Diplomacy

Toward the end of the Korean War, Stalin made a surprise proposal for a unified, neutral Germany with free elections. The Allies already began a program of German rearmament, with plans to incorporate the western Federal Republic into NATO—a move that Stalin’s offer was clearly designed to stop. Negotiations could at the very least stall this outcome and help sow discord among the Western powers over the need for a security community directed against the USSR. Stalin indicated a willingness to meet with newly elected president Dwight Eisenhower, but Washington so thoroughly internalized distrust of Stalin and the USSR more broadly that they took his offer as the latest in a long series of ploys meant to distract and confuse. Furthermore, German neutrality would kick US forces then stationed in Germany out of Europe, while Soviet forces had only to return to the Polish border. Perhaps most importantly, a unified Germany had been a major source of European insecurity for as long as it had existed. Truman’s ally in West Germany was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, an aging but still formidable politician dedicated to anchoring Germany firmly within the Western alliance. He feared any rekindling of German nationalism would exhume the ghosts of its Nazi past.

Stalin’s plans may never have gone anywhere, but his death in March 1953 passed the topic to a group of successors whose struggle for power among themselves precluded any unified foreign policy. The result was a diplomatic stalemate, with the newly reelected Churchill serving as the lone voice of renewed negotiations. However, Eisenhower and devoutly religious Secretary of State John Foster Dulles regarded any concession to the Soviets as immoral and counterproductive. Only when West Germany was safely within NATO did Eisenhower see a value in dialogue, but once that occurred, “there was less and less to talk about [it]” (515). Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged victorious from Kremlin infighting, met in Geneva in 1955, which signaled a willingness to negotiate but opened up few concrete subjects on which to negotiate. However, Khrushchev was far from done in challenging the Americans, especially in the rapidly decolonizing parts of Asia and Africa.

By the mid-1950s, the Middle East emerged as a crucial theater where the Soviet Union could operate beyond the limits of containment. The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 inflamed Arab nationalism, which later prompted a group of Egyptian military officers to overthrow the pro-British monarchy and establish a government under Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Soviet Union supplied Nasser with arms, putting the US in a dilemma of containing a Soviet ally when doing so would require propping up the vestiges of British imperial power in Egypt, which they were loath to do. The US tried to mollify Nasser by funding the construction of the Aswan Dan while sponsoring peace talks with Israel but then withdrew aid for the Dam when Nasser recognized the communist government in China; the US still regarded the government-in-exile in Taiwan as legitimate. French and British attitudes were hardening toward Nasser, whose example threatened their imperial power after he championed the cause of Algerian independence from France.

The final straw was Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, seizing control of the vital waterway from the joint French-British company that managed it since its construction in 1869. The US rejected the use of force against Egypt and tried to devise “legal formulae to get around possible obstacles to free transit through the Canal” (533), but the French and British had little patience for these complicated questions, believing accommodation of Egypt was tantamount to appeasement of the Soviet Union, who stepped up their support of Egypt in the crisis. France and Britain launched a “convoluted scheme” where Israel would invade Egypt (540), which London and Paris would use as a pretext to demand a restoration of free traffic on the canal under their supervision. The US condemned the invasion in no uncertain terms, even joining the Soviet Union in the United Nations in calling for a ceasefire and standing by as Saudi Arabia imposed an oil embargo. The invaders agreed to a UN peacekeeping force, but the humiliation of America’s allies did not moderate Nasser’s behavior in the coming years. Khrushchev attributed America’s reaction to “weakness rather than to high principle” (548), and he came to believe a more confrontational policy could secure dividends. 

At roughly the same time as the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary was also posing a major diplomatic crisis. Soviet rule in satellite states such as Hungary was brutal, and even after Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in February 1956, he insisted on a firm hand to safeguard its empire against Western pressure. John Foster Dulles called for liberating “captive nations” (as quoted on p. 553), but there was little policy to substantiate his rhetoric. In October, Poland declared a “national road to socialism” (as quoted on p. 554), an implicit rejection of Soviet dominance, which the Soviets negotiated by accepting the leadership of Poland’s preferred candidate while keeping it within the Warsaw Pact, the USSR’s answer to NATO which had come into effect in 1955. Protests broke out against Soviet rule in October 1956, demanding a multiparty government and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The Eisenhower administration urged a peaceful solution and insisted it sought no allies in Eastern Europe, which the Soviets found more threatening merely by suggesting the possibility of an alliance. The Americans outlined no penalties the Soviets would face for resolving the issue with violence, and so when they crushed the uprising brutally, they faced no penalties. It was a conspicuous failure to even speak, much less act, from a country that saw itself as occupying the moral high ground.

As important as Suez and Hungary were to Cold War dynamics, Berlin remained the central point of conflict through the 1950s. After the formal split between West and East Germany, the Soviets faced the humiliating prospect of tens of thousands of Germans fleeing the communist police state in the east for the Federal Republic. Desperate to prove history remained firmly anchored to communist dialectics, Khrushchev saw a weak point in West Berlin, the western-controlled portion of a city that itself was entirely within East Germany. Khrushchev demanded all of Berlin become a free city, or else he would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, who would assume full control of the city and force the Western powers to leave or risk war.

Adenauer saw this as a direct challenge to West Germany, but Britain was unwilling to risk war for what seemed to be a minor issue. Eisenhower disavowed any attempts to defend Berlin with force, while Dulles sought the same kind of legalistic middle ground he sought in Suez prior to the invasion, even hinting at the possibility of reunification. The willingness to negotiate took the sting out of Khrushchev’s threats, who let the duration of his ultimatum pass without incident, instead accepting an invitation to visit the United States. Khrushchev renewed his threats in 1961 after John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency, but then ended the crisis on his own terms with the surprise construction of a wall in August 1961, which would cleave the city in two for the next 28 years. Diplomatic progress once again ground to a halt, even as Germany chafed at the wall as indicating their division would persist indefinitely. Just as German-American relations were souring, Khrushchev attempted to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to offset its massive disadvantage in strategic weapons. After backing down in Cuba, the Soviets never again challenged Berlin or any other territory squarely within the US sphere of influence.

The Western coalition was always more fragile than that of the east because it did not require force and intimidation to hold it together. After the Suez Canal crisis robbed them of the power to act independently, “France accelerated its independence; Great Britain opted for strengthening the partnership with America” (597). The British retained their historical sense of pragmatism, and often bristled at American moralism, but it made itself an effective go-between, moderating the American position while maintaining general support. Yet Britain also called for the removal of American nuclear weapons from Germany, which Adenauer saw as the crucial link between his state’s security and America’s. France would never equal the British in influence, and so under Charles de Gaulle it sought to maximize its own interest, often by clashing with the US and Britain. Once Britain and France both acquired nuclear weapons, they were able to use their independent deterrent capacity to win some independence from Washington, and France would later remove its forces from the unified NATO command, albeit without withdrawing from the alliance entirely.

The United States resented de Gaulle’s obstinance as a rejection of the unanimity required to sustain the alliance, but France insisted its alliance commitments were subordinate to strict calculations of national interest. France ultimately failed to create an independent European military structure with itself at the head, but the collapse of communism and the subsequent formation of the European Union would restore it to some measure of its previous political importance.