916 ★ CHAPTER 23 The United States and the Cold War
victims of starvation after American bombing destroyed irrigation systems
essential to rice cultivation), along with hundreds of thousands of Chinese
troops. Korea made it clear that the Cold War, which began in Europe, had
become a global conflict.
Taken together, the events of 1947–1953 showed that the world had moved
very far from the hopes for global harmony symbolized by the founding
of the United Nations in 1945. No longer did the United States speak of One
World (the title of Wendell Willkie’s influential wartime book). Instead, the
world had been divided in two. The United States now stood as the undisputed
leader of what was increasingly known as the West (although it included
Japan, where permanent American military bases were established), or the
Free World. NATO was soon followed by SEATO in Southeast Asia and CENTO
in the Middle East, forming a web of military alliances that ringed the Soviet
Union and China.
Cold War Critics
In the Soviet Union, Stalin had consolidated a brutal dictatorship that jailed
or murdered millions of Soviet citizens. With its one- party rule, stringent
state control of the arts and intellectual life, and government- controlled
economy, the Soviet Union presented a stark opposite of democracy and “free
enterprise.” As a number of contemporary critics, few of them sympathetic to
Soviet communism, pointed out, however, casting the Cold War in terms of a
worldwide battle between freedom and slavery had unfortunate consequences.
George Kennan, whose Long Telegram had inspired the policy of containment,
observed that such language made it impossible to view international crises on
a case- by- case basis, or to determine which genuinely involved either freedom
or American interests.
In a penetrating critique of Truman’s policies, Walter Lippmann, one of the
nation’s most prominent journalists, objected to turning foreign policy into an
“ideological crusade.” To view every challenge to the status quo as part of a con-
test with the Soviet Union, Lippmann correctly predicted, would require the
United States to recruit and subsidize an “array of satellites, clients, dependents
and puppets.” It would have to intervene continuously in the affairs of nations
whose political problems did not arise from Moscow and could not be easily
understood in terms of the battle between freedom and slavery. World War II,
he went on, had shaken the foundations of European empires. In the tide of
revolutionary nationalism now sweeping the world, communists were certain
to play an important role. It would be a serious mistake, Lippmann warned,
for the United States to align itself against the movement for colonial indepen-
dence in the name of anticommunism.