On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Carrol Cox wrote:
> > The agony of "losing" China went a long way towards causing both
> > Korea and Vietnam. And the whole Cold War, for that matter.
>
> It's been so long since I read it that I can remember no details nor
> correct labels, but I think long ago Chomsky wrote an analysis of a
> "National Security" document produced during the Truman administration
> that both laid out the contours of what came to be called the Cold War
> AND explicitly stated as one of its aims to "prime" the u.s. economy. In
> the late '40s there was really widespread fear -- both in public
> discussion and apparently in discussion in inner circles -- that the
> unemployment of the '30s would reoccur. It was not only Stalinists who
> thought that a "final slump" might be in the offing.
Your memory is accurate, as many have already confirmed and built on. But I should point out, to return to our earlier discussion, that it has nothing to do with Vietnam. The original plan of containment that went with this economic plan was laid out by George Kennan in the famous memo by "X" in Foreign Affairs on year earlier, and was entirely restricted to the industrial core. Kennan distinguished between
<quote>
areas that I thought vital to our security and ones that did not seem to me to fall into this category . . . There were only five regions of the world -- the United States, the United Kingdom, the Rhine valley with adjacent industrial areas, the Soviet Union and Japan -- where the sinews of modern military strength could be produced in quantity.
<unquote>
In other words, for Kennan, the cold war was purely eurocentric, plus Japan. And that seemed to fit in just fine with the economic purposes of NSC-68. It was the cold war of the Marshall plan and Japanese economic reconstruction.
But Korea changed all that. And Korea could have been greatly limited in its impact had it none been for our sudden and capricious commitment to defend Taiwan. (Had we made it clear were were willing to trade one for the other, our relation to China would have been much different.) And the sudden commitment to defend Taiwan, although still controversial, came at least in part from the baying of the far right over the shame of "losing China" and abandonning Chiang Kai-Shek.
That's what I meant by the "loss" of China going a long way towards causing the Cold War. I mean causing it in its final, everywhere-in- the-world-counts form. Korea caused our world view to anneal in that form in the fire of war, and to see resisting "Chinese expansion" as somehow essential to our interests when it was not. Which background gave events in Vietnam a different meaning.
BTW, fwiw, Kennan was against Vietnam from the very beginning, from almost before the beginning. He says that in 1950 he urged the government to tell the French government that:
<quote>
. . .we cannot honestly agree with them that there is any real hope of their remaining successfully in Indo-China, and we feel that rather than have their weakness demonstrated by a continued costly and unsuccessful effort to assert their will by force of arms, it would be preferable to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level, unimpeded by foreign troops or pressures, even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Viet-Nam and Viet-Minh, and the spreading over the whole country of Viet-Minh authority . .
<unquote>
This from the ur-Cold Warrior, who as ambassador to Stalin's Russia, had fewer illusions than anyone.
BTW, both quotes are from his memoirs.
Michael