School of War - Ep 125: Nick Bunker on America and the Early Cold War

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Nick Bunker, journalist and author of In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950, joins the show to talk about the first decade of the Cold War. ▪️ Times      •      01:36 Introduction      •      02:26 Countdown to war     •      05:17 Biden and Truman       •      09:05 A failure of American policy?     •      13:09 Present at the Creation       •      21:16 Stalin’s view of the world     •      25:50 Stalin and China         •      30:44 Developing nuclear thinking       •      32:39 Robert Taft     •      38:01 No choice but to defend Korea     •      46:44 NSC-68 Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Follow the link to buy the book - In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950

We keep coming back to the early Cold War here on School of War, for what I assume is an obvious reason, namely U.S.-China relations today. But the late 1940s and early 50s are also interesting because so many of the military challenges and foreign policy debates then are so early similar to today's. How to prepare for and manage limited wars. How to integrate the awesome power of nuclear weapons into American strategy. Whether Asia or Europe should be America's focus. how to discern the objectives of communist powers, to name a few.

Today, we're going to look at some of these parallels. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1921, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who not see buildings down. We shall fight down the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Nick Bunker,

who won the 2015 George Washington Book Prize for an Empire on the Edge. He's a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, author of numerous books, one-time journalist for the financial times, if I'm not mistaken, and is now the author of in the shadow of fear, America and the world in 1950. Nick, thank you so much for joining the show. Well, thanks for having me, come up. Thanks for having me. That's great. So I will not be the first to observe in your book. You were not the first to suggest that there are striking parallels between the period you have covered in your book and American politics and in particular

American attitudes towards international affairs today. So I thought I would start us very big picture. What is it about, you're covering roughly the period from what, the Soviet, the first Soviet nuclear test in the summer of 49 to the kickoff in Korea the following summer. So a period where everything, everything which sort of seems like it's going to go in one direction, suddenly screeches and goes in another direction. What are the main parallels between that period and what we are looking at in American politics today. And are those parallels the reason you wrote the book?

Jalardis, yes. You see, I'd written a book, which you mentioned earlier called Empire on the Edge, which was about the countdown to the American Revolutionary War, really seen from a British point of view. And I'm always interested in the countdowns to wars and what precedes wars, whether rather than actually the wars themselves, because I'm not a military historian as such. I like to explore what goes on the kind of internal tensions and the problems that a country has which sometimes leaded into a war that it wasn't expecting to fight, which was certainly the case in 1950 with the Korean War. But also, yes, I mean, I was very struck in 2017, 2018,

when I was starting to work on in the Shadow of Fear by some of these historical parallels. We had, in 2018, the kind of crystallization of a new period of confrontation between the United States and China, and that was something, of course, you saw in 1940, 1990, when Mao Zedong had just come to power and created the People's Republic. We also had a kind of deterioration in relations between the United States and Russia. We didn't yet know, of course, there was going to be a war in Ukraine.

But there were certainly kind of warning signs. There were indications that something of that kind might be on the way. And in Britain, we had a period of acute division after the Brexit referendum. Now, the period, 94 to 1950 was also a period when not only did you have these new challenges involving the relationship with the United States and Russia and China, but you're also also again, you know, had a kind of dissent into a great deal of acrimony and partisan strife, which today we most commonly associate with the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy. But it wasn't justice to do with McCarthy.

There were all kinds of other issues that were dividing America. And the great paradox was that at this particular point, from an economic point of view, America really didn't have very much to fear. America was actually in very good shape. And yet it was at that moment when it was in very good shape, that it became riven by strife and partisan rancor in the way that I describe in the book. Well, let's, let's zoom in on different elements of this parallel then. So maybe, maybe start with, with Truman and the Democrats in his administration. I have been struck. And I, this is not me putting words in your mouth. This is my own characterization of things. But I have been struck by the way, the ways in the ways, the ways in the ways, reflects rhetoric and instincts that I see in the Truman administration. I think the Biden administration, many people who serve in that administration would take that as a compliment. I don't necessarily intend it as a, as a, as a, as a comprehensive. comprehensive compliment, ways in which, for example, internationalists, a really robust internationalist

rhetoric and commitments is sort of commingled with the, you know, kind of quote unquote realist practice and sometimes rhetoric that doesn't seem to be moving in the same direction as actual meaningful commitments. But what's your take on what Truman wanted to see happen in the year that begins in the summer of 1949 and what actually happened? And, you know, what do you think the parallels of that specifically are today? Well, if you look at the domestic sphere, I mean, I think you're entirely right. I think many people in the Biden administration would regard it. They'd be proud of being compared to Harry Truman. Although I see the Truman administration has really having some quite serious flaws. Now, I think from a domestic point of view, remember that Harry Truman's program was, on me, called the Fair Deal. It was supposed to be a kind of rejuvenation and reinvention and continuation of Roosevelt's new deal. But as I say, called it the Fair Deal. And Truman, I think, was a man who saw fairness. as being his goal. I mean, he wanted to be fair to all Americans. The problem with Truman, I think,

was that he tended to see America as though it consisted of a series of great big interest groups, labor on the one side, farmers, to some extent, small businesses, and he tried to be fair to everybody. And so he had a program that was intended to kind of continue with the New Deal and produced a kind of a fair social settlement. So he wanted to help the labor unions by restoring to them some rights they had lost in 1946, in 1947, when the Republic's control Congress. He wanted to have a new kind of farm policy that he thought would be fair for everybody.

He wanted to build housing. I mean, he wanted to have a federal education plan. He had a whole series of goals. And the trouble was that he was completely derailed in the first half of 1949, which was something by something he wasn't expecting, which is recession. And the recession had the effect of blowing a hole

in his fiscal policy, which meant that he couldn't really afford these plans which he wanted to put into practice. And also, of course, he had a divided Democratic Party. The Democratic Party at the time really was very divided indeed. It was quite a dysfunctional party. And it was a party that had been in power too long. And it acquired the bad habits that come from being at the White House for 20 years. So that's what he was doing on the domestic side.

