The menopause of empire - postwar American foreign policy

Progressive, The, May, 1998 by Gore Vidal

Dissenters like Wallace were labeled communists and ceased to engage meaningfully in public life. An ancestral voice in his own time, Wallace spoke again on May 21, 1947: "Today, in blind fear of communism, we are turning aside from the United Nations. We are approaching a century of fear." And thus far he has proved to be half right. On July 26, 1947, Congress enacted the National Security Act, which created the National Security Council, still going strong, and the Central Intelligence Agency, still apparently hung over a cliff as the result of decades of bad intelligence, not to mention all those cheery traitors for whom the country club at Langley, Virginia, was once an impenetrable cover.

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created, only Charles De Gaulle got the point of what we were doing. He took France out of our Cosa Nostra and developed his own atomic bomb. But France was still very much linked to the empire, through the CIA and other secret forces.

Political control was exerted within the empire, not only driving the Labor prime minister, Harold Wilson, around a bend too far, but preventing Italy from ever having a cohesive government by not allowing the historic compromise, a government of Christian Democrats and Communists.

The Soviets promptly cracked down on their client states--Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany--and the wall went up in Berlin.

From 1950 to 1990, Europe was dangerously divided and armed to the teeth. But as American producers of weapons were never richer, all was well for their world.

At Yalta, Roosevelt wanted to break up the European colonial empires, particularly that of the French. Of Indochina, FDR said France has milked it for 100 years. For the time being, he proposed a U.N. trusteeship. Then he died.

Unlike Roosevelt, Truman was not a philatelist. Had he been a stamp collector, he might have known where the various countries in the world were and who lived in them. Like every good American, he knew he hated communism; he also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing--no one was ever quite sure.

Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism--imported by comical German immigrants with noses always in books--was an ominous spectre calculated to enrage a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care, and other devil's work. It is still being fiercely resisted a century and a half later.

In 1946, when Ho Chi Minh asked the United States to take Indochina under its wing, Truman said, No way, you are some kind of Fu Manchu Communist--the worst. In August 1945, Truman told De Gaulle that the French could return to Indochina--we were no longer FDR anti-imperialists. As Ho had his northern republic, the French installed Bao Dai in the South. On February 1, 1950, the State Department came to this extraordinary conclusion: "The choice confronting the United States is to support the French in Indochina or face the extension of communism over the remainder of the continental area of Southeast Asia, and possibly further westward." Thus without shepherds or even a napalm star, the domino theory was born in a humble State Department manger.