A Global Imperium, by Invitation and Imposition
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, quickly fulfilled his vision of US world leadership, yet it took the challenge of communism to motivate Americans to embrace their new role.
Thanks to the specter of communism, the American imperium was up and running by the 1950s, and it would endure through the Cold War and into the next century. But while it was liberal in nature, it was not self-sustaining— for that, the United States now needed to act as a global police power, backed by the deployment of armed forces as well as other means of power at its disposal.Military power was of course crucial. The end of World War II initially brought forth a rush to demobilize the bulk of the US armed forces, but the emergence of an international rival that could challenge American power on an international scale, the Soviet Union, caused the Truman administration to reverse course. Though military spending after 1945 never reached the soaring levels seen in either of the world wars, the early Cold War marked a period in which US military prowess and readiness remained high, unusually so for peacetime. Technologically, moreover, the United States continually enhanced its military capabilities so that it could always overpower an adversary even when it was outmatched in terms of raw manpower. And throughout the Cold War, even under presidents such as Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan who pursued detente and arms control with the Soviets, nuclear weapons and their attendant delivery systems were key to maintaining America’s overwhelming technological-strategic superiority.[2842]
The consolidation of “a preponderance of power” after 1945, as the historian Melvyn P. Leffler aptly puts it, was neither accidental nor inadvertent.[2843] Beginning in 1947, the federal government put in place the mechanisms and institutions of a “national security state” able to sustain the indefinite struggle against global communism known as containment.[2844] With the Soviet threat appearing to gather momentum, in 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, which institutionalized a state of permanent war-readiness short of waging total war—this single piece of legislation created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and the National Security Council (NSC)—and for the next 45 years, the United States would remain on something close to a permanent war footing.[2845] Universal peacetime conscription followed in 1948.
Throughout the Cold War, presidents and Congress continually refined the structure of the armed forces so that each strategically important region in the world became the focus of its own unified US military command, a process that enabled tighter coordination and elevated military considerations to rank alongside diplomatic and economic ones in times of crisis.[2846] The Pentagon’s budget also increased with its authority. In fiscal year 1951, partly in response to the Korean War and partly as the fulfillment of a strategic vision outlined in the secret internal study known as NSC-68, US defense spending immediately tripled and eventually steadied for the next two decades at around 10 percent of GDP.[2847] To augment the CIA’s human intelligence activities, Truman created the National Security Agency, a vast signals intelligence operation headquartered near Washington that was essentially the first global eavesdropping project, in 1952.[2848] The result of all this was the accumulation of incredible military power that outpaced all possible rivals, and by 1955 Washington’s share of great-power military expenditures stood at 52.4 percent, compared to the Soviet Union’s 38.2 percent.[2849]The United States never fought the Soviet Union, but it did find itself confronting Soviet or Soviet-backed forces around the world. In Berlin (1948-1949 and 1961) and Cuba (1962), tensions nearly led to a military clash between Americans and Soviets, but conflict remained metaphorical and political. By the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the containment of the Soviet Union in Europe was more or less a mission accomplished, albeit at the price of accepting Moscow as an equal partner in the realm of international security.
The containment of China was another matter. Unlike in Europe, Asian challenges to the American imperium in Korea and Indochina caused two major wars.[2850] Without nuclear deterrence to keep the powers from each other’s throats or induce caution in US foreign policy, as existed in Europe, there were fewer impediments to waging war in Asia.
The Korean War (1950-1953) settled little on the peninsula itself, where the truce of 1953 established a de facto border between the North and South that was virtually identical to the boundary that had existed at the outbreak of war in 1950, but it did lead to a permanent US commitment to the protection of non-communist states in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Despite resulting in a bloody, unloved stalemate, the war implanted and deeply entrenched American power in East Asia and enabled it to shape the politics and political economies of the non-communist states in the region. The war for Indochina (1963-1975), however, turned out rather differently. Backed by the intervention of regular military forces from North Vietnam and an uninterrupted stream of supplies from China, the South Vietnamese insurgency posed an insoluble problem for American power. The main belligerents—impoverished North Vietnam, derided by President Lyndon Johnson as a “raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country,” pitted against the awesome combined might of the United States—were hopelessly mismatched.[2851] But the mismatch turned out to be irrelevant in the irregular jungle warfare of Indochina, where America's technological superiority was offset by the difficult terrain (variously jungles, delta wetlands, and mountains) and greater levels of commitment by the Vietnamese communists. The United States quit the country just as the People's Army of Vietnam was about to capture Saigon and reunify the whole nation under communist rule. Yet even defeat in Indochina in 1975, when Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos all became communist states within a few weeks, could not derail America's imperial project.During the Cold War, measures short of war also proved useful in beating back challenges along the periphery, as the United States intervened constantly in the domestic affairs of client, allied, and adversarial states. Americans did so for strategic and security reasons (to ensure quiescent and cooperative leaders, such as in South Vietnam in 1963, Cambodia in 1970, and on many occasions in Latin America) and for ideological reasons (to ensure that local governments were amenable to selfdetermination, market capitalism, and, to a lesser extent, liberal democratic rule).