On the foreign policy side, I mean, he believed he had a great plan. I mean, he had created NATO or at least the NATO legislation through Congress. and they had the Marshall Plan and he believed that with these things, the Marshall Plan and NATO, he could create a robust, strong Western Europe that would stand up to the Soviets. So we had all these plans. And, of course, the trouble was he was overtaken by events.

He was overtaken by the recession of 1949 that damaged his domestic program. And then he was overtaken by the fact that Stalin. Stalin proved, of course, to be a far more wily and devious and subtle character than I think Truman allowed for. Yeah. So on the Truman administration in Asia, which is something you spent a fair amount of time in the book, that's an area where to me the parallels are just sort of unavoidable. They hit you in the face. You have, you have accusations from the right that Truman and the Democrats, quote unquote, lost China. You have an element of the right that wants an American foreign policy that focuses on the east, on China and Asia, sort of to the exclusion of Europe, with.

with some, you know, we should talk about Robert Taft, I guess, with some arguing essentially against American participation in NATO, but somehow for a robust American response to Chinese communism and then the details on what that robust response looks like get sort of vague. The parallels of this today are relatively clear. I guess, I mean, one way to get into this would be, in your view, did Republican, setting aside sort of McCarthy and sort of ridiculous populism, let's like sort of take the Taft line, maybe. Did right-wing critics of the Truman Forum policy have a point when they complained that there was, whether Truman administration or Democratic Party leadership, culpability more broadly,

for the fall of China to communism? Was there a failure of American policy, or was that pure politics in your view? Oh, no, I think there was a failure of American policy, definitely. If you take Taft, now Taft at the time was pursuing really two different paths. He was critical of the concept of NATO because he didn't believe the concept of NATO, was actually going to bring about what he thought it was going to, what he was supposed to bring about, which was peace in Europe and at a safe Western Europe. He thought it might actually simply lead to provoke the Soviet Union to attack before NATO was up and running.

But Taft made some very good points about that. I mean, the trouble with NATO was that although NATO had been created legally, I mean, there was a NATO treaty, NATO at the time was still like a kind of great big mushy donut with a hole in the middle. And the whole was Germany, until they could rear on West Germany and until France was strong enough to defend it. of NATO didn't really make a lot of sense. So there was some justification, I think, in what Taft argued. And it wasn't until really in 1954, 55, that NATO was really in a kind of robust state to be an adequate defense.

But I think in Asia, the criticisms are really very well-founded. Now, I would regard myself as kind of a liberal internationalist, and I wouldn't regard myself as being a conservative either. But I think you've got to look at the objective reality, which is that America hadn't really thought through what it was doing in Asia. I mean, there was a basic problem, I think, that, America knew certain parts of Asia very well. America had been heavily involved in issues in China throughout before World War II during World War II in terms of relation with Chankai Shek

in terms of its attempt to try and to uphold and bolster the Chankajat, the Kuomintang regime against the communists. They certainly were very involved in China, but there are whole other parts of Asia where America really didn't have very much by way of track record and experience. And they didn't think things through. And I think in, In particular, I think there's fault that lies at the door of Dean Atchison, the Secretary of State, who is very much preoccupied with Europe, very much preoccupied with NATO, very much preoccupied with creating a robust economy in Western Europe. But he didn't think through a lot of the details of American stance in Asia.

And I think above all, the really big mistake was he misunderstood what the Russians were up to. He attributed to the Russians a kind of imperialist, a kind of naive imperialist expansionism, which wasn't really accurate. What he did was he underestimated time and again. the sheer cunning and the intelligence of Joseph Stalin. Yeah, you praise Atchison's prose in your book. Obviously, I think there's something to that.

Though, I have to confess, I worked my way through big chunks of president of the creation over the course of the last year. And I found myself, I reacted differently to it. It's well-styled, and you're not wrong about that. But it's more his attitude, his sort of stately patricianness of it all, in particular when it comes to, to Alger Hiss, which he addresses in the memoir, and he's so dismissive. He's so high-handed in his treatment of the subject and his defense of himself. So offended that anyone could themselves take offense at, you know, his and the state departments and everyone else is covering

for an actual communist spy. But let's, so let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, so you, you know, you talk about famous speech he gives the press club in Washington in January of 1950. This is the, speech where he doesn't include Korea, South Korea in the, in the, in his listing of the American defensive perimeter in the Pacific, which then became a huge political issue. People would claim that the speech essentially was a, you know, a red flag to the bull of the Soviets. There's some element of fairness to that. There's some element of exaggeration. I think the exaggeration, of course, is that he was just stating American policy. He did not make a mistake.

He was, he was asserting something that other Truman officials asserted on a regular basis that South Korea was not, in fact, not in the defensive perimeter of the United States. Nevertheless, on his characterization of Stalin and Soviet intentions, what's fascinating about that speech is he's telling Washington, just look, these two powers are going to come apart. There's no way they're going to maintain cooperation given the pressures that exist between the two of them. Why was he so sure, I guess, that that was the case? What was the source of his belief?

Because obviously decades later, some version of it became true. And what was actually happening? Like, tell us, tell us in fact what was going on between the Chinese and the rest. Well, before I do that, just on the subject of Acheson's prose, now I agree, the prose is great in the present of the creation. But when you look at President of the Creation, his autobiography in detail, and you compare it with some of the source material, you find that Atchon was a bit inclined to be kind of, he was a little economical with the truth sometimes.

