History

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

That war started in 1931 when Japan, which had industrialized and somewhat Westernized itself in the years since 1854, moved its armies from Korea (which it had occupied since winning the Russo-Japanese war of 1905) into Manchuria, which was nominally under Chinese sovereignty. Japan was in possession not only of Korea, but of the Shantung peninsula, a part of China formerly German-occupied, and awarded to Japan by the Versailles peace treaty of 1919. By the 1920s. Japan was observing chaos in neighbor country, and took advantage of what seemed a historic opportunity.

China had overthrown its emperor in 1911 and reconstituted itself as a republic, but within a few years had become divided among various contending regional war lords. In effect, China was undergoing a slow-motion civil war. By the mid 1920s, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuo Min-tang party had emerged triumphant among the warlords, but a small but growing communist faction that had been born in Shanghai had survived Chiang’s attempts to destroy it, and had (by means of the famous Long March of several thousand miles) established itself in its own territory in northwestern China. In the face of Japanese aggression, Chiang’s response was divided and reluctant. (The Japanese invasion, he said, was like a cancer of the skin, whereas the Communists were cancer of the vital organs.)

Japan had managed to defeat the Czar’s armed forces in 1905; it was more than a match for Chiang Kai-shek. The only problem was, there was never any place to stop. Every step led to another step, until (like Germany invading Russia) Japan found itself fully committed in an invasion of a much larger country that it could never hope to occupy. And the more it forced itself upon hapless China, the more it became seen as a force that might menace others. The fact that it had joined Germany and Italy as part of the Axis only made it seem the more threatening. (There is comedy amid tragedy. One such touch: The racist Germans, respecting and needing the Japanese, termed them, presumably with a straight face, “honorary Aryans.”)

Inter-war Britain and France were in no mood to look for another enemy when they were so seriously threatened by the rise of Nazi Germany and, earlier, fascist Italy. They offered no opposition to Japan’s imperialist expansion, particularly its attacks on China. American isolationism was too strong for President Roosevelt to do much, whatever his inclinations. Mostly – until mid-1941 – he confined himself to words. But then, at almost the same time as the German invasion of the Soviet Union, delivered an ultimatum. Japan would cease its incursions on Chinese sovereignty or the United States would impose an embargo on oil and steel exports.

If this was meant to bring the Japanese to heel, it backfired. If it was meant to bring them to provoke a war in which they could be easily crushed, it backfired. What it provoked was the naval air assault on Pearl Harbor at dawn, December 7, 1941. That catastrophic morning, although no one knew it at the time, was the end of the era of surface fleets. The Japanese attack sent battleships to the bottom of the harbor, but it missed American aircraft carriers, which were out to sea on maneuvers, and it missed the submarines and the oil tanks holding the fuel that submarines burned. America defeated the Japanese Navy with the equivalent of U-Boats and Luftwaffe, combined with the capture of strategic islands for the sake of the bases they could provide for land-based bombers and fighters. In the end, America defeated Japan without ever landing an American soldier on Japanese soil (unless one counts Okinawa as Japanese soil, as Japanese do). Submarines sunk the shipping it needed not only to supply its overseas bases but to transport food to the home islands. Carrier-based airplanes fire-bombed Tokyo and other cities. Finally Okinawa-based B29s destroyed much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with one bomb apiece – the atomic bomb that would bedevil the world thereafter.

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

Now, before we consider the Japanese-American conflict, let’s look at how the first two years of World War II had already changed Europe. Since we are looking backwards, we want to see it in light of what happened later, rather than what had happened before. A quick overview shows that every important postwar trend had its roots in those first two years.

