The free world colossus;: A critique of American foreign policy in the cold war (American century series) (Paperback)

The author shows very clearly the origins of the Cold war. It had always been the announced intention of the Western powers to destroy the Soviet Union. With the United States aquring virtually unchallenged and unprecedented world power after World War II it viewed the Soviets as its primary rival. The Soviet Union was occupying Eastern Europe through which it had been invaded three times in the preceeding decades, the latest of course being the immensely barbaric Nazi occupation. The Soviets hoped to neutralise Germany's military capacity and hoped to acquire immense reparations to help themselves rebuild. American loans of course, came with alot of strings attached, especially with regard to economic policies. The Americans refrained from discussing any sort of mutual withdrawl from occupied territories with the Soviets. They rebuffed Soviet efforts at mutual disarmament (or accepted then rebuffed as in 1955) prefering to have "Open skies" inspections whereby the U.S. could fly its U-2's over Russian territory unimpeded as it kept producing more sophisticated and lethal nuclear weapons. As the Soviets reduced their military arsenal and manpower the Americans increased theirs, helping to fuel the arms race. The theory was articulated George Kennan "Mr. X": the Soviet Union is incapable of negotiating with (which is to say succumbing to each and every U.S. demand), therefore it must be "contained" i.e. in large part meaning effecting its gradual weakening and hopeful destruction. In reality U.S. policies and actions (one example being announcing the Truman doctrine while the Western foreign ministers were meeting with Molotov in Moscow) tended to strengthen the most reactionary elements in the Soviet Union and its satellites and delay and weaken any movements towards liberalization; the Stalinization of Eastern Europe began in the months after the Truman doctrine was announced. This was recognized by a few elite intellectuals and planners like Walter Lipmann and later George Kennan himself and "containment," would eventually be moderated somewhat later due to changing conditions of U.S. power vis a vis the Soviets.

The author also engages in extensive and important though not very profound discussion about the true intentions about U.S. fulminations about communist totalitarianism. The U.S., of course, used alleged Soviet expansionism as an excuse to block revolutions away from the misery of the vast majority of the populations of the third world, away from the right wing status quo. The British and then the Americans reinstalled Nazi collaborators in Greece to beat back the popular communist party whose rebellion Stalin was trying to put to rest as Milovan Djilas later revealed. In Italy it massively intervened to block the coming to power through democratic elections of the communist party and declared that any nation which voted communists into power would be ineligible for U.S. economic aid. In Korea, from the moment it occupied it, it disbanded the communist dominated anti-Japanese resistance governing councils and installed a very brutal and corrupt dictatorship making the Korean war inevitable. In 1958 it occupied Lebanon in order to block a popular revolution there and contain the possible threat of the example of the 1958 revolution in Iraq. In Guatemala he cites statistics from the Chase National Bank that that country was experiences unprecedented economic successs both in terms of its history and in relation to the rest of Latin America before the 1954 U.S. engineered counterrevolution. He quotes President Eisenhower in his memoirs as saying that Ho Chi Minh was the most popular leader in Indochina before the U.S. installed a very brutal dictatorship in South Vietnam and blocked the 1956 nationwide elections as called for in the Geneva accords. He quotes president Kennedy as saying that Cuba under Batista was the ultimate in neocolonial degradation for the vast majority of the Cuban people and he provides statistics to back up this point (page 203--I think of this when contemplating a recent statement by the author, who of course has become an extremely violent and wealthy reactionary, in one of his books to the effect that Cuba "enjoyed" a high per capita income prior to 1959). He points out that the extreme U.S. hostility to the change away from the right wing status quo in Cuba forced Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union. On page 229 in a footnote he provides citations from a Council on Foreign Relations report about the extremely barbarous conditions lived under the U.S. backed Somoza dictatorship. He provides a particularly superb account of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and points out the contradiction between the program's goal of reducing poverty, increasing health, education, economic growth, etc. with U.S. laws designed to severely punish any nation which sought to restrict the rights of corporations to plunder their countries.