THE US IN THE POST-WAR WORLD

[This is the second of six articles I am writing on the respective positions of Britain, the US, France, Germany, Russia and China in the post-war world]

Presidents:

1945-53 Harry S Truman                    1977-81 Jimmy Carter

1953-61 Dwight D Eisenhower           1981-89 Ronald Reagan

1961-63 John F Kennedy                    1989-93 George Bush

1963-69 Lyndon B Johnson                1993-2001 Bill Clinton

1969-74 Richard M Nixon                  2001-09 George W Bush

1974-77 Gerald Ford                          2009-     Barack Obama

The US was the overwhelming victor of the Second World War. Although she had spent enormous sums of money equipping herself and her Allies and had suffered heavy casualties (405,000 dead), her homeland and civilians were untouched, her industries were operating at full capacity and her huge armed forces were victorious in Europe and the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt, the inspiring leader since 1933, died in office in April 1945 just before the German surrender in May and his successor vice-President Harry Truman took the fateful decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 ending Japanese resistance. The Nuclear Age had dawned and the US maintained global dominance for the next 25 years.

Early Post-War Years

Harry S Truman

Dean Acheson

There was inevitably a period of confusion as millions of soldiers returned to civilian life and industries once geared up for war production changed to manufacturing other much-desired items. Generous schemes were established to assist GIs re-integrate, but there were shortages of materials and many strikes – union power was curbed by the Taft –Hartley Act of 1947, passed over Truman’s veto. Against the expectations of pundits, Truman won re-election in 1948 and surrounded by a competent New Deal team later including Dean Acheson, headed a successful presidency. He took the risk of alienating Southern Democrats by ordering the desegregation of the armed forces, which took some years to take full effect.

Foreign affairs were an urgent priority. Europe was prostrate but the US responded generously with the Marshall Plan greatly helping reconstruction in Western Europe.  The Iron Curtain divided Europe into Allied and Soviet spheres, with partitioned Berlin an isolated island. The Soviets blockaded Berlin in 1948-49 but an Anglo-American airlift lasting 10 months triumphantly defied this pressure. Immediate recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, despite State Department misgivings, upset the Arab world but was electorally popular. NATO was established in 1949, underlining the US commitment to Europe; West and East Germany were created. In 1949, the Soviets showed they were rapidly catching up in the arms race by exploding their first atom-bomb.

In Asia, Japan was governed by US General McArthur and China, though rent by civil war, was a special US interest. The triumph of Mao’s communists in 1950 came as a nasty shock and the US persisted in a policy of only recognising Chiang-Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government, now exiled to Formosa (Taiwan). A major crisis arose when North Korea invaded the South in 1950. A UN force, mainly American, was despatched but the war was bitter and 30,000 US soldiers lost their lives. China intervened dangerously and the US commander McArthur disobeyed Truman who dismissed him in 1951.The fighting ended in 1953 with de facto partition but no peace treaty was ever signed.

The US in the 1950s

Soviet and Chinese hostility stiffened the attitude of a growingly conservative US. The expansion of Communism was to be limited by the policy of Containment associated with the state department official George Kennan. This policy came to be exercised aggressively in the 1950s, especially by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who would intervene politically or even militarily when communism threatened. The US came to support some unattractive anti-communist regimes, notably those of Syngman Rhee in South Korea, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and others in Latin America.

Dwight D Eisenhower

John Foster Dulles

 An anti-communist hysteria and spy-mania engulfed Washington through the House Un-American Activities hearings and the wild accusations of Senator Joe McCarthy until his bubble was pricked in 1954. As an omen of much worse unrest later, Eisenhower used Federal powers in 1957 to force the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, when governor Orval Faubus defied the law.

Despite these problems, the US enjoyed a golden age of capitalism in the 1950s. Great corporations expanded and prospered, the stock market rose headily, business was good. No country could rival the US; American cars, clothes, machines, movies and life-style were admired and yearned for. The mighty dollar allowed Americans living abroad to live like kings. Easy-going President Eisenhower, a popular war hero, ran a largely laissez-faire administration. As he relinquished office he wisely warned against the power of “the military-industrial complex”

There were a few international set-backs; Nasser seized the Suez Canal in 1956 and collusion between key US allies, Britain, France and Israel to regain it upset Eisenhower who refused to support them. A period of recrimination followed when Nasser kept the Canal. An attempt by Hungary to break free of foreign domination was ruthlessly suppressed by Soviet tanks in 1956. Soviet scientific progress was apparent as they beat the US to launch the first satellite Sputnik in 1957 to be followed in April 1961 by the first man in outer space with Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight.