1. The Netherlands and France were overrun and occupied. These were both major colonial powers. Defeat of the mother country by Germany left their colonies in Asia unprotected. Thus, Japan occupied Indochina in 1940 and, immediately after Pearl Harbor, overran the Dutch East Indies. After the war, neither mother country would be able to resist what was called national liberation. Indochina became Vietnam (and then for 20 years North and South Vietnam, and then again Vietnam). The Dutch East Indies gained independence in 1949 as the Indonesia, and quickly became one of the leaders of the nonaligned (between the communists and the West) nations. French territories in Africa escaped occupation by Axis powers, but French defeat sowed the seeds that would sprout in the 1950s, resulting within a few years of the transformation of the French Empire into a loosely tied francophone community of independent African nations.
2. Great Britain for the second time in 20 years strained every nerve to maintain itself against an overpowering force. British armed forces were equipped by American factories and supplied by American ships. In the period before America entered the war, those arms and those shipments had to be paid for. The money could only come from liquidation of overseas investments. In effect, that first two years of war accelerated the liquidation of the British financial empire which the first World War had begun. Although Britain emerged from the war victorious (in that its enemies had been defeated), it emerged bankrupt, rationed, and exhausted from the death-struggle, much of its domestic infrastructure damaged or destroyed. Heavy American postwar pressure to decolonize, combined with economic exhaustion and pressures from nationalists in India and elsewhere resulted, within 15 years, of the British Empire joining the other imperial casualties of the 20^th century.
3. Italy lost not only Albania (which it held briefly) but Ethiopia, which it had conquered in 1935, and Libya which it had held for 40 years. Germany had already lost its overseas colonies in the 1919 peace treaty that ended World War I. And Belgium, unable to fight the postwar anti-colonial tide, would give up the Belgian Congo in 1960. All these countries – all of Europe, in fact, other than Spain and Portugal, which had remained neutral in the war — would henceforth confine their energies and activities to Europe. The age of European domination of the world was over. Its successors, as we have seen, were the two opposing superpowers, the daughters of Europe.

Of these two, America was the only truly global superpower. Only the United States had found a two-ocean war. The British navy had participated in some naval actions in the Pacific, but, naturally, had concentrated its effort in the North Atlantic which was vital to survival. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan three months after the German surrender, as promised at Yalta, which, as it turned out, was just one week before Japan finally quit. The overwhelming bulk of the war against Japan was fought by China and by the United States.

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

For two years, America watched the war in Europe expand. When Germany attacked Poland in September, 1939, England and France declared war. Poland was defeated in a month, and when there was no further land warfare that winter, some people took to calling it a “phony war.” That phase ended in the spring of 1940, when Hitler’s armies, navy and air force overran Denmark and Norway, then the Netherlands, Belgium and, in a terrific shock to the west, France. All this shook America’s determination to remain uninvolved. In the fall, the Luftwaffe carried the war to the British homeland, and in the final weeks of the 1940 presidential campaign, America were hearing nightly broadcasts from London describing the Battle of Britain.

These broadcasts perhaps did as much as any other single event to heighten American sympathies for England and the resistance to Hitler. All through the year 1941, America remained technically neutral, but in fact aligned itself ever more closely to the British empire. Lend-Lease “lent” the British some overage, practically obsolete, four-stacker destroyers left over from the first world war. (Though over-age, they were useful, and desperately needed, in convoying ships through U-Boat-infested waters.) In return, the British gave the U.S. 99-year leases on various strategic properties in the western hemisphere, on which U.S. forces built bases which it used in order to perform air and sea patrols. President Roosevelt announced that the North Atlantic west of Iceland was an American strategic zone which the U.S. navy would patrol against U-Boats. Thus, for months while America was technically neutral, the U.S. navy was stalking and sometimes depth-bombing U-Boats in what had been redefined as American waters.

In June, 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, and the English and Russians immediately made common cause despite Churchill’s absolute anti-communism, which extended to the very first days of the communist revolution during World War I. (“If Hitler invaded hell,” Churchill said, “I would feel obliged at least to make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”) In the next six months, German forces repeatedly overwhelmed Russian armies, and penetrated hundreds of miles into the interior of Russia. But the Russian armies, in classic fashion, traded space for time – that is, they retreated when necessary to avoid destruction. Russia, unlike every other country Germany had attacked, had plenty of space to trade. The very expanse of Russian landmass absorbed hundreds of thousands of German troops, diluting their superiority in numbers as they proceeded eastward – and the Soviet government was prepared to retreat behind the Ural mountains if need be. Still, by December, 1941, the Germans stood at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad.

