The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II

No one escapes from history, not even historians. Historical accounts and historical fortunes rise and fall with the passage of time. At one point slave owners are in and abolitionists are out. Next generation the sides are reversed. When a strong president is running the show, the Eisenhowers are glorified; when the Eisenhowers are in office, the Roosevelts receive the historian's prize.

For the contemporary American historian who wishes to rise above the fray, the options are few. He can reject the current revisionist trend and adopt an orthodox stance. He can synthesize the two strands and turn out the definitive work. Or he can borrow a little from each, blur the basic issues, and emerge with a book that seems statesmanlike only because it is so jejune. Adam Ulam took the last choice; the result is his intellectually anemic study, The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II.

America has been unrealistic, Ulam writes. Which is partly true. After World War II the Soviet Union lay weak and tattered. Over 20 million of her people were dead; her industrial plant was devastated. Why did America, relatively unscathed and industrially strong, shudder at its nightmare vision of Russian boots trampling Western Europe? Ulam offers two explanations. Americans were overcompensating for their former low estimation of the Russians--no one had thought the U.S.S.R. could long withstand the Nazi onslaught. And the West felt guilty. The Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the German attack. The British and Americans didn't want to believe that the war damage had been great enough to cripple the Russian nation. By not recognizing the extent of the damage, the West threw away its strongest bargaining counter.

Contrasted with the other Allies. Stalin played a shrewd and knowledgeable game. Ulam is at his best when he speculates about the Soviet leader's motives and plans. Only Stalin knew the extent of Russia's weakness. And by exploiting his opponents' fear and guilt, he was able to win his objectives, and more. Throughout his East European campaign, and particularly in Poland, Stalin mixed cunning, ruthlessness and masterful diplomacy to win the reins of power for pro-Russian communists.

Stalin's success story was dimmed slightly by his failures in Finland, Iran and Turkey. But they were secondary goals. Only one unresolved issue glared on the map in Stalin's office: Germany. To Russia, as to France, indelible memories of German belligerence necessitated top priority for the German question. Ulam sees this preoccupation with Germany as a continuous thread running through postwar Soviet foreign policy. In March, 1947, Molotov suggested a reunified Germany, but the plan was overlooked by the U.S. The 1948 Berlin blockade was not a grasp for a city of 2 million people. Ulam suggests, but an attempt to reopen the question of a united Germany. The Rapacki Plan, which Russia forwarded and America rejected in 1957, proposed a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe. And according to Ulam's novel interpretation of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Russians sought not a redress of the balance of power--"one does not risk an immediate nuclear war just to ensure that your opponent will be only twice as strong rather than four times"--but a wedge to force the U.S. to sign a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, a treaty that would keep atomic weapons out of Germany.

Actually, Russia wanted a bit more in Cuba, Ulam maintains. In the forties, Germany--and to a lesser degree. Japan--had loomed as the major threat. But by the sixties, another villain had walked on stage. One of the great ironies of history is that the Communist victory in China, which Americans eyed as an unprecedented calamity, turned out to be an even greater blow for the Communist comrades in the Soviet Union. By 1962, the Soviets feared China as much as Germany, China, along with Germany, was the target of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that Khruschchev hoped would emerge from the Cuban confrontation.

When Kennedy blew the lid off the Cuban affair, Khrushchev had to scramble out backwards. The German question was never resolved. For once, America had been firm: but whereas in the past, firmness would have produced material rewards, in 1962 the U.S. pushed the world to the brink of the apocalypse and came out with little to show for it. If Ulam is right, and the Russians were after a treaty, we might all be better off had the ploy worked. The only beneficiary was Kennedy's prestige, and an assassin's bullet the following year made that gain negligible.

What could the U.S. have won? What did she want? Ulam's depiction of the Soviet side of the coin is perceptive and imaginative. His analysis of the thrust of American policy is confused and disingenuous.

A neo-Kennanist, Ulam believes that a fuzzy idealism fogs American objectives. He is surely correct in thinking that popular sentiments in a democratic state can have an important influence on policy decisions. But on the other hand, public opinion is largely molded by society's portrayal of facts. Often the interests, if not the motives, of people and government coincide. For example, Ulam chides the U.S. for her rigid anti-imperialism in the late forties. He blames it on idealism, on "the Americans' real incomprehension as to what the international order is or could be in this sinful and complex world." To be sure, the man in the postwar street would have given noble reasons for his opposition to British and French colonialism. But how much was his government influenced by idealism, and how much by the visions of ripe markets and raw materials waiting beyond the imperialist walls? How much by the impulse to do "the right thing," and how much by the desire to disengage from the imperialists and win friends among the new nations? Granted, the policy flopped. But was it the failure of principles, or the failure of greed? In this case, the two reinforced each other. Ulam makes no distinctions.

