May 8th marks eighty years since the end of the Second Word War in Europe. While the British, Soviet and American alliance emerged victorious in the war against Hitler’s Germany, we soon found ourselves in the midst of a new and dangerous Cold War with our erstwhile allies in Russia. But the first Cold War was not foreordained. After all, during the war, and in the immediate afterglow of victory, American public opinion, as well as that of the country’s leading politicians —a bipartisan cast including everyone from Wendell Willkie and Herbert Hoover on the right to Henry Wallace and Elenor Roosevelt on the left — were in favor of good relations with the Soviet Union. But shortly after VE Day, the “Spirit of the Elbe,” which was thought to have captured the prevailing spirit of cooperation between the US and USSR, was replaced by a new and dangerous animosity between the Washington and Moscow. That Britain would revert to its traditional hostility toward Russia, a hostility that dates back to the Crimean War (1853-1856), was not particularly surprising. The British establishment saw the Soviets as simply the other side of the Nazi coin—a sentiment captured by the acclaimed novelist Evelyn Waugh. Upon learning of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Guy Crouchback, the fictional protagonist of Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, expressed his view that, “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” That the Americans would follow Britain’s Russo-phobic policy after the war was no sure thing. But the untimely death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt only a month before VE Day, on April 12, 1945, surely didn’t help matters. In dropping Vice President Henry Wallace from the ‘44 ticket and replacing him with Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt inadvertently planted the seeds of his legacy’s undoing. Specific policy choices made in the eighteen months following Roosevelt’s death doomed any real prospect for postwar cooperation with the Soviets and began a four decade Cold War that nearly resulted in a nuclear armed-clash in October 1962. Truman was an unlikely and unsuitable heir to the Rooseveltian foreign policy tradition. An anti-Communist hardliner with ties to the corrupt Democratic Party machine that ruled Missouri, Truman had long harbored an animus toward the Russians. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Truman took to the Senate floor and declared that, …If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible." Which isn’t to say FDR was perfect. His skirting of the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the 1930s; his goading of the Japanese into an unnecessary war in the Pacific; his internment of Japanese-Americans in California; his short-sighted and high-handed treatment of our French ally Charles de Gaulle will stand as enduring marks against his record. Yet for all that, Roosevelt’s wartime leadership was such that, as the British historian AJP Taylor wryly noted, among the wartime Big Three, Roosevelt was the only one “who knew what he was doing.” Roosevelt’s postwar vision of great power cooperation and reciprocity as embodied in the principles of the UN Charter surely would have been preferable to what came next. But that vision died with him. Truman, aided by his virulently racist Secretary of State James Byrnes, and Byrnes’ debonair and accomplished successor, Dean Acheson, adopted a British-style hardline against the Soviet Union. Still worse,Truman purged his own party of progressive foreign policy voices (such as Wallace) and at times tried to out-McCarthy Joe McCarthy, requiring loyalty oaths for government employees in 1947 in response to the new Red Scare. Still worse, Truman’s decision, during the first week of August 1945, to drop nuclear bombs on Japanese targets of no military value—by that point in the war the respective populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mainly women, children and elderly — was motivated by his desire to send a message to Stalin. In other troubling respects, Truman was ahead of his time. He was the first US president to allow his foreign policy to be dictated by domestic ethnic lobbies—his capture by the nascent Israel Lobby and the role it played in convincing Truman to go against the advice of his most experienced military and political advisers in an early recognition of Israel has been well documented. Less well known is the role eastern European emigrant communities (what came to be known in the 1950s as the “Captive Nations”) played in Truman’s decision to turn his back on Roosevelt’s vision of cooperation and comity in the postwar era in favor of one of confrontation and conflict. That such a policy was laid out for him by the esteemed US diplomat George F. Kennan (at the behest of the hawkish Navy Secretary James Forrestal), and that such a policy received such wide acclaim from the Washington establishment (a notable exception in this respect was the widley read columnist Walter Lippmann) made the choice of confrontation that much easier. Indeed, the period between April 1945 and September 1946 ought to be seen as the period when Truman and Byrnes lost the postwar peace. George F. Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ was wired to Washington in February 1946. While Kennan later protested that his message was distorted, the telegram was, in fact, imbued with the spirit of Cold War militancy. The following month, Churchill, who, though voted out of office in July 1945 but remained wildly popular in the US, delivered his famed Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. The speech heralded the division of Europe between the communist and “free” worlds, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” By September 1946, the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Novikov, in a telegram to Stalin that the Kremlin kept secret until 1990, expressed his view that relations between the US and USSR were headed down the wrong path. It is worth quoting at some length because it captures (though with an irritating surfeit of Marxist lingo typical of Soviet-era communications) just how drastically the situation in Washington had changed in the months since Roosevelt’s death. “The foreign policy of the United States,” wrote Novikov, …which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy. This is the real meaning of the many statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles; that the United States has the right to lead the world. All the forces of American diplomacy -- the army, the air force, the navy, industry, and science -- are enlisted in the service of this foreign policy. For this purpose broad plans for expansion have been developed and are being implemented through diplomacy and the establishment of a system of naval and air bases stretching far beyond the boundaries of the United States, through the arms race, and through the creation of ever newer types of weapons. Turning to the state of play within the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Novikov told Stalin that, ….The foreign policy of the United States is not determined at present by the circles in the Democratic Party that (as was the case during Roosevelt's lifetime) strive to strengthen the cooperation of the three great powers that constituted the basis of the anti-Hitler coalition during the war. The ascendance to power of President Truman, a politically unstable person but with certain conservative tendencies, and the subsequent appointment of (James) Byrnes as Secretary of State meant a strengthening of the influence of U.S. foreign policy of the most reactionary circles of the Democratic party. The constantly increasing reactionary nature of the foreign policy course of the United States, which consequently approached the policy advocated by the Republican party, laid the groundwork for close cooperation in this field between the far right wing of the Democratic party and the Republican party. At the same time, there has been a decline in the influence on foreign policy of those who follow Roosevelt's course for cooperation among peace-loving countries. Such persons in the government, in Congress, and in the leadership of the Democratic party are being pushed farther and farther into the background.” As Novikov rightly pointed out, Truman was in the process of laying the foundations of the national security state which would become institutionalized with the passage of the 1947 National Security Act and later, with the implementation of National Security Memorandum 68 in 1950. Among the most astringent critics of the national security state was the novelist and critic Gore Vidal, who, in the late 1990s, noted that, “The inexorable beatification of Harry Truman is now an important aspect of our evolving imperial system.” What we have today is a Democratic Party that stands proudly, unabashedly as the party of the national security state. The Democrats have become a bulwark of the national security state, its interests, its prerogatives and naturally, its personnel. This is Truman’s real and lasting legacy. Part II will be published on May 8th. James W. Carden is editor of TRR. The Realist Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. © 2025 James W. Carden |