Then, as Roosevelt had wished, the United States entered the war against Germany, but the way it happened was odd. It wasn’t as a result of American attacks on German U-Boats or American arms sales to Great Britain or halfway steps to war such as Lend-Lease, at least, not directly. And it wasn’t because America declared war on Germany. Instead, it was because in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Empire of Japan had struck at the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. On December 8, President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, and two days later Germany (and Italy) declared war on the United States! The immediate American response was, of course, a reciprocal declaration.

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

Why had the war led to a bipolar world? Look at the war’s results. Japan and Germany, the prime opponents, had been economically and militarily flattened. Equally exhausted were Italy, the third Axis power, which had been defeated in 1943, and France, which had emerged on the winning side under Charles DeGaulle, after defeat in 1940, and Great Britain, the only power to fight the entire war from September 1939 to September 1945.

The Soviets had lost 20 million people in the war, and had had most of their industrial heartland destroyed, either by Germans or by their own hand in “scorched earth” tactics. But the Red Army of 1945 far outnumbered American troops on the ground in Europe, and even outnumbered the troops of the Americans combined with their European allies. The West feared that the only thing preventing the Red Army from conquering its way to the Atlantic was America’s possession of the atomic bomb.

The Soviets feared that a continued American monopoly of atomic bombs, then hydrogen bombs, would sooner or later lead to an attack such as the one Hitler had made a few years earlier. Similarly, the Americans feared another Pearl Harbor, this time with atomic warheads. Hence, the arms race, and what came to be called the balance of terror. Hence, too, Soviet and American rivalry among what came to be called the Third World – the African, Asian, and Latin American countries whose alliance might amount to a flank attack by whichever power or social system captured their allegiance.

It was a long, expensive conflict. True, it was cheaper than another hot war would have been, but it was expensive enough. America’s triad of forces included a strategic air command that kept bombers in the air 24 hours a day, fleets of nuclear-powered attack submarines and carrier forces, and ground forces and Marines stationed in various countries around the world.

What was perhaps more expensive, in some ways, was that America – or rather, the people who got hold of the levers of power, whether elected officials, military officers, behind-the-scenes operatives of covert agencies, or other people whose money or connections bought them a passing measure of control — got into the habit of thinking that it was America’s right and responsibility to control events. Domestically, this led to ever more intrusive surveillance and manipulation of American citizens. Internationally, it led to ever more assertive efforts to influence other countries’ popular opinion, elections, and policies, and led to the pursuit of ever larger ability to project American military power – that is, to threaten. America had come a long way from its pre-World War II isolationist position.

 

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

By the year 2000, the Soviet Union had collapsed of its own weight. The Soviet Union was gone, and its successor states were broke and demoralized. Communist rule had collapsed in the European satellite countries of Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. (Communist Yugoslavia had gone its own way decades ago. Communist Albania followed the Chinese rather than the Russian model.) China was ruled by its own communist party, but China, unlike Russia, was historically a relatively stable presence rather than an expansionist state. That left only Cuba, which was no conceivable military threat in its geographical, economic, diplomatic and social isolation. The historical communist challenge to pluralistic capitalist societies had been growing through the 20^th century, as we shall see. Now it was gone, and America stood alone.

America had outlasted the Soviet bloc, and had become, in all but name, the center of a global empire, alone at the pinnacle of power. But that long cold war had exacted a price, and perhaps the economic price paid was the least of it. (Military expenditures were considered to be a form of insurance against a return of the Great Depression of 1929-1940.) Forty years of military, diplomatic, economic, social, and cultural contention had changed American society. How could it not? In 1963, president John F. Kennedy had said that the nation did not seek a pax Americana, in which its will was supreme and its word was law. This was true at the time, but by the year 2000, was it still? It certainly was not true while the Soviet Union posed its deadly challenge.

