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

The Communist victories were carried to conclusion in 1949. In January, Peiping was captured from the Nationalists and, three months later, the Yangtze River was crossed, and Nanking fell (April 23rd). In the course of the summer, all the south fell, and the Nationalist government, eight years to the day after Pearl Harbor, fled from the mainland to Taiwan (Formosa), where they were protected from Communist pursuit by the United States Seventh Fleet.

In December 1949 Mao Tse-tung and Stalin met in Moscow for their first and last meeting. These led to a mutual-assistance treaty signed on February 14, 1950. By this agreement Mao sought economic and technical assistance which he needed to build up China, while Stalin sought to use these needs to turn China’s unexpected developments in directions he desired. Most of the agreements remained secret, but the chief included a defensive military alliance, detailed agreements by which most of the railways and ports controlled by the Russians in the north would be turned over to the Red Chinese by the end of 1952 (these included Port Arthur), and a loan to China of $60 million a year for five years at 1 percent interest (much less in total than China had sought). Less tangible agreements left Outer Mongolia and Chinese Tannu-Tuva in Soviet control, set up a condominium in Sinkiang, left North Korea in the area of Soviet control, and turned China’s expansionist ambitions southward. At the same time, a secret agreement may have been made to support the projected North Korean attack on South Korea, as 50,000 Koreans in the Chinese Communist forces were weeded out and transferred to the North Korean Army in the next five months.

One consequence of the Sino-Soviet agreements of February 1950 was a mass influx of Soviet advisers and technicians into China to guide their allies in use of the new equipment and methods made possible by the Soviet loan. These rose to scores of thousands, of which about half were military. At the same time, about 6,000 Chinese students were admitted to university study in Russia. All this cooperation ended in the shattering collapse of this alliance exactly ten years after it was established (1960).

American Confusions, 1945-1950

The American response to the Soviet refusal of postwar cooperation was confused and tentative. For months after the Truman Administration recognized the situation, it was reluctant to make any public announcement of this fact because our military demobilization could not be reversed until it had run its course in 1947 and until a new strategic system and consequent military organization could be reached. For this reason, the first announcement came from Winston Churchill in his speech in Fulton, Missouri, in June 1946. In this he spoke of the “Iron Curtain” which Stalin was lowering between the Soviet bloc and the West. It was also British initiative over Greece and Turkey at the end of the year which led to the “Truman Doctrine” of March 1947.

Truman could not get any constructive help from the leaders of the armed forces in establishing a new strategy (they were much too busy fighting each other in protection of the vested interests surviving from World War II), so he was forced to fall back on other forms of resistance, particularly economic, diplomatic, and ideological. The resulting strategy is known as “containment.” It lasted from early 1947 to 1953, and was resumed gradually after 1958. Its chief characteristics were economic and financial aid to other nations, to eliminate the misery and ignorance which fosters Communism, and acceptance of the rights of neutrals and allies to follow their own policies and to be consulted on our policies, without primary reliance on our military force.

As early as August 1945, Truman asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to draw up recommendations for America’s postwar security needs. The bitter rivalries among the three services made it impossible for the JCS to agree on a common strategy, and thus they could not ascertain the country’s ‘weapons needs. At the time, the air force was convinced that the next war would be very brief and would be settled by the Strategic Air Command dropping atom bombs on enemy cities. In its view the army and navy’s roles would be restricted to mopping up after SAC had defeated the enemy. Accordingly, it wanted 70 air groups of the new 6-engine, propellered B-36 bombers (Convair), which flew in prototype in 1946 after six years’ work but which would not be available in quantity until 1949 (when jet propulsion made them obsolete).

The navy in 1945 was much larger than all other navies of the world combined—“a five-ocean navy to fight a no-ocean opponent,” said the air force—but its future had been placed in great jeopardy by the atom-bomb tests staged at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1946. These tests showed that a fleet would suffer very great damage, unless widely dispersed, from atomic explosions in the air, while a blast under water would drench it with almost irradicable radioactivity. Nonetheless, the navy had to seek a role in the growing rivalry with Russia, and pinned its hopes on its ability to reach the enemy with atom-armed planes flown from the deck of a 65,000 ton “supercarrier” of astronomical cost.

The army, almost eclipsed by the plans of its more glamorous rivals, wanted Universal Military Training (UMT) leading to highly trained reserve units, in spite of the air force’s insistence that World War III would be over before ground forces could be mobilized.

These disagreements between services made it impossible for the JCS to achieve any agreement on strategy or on weapons needs in answer to Truman’s request of 1945. Accordingly, in June 1946, they informed the President that a unified strategy could be reached only after achievement of a unification of the three services into a single organization. For this reason, it was not until April 1950, that the United States obtained a strategic military policy to underlie Truman’s policy of containment, which was then three years old. The new strategic policy was embodied in NSC 68, which, despite its code identification, did not come from the National Security Council, but was the child of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, led by Paul Nitze.

The inability of the armed services to provide the country with a defense policy, because of interservice rivalries, is a consequence of the fact that military leaders are specialists and technicians, concerned with means rather than with goals, and, like all technicians, need guidance (or goals) set by other persons with larger perspectives. This weakness is more obvious in peacetime than in war, and is more common among Americans than among some others. Americans work together best when the organization’s goal is explicitly established. In this they differ from the British, who can work together perfectly well in organizations without any apparent goals and are, indeed, suspicious of any desire to establish explicit goals or overriding policy. Americans, when goals are established (as they are in business in peacetime by the balance sheet or as they are in war by the desire for victory) work together very effectively, but political work in peacetime, with its ambiguous goals, is relegated to rivalry, bickering, and total inability to relate means to goals. As a result, the means themselves tend to become goals.

It was the emphasis upon means rather than goals, and the compromises between conflicting means, which led to the National Security Act of 1947. This sought to evade the need for clear hard thinking about goals and the subordination of means to goals by reorganization of the top levels of governmental operation concerned with security. It set up a system based on secrecy and anonymity which may, in time, revolutionize the whole American system of government. In this reorganization there were at least three major parts: (1) unification of the armed services; (2) creation of the National Security Council as an advisory board to the President; and (3) reorganization of the whole system of intelligence and spying, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the code-breaking National Security Agency (NSA).