U.S. Cold War Policy: Intermittently Self-Defeating

Between 1946 and 1990, U.S. policies were, to say the least, inconsistent. From FDR’s apparent friendly trust in Stalin’s agreements to Harry Truman’s discovery of the Soviet menace, from containment to rollback, America took different approaches at different times - and occasionally different approaches at the same time.

In 1964, scholar John Stormer identified these inconsistencies. Beyond merely being inconsistent, however, he notes that these policy quirks were not even in America’s best interests.

Quoting from the Congressional Record, Human Events magazine, and a New York Times News Service wire story printed in the Dallas Morning News, Stormer, writing in 1964, highlights the contradictions in American Cold War policy:

Nikita Khrushchev has said that peaceful coexistence involves peaceful economic competition. Our leaders agree, and place great emphasis on this aspect of the cold war in urging disarmament. Why then has the United States ...

... supplied nuclear reactors to the communist government of Czechoslovakia, railway equipment to Bulgaria, chemical plants to Yugoslavia, and synthetic rubber plants to Soviet Russia? Why has America given Russia the machinery to produce the precision batl bearings used in the guided missiles they “rattle” during every international crisis?

Why has America built the world’s most modern, most highly automated steel finishing plant for the communist government of Poland? Constructed in Warren, Ohio, the plant was dedicated as the Lenin Steel Works by the U. S. Ambassador to Poland in July 1961. The American people “lent” the communists $2.5-million to pay for it.

John Stormer presents these discrepancies. Behind them lies a question: are they the result of incompetence or malice? Are they the result of good intentions warped by naive miscalculations? Or are they the result of a deliberate effort to weaken the United States?

In the half-century which has elapsed since Stormer’s publication, elements of both have come to light: some of these actions were the result of well-intentioned efforts, others were the fruit of Soviet operatives who managed to nudge policy makers into bad decisions.

Despite such clumsy moves, and despite communist moles inside the United States, Soviet Socialism finally collapsed under weight of its own economic mismanagement, no longer able to keep paying for the military technology it needed to keep pace with NATO.

Pro-Communists and Anti-Americans: Then and Now

At some point during the Cold War, there was a shift in emphasis among those who wished to undermine and overthrow both the United States government and American society.

During the earliest phases of the Cold War, the international Communist conspiracy targeted the U.S. government. Even before the Cold War, starting around 1919, Soviet operatives in the United States created an espionage network designed effect a revolution, even a “violent” revolution. (The specification of a “violent” revolution comes from the Communist Party’s own documents.)

The Cold War as generally defined started around 1946, and sometime thereafter, the shift began, moving from the overthrow of the U.S. government toward the humiliation of American society. Some historians refer to result of this shift as ‘cultural Marxism.’

Before this shift, the goals of the international Communist conspiracy were, among other things, the glorification of the Soviet Union and the subjugation of the United States into a grand Soviet empire. After this shift, the goals were, inter alia, the humiliation and weakening of the United States.

To be sure, the earlier goals and the later goals were related. But there was a shift of emphasis, as historian William F. Buckley wrote in March 1967:

Further on the question: Who are the new pro-Communists? - further evidence that the new breed is negatively defined. They are not so much pro-Communist as anti-American. But since they work at anti-Americanism feverishly and at anti-Communism not at all, the vector of their analysis and passion is pro-Communist.

The earlier generation included people like Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, and Thomas Arthur Bisson. Their allegiance was more directly to Moscow and the various intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union.

This newer generation of the international Communist conspiracy was typified by Frank Marshall, Bill Ayers, and others. Such men were less constrained by their affection for the Soviet Union, and more directly motivated by their desire to harm the United States.

Decades later, yet another generation of the international anti-American conspiracy would emerge: a generation of political thinkers whose ideologies were no longer framed within Cold War terms. The Soviet Union had fallen, and internationalist Communism had morphed into a version of ‘progressivist’ politics.

Cut free from the Soviet intelligence agencies which had directed earlier Communist operatives, this third generation did not trust, understand, nor appreciate the United States, its Constitution, or its people.

In effect, these people did not see the Constitution as guarantor of personal political liberty; did not see the American people as essentially freedom-loving and good-natured, if imperfect; and did not see the United States as a land which, albeit imperfectly, sincerely strove to offer equal opportunities.

This most recent generation of the conspiracy largely eliminated all ties to Moscow and to doctrinaire Marxism, embracing instead a vaguer and more flexible progressivist socialism, the goal of which was statism. Free from any obligation to promote stalinism, these conspirators instead focused their efforts on diminishing the United States militarily, economically, and diplomatically toward other nations, and internally weakening both its social institutions and its constitutional governmental institutions, to pave the way for the hegemony of non-constitutional governmental institutions.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, the United States finds itself threatened no longer by Soviet Socialism, but rather by a group of anti-American Americans whose goal is to weaken and humiliate their native land and their fellow citizens.