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.