The Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was already in the making long before the Truman Doctrine was announced in the spring of 1947, and in fact dated back to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. During that period, the U.S. and other Allied nations sent troops to support the anti-Communist Whites against the Reds, and then refused any diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1934. Even the policy of containment was not new since during the 1920s and 1930s the Western powers attempted to create what they called a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Communist Russia. Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were only allies of convenience during World War II, but even before the hot war ended, as the Soviet Red Army rolled over the Russian border into Eastern Europe, finally capturing Berlin. In 1944, the Western Allies believe that the stood by while Hitler sent in the SS to destroy the Warsaw Uprising and the city of Warsaw itself, because he did not intend to allow a pro-Western government in Poland. In Poland at least, the Soviet intention was to install a satellite regime, although Stalin did not do this with Finland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, at least not immediately. From the American and British viewpoint, the threat of the atomic bomb was necessary to restrain the Soviets, although this turned out to be a serious miscalculation when Truman attempted atomic diplomacy at Potsdam in July 1945. Stalin ordered work on the Russian atomic bomb speeded up, and one was tested successfully in 1949, so the American monopoly on these weapons lasted only four years. Throughout the Cold War, it became clear that no matter which weapons the U.S. developed, the Soviets would match them, such as testing a hydrogen bomb in 1953, just one year after America. Thus the Cold War and the nuclear arms race were already underway even in 1945 in both Europe and Asia, although the official declaration only occurred with the Truman Doctrine in 1947.
Japan was probably going to surrender in 1945 even if the atomic bombs were no dropped and that no invasion would ever have been necessary. Their only condition was that the United States “guaranteed the safety of the Emperor Hirohito”, and in the end the Truman administration agreed to this rather than prosecuting him as a war criminal (Sherwin xviii). At the time in the summer of 1945, all the top military and civilian officials of the administration except Secretary of State James Byrnes had already advised Truman to accept the Japanese surrender on this condition. Yet when the Potsdam Declaration was issued in July 1945, Truman and Byrnes removed the condition that would have allowed the emperor to remain in power. As Sherwin put it, “for forty years, the American public had been misled about the decision-making process”, as indeed most of it still is even today (Sherwin xv).
Truman, Byrnes and Winston Churchill regarded the atomic bomb as an instrument of diplomatic coercion to win concessions from the Soviets in Eastern Europe and Asia, and that they dropped it on Japan as a demonstration of resolve that they had the will to use it on Russia. Americans like to see themselves as the “good guys” in history and still regard World War II as “the good war” that destroyed fascism in Europe and Asia, and do not like to imagine that racism, brutality, and cynical calculations of postwar power politics were also present on their side, but the record shows this was indeed the case with the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan (Sherwin xvi). Therefore, the official version put forward in 1947 by Henry Stimson that the atomic bombs were used to save American lives, was incomplete at best, for other factors such as racism, ending the war before the Russians occupied more territory in Asia and using the threat of nuclear weapons in coercive diplomacy were all important factors.
Truman, Stimson, Secretary of State James Byrnes and other civilian and military leaders were thinking in 1945 that the atomic bomb would be an instrument of coercion against the Soviets. In May 1945, Truman also told Joseph Davies, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, that one reason he was delaying the Potsdam Conference with Stalin was that “the test was set for June, but had been postponed until July”, indicated that he wanted to know that the atomic bomb worked before meeting with the Soviets (Davies Diary, May 21, 1945). At Potsdam, Truman and Byrnes were openly excited by the successful test of the atomic bomb and the possibility that it would “a master card” and “royal straight flush” in diplomacy to coerce and restrain the Soviets (Alperovitz 31). Even before he departed for Germany, Truman stated very bluntly that he intended to use the atomic bomb to intimidate the Russians when he said that “I’ll have a hammer on those boys” (Alperovitz 30). Prime Minister Churchill was also very excited when he learned that the test had been successful in New Mexico and expected that Britain and the U.S. would be able to dominate the Soviets diplomatically. Secretary of State Byrnes, who had always had presidential ambitions and still resented that Truman had been selected as vice president in 1944 rather than himself, was a great enthusiast for atomic diplomacy, and thought that the bomb might “put us into a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war” (Alperovitz 32).
Atomic diplomacy and the scramble to occupy Japan and South Korea ahead of the Soviets were just graphic examples of the nascent Cold War that was already underway before the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan of 1947. One immediate effect was that military aid to Greece, Turkey and Iran was increased and the Soviets were warned that they would face a military response and possibly even a nuclear attack if they encroached on those countries. Britain and the U.S. did not take this stand simply because they supported democracy and hated Communism because none of these countries were democratic at all in 1947. Even then, the Middle East was a vital supplier of oil to Western Europe (if not yet the U.S.) and it required oil and other raw materials to fuel its economic recovery. When Iran nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum), for example, the U.S. and Britain overthrew the national government and continued to support the Shah’s autocratic rule until he was overthrown by the Islamists in 1979 (Kinzer 195-98). At the heart of Kennan’s strategy was the reconstruction of western Germany and Japan as bulwarks against Russia, and he understood that the main problem in Western Europe was war-weariness and economic insecurity (Kennan 1946). One of the difficulties of Kennan’s strategy for reviving the industrial powers was that all the industry in Japan and Western Europe in 1947 was a long distance removed from the natural resources in Asia, Africa and Latin America. For this reason, U.S. Cold War strategy kept expanding to cover all these colonies and former colonies in the developing world, where the ruling regimes were highly corrupt and repressive. Even the Truman Doctrine implied that it might became far more elastic and offer aid to other nations besides Greece, Turkey and Iran, since it affirmed that “totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States” (Offner 2011). This is what Truman informed Congress, at least, to get military aid and the Marshall Plan passed, but over time, with the policies outlined in NSC 68, for example, the Cold War really did become global and not even the resources of the United States were unlimited.
In 1945, the U.S. leaders really did assume that they were going to be reshaping the world in 1945, given that that were by far the strongest economic power still on the board and they also had nuclear weapons. Of course the Soviets did not become more pliable and cooperative as a result, but rather intensified their own work on nuclear weapons and missiles, and cracked down even more harshly of their satellites in Eastern Europe. This was the familiar pattern of the Cold War, where escalation on one side brought a similar response from the other. In Japan the U.S. completely rebuffed Soviet requests for an occupation zone, since even in 1945 the Soviets and Western allies were already clashing over occupation policies in Germany. That country was formally divided into East and West in 1949, just like Korea was divided along North and South lines in 1948. Although the Soviets tried to prevent the unification of the West German zones into one country with the Berlin Blockade in 1948-49, the Truman administration supplied the city by air, and also agreed to a formal military alliance between the U.S. and the Western European states—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. From that point to the end of the Cold War forty years later, Europe remained divided and the Western states were under the American nuclear umbrella, as was Japan. In addition, through the Marshall Plan and similar programs from 1947 onward, the U.S. provided massive economic assistance to rebuild Japan and Western Europe. In both Europe and Asia, the lines where the Russian and Western armies met in 1945 basically became the lines of division in the Cold War for the next four decades, and this situation simply became the new normal in international affairs.
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