Every so often, before we can examine a given situation in hindsight, we will have to jump backwards to put it into context. We’ll put these little sketches into italics, like this:

The Second World War ended in 1945 with Japan and all the European powers exhausted. Only the United States and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, emerged from the war stronger than they had been before it began. Mutual suspicion soon turned to active hostility. The Soviet Union made military and economic satellites of the countries its troops had overrun in defeating Germany. The United States helped the other European powers to recover economically and established NATO as a mutual defense alliance. An arms race followed. Guided missiles carrying nuclear payloads soon put the whole world in danger. In retrospect, the danger peaked in 1962, but no one knew it at the time. The military, diplomatic, and economic rivalry continued, sometimes colder, sometimes warmer, until the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet Premier, following three old men whose policies could be summed up as “more of the same.” But his reformist policies of glasnost (“voice-ness,” or free speech) and perestroika (economic restructuring), failed. The economic problems worsened, political control was slipping away from the party, and no one had a clue as to what to do. In 1991, some party chiefs attempted to unseat Gorbachev in a coup. Instead, the regime collapsed. The end of the Soviet state brought the end of the cold war and the threat of Soviet troops overrunning Europe or Soviet missiles destroying American cities.

If America had not quite won the cold war, at any rate the Soviets had lost it. The bipolar world that had followed World War II was gone.

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

At the end of the 20^th century, the United States of America was being described as the world’s sole remaining superpower, even hyper-power, with no equal and few rivals. There was good reason why publisher Henry Luce had dubbed it “the American century.” Militarily, economically, culturally, scientifically, technologically, America was something unprecedented in the known history of the world.

Before we trace the journey, first a snapshot of the American state and culture at the pinnacle.

Militarily, America, for better or worse, spent more money on arms than the next several powers combined. Leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which it had founded, multiplied its potential military power further, and entangled past and potential rivals in a cooperative web of “defense” relationships that discouraged or prevented them from embarking on any independent enterprises that the NATO command structure – in other words, American decision-makers – might consider potentially disruptive. America maintained a network of overseas military bases which, counting all sizes from tiny to huge, numbered more than a thousand. Its nuclear navy and its air fleets were capable of projecting America’s arms to any point on the globe, although – as several so-called “brush-fire wars” had demonstrated – this was not quite the same thing as saying that America’s military reach assured that it could have whatever it was resolved to have. Small countries determined not to submit to force could and did maintain independence, though at the cost of horrific casualties.

This military supremacy came at a cost. Overseas, it naturally generated resentment. Domestically, its drain on economic and other resources led some to question how long the nation could afford the strain, and led some to speculate that America’s reach had already exceeded its grasp. But what the 21^st century would bring was for time to show. In the year 2000, America’s military power was not only unmatched, but unmatchable, for no other country or group of countries outside of politically contained Europe had anything like the resources that would be required.

Economically, America had rivals, but not yet any equal. It had technological infrastructure, an established industrial base, research and development facilities, raw materials, and a large domestic consumer market. The world knew only one comparable wealth-creation machine, the relatively recent European Community. In the year 2000, the EC’s new currency, the Euro, was not yet a decade old, and there were doubts as to its long-term practicality. Europe, even if we confine ourselves to Western and Central Europe, was unlike the United States in that political control was divided among many independent states speaking different languages, nurturing different cultural values, and having separate (if slowly integrating) economies. To ask the Euro to bridge all those differences was asking a lot. The United States had no such problem. Beyond Europe economically was Japan, still struggling from its economic implosion of the 1980s, and beyond Japan were Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRIC countries, each with a large domestic market, but all struggling to overcome centuries of economic underdevelopment. They were coming up fast, but in 2000 their challenge was still mostly in potential. As to the rest of the world, it too had the potential for rapid development, depending on each country’s decisions, but in the year 2000 they were very much also-rans.

Culturally, American images were everywhere. American movies, TV shows, books and magazines were available everywhere. The resulting distorted-image description of American life actively inspired both emulation and rejection worldwide. Love America or hate it, you couldn’t ignore it. Of what other country could this be said? Again, The American Century.

Scientifically and technologically, the United States was still the single largest employer of brainpower in the world. Beginning perhaps with the flight westward in the 1930s of Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany and conquered countries, continuing and accelerating after World War Two, the “brain drain” had lured the most talented and highly skilled individuals from every country that did not actively restrict their immigration. (If it has not already been done, someone should tally Nobel Prizes won by the United States, separating them into two groups, those won by native-born Americans and  those won by immigrants. I suspect that the result would be very enlightening.)

So that is the high seat upon which the United States perched as the 20^th century came to an end. Now, how did it get there? We can’t tell the story in any detail, but we can trace a few of the more important trends and turning points.