this time into “the brave Russians,” whose resistance to the Nazis “amazed the world.”⁴

      American elite opinion had been divided in the 1930s and early 1940s over the Soviet Union. The State Department favored support for right-wing dictatorships that repressed the political left and kept an open door to foreign investment, including in Eastern Europe.⁵ Wall Street firms like Sullivan and Cromwell, employers of the Dulles brothers, provided a cloak of respectability for the Nazis before the war, acting as counsel for financiers who bankrolled Hitler while supporting the FDR–Neville Chamberlain “appeasement” policy enabling Hitler’s early conquests. According to Joseph E. Davies, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, they were among the influential classes of people in the United States and elsewhere “who abhor the Soviets to the extent they hope for a Hitler victory in Russia.”⁶

      The Soviets had built up a powerful military through a centralized political economy. The Red Army faced the majority of the Reich military on the Eastern Front when the Allies faced a dramatically smaller force on the Western Front, making it clear that without the Soviet Union, the Nazis would have ruled all of Europe.⁷ General Douglas MacArthur stated in February 1942 that during his lifetime, he had

      participated in a number of wars and witnessed others, as well as studying in great detail the campaigns of outstanding leaders of the past. In none have I observed such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counterattack which is driving the enemy back to his own land. The scale and grandeur of this effort marks it as the greatest military achievement in all history.⁸

      The most important battle was at Stalingrad in February 1943, where the Soviets fought the Nazi invaders to the last basement in frigid temperatures after the city had been reduced to rubble by Luftwaffe bombers. The epic victory—compared in the Soviet press to the ancient battle of Cannae in which Hannibal’s Carthaginians routed Rome—was followed by the Battle of Kursk, in which the Red Army turned back the last major German offensive three days before the Anglo-American landing in Italy.⁹

      Historian Richard Overy, in his book Why the Allies Won, credits Soviet planning and central direction for providing the “weapons and food and labor to sustain the deep war.” He wrote that “the [Soviet] success in 1943 was earned not just by the tankmen and gunners at the front, but also by the engineers and transport workers in the rear, the old men and the women who kept farms going without tractors or horses, and the Siberian workforce struggling in bitter conditions to turn out a swelling stream of simply constructed guns, tanks and aircraft.”¹⁰

      In December 1941, the State Department had rejected Stalin’s proposal for an agreement in which the United States and Britain would recognize the Soviet Union’s existing boundaries and acquisition of the Baltic States and Eastern Poland after the war, forcing Stalin to “trust to the power of the Red Army to win the guarantees the West rejected.”¹¹ Even more troublesome from the USSR’s