He sometimes misrebed at an event. One thing I did was I compared Atchison's description of his dealings and negotiations with the British in the fall of 1949 with the British official records that are now the National Archives in London. And the picture is completely different, actually. So you've got to be careful. Atterson was a man who liked to create,

he wanted to create a dramatic literary narrative. And he didn't necessarily let the facts, he didn't really want to let the facts get in the way of the story sometimes. You had to be careful with Dean Atterson. Now, on the subject of Asia, I think there was an underlying conceptual or philosophical problem that Atterson had. And I think it goes back to,

a cultural thing, which is that Atchison and his colleagues, George Kennan, for example, and other people in the administration says Admiral Harriman, were very much people preoccupied with industry. You know, they believed that America's great strength was its industrial might. That they believed what had won World War II. And when they looked around the world, they looked at hubs of industry. They looked at the German Ruhr. They looked at Great Britain with its coal in those days and iron and steel and shipyards.

They looked at Russia and the Urals, et cetera. and they looked at Japan. And they thought those are the places that really mattered. Now, when they looked at Asia, of course, much of Asia didn't have industrial hubs at the time. It was fundamentally agrarian. And I think Acheson had a real problem with that. He couldn't really quite work out what you were supposed to do as America in these kind of agrarian economies where the issues of things like land reform.

Now, for that reason, therefore, I think he misunderstood some of the issues. And he also, I think, misunderstood the way Russia was actually operating in that region. Now, Atchison tended, and I think you'll find this actually now in some commentators about Russia even today since invasion of Ukraine. He tended to have kind of simple view of Russian history. He thought that Russia had always been an expansionist imperial power, that Russia meant to dominate Asia in the same way that it had come to dominate Eastern Europe, and that Russia intended, therefore, to take parts of China and annexed into itself. In particular, he was interested in Manchuria and Xinjiang. And the reason Manchuria was important, Manchuria was really the heart of Atchon's thinking was that Manchuria was an industrial hub.

I mean, Manchuria had coal mines, it had iron ore, it also had a huge crop of soyobins and so forth. And Manchuria was the part of China, of course, that Japan had taken over in the 1930s and turned into a kind of extension of the Japanese economic empire. And that was what Atchon was focused on. He believed that the Soviet Union were going to try and take out. Manchuria away from China and turned China into a kind of tributary state. And because actually, that wasn't what the Russians were doing. The Soviets were much more concerned with actually launching an armed struggle in Asia.

I mean, the Soviets were actually talking in Prabda and so on about having a proletarian revolution all the way across Asia with armed struggles in Vietnam and so on and so forth. They were even talking about possibly having an armed struggle in Japan itself. That was actually what they were concerned with. Now, when it came to the press club speech, Atterson really wanted to talk about this whole big issue of Soviet imperialism. He wanted to send a message to everybody in Europe and in China as well and say, look, this is what the Soviets are doing. And what we have to do is bite our time and wait and gradually prize Mount Sitong away from Stalin. Of course, remember, at this particular moment, Mount Siton was actually in Moscow discussing a treaty of alliance with Stalin.

Now, Atten, not only did Atchistan, I think, misunderstand what the Russians were doing, He also didn't neglect it to pay attention to that he himself didn't really know what was going on in Moscow. I mean, the United States had really no idea what the state of play was between Mao and Stalin. Indeed, that wouldn't really become clear to anybody outside those two men until much, much later when the Soviet and Chinese archives, when the Soviet archives anyway became available in the 1990s. So, Atis intended to sort of leap to conclusions about what was going on. Now, when he gave the press cup speech, he really wasn't meaning to talk very much about Korea or Taiwan. He was really wanting to talk about this great big issue.

And his comments about Korea and Taiwan were really kind of an aside. But, of course, they ended up having quite a devastating effect because, of course, Stalin appears, and it's almost certain Stalin took his comments as being another piece of evidence that America wouldn't step up to the defense of South Korea if the North invaded. But it certainly fed into Stalin's thinking. But I think everything really flowed from the fact that Attison tended to take a very broad brush, top-down macro view of what was going on in Asia, he didn't really pay enough attention to kind of the local details and the nuances. And I think that's something you still find today.

You know, when people talk about a pivot to Asia as the Obama administration, you know, when in Britain we had Boris Johnson who talked about a tilt to Asia, they forget that there's really not such thing as Asia. There are all these different countries, which all have kind of different interests, and there are all kinds of different situations going on and around this huge, vast, expansive territory. And you're really going to pay attention to the nuance and the light and shade, as well as instead of having this kind of rather oversimplified, great big geographical overview. Yeah.

Let's talk about the debate about communism in Washington in all of its ugliness and complicatedness. I got into a bit of a tiff on this podcast some months ago with a guest, great historian, Max Hastings. Right, absolutely. I don't know if you have a relationship with him, but we did have a very pleasant conversation about his book about the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then right at the end, things got kind of unpleasant kind of quickly. And I was surprised.

I didn't intend to start a fight. But I said something about, you know, isn't the fact that at the end of the crisis, the Kennedy administration conceded essentially that they would no longer have a regime change policy for Cuba, you know, whatever you want to say about it, wise or unwise, it is a concession. You know, they backed down from an American policy position as part of the resolution of this crisis. And his response was something on the order of, well, I mean, I guess, but, you know, only if you accept that there was some validity to that policy in the first place. And if you accept that, then you basically think about the world like Putin thinks about the world. I took a little offense

to that. And we kind of got off to the races. But in the midst of it, I said, well, you know, one thing that Kennedy had to think about when he was formulating policy was that there were, you know, essentially, and I think I put it crudely in the moment and said something to the effect of, you know, when he looks at the Soviets, he has to contemplate Soviet policies of world domination on the other side of the table. Like, that's something. he is dealing with. And when Vladimir Putin, you know, looks at the United States, it would be a little ridiculous to think in similar terms. And he dismissed it out of hand. And if I had formulated it less crudely, I think I would have been less open to this saying something effective error. And there is no

