The Growth of American Power Through Cold and Hot Wars 311While the traditional story of the cold war revolved around the U.S. fight-
ing for “democracy” against an aggressive Soviet desire for expansion, the real
story may be quite different. The U.S. held a great imbalance of strength
throughout Europe and had its own atomic program getting off the ground.
So the Americans remained far stronger, and political-military conditions in
Europe, despite fear-mongering, were stable. In other parts of the world, how-
ever, the Cold War was more volatile and in fact became “hot” in various
places, though usually not with American forces involved. As a result of its
great power, the U.S. could be involved at points all across the globe when it
felt its interests were threatened or when it sought to increase its influence.
By the early 1950s, the Cold War, which began as a confrontation over parts
of Europe, Poland and Germany in particular, now spanned the entire world.
Asia, Running Cold and Hot
The Cold War would be especially intense in Asia, where two areas domi-
nated U.S. thinking. Japan, the aggressor in World War II, had to be rebuilt
along capitalist lines both to provide markets and investment opportunities for
U.S. businesses, and to contain Communism in that region. But, outside of the
Soviet Union, no country was as important in the early cold war years as
China. During World War II, China was an American ally, led by Jiang Jieshi
[then known as Chiang Kai-Shek] and his political party, the Guomindang
[then the Kuomintang]. Jiang and the Guomindang, however, were corrupt
and inefficient and, though attacked by Japan, were not effectively fighting
against their invaders. In large measure this was because the Guomindang was
under attack from an internal force. China, since the years right after World
War I, had been in a Civil War, with Jiang facing the forces of Mao Zedong
[then Mao Tse-Tung] and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]. The
Guomindang received huge amounts of U.S. aid during the war but, rather
than focus on the Japanese, used it against the CCP, or Jiang sent much it
offshore to Formosa [later Taiwan] to amass his own personal fortune. Mao
and the Communists, meanwhile, were more effective in fighting the Japanese,
and more popular among the people because of their program which prom-
ised land reform and greater political rights, unlike the repressive Guomindang.
During the war, many U.S. officials, civilian and military, traveled to China to
survey the situation there and there was a broad agreement that Mao was