The problem becomes even more complex, because fundamentally the explanations and motivations conflict. You may favor economic aid as a humanitarian gesture and overlook the provisos which bind the people of the recipient nation to a life of misery. You may press for tariff reductions as a "progressive" move and not realize that only industrialized nations with high-cost manufactured goods progress in a tariff-free market economy. You may deplore the life style of South American peasants and forget the cheap price of bananas and the high dividends on your copper stock. But when you wake up, and see that your comforts are based on the misery of others, and that the still greater comforts of others are based on the misery of all--then, does the American Dream explode? And does the Great Society explode with it?

Pretty intricate issues. Ulam ignores them. By studying "good intentions" in a vacuum, he misses the drift of American foreign policy. His "analysis" of Vietnam is typically shallow and absurd. Contradicting the consensus of past and present critics (including such men as President Eisenhower). Ulam contends that Ngo Dinh Diem would have won had elections been held in 1956. "It is a testimony not so much to his undemocratic propensities as to his political clumsiness, one should think, that Diem did not insist on having elections," he writes. What evidence has he for this astonishing conclusion? "The partition of Vietnam was followed by a migration of nearly one million people south, while only about one-tenth of the number went in the opposite direction."

Ulam fails to mention that 85 per cent of the estimated 900,000 refugees were Catholics. Often affluent and sympathetic to France, these Vietnamese might indeed have had qualms about Ho Chi Minh's regime, and preferred the Catholic Diem and his family. A devoted campaign by Northern priests strengthened any propensities to emigration. The U.S. played a role as well. According to Bernard Fall, "the mass flight was admittedly the result of an extremely intensive, well-conducted, and, in terms of its objective, very successful American psychological warfare campaign. Propaganda slogans and leaflets appealed to the devout Catholics with such themes as 'Christ has gone to the South' and the 'Virgin Mary has departed from the North.' "If Ulam seriously believes that the people were voting with their feet, he might consider the ways the election was rigged.

Confusing American propaganda with Vietnamese reality, Ulam bandies about words like "totalitarian." Radical war critics, he writes, demand "the sacrifice of 18 million people to a harsh totalitarian rule." In what ways is the North "totalitarian"--the word soon loses all meaning--compared to the police state of the South? At another point, Ulam writes, "A totalitarian regime, especially a Communist one, seldom has much difficulty in repressing a budding guerrilla movement....An authoritarian non-Communist regime can sometimes deal with an incipient revolt with the same massive retaliation technique....A democratic country simply cannot have recourse to such methods." One wonders if Ulam has heard of saturation bombing. Does he read the newspapers? Or does he glean his Indochina analysis from Presidential television speeches?

By digging no deeper than the level of official explanation, Ulam loses sight of the peculiar tension characteristic of American democracy. Policy is not created to realize quixotic ideals. No American President invaded Vietnam to preserve freedom. The reasons were partly economic, partly diplomatic, partly strategic. Perhaps even a bit idealistic. But surely altruism was not the motivating cause. Wide-eyed idealism and self-righteous fervor thrive amid official justifications and popular explanations. Among themselves, the professionals are somewhat less noble.

But those popular explanations have a life of their own. Once the U.S. government had identified South Vietnam's survival with America's safety and the preservation of liberty, it was stuck. The American people believed their leaders' rhetoric. Reading the Pentagon Papers, we sense the frustration of men who had sold a war so well that they could no longer think of declaring it worthless.

Ulam doesn't forget these men. But he never stops to analyze their motives. He views their actions only as reactions: he judges their success by their ability to best the Soviet Union. And he confuses rationalizations with explanations. "Had the United Stated been ruled by a dictator or an oligarchy, or had the American people been permeated by a spirit of aggressive nationalism, there was little that it could not have accomplished without war and merely through diplomatic and economic pressure." Ulam writes. "But one cannot regret that the American people were not possessed by the passion to rule the world, for certainly such a passion is incompatible with democratic institutions and with that pleasant life which the American people have enjoyed...."

In one short passage. Ulam fatuously implies that the masses of people are running this country. He dismisses the possibility of Americans being "aggressively nationalistic," leaving one to wonder about prowar rallies and dead gooks. And most important, he fails to see the distinction between the ability to rule the world American-style--through corporate domination--and the "pleasant life" which most Americans are able to lead.

By putting the issues into operational terms (who outwitted whom) Ulam can skim over motivation. Without motives, there are no heroes and no villains. Omitting explicit evaluations. Ulam appears to rise above the bickering of his orthodox and revisionist fellows. But he merely sidesteps the debate.