The United States intervened mostly when strategic and ideological considerations converged, when a change of local government was desirable as both a security imperative and an ideological objective. Regimes changed frequently around the world as the United States (and the Soviet Union) battled for global hearts and minds in the Cold War, most notably in US-backed coups against leftist nationalists such as Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran (1953), Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), and Salvador Allende in Chile (1973). In 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam and once one of Washington's closest allies, was ousted in a coup encouraged by the Kennedy administration. In 1965, US Marines invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic to ensure the installation of a pliant noncommunist government.[2852] By contrast, thanks to their staunch anti-communism, right-wing authoritarian regimes found favor in Washington despite their undemocratic nature.[2853]US policy toward Cuba in the early 1960s provides the starkest example of American imperialism in action, driven equally by the imperatives of security and ideology, but it also reveals the limits of American power. Fidel Castro came to power by ousting the US-backed authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. When he was leading a guerrilla army against the Batista government, Castro was a radical nationalist; once he came to power, he began to implement communist rule. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations considered a Soviet-backed state 90 miles from the Florida shore to be both an acute security risk and an intolerable ideological challenge. Under the guise of the CIA, the Eisenhower administration drew up plans to invade Cuba and install a new government. Kennedy inherited those plans and launched them in April 1961 in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The objective of the invasion, led by nearly 1,500 anti-communist Cuban exiles, was to remove Castro from power and spark a popular uprising against communism.
The invasion failed, but this spurred the CIA, with Kennedy's approval, to launch Operation Mongoose, which included multiple assassination attempts against Castro and a wave of economic warfare against Cuba. Unusually, the United States failed in its efforts to bend Cuba to its will. Not only did Castro move the island much closer into the Soviet orbit, his regime outlasted the Cold War itself—and 10 American presidents along with it. Mossadegh and Arbenz must have looked on with envy at Castros survival skills; had they not been murdered during their overthrow, Diem and Allende surely would have too.[2854]America’s stewardship of its empire often took economic or political form as well—a natural development considering that as late as 1953, the United States had a commanding 44.7 percent of world industrial output.[2855] In 1947, for example, when faced with an economic crisis in Western Europe and the prospect of losing its position of leadership to the Soviet Union, the Truman administration launched the Marshall Plan, which pumped over $12 billion into Europe over the next five years. The ultimate objective, easily achieved, was to bind the advanced industrial economies of Europe to an American-led international order of regulated capi- talism.[2856] In 1949, when faced with what it perceived as a Soviet bid for the domination of all of Europe, the United States and its allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defensive military alliance that was as important politically as it was militarily. In later years, the State Department sponsored the construction of similar alliances elsewhere in the world—the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization in 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization in 1955. In 1961, John F. Kennedy attempted to emulate the Marshall Plan by announcing the Alliance for Progress, an endeavor that aimed to pump over $10 billion into Latin America to stave off communist revolution by creating conditions for the emergence of a property-owning middle class.[2857]
The American imperium spanned the globe during the Cold War, but its center of gravity shifted dramatically over time—from Europe to East Asia to the Middle East—as challenges to the overall system emerged in different places at different times.
Just when American power had helped stabilize one strategically critical region, problems in another would erupt and draw the United States into a new part of the world (although often the focus could fall on more than one region simultaneously). Another region drew a great deal of American intervention, of course: Latin America. But US engagement to the south—military, political, economic—was different, and long predated the Cold War. Because of their geographical proximity, Latin America and the Caribbean had always been strategically vital to the United States, whether or not there existed a liberal internationalist system of world order.[2858]One way to measure this shift in focus from Europe to East Asia to the Middle East—and perhaps the most indicative when measuring imperial activity—is to trace the surge in the intensity of America's military involvement. The initial center of gravity, between 1947 and 1963, was found in Europe, where the Cold War began. To counter a perceived Soviet threat, the US military built up bases in Western Europe (where its forces were stationed indefinitely), pumped in military aid to its allies, rearmed West Germany, and oversaw the creation of NATO, the first permanent politico-military alliance in American history. By the 1960s, with the building of the Berlin Wall and the de facto acceptance of a divided continent, Europe had lost its sense of crisis.[2859] East Asia was the second center of gravity, though its crisis phase overlapped considerably with Europe's. The Asian crisis, which lasted from 1949 until 1975, was shaped by America's standoff with the People's Republic of China, which in turn provoked the Cold War's two largest military conflicts—the wars in Korea and Indochina. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's opening to China in 1971-1972 began to resolve the US crisis of authority in Asia, and the fall of Saigon in 1975 ended US military involvement, but it was not until Deng Xiaoping moved China away from socialism and toward a market economy in the late 1970s that America's Asian conflicts came to an end.[2860] Around this time, the United States increased its own direct involvement in the Middle East, marked by three important developments. The first was the pronouncement of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, in which President Jimmy Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by vowing that any attempt to control the Persian Gulf would be regarded as a threat to US national security. The second came in 1982, when President Ronald Reagan deployed 800 US Marines to Lebanon to intercede in the civil war that reignited following an Israeli invasion; 241 Marines were killed when Islamic fundamentalists from Hezbollah detonated a massive bomb outside their barracks. The third was in 1983: in response to the region's growing turmoil and increased strategic importance, the Pentagon created a separate unified military command—known as CENTCOM, for Central Command—to oversee operations in the Middle East.