such thing as Soviet attempts at world domination. That's ridiculous. And I do find that this sort of instinctive rejection of the notion that Stalin had aspirations to, you know, certainly Eurasian hegemony, if not in some fashion more. And what, obviously, a lot depends on what in some fashion means in that sentence, like to be pretty common. And I, and I think that the way in which sort of right-wing populism in the late 40s and early 50s and sort of McCarthyism was such a cartoon, such a sort of ridiculous, you know, parody of what actual criticism ought to have looked like that it gives people who, who for whatever reason are sort of minimizing the force of Soviet policy something to point at and say, well, it's just, it's just ridiculous. Like, look, you know,

you're basically like Joseph McCarthy. Whereas in reality, Soviet. policy was was dangerous and serious. And there were Soviet spies, you know, and all the rest of this. So what is, you know, just to put all this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, what is, what were the dimensions of, of anti-communist and anti-Soviet critique in Washington at the period? And to what extent was, was there some substance to it? To what extent was, you know, at the core of what McCarthy was saying, was there some substance to, or to what extent was maybe McCarthy obscuring criticism level by others that should have been taken more seriously and should be remembered better today. Well, McCarthy, leaving McCarthy's side, I think pretty much everybody was an anti-communist

in Washington, remember, in 1949 in 1950, even people who have thought of as being people on the left, like Arthur M. Slesinger Jr., who became, of course, the great chronicler of the Kennedy administration, Schlesinger was a fierce anti-companist. I mean, he had spent time in Paris, in the fortas with Admiral Harriman. He hated communism just as much as anybody else did. So anti-communism wasn't something something that you simply had on the right of politics. It was something everybody had. My view about Stalin is, I think Stalin is the character. You really have to study Stalin very closely. But in my view about Stalin is the best way to study Stalin

is to start with what Stalin wrote himself. Stalin wrote a great deal. He gave a great many speeches. And although he was a devious individual and he was a cunning individual and he was enigmatic in terms of his policy, there wasn't really very much of an enigma about Stalin's view of the world. I mean, there were two books that Stalin wrote that I think, you know, a really, really essential reading.

One was the thing that he produced in 1937 and 1938, which was a history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was known as the short course. Now, it's very hard to get any copies of it now. I've got one. I had to buy, you know, from a used book, so I eventually have found one. It's very hard to get hold of it because after Stalin's era, it was kind of officially disowned by the Communist Party,

you know, when Chris Chiv took over. But it actually explains exactly what Stalin's view was. I mean, Stalin believed that capitalism was doomed because of its internal contradictions. He honestly believed that. He believed that socialism and then communism would eventually come to pass everywhere, It was his job basically to speed up the process.

But he also believed that in that process of capitalist decay, the capitalists would fight back by launching imperialist wars of encirclement against the Soviet Union. And I have no doubt that's actually what Stalin believed. Everything he did in the 30s, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Stroh trials and so on, so he says that's actually what he believed. And then after World War II, in the early 50s, Stalin read another little book called Economic Problems of Socialism, which nobody reads today. And quite honestly, it's not surprising.

It's not what you might call a light read for the beach. But it actually is a classic piece of Marxist and endless literature. Now, what Stalin was worried about was that they had a big problem, which was that Soviet agriculture was feeble. You know, the productivity is always the problem the Soviets had right through until the 1980s, the low productivity of Soviet agriculture, which is terribly embarrassing for Stalin. Because, of course, one of the centerpieces of Stalin's career

had been the collectivization of Soviet farms starting in about 1920, So Starnan wrote this little book called Economic Problems of Socialism in the early 50s during the Korean War to try and explain why socialism and then communism was actually the right way to agriculture. And it's a classic Marxist tract. I mean, there's nothing about it that you wouldn't expect. And so I do see Stalin as what he was. He was a Marxist Leninist. The Marxism was all the economic theory of Marxism. The Leninism was the tactics you needed to go through in order to get the revolution going.

Now, that included a lot of flexibility on a short-term basis. because that's what Lenin was like. I mean, Lenin wrote all these pamphlets and newspaper articles and books during his career, continually changing his position with regard to the short-term tactics of getting the Bolsheviks into power. And I think that's the case with Stalin. He did have this overall, very big theoretical view that capitalism was doomed. It was going to disappear through its own contradictions. His job basically was to get that process going as quickly as possible

and to make sure that the Soviet Union came out at the end of the day as being the dominant power. but surrounded by all these other satellite powers, which are also going to be socialist and then communist. So that's the way I see Stalin. Now, that being so, the kind of critiques in Washington at the time by anti-comus were probably fair. And as I say, they were shared by many people on the left as well as on the right. McCarthy was really operating in a kind of different,

different sort of a kind of different sphere. In McCarthy's argument, of course, was that one of the key issues here was that Washington itself had been contaminated by communist infiltrators, the state department was riddled with communist. Now, there had been some truth in that. There had been substantial communist infiltrated in the 90thirt. And anyone who reads about history of America in the 930s can see that. But the trouble was that McCarthy kind of went off into a kind of a wild kind of goose chase

because he never actually managed to name famously. He never actually managed to name one definitely sure-fired communist. So back to Stalin then, how does the sort of grand strategy that you just outlined, how does that play out with regard to Asia? Give us a bit of the narration here in 49 into 50, the decision making on Korea, Korea, not Taiwan, for example. How is he actually thinking practically? Well, I think about two aspects of this.

First of all, Stalin went back a long way with Asia. Stalin had been thinking about China and had been involved with China way back since the middle of the 1920s. One of the first disasters of Stalin's career had been in 1927 when he had advised the communist party in China to ally itself with Chiang-Khaish and the Kuomintang, whereupon the Kuomintang and Chakoshaegad had purged and massacred the Communist Party in Shanghai, almost destroying it, which was eventually what led, of course, to Mao's long march. Stey went back all the way with this.

So Stey had been following Asian affairs with great interest, and he'd been spying on Mao, spying on the Communist Party, infiltrating the Communist Party and the Kremlin tank for years and years and years. So he was very well aware of all the issues. Now, the tactical situation he found himself, I think, in 19449, was that he believed at the time was right to start prodding nationalist move around Asia in a more violent direction. There's a very interesting episode with regard to Japan.