The American Dream

The Americans must have regarded themselves as the most fortunate of people. National wealth brought great material comforts. The US standard of living, her easy luxury, her gleaming consumer goods outstripped those of any other country. A flood of immigrants was absorbed into the melting-pot, employment levels were high, equality was proclaimed – even if black Americans lagged behind. Since 1945 American culture had been vibrant. Novels, if not their best, flowed from Hemingway and Steinbeck. Norman Mailer, James Jones and JD Salinger captured the imagination of a new generation.  Jack Kerouac’s On the Road spoke to the disillusioned; Arthur Miller’s dramas thrilled his audiences; the All-American verities of artist Norman Rockwell in time gave way to experimental Rauschenberg. Wonderful movies streamed out of Hollywood, including timeless MGM musicals to make the world sing, dramas like All about Eve or A Star is Born, Cecil B deMille blockbusters and comedies ranging from Abbott and Costello to Bob Hope. The reach was global as pop music burgeoned from the sophisticated tones of Frank Sinatra to the raucously dynamic Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Little Richard.

The Sixties and early Seventies

The 1960s were more troubled. They started off in a blaze of optimism as John Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, representing a new and more glamorous generation. A memorable Inaugural address fired the idealism of service and another at the Berlin Wall proclaimed Western freedom – but the rhetoric was greater than the achievement. A crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba in October 1962 brought the world to the brink until Khruschev backed down. Kennedy had acted decisively. When Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963, the US and the world were stunned and regretted what might have been if Kennedy had served his full term.

John F Kennedy

Lyndon B Johnson

                                               

  The assassination of JFK high-lighted the worrying trend towards political violence in the US. Civil Rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965, Martin Luther King shot dead by a white racist in 1968 and Robert Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic nomination, killed in Los Angeles also in 1968. The new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a Southern machine politician and expectations were not high. However LBJ understood how Capitol Hill worked and made very substantial legislative progress on what he called The Great Society confirming voting rights, educational rights and employment rights for American blacks. This was a huge achievement to emerge from much turmoil.

Johnson was less fortunate overseas. For years the US had been at the edges of the conflicts in Indo-China. When the French were defeated in 1954, American aid and later “advisers” bolstered the mainly Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem (assassinated in 1963) against North Vietnam and the local communist Vietcong. JFK had increased US involvement and in 1964 Johnson used an obscure naval action in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify obtaining from Congress freedom to wage open war against North Vietnam. Despite immense US commitments and optimistic assessments, little military progress was made and there was a shock when multiple targets were attacked in the 1968 Tet Offensive. The US gradually withdrew its armies in 1973 but the war dragged on until South Vietnam finally collapsed in 1975. This was a heavy blow to US prestige in Asia and the war split US society grievously; the human cost of 58,000 US dead was chilling.

Richard M.Nixon

Kenry Kissinger

 

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LBJ did not stand for re-election in 1968 and there were serious riots as Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate at Chicago. George Wallace, governor of Alabama, stood on a racist platform as the third candidate. The Republican Richard Nixon won the election comfortably and the liberal 1960s were over. Richard Nixon was unlovable but an experienced politician who became expert in international affairs. Early on, he was able to bask in the reflected glory of the NASA Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969.  Closely advised by Henry Kissinger, Nixon pulled off a momentous détente with China in 1972 and a US settlement of the Vietnam War with the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. His real virtues were overshadowed by the shameful Watergate scandal of 1974 and painfully he resigned to avoid impeachment.

Economic Pressures

The US’s total dominance of the global economy could not last. By the 1960’s Japan had made great strides as had Germany and the EEC. The US started to run a balance of payments deficit rectified not by higher taxes but by overseas deposits in the US as a safe haven. Inflationary pressures arose both from Johnson’s Great Society and from the cost of the Vietnam War. The dollar had become overvalued and in 1971 the Bretton Woods system which had run from 1945 broke down. The dollar’s fixed exchange rate ended and it ceased to be convertible into gold; in due course all major trading currencies floated. Although the US as much as Europe suffered when the Arabs imposed their oil embargo in 1973, followed by a huge increase in the cost of oil, the US deficit was easily offset by the flood of petro-dollars returning to her. The US sucked in global liquidity from the Middle East, and later from China, which was recycled by Wall Street into a variety of financial instruments, contributing to the Economic Crisis of 2007.

 The unhappy 1970s and the Reagan Era

Nixon’s stopgap successor Gerald Ford lacked charisma and was followed by dogged Democrat Jimmy Carter. Both suffered from an economic recession and “stagflation”. Ford fell out with intransigent Israel, who had plenty friends in Washington, and Carter was eventually brought down by his failure to end a 444-day diplomatic hostage crisis in Iran in 1980, whose revolutionary Shia Muslim government was rabidly anti-American. Important arms limitation treaties were signed with the USSR and a green agenda was established by idealistic Carter.

The US wanted a change and embraced former movie actor and California governor Ronald Reagan. He was at 69 older than any other incoming president and no intellectual but his two presidential terms were highly successful, greatly reviving the Right.

Ronald Reagan meets Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986

 Nonchalant, confident and homely Reagan has a rather simple world vision. The US was threatened by the “evil empire” of the USSR – so US military expenditure was much increased and the Star Wars missile defence plan initiated. Libya was funding terrorism – so Tripoli was the target of a punitive bombing raid in 1986. Taxes were too high – so Reagan cut business taxes and followed the monetarist policies elucidated by Milton Friedman. The US economy responded and prosperity returned, even though some taxes were re-imposed. He frowned upon welfare dependency – so he cut programmes for the poor and urged them back to work. In all this he was supported by his close ally Margaret Thatcher of Britain who operated similar policies. The USSR’s ramshackle economy could not compete with the US on defence and Reagan’s successor Bush witnessed the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and finally the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Much of the credit goes to Ronald Reagan.

