Power and Complacency by Phillip T. Lohaus

Author:Phillip T. Lohaus [Lohaus, Phillip T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL011000 Political Science / International Relations / General, POL062000 Political Science / Geopolitics
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Contemporary Short-of-War Competition

There was, of course, one major roadblock to this rosy outcome: the Soviet Union. The United States had much more leverage in negotiating the terms of peace than it had had after the First World War. But the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of allied losses, also held sway at the negotiating table, both in the absence and in the presence of the United States. In what has become known as the percentages agreement, Churchill and Stalin discussed a scheme, without President Roosevelt, at the Moscow Conference of 1944 to carve the world into separate spheres of influence: one for the victorious democracies and another for the Soviet Union.81 At the other major peace conferences, the demands of democracy undermined America’s bargaining position. At Tehran, President Roosevelt recused himself from the question of Poland’s future due to Polish-American interests in his upcoming election, and in preparing for Yalta, American diplomats underscored that Stalin would have the luxury of speaking for himself rather than for the people he represented.82 As in conflicts past, the United States either failed to grasp the consequentiality of the negotiations underway or assumed the possibility if not probability of future cooperation with the Soviet Union. Either way, the Allies had rid the world of fascism, but the brand of authoritarianism espoused by Stalin would remain.

The dangers of this new reality were not entirely evident at war’s end. Between 1945 and 1946, the United States reduced the size of its standing army from over eight million active troops to under two million, even with the forthcoming and foreseeable increase to its peacetime worldwide responsibilities.83 The U.S. government disbanded the Office of War Information within two weeks of peace with Japan. Although President Harry S. Truman became convinced of the need to retain the intelligence analysis and operations capacity established by the OSS during the war, others in the executive branch and in Congress saw little need to maintain this functionality in in the newfound era of peace.84 The advent of the atomic bomb served as a rationale for a drawdown that was in fact quite typical of America’s tendency to dismantle military and intelligence functions at the end of a war—and one called for by the American people.85 Having only recently facilitated the founding of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods system of international monetary management, few had the stomach to consider the possibility of future conflict.

Not all believed that the international institutions established at the end of the Second World War would be sufficient to curtail threats to American national security. When the U.S. Department of Treasury inquired of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in early 1946 why the Soviets seemed uninterested in the newly established mechanisms of international economic governance, Deputy Head of Mission George F. Kennan responded with his Long Telegram. The memorandum detailed the Kremlin’s deeply held sensitivity to “capitalist encirclement,” and characterized the Soviet psyche as one “highly sensitive to the logic of force” and “impervious to the logic of reason.

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