Now, it's hard to imagine this now, but of course Japan actually did have a substantial Communist Party after 1945. And in 1949, the Communist Party in Japan launched a campaign of strikes and some terrorism in parts of Japan, which was really quite a dramatic episode. Now, this is all kind of forgotten about today. One of the reason it's forgotten is because this period, 1949, 1950, was before. the Japanese economic miracle really began. I mean, the great Japanese economic miracle really didn't get underway until somewhat later

in maybe 1952, 53, 54. So this period of Japanese history was kind of a kind of, it was like the anti-rule or the anti-chamber or the period of preparation before the great surge in Japanese economic growth. Now, Stalin played a bit of a role in this. Stalin saw what was going on. And Stalin strongly backed those people in the Japanese Communist Party who wanted armed struggle, who wanted strikes, who wanted terrorism and so on. Now, I think that was very revealing, very revealing indeed.

It wasn't really picked up in Washington at the time. This was what Stalin was doing. Nor did I think that they appreciate the fact there really were these insurgencies going on. For example, there was a communist insurgency in Malaya, which the British had 10,000 troops fighting. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam were making a lot of progress in Vietnam, where it effectively, they had managed to force the French army back to really just strong points around Hanai and Saigon. So all these things were going on. And I think what happened in early 1950 was that, that, First of all, Stalin assured himself that Mao could be trusted, so he was prepared to form an alliance with Mao.

Secondly, I think he thought the time was right for a more aggressive policy. And also, he had some very compelling reasons to want South Korea taken over. I mean, South Korea was strategically very valuable for Stalin. It was potentially a big source of raw materials, food materials. It helped to protect the southern flank of the Soviet Far East. if you could take over South Korea then basically you put a lot of pressure on Japan because you could base submarines and aircraft in South Korea

he had all kinds of reasons and finally of course if he looked at America at the time he could see a divided country he read the press cup of speech he could see other things that were going on in Washington that suggested that Washington was in disarray and really didn't know what it was doing and so yeah it seemed perfectly reasonable

for him to give the okay for Kim Ilsung to invade the South. It made all made sense and it was on final point which was the nuclear issue I think this is a really important point, which is that, of course, America at the time still had a practical monopoly over the atom bomb. I mean, Russia had detonated a device in August, 1949, but they still didn't necessarily have a full array, if you like, of nuclear weapons and delivery mechanisms. But the reality was America didn't really have an aircraft that could deliver the atomic

bomb in the way that it really needed to in the event of a war with Russia. And Stalin was aware of this. Stalin was aware that his own air defense was robust. He had a new aircraft, new jet fighter, the Big 15. So when he was making his decisions in 1950 with regard to career and regard to other issues, he didn't actually need to feel kind of terrified of the American nuclear deterrent. I wouldn't say he thought it was kind of a paper tiger, but he certainly didn't need to feel unduly alarmed about the fact that he was going to have atom bombs raining down on Moscow.

Right. Right. And it's fascinating to read about nuclear strategy in the period, and for that matter, the strategists at the time, right, Speaking for myself, looking back in the Cold War, the instinct is to think of everything in terms of mutually assured destruction. Yeah. Which, of course, does become the dominant thinking as the years go on. But that is not the case in 1949 and 50 where, you know, you, you know, you read descriptions of war plans where I'm obviously sort of farcically summarizing this. But, you know, the third division will maneuver through this mountain pass. And the other mountain pass, we're going to nuke, you know, to support the maneuver.

You know, the integration of these weapons at both the tactical, but sort of whatever, you know, they can. operational level, if you like. You know, not quite strategic city killing, not quite what we would think of as tactical nuclear weapons today. But battlefield use for the prosecution of wars. It's totally fascinating subject to me. Yeah, I think that's right. Nuclear thinking really was in its infancy of the time.

I mean, you know, when we think about the Cold War or the nuclear enemies of it, we think about Dr. Strange up, basically. We've all seen the film Dr. Strange Up, which is in many ways very accurate about the kind of thinking that were developed by the early 60s. But that was long after the period we're talking about here. So nuclear thinking was undeveloped. And also there was this basically problem, which was the American war plans for defending Western Europe all depended.

There was a big plan called OffTackle. And this plan entirely depended on sending American bombers over to Moscow and Leningrad and so on and destroying them. Now, the difficulty was that the only aircraft the Americans had at the time that could deliver the atom bomb was the B-36, which was this kind of lumbering hulk of a bomber, which was obsolete even before it was, even before it started to go into office. operation. You're a long way. It was another five years before the United States had the B-52. So in many respects, the nuclear, the nuclear armed American strategy, it wasn't really feasible.

And I think Stalin kind of understood that. Yeah. So then the American response, or maybe be more specific, the conservative response to Asia in particular in the period that you're writing about, you have this argument that sort of is associated with Taft. And I'd love for you to kind of spell this out for us a bit, that while Europe is a bit of a trap and the Truman administration's policies in Europe are going to start a war rather than prevent a war, what we need to do is focus on Asia somehow. What was the, what was beyond beating up on Truman for the failures of his administration, for what had already happened? What was the substance of that? What was to be achieved if you sort of outlined very, I think, well and persuasively sort of Stalin's vision for

Asia as part of his Marxist, London is thinking. What was the Bob Taft vision of Asia? What was American policy supposed to achieve there? And how was it supposed to do it? Well, first of all, Taft policy was a bit of a work in progress. You know, Taft had really been focused mainly after World War II on domestic policy. I mean, the big things that Taft was involved with during the Truman administration were the Taft-Hartley Act, the famous Taft-Artley Act, which was Labor Relations legislation, where he wanted to curve the power of the labor unions. And then with a housing act, he was very concerned with housing issues in America, the big housing trust.