Life in the US from 1960 to the present

There has of course been a transformation in the last 50 or so years but some things do not change. The US remains by a wide margin the richest country in the world and a global leader. Her people are a curious mixture of the puritanically religious, the dedicatedly commercial and the wildly unconventional. Her politicians do not have the debating and intellectual skills valued in Europe but seem to manage pretty well. Business enjoys a much higher prestige than elsewhere.

The cultural reach is enviable. Fine concert orchestras and auditoria abound. Most cities have galleries and museums of estimable quality. The theatre survives and some television is of a high standard. Writers like Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe and Lewis Lapham have scandalised, amused and instructed us, as have gadflies like Truman Capote. The art world has seen reputations come and go including those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The film industry has rather abandoned Hollywood itself but the world has still thrilled to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones sagas or the films of Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The horrors of Vietnam were evoked by The Deer Hunter and Platoon and there have been fine sci-fi fantasies from Back to the Future onwards. Pop music has seen black Americans take a leading place with many fine Motown artistes, energetic Michael Jackson and lovely but tragic Whitney Houston.

The US seems basically conservative, but she enjoys an excellent education system and the people are better travelled and less parochial than once they were. Their pride in their own country and her achievements is admirable.

The US from 1989 onwards

Although George Bush Senior saw the end of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, his presidency was essentially an addendum to that of Reagan. He handled well the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and saw to Saddam’s dislodging and defeat; he might have pressed his advantage harder. Preppy Bush did not have Reagan’s popular touch and he gave way to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in 1993.

Clinton had the good fortune to preside over a period of unparalleled prosperity.  He was folksy and articulate, pushing forward the North America Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, pressing a State Insurance Program for children through the Republican Congress together with other welfare reforms. He undertook in return to balance the budget. Overseas, the Cold War was over but NATO forces had to intervene against the Serbs in Bosnia in 1996 and in 1999 NATO handed over Kosovo, where Serbia had been harassing ethnic Albanians, to UN administration. Various embassy bombings in East Africa underlined the growing threat from Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Clinton’s womanising became an issue and he was accused of perjury and almost impeached; the US had little appetite for such a move and Clinton escaped, remaining a popular, if personally flawed, president.

 The two presidential terms of his Republican successor George W Bush were beset by great problems. The election was won by a whisker of votes in Florida; Bush himself was not an impressive figure, oddly inarticulate publicly. He surrounded himself with Neo-Con figures, given to extreme rightist opinions, although there were mainstream Republicans too. He relied on advice from his experienced Vice-President, Richard Cheney.

On 11 September 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 civilian airliners and flew them in suicide attacks on the New York World Trade Centre, whose twin towers collapsed, on the Pentagon, which was seriously damaged and on the Capitol, saved by the brave actions of the passengers. Almost 3,000 people were killed; the US rallied patriotically round her President.

Richard Cheney

George W Bush

Bush declared a War on Terror invading Afghanistan which harboured Osama bin Laden and overthrew the Taliban. Establishing a stable regime proved elusive and the Taliban continue to mount a major insurrection.  He had a handful of allies, notably Tony Blair’s Britain. More controversially he and his allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, on the pretext that it was developing weapons of mass destruction, later unproven. Saddam was overthrown and hanged but murderous sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia emerged and more than 100,000 Iraqis have since died. Both wars became very unpopular in the US and Iraq has been evacuated and an Afghanistan withdrawal is under way.

Domestically Bush dismissed the Kyoto green protocols, spent large sums on welfare and Medicare as the economy improved but his second term was difficult. He was blamed for mishandling Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans in 2005. Much worse was the Economic Crisis which simmered from 2007 with sub-prime mortgage worries but exploded in 2008 with the collapse of Lehmann Brothers and difficulties in many other financial institutions. Wall Street had been inadequately controlled in retrospect by Alan Greenspan, 19 years heading the Fed. The sober-sided bankers of yesteryear had morphed into greedy well-heeled shooters betting, and ultimately losing, in a vast global crap-game. Greenspan’s successor Ben Bernanke had to clear up a horrible mess and the world economy has stalled.

The Future

The election of Barack Obama as President was a triumph for the long struggle for black civil rights. He inherited a deep well of goodwill, but though his rhetoric has often been inspiring, his achievements have disappointed and his crab-like caution has frustrated his supporters.

Barack Obama

Yet in the final analysis the US occupies an immensely strong place in the world. Her GDP is twice that of her nearest rival, China. The Cold War and the overt threat of nuclear war are over. Diverse and multi-racial US society is peaceful and forward-looking. Internationally the US has earned loyal friends. How to live with an assertive Muslim world remains a challenge and patient diplomacy may be required to bring China fully into the family of nations.

Long may the US flourish!

SMD

26.08.12