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was too deep. Moreover, as Kenneth Latourette, an authority on Far Eastern history, put it in explaining the subsequent victory of the Communists: “A major reason for the Nationalist defeat was that the Kuomintang, the national government run by it, and Chiang Kai-shek had completely lost the confidence of the Chinese people.”

      The State Department White Paper on China, issued at the time of the Communist victory in 1949, declared:

      The historic policy of the United States of friendship and aid toward the people of China was, however, maintained in both peace and war. Since V-J Day, the United States Government has authorized aid to Nationalist China in the form of grants and credits totaling approximately 2 billion dollars. … In addition … the United States Government has sold the Chinese Government large quantities of military and civilian war surplus property with a total procurement cost of over a billion dollars. …

      Further along, the White Paper also describes the Nationalist government as “a Government which had lost the confidence of its own troops and its own people.” Thus, American “friendship and aid toward the people of China” was translated into several billion dollars for the Nationalist government of China, which, according to official documentation, was not supported by the people of China. The reason for the nonsupport was that the Kuomintang was brutal, corrupt, inefficient, and dictatorial. It was dominated by the rich and the reactionary, and it was subservient to Western power—all those factors that the Chinese Nationalists themselves had hoped to eradicate after the 1911 revolution.

      The “historic policy” of the United States had not been one of “friendship and aid to the people of China,” as the White Paper asserted. Long before the Communists came to power, American policy was based not only on strategic interests but on commercial interests, as the treaty arrangements following the Opium War and the “Open Door” policy testify. What was abhorrent to the United States about the Communists running China was not that intellectual and political freedom were limited—this was certainly true under Chiang—but that a powerful independent China, which the Communists were creating, would lend itself neither to the West’s traditional commercial dealings with the huge China market nor to political and military control.

      After Mao’s victory, United States policy toward China remained consistent through five administrations. Its principal elements were: maintenance of a military base on Taiwan, to which Chiang had fled and where he now planted a dictatorship over the eight million Taiwanese; pressure on smaller states in the United Nations to keep Chiang in China’s seat on the Security Council and to keep Communist China out of it; refusal to give diplomatic recognition or economic aid to Peking; construction of a ring of military bases around China, with American troops, planes, and weapons, in Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and Thailand.

      America’s China policy was not conducted in a vacuum. All major episodes of American foreign policy in the postwar period show the same fanatical anti-communism. This obsession was due less to ideological-moral disagreement than to the fact that Communist nations posed an especially tough obstacle to the normal drives of liberal nationalism: for expansion, for paternalism, for maximum profit. These nationalist ambitions have always been presented to the public in the guise of protecting national security or promoting peace or defending other nations against aggression or helping backward nations to modernize—justifiable objectives that have lent moral passion to the most ferocious technology of death ever devised. In the actual practice of American policy, this combination of moralism and technology has supported a willingness to use massive violence, to break the peace, to exhaust the national resources, and, finally, to threaten the internal cohesion of the United States itself—in other words, to have effects totally different from those promised.

      The remainder of this chapter summarizes some of the major aspects of American foreign policy in the postwar period. They are discussed under the general headings of Intervention, Economic Penetration, Militarization, Vietnam. All are discussed in the light of the discrepancy between liberal rhetoric and liberal nationalism in action.

      I. INTERVENTION

       A. Korea, 1950–1953

      On June 25, 1950, the armies of Communist North Korea crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea; the next day, President Truman, presumably to help the South Koreans defend themselves against the attack, announced the use of American air and sea forces in Korea. His announcement was made in response to a UN resolution asking the invaders to withdraw to the 38th parallel. “A return to the rule of force in international affairs would have far-reaching effects,” said Truman. “The United States will continue to uphold the rule of law.”

      If the rule of law was represented by the United Nations, American military action stretched it to the breaking point. The UN resolution on Korea had recommended “such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore peace and security in the area.” The United States, with General MacArthur in command of a largely American “United Nations” force, went further; after pushing the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel, it moved all the way up through North Korea to the Yalu River, on the border of China—-an action that provoked the Chinese into entering the war. They swept southward until the war was stalemated at the 38th parallel.

      To call American intervention a blow to “the rule of force” must have seemed bitterly ironic to the Koreans, North and South; in three years of war, American bombers reduced Korea to a desolate, corpse-strewn shambles, with perhaps two million Koreans, North and South, dead. Napalm was used, and a BBC correspondent described the result:

      In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus … He had to stand because he was no longer covered with a skin, but with a crust-like crackling which broke easily … I thought of the hundreds of villages reduced to ash which I personally had seen and realized the sort of casualty list which must be mounting up along the Korean front.

      The war was a catastrophe for the Korean people. America’s intervention illustrated, once again, the common moral failure of international diplomacy, as true of liberal capitalist nations as of others: that transgressions—certain transgressions, of course—must be punished, even if it means supporting an undemocratic regime, and even if the punishment falls with devastating effect on the original victims of the transgression. The effect of intervention in Korea was not rectification but destruction.

      Not only was it ironic that America should castigate “force,” it was deceitful that it should talk as the champion opponent of aggression. Other cases of aggression in the world did not prompt such a drastic response from the United States. When Arab states invaded Israel in 1948, the United States did not mobilize the UN and its own armed forces for intervention. The fact was that in Korea the United States had a political stake: the dictatorial regime in the south of Syngman Rhee was an American client. Furthermore, America wanted South Korea as a military base on the Asian mainland. It had an eye on Communist China, and it was still operating on the balance-of-power concept that Roosevelt in 1945 thought was outmoded.

      Truman’s statement of June 27, 1950, announcing the use of American military force to help South Korea, simultaneously ordered the Seventh Fleet to defend the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan. It also directed more military aid to the French forces fighting against the Communist Viet Minh insurgents in Indochina. When the long-range effects of the Korean intervention are considered, on the Korean nation and its people, on Sino-American relations (postwar treaties had assumed Taiwan belonged to China), and on the American attitude toward the French imperialists in Indochina, it is difficult to see how the declared aim of the intervention—to bring peace and stability to Asia—was furthered.

       B. Guatemala, 1954

      What Truman had said at the start of the Korean intervention about the United States upholding “the rule of law” as opposed to the “rule of force” was utterly contradicted in 1954 by the American overthrow, through force, of the legally elected

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