So he only really started to get heavily interest in foreign policy, really in the period we're talking about now around about 94 and 950. And it took him a while. It wasn't really until 1951, but Taff really had a full-scale statement. But he did have allies in the Republic. I have a friend's allies in the Republic Party who had some very interesting views about Asia. I think there's two aspects of this. One remember is the role of California. Now, this is a very important point, but this was the period of which California really became a crucial, decisive part and influence on American.

politics because you'd have this enormous increase in the population of California in 1940, so 50% increase. And California was becoming more and more dominant. So you were suddenly to see the emergence of people like, well, Earl Warren, obviously, governor of California and then Chief Justice Supreme Court, and of course Richard Nixon. And there was another at a time that's kind of forgotten called Senator William Nolan, who was a kind of friend and ally of Nixon. And being Californians, of course, they were far more preoccupied with Asia than you would be if you were on the East Coast. I mean, Asia was their backyard, so speak, and they could see the importance of the Philippines, they could see importance of Hawaii,

they could see the importance of Taiwan and so forth. And Senator Nolan, in particular, who became really one of the most important figures in the Republican Party, was particularly concerned with China. And he'd spent time in China. He was actually in Chongqing, Shankarach's capital in China in 1940, shortly before it fell. And he came back from Chong King and toured the West Coast talking about the essential importance of keeping Asia as a kind of sphere for Americans to prosper and have influence. So he was important. He was critically important. And then there was the Taiwan question. And the Taiwan question kind of blew up at the end of 1949. And I think partly the Republican Party did use it as a kind of a political stick with

which to beat the actress and Truman administration. They could see that the thinking of the Truman administration was more than a bit fuzzy on the subject to Taiwan. But I think also genuinely, they believe that Taiwan should be protected. I mean, today you look at Taiwan. And we look at Taiwan now, and we can see that Taiwan is a vibrant democracy. I mean, it's a vibrant democracy, and it should be defended for that reason, not simply because it's kind of a pawn in a chessboard. Now, then, of course, Taiwan wasn't a vibrant democracy. But there was, there had been a democratic movement in Taiwan in the 1920s and 30s.

People like Northern were aware of this, that Taiwan had always wanted to be free of the Japanese, for example, as they were generally committed to it. And the problem at the end of 1940, at the end of 1940s was that the Truman administration was saying, we don't want to defend Taiwan because we don't. don't want to appear to be imperialists. We don't want to appear to be trying to take over Taiwan for our own benefit, and we don't want to appear to be defending Chankaj Shek because Chankaj Shek is a discredited regime. To which the answer was from, for example, General MacArthur and from the Republicans in Congress, especially those in the West Coast, was yes, but Taiwan can be defended. You know,

Taiwan is easy to defend. During World War II, the United States had decided not to invade Taiwan instead to invade the Philippines, precisely because Taiwan was a defensible place. It had this very rocky shoreline on the east coast. The weather in the Taiwan state is often very difficult. Invading Taiwan would have been very hard for Mount Chaitung. Taiwan can be defended. If it can be defended, simply by sending the 7th fleet to patrol the Taiwan state, well, why not do that? What kind of signal will it send to the rest of the world if we can't even defend Taiwan? And the same logic sort of went for South Korea, too. So that was the substance of it. It took a bit of a while, as I say, for Taft himself to develop this into a really fully coherent policy. But one thing he did

know was he definitely wanted to see Taiwan defect. Yeah. One of the striking, I mean, it's sort of the climax end of your book. I mean, one of the striking things about the history of the period is the way in which you have Korea demoted in America, the sort of Truman administration vision of Asia. And then in the course of a few days, we are fighting a massive, massive slightly overstated, a large, a significant land war in Asia, in South. Korea and later North Korea. It's it's startling. It's the kind of thing that one imagines

that if you buttonhole, you know, Truman or any of his senior aides in, you know, May of 1950 and told him this was about to happen, they would have looked at you like you were an insane person. And yet it did happen. And it happened, sort of part and parcel of this whole rethinking of Cold War strategy that you also get into in the book, this, uh, the development and ultimately the enshrining of NSA 68 as the national security. strategy of the United States with regard to the Soviet Union. To sort of close off the story for us, you know, how does everything, you know, things change slowly and then all at once, you know, sort of like bankruptcy, right?

It's like, how does all of this happen so quickly? And why is it that politicians and statesmen who are, you know, adapt and well-read and extremely experienced men like Harry Truman and Dean Atchinson just simply don't anticipate what comes and then change so quickly in the face of what does happen. Well, first of all, yeah, there was plain intelligence failure. There have been, as I think you've argued yourself in the piece you wrote with Congressman Gallagher and Foreign Affairs, there was an intelligence failure, there was a deterrence failure, there was a readiness failure, all these failures.

But the fact was, if you looked at the kind of words the Truman administration had said about career in preceding years, they really had no option but to defend career. because having made all these practical mistakes about deterrence and readiness and intelligence, nevertheless, they had made commitments. You don't have to read the Truman Doctrine itself. Look at the Truman Doctrine. Look at the UN Charter. Look at the kind of statements that Atchus and itself had made about defending Singman rape.

And you also had to bear in mind that during the few days before the Korean War broke out, just before Kim Il-sung invaded the South on the night of 24th, 25th June, John Foster Dulles, who was Atterson's kind of special envoy to Asia, had actually been in Korea, and he had given a speech to the Korean Parliament saying America will always stand by Korea. Having done those things, they really had no option. I mean, they were totally unprepared. The problem, of course, was there had been a lot of rhetoric. There had also been some faulty signals sent to the Soviet Union, some very faulty signals sent to the Soviet Union,

and there was a failure to actually have a military plan. And I think the moral of this story is, if you're going to defend a country like her, And if you're going to have a stance in Asia of the kind of America has now, you've got to make sure you've got a consistency. You've got to be saying the right big picture things about where you're committed to. You've got to actually have the intelligence to know what's really happening on the ground. And you've got to make sure you've actually got the wherewithal to put into practice the kind of commitments you've made. You've got to have all these things fitted together. Now, you know, I think people with listeners can make up their own minds about whether they think in relation to Taiwan and other parts of Asia.

