Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The destruction of international law, like the destruction of international order, has gone much further than this. As long as the chief criterion for a state’s sovereignty, and hence of recognition, was ability to maintain order, states in international law were regarded as equal. This concept is still recognized in theory in such organizations as the Assembly of the United Nations. But the achievement of nuclear weapons, by creating two super-Powers in a Cold War, destroyed the fact of the equality of states. This had the obvious result of creating Powers on two levels: ordinary and super; but it had the less obvious, and more significant, consequence of permitting the existence of states of lower levels of power, far below the level of ordinary Powers. This arose because the nuclear stalemate of the two super-Powers created an umbrella of fear of precipitating nuclear war which falsified their abilities to act at all.

As a result, all kinds of groups and individuals could do all kinds of actions to destroy law and order without suffering the consequences of forcible retaliation by ordinary powers or by the super-Powers, and could become recognized as states when they were still totally lacking in the traditional attributes of statehood. For example, the Léopoldsville group were recognized as the real government of the whole Congo in spite of the fact that they were incapable of maintaining law and order over the area (or even in Leopoldsville itself). In a similar way a gang of rebels in Yemen in 1962 were instantly recognized before they gave any evidence whatever of ability to maintain control or of readiness to assume the existing international obligations of the Yemen state, and before it was established that their claims to have killed the king were true. In Togo in the following year a band of disgruntled soldiers killed the president, Sylvanus Olympio, and replaced him with a recalled political exile.

Under the umbrella of nuclear stalemate, the boundaries of old states are shattered by guerrillas in conflict, supported by outsiders; outside governments subsidize murders or revolts, as the Russians did in Iraq in July 1958, or as Nasser of Egypt did in Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere in the whole period after 1953, and as the American CIA did in several places, successfully in Iran in August 1953, and in Guatemala in May 1954, or very unsuccessfully, as in the Cuban invasion of April 1961. Under the Cold War umbrella, small groups or areas can obtain recognition as states without any need to demonstrate the traditional characteristics of statehood, namely, the ability to maintain their frontiers against their neighbors by force and the ability to maintain order within these frontiers. They can do this either by securing the intervention (usually secret) of some outside Power or even by preventing the intervention of a recognized Power fearful of precipitating nuclear or lesser conflict. In this way areas with a few states (such as southeast Asia) were shattered into many; states went out of existence or appeared (as Syria did in 1958 and 1961); and so-called new states came into existence by scores without reference to any traditional realities of political power or to the established procedures of international law.

The number of separate states registered as members in the United Nations rose steadily from 51 in 1945 to 82 in 1958 to 104 in 1961, and continued to rise. The difference in power between the strongest and the weakest became astronomical, and the whole mechanism of international relations, outside the UN organization as well as within it, became more and more remote from power considerations or even from reality, and became enmeshed in subjective considerations of symbols, prestige, personal pride, and petty spites. By 1963 single tribes in Africa were looking toward recognition of statehood through membership in the UN even when they lacked the financial resources to support a delegation at UN headquarters in New York City or in the capitals of any major country and were, indeed, incapable of controlling police forces to maintain order in their own tribal areas.

In this way the existence of nuclear stalemate within the Cold War carried on the total destruction of traditional international law and the gradual loss of meaning of the established concepts of state and public authority, and opened the door to a feudalization of authority somewhat similar to that which the founders of the modern state system and of international law had sought to overcome in the period from the twelfth century to the seventeenth.

XVII. NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND THE COLD WAR: 1945-1950

The Factors

The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1949

The Crisis in China, 1945-1950

American Confusions, 1945-1950

The Factors

Historically the period 1945 to early 1963 forms a unity. During this period a number of factors interacted upon one another to present a very complicated and extraordinarily dangerous series of events. That mankind and civilized life got through the period of almost two decades may be attributed to a number of lucky chances rather than to any particular skill among the two opposing political blocs or among the neutrals.

The period as a whole is so complex that no successful effort has been made by any historian to present it as a unity. Instead, it is usually treated as a series of separate, relatively isolated, developments, such as events in the Far East, United States domestic history, Soviet domestic history, developments in science and technology, the rise of the neutrals, and other developments. Such a presentation is not adequate because it falsifies the historical fact that these (and other) developments occurred simultaneously, and constantly reacted upon one another. Moreover, the central fact of the whole period, and the one which dominated all the others, was the scientific and technological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, because this rivalry formed the very foundation and core of the Cold War, which was recognized by everyone to be the dominant political factor of the period.

Unfortunately, the Cold War is almost always described in terms which put minor emphasis on, or which may even neglect, the role of Soviet-American technological rivalry. This is done because most historians do not feel competent to discuss it; but chiefly it is done because much of the evidence is secret. Because of such secrecy, the story of this Soviet-American technological rivalry falls into two quite distinct, and even contradictory, parts: (1) what the real situation was and (2) what prevalent public opinion believed the situation to be. For example, in 1954-1955 the Soviet Union had a thermonuclear so-called H-bomb many months before we did, when public opinion believed the opposite; again, in late 1960 there was a widespread belief throughout the world in a so-called “missile gap,” or American inferiority in nuclear missile weapons, when no such inferiority existed; and finally, for a period of several

years, from 1957 to about 1960, the Russians were in advance of the United States and the free world generally in missile technology and in missile-guidance mechanisms, although this was not reflected, then or later, in any superiority in nuclear missile weapons, because of their simultaneous inferiority in nuclear warheads for missiles, an inferiority by a wide margin both in numbers and in variety of such explosive weapons.

In dealing with this central factor of the world situation, the historian is prevented by secrecy on both sides from making any assured or final judgments, and must simply make a judicious estimate of the situation on the basis of available information. Unfortunately, the influence of this factor is so central, and thus so all-pervasive, that inability to be sure of the facts on this matter brings a fair amount of uncertainty into many other areas, such as, for example, the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles or the real significance of the so-called “atomic espionage cases.” Such uncertainty, however, is always present in historical analysis of the recent past, and most historians, knowing that the documents and thus the facts are unavailable for contemporary history (say, the last twenty years), usually leave the most recent past to others, to political scientists, journalists, or biographers.