Now, there is that kind of coherence of strategy. But you've got to have everything fitted together. You know, you can't simply have only one piece of the jigsaw parts. You've got to have the whole thing. And I think that's kind of the situation I see in Asia at the moment. That the various parts of American policy in that region don't necessarily fit together very neatly. They don't all cohere. Some parts of them are a lot more robust than others.

Yeah. Yeah, I basically agree with everything. I think those are very wise words. I mean, this is what drives me nuts about the Acheson's. speech is the way. You put it well. It's a great answer. They had no choice. Of course, they were going to have to defend South Korea. To think that you were going to wash your hands of it in the event of a major event like what actually occurred was fanciful if you actually contemplated what that would look like and how the American public would react. How many American soldiers

were going to die in any kind of invasion? It was just fanciful that you weren't going to defend the place. And so then having to know that on some level while at the same time engage in this sort of muddled public diplomacy where you are communicating ambiguity, which seems to me ultimately what Atchison is trying to do, is trying to create space in his remarks and leave room to maneuver. Well, why, knowing that a consequence of that could be, it could be taken as an invitation, which in fact it was, why? Why? I just don't, I've never fully, I mean, I understand why I was thinking, but it seems like such an obvious mistake. Well, there was a gentleman who wrote about this his memoirs. Very interesting one. Paul Nitsy. Yeah. Do you remember Paul

Nitsi was the principal author of NSC 68, the great strategic document that, as you say, kind of became a sort of blueprint for American strategy in this part of the Cold War. Now, that's a very big picture document. When Nitzie came to write his memoirs many years later, he actually did mention the fact that in the spring of 1950, he had a visit from a gentleman, his name, I forget now, actually, who did come to him and say, look, never mind the big picture, Mr. Nutsi, I've been studying the situation in Korea. I've been studying the perimeter of the free world, if we use that expression.

And I think the most likely place of there to be a war is Korea. And he wasn't the only person who said there were journalists would go to Korea and they'd come back and say, well, it's going to be a war. There were border classes, all these kind of things going on. And Nisichik's credit actually mentions this and says, well, actually, if we got it wrong, you know, if instead of looking at the big picture, we'd actually look at all the small pictures and tabulated all the threats around the perimeter, it would have leapt out of us that there was going to be an explosion in Korea.

But I would say this, though, you mustn't let Republicans off the hook about this, because it wasn't just Hudson who sent 40 signals. Now, there was an interesting episode in January 1950, only a few days after the press cop speech, perhaps. And this was the thing called the Korean Aid Bill. There was a bill that was going through Congress to give, I think it was about $100 million of aid to Korea, most of which would have been things like fertilizer and tractors and that kind of thing. And it was voted down in Congress. The Republicans got together with some conservative Democrats from the South, and they voted it down. And the reason they did this really was because they were upset about Taiwan. They thought Taiwan should be defended and they said, if you go ahead and defend Taiwan,

then we're not going to give you money for Korea. Now, the trouble is, if you look at some of the language the Republicans using that debate, it was almost as bad. It was actually worse than Atkinsons. For example, they said that sending money to Korea would be like, quote, pouring money down a rat hole. And that pouring money down a rattle rhetoric was one that was often used by Republicans at the time to describe foreign aid programs.

Now, if you went around saying things like, if we send money to Korea, it's like pouring money down a rattle. It's not surprising that if the Soviet embassy were reading a congressional record, they might report that back to Stalin and say, well, actually, we don't think the Republicans want to defend Korea either. Right. No, it's very fair. And on this question, since you raised him, Needs in NSC-68, you know, his great fall, of course, is George Kennan, as you, as you write about. And it's funny, you know, NSC 68 is not held in high regard in my experience by the great strategic, the great historians of strategy and strategy of the early Cold War today. And maybe my data points are too limited. But people like John Gattis, you know, brilliant historians and analysts, you tend to, they tend to make the complaint about NSC 68, which just for anyone who's coming to the subject for the first time listening here, essentially proposes a perimeter defense of Eurasia against communism.

The United States will, you know, to put it in more classical geopolitical terms, you know, support allies or around the Eurasian rimlands and kind of, you know, make a point of pushing back against communism wherever it rears its ugly head. I mean, I'm expressing it more crudely than the document does, but I think that's a fair, a fair summary. And it presents, it presents the case for doing so in these sort of moralistic terms, sort of stirring language and the policy is maximalist and the complaint that Gattis and others will make about the document.

is that it's wildly, there's no, there's no serious effort to match resources to the effort. And in fact, if push came to Shev, the United States was not capable of defending every element of the Eurasian perimeter. They were practically speaking, going to have to be choices and emphasis made and main efforts assigned and supporting efforts assigned and, you know, potentially no efforts assigned in places. And the document just to sort of read like that, as opposed to the Kennan approach, the parallel approach, which called for a strong point to, We pick the things that matter. We reject the things that don't. This is sort of in the spirit in some

ways of Atchison's remarks. You know, South Korea just doesn't matter as much as Japan. And so we're going to defend Japan and South Korea. We're going to kind of shrug our shoulders. And to me, the complaints have always seemed a bit off. And I'm just sort of thinking aloud here. And I'm curious to know your response to this. But on one level, it's obviously true that Nietz and his team in NassC68, they don't. They simply don't have a meaningful assignment of resources to the demands that they potentially are making on American power in the 30,000 foot plan that they are outlining. On the other hand, the shortcomings of the strongpoint defense in a way are a theme of everything we've just discussed. If you lead by saying, we'll defend Japan and not South Korea,

pretty soon you have a war in South Korea that you might have avoided if you had articulated a more robust commitment to freedom in the defense of proxies or allies or partners or whatever you want to talk about them as, that may be. Maybe, actually, if you were tested in enough places, would ultimately be overwhelmed by your own inability to muster sufficient resources, but maybe in the active deterrence, you can be more successful. This is this tension I've been trying to think through for some time now, and I find myself, my own political prejudices, very moved by NSC-68 and very, very turned off by George Kennan

and the kinds of things that he wrote. And I don't know if you, if you, what is your view of NSC-60? I don't know if you agree at all with the support for it, I just laid out. But obviously, the shock of Korea is what kind of puts it into place as the policy of United States. It was a bit on ice before that. Do you think it was the way to go? Well, personally, I think Eisenhower's new look was a bit more intelligent, actually,

the NAC 68, but that came a little bit later. But, well, what I say in the book is the problem with NAC 68 was it was politically absurd, really. I mean, that was the difficulty that it envisioned, it would have envisioned this huge, enormous expansion in American military expenditure. I mean, NITSE didn't actually put any figures on that, but it would have been a very big multiple of the $13 billion year that America was actually spending. And the difficulty at that point was, I mean, Truman couldn't even get through Congress a modest aid package for building, for federal aid for building high schools.

So the process of NSA 68 was pretty remote. But I think, to be fair to NSA 68, you got to remember that first of all, it wasn't intended to be secret. Now, people often talk about NSA 68. It was those is this kind of top secret plan no one was going to be allowed to read. And in fact, the reverse was true. The reason it was secret was because Truman didn't want to get out in the public domain because you can see these critical problems with it. Atterson actually wanted it made public.

The whole point of NSA 68 was that it was going to be a prelude to a great big campaign of public relations and advocacy and speechmaking both in the United States and in Europe. And that was really crucial in Europe as well, intending to kind of galvanize the free world. That was really what it was supposed to be. So the fact that it wasn't fully worked out and that it wasn't totally fiscally coherent, I think, really is kind of a little bit beside the point. I think the plan was, first of all, they were going to have to have the midterm elections in November 1950. They were going to have to make some gains and then Acheson would have the job of going out and selling NS68 to the nation, but also to Britain and France and the other European powers because they were essential parts of it.

And it wasn't intended to be just an American strategy. It was intended to be a European strategy as well. I'm probably having Japan would have to come in there somewhere too. So I think that was really what it was. And so you wouldn't, expect it necessarily to be fully worked out and fully costed and all that kind of thing. It really was intended to be a hearts and minds kind of issue, which is really what Atchison was interested in. You know, Axon actually had given speeches a few months before NSA 68, NSC8 was finally sent to the president.

Atchson had already given speeches in California, what they call the total diplomacy speeches, which had already talked about the basic concepts. And if you read newspaper columnists at the time, the ones who were really well informed, like James Reston, New York Times or the Allsop Brothers in New York Herald Tribute, you can see that they had almost certainly been shown drafts of it because they knew what was in the works. Now, of course, as you say, Korean war breaks out and it all becomes slightly academic because America then has no option but to have a huge military builder. But I think if NCC had had gone according to plan, you would have had this great big

kind of exercise of public relations and moral rallying, which might have actually had the effect that you described. The only struggle was that by this stage, Stalin was way ahead of the game and had already given the OK for the invasion of South Korea. So he'd kind of consigned it to somebody's into the history books. Yeah. Nick, this has been a really interesting conversation. You were very kind to point out.

I wrote something myself focused fairly narrowly on those practical failures around the start and then conduct of the Korean War. But I'm not a historian of the period. And so I have all these sort of ill-formed thoughts and questions about. I've learned a lot talking to you. It's a fascinating conversation. I read the foreign of first piece. And I thought it was great because, I mean, with yourself and Congress, Gala. And when I heard the podcast,

you do with Mr. Gallagher. I thought, well, actually, although he and I on a slightly different size of a particular fence, I pretty much agree with him 100%. Yeah. Well, there is you, you know, there is this odd moment or odd phenomenon, I should say, in American politics that's been true for several years now. You see every now and then you see elements of it fray, but China and the threat of Xi Jinping is the one issue about which there is fairly broad-based cooperation in Washington. I would say maybe I would add now that now that there's a war in the Middle East, maybe I would add support to Israel. Though that that of course is not as broad based and there's much more vocal criticism from the other side on China. There's there's a you know a union of sort

of right of center hawks and left of center sort of old labor folks who who resent the impact of China on the economy and then with you know sort of increasing populism on the right. You see arguments like that on the right as well and it's broad based. My, my, my, my my own time in the Senate saw a fair amount of cooperation between Senator Tom Cotton and Senator Chuck Schumer repeatedly on different China initiatives, which is not the most natural pairing in some way. Well, Schumer, yeah, as you mentioned, Chuck Schumer has really been sort of up front on this issue for years now.

I mean, Gar-McColoy, going right, really, I think, to issues about Tibet, actually. I think that's really where we're all started. Tibet's the kind of forgotten aspect of all this. Nobody talks about Tibet now, and yet, you know, Tibet is the place where you saw some of the worst behavior of the Chinese communist during back in the 1950s. There's been this kind of unresolved dreadful issue now for many decades. I shouldn't be forgotten. Your precise pronunciation of Chinese names leads me to ask.

Did you spend time as a journalist in China or do you spend a fair amount of time in Asia? Well, I did a stint in Hong Kong for the FTA many, many years ago. And I did quite a bit of traveling in China then. That was long ago, actually, in the early stages of Chinese opening up. Then, of course, I worked myself for Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, which is HSBC, Great British Bank. I didn't spend much time with him in China, but I'm kind of, by the way, I'm not sure my pronunciation is actually accurate. I just kind of, I just, I just kind of, I just, I just, I just, I'm educated listener,

it's really working. So don't, don't let on, don't let on. I just try to do the best I can, you know. Nick Bunker, author of In the Shadow of Fear America and the World in 1950. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you, Aaron. That was great.

I enjoyed it too. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.