Document created: 30 August 04
Air University Review,
March-April 1970
Dr. E. S. Hartsook
André
Fontaine says he wants his History of the Cold War to contribute to the
work of clarification and revision that is now going on in regard to the cold
war. And it is in this larger framework that his history, in addition to its own
great and special merits, must also be viewed.* Since 1961 at least, there has
been a whole stream of books and articles analyzing the origins and caused of
the cold war. A good proportion of these works share what has become known as
the “revisionist” view of cold war history. In this view, the United States
was as much to blame as the Soviet Union, if not more so, for
the hostility that arose in U.S./Soviet relations after 1945. The revisionist
view holds that Stalin believed he had negotiated a clear security perimeter in
eastern Europe, with Churchill at least, and that the strong U.S. reactions to
his policies there alarmed him into taking countermeasures. The revisionists are
for the most part certain that the U.S. atomic bomb played a very large role in
scaring Stalin into such actions. Some of them even say the United States
dropped the bomb not so much to defeat Japan as to intimidate Russia and that,
once the U.S. had the bomb, U.S./Soviet relations were dominated by that fact
and by the Soviets’ resulting fear and insecurity. Most of them would say that
throughout the subsequent years U.S. policy continued to fall victim to its own
mistaken view of the situation, hewing rigidly to long-outdated lines of
thinking. Some do not hesitate to add their belief that there is a large group
of people on both sides with a vested interest in the cold war and its
continuation.
Fontaine
is certainly an antidote for any easy, quick judgments concerning the cold war.
Unlike most of the revisionists, who trace the origins to 1946–47, he takes
the beginning back to 1917 and the October Revolution. In his view, from the
time the Soviets began their revolution there has been a cold war between them
and the “bourgeois” world. Moreover, Fontaine says he has not tried to prove
a thesis “but simply to tell the story of what has been, after all, the
greatest war of all time.” His history is indeed evidence of this, for in the
two volumes he endeavors to portray the cold war in such wide and deep and
detailed fashion that the reader can judge about it for himself. It is as if he
is creating a giant, modern-day Bayeux tapestry, taking the utmost care to
include every detail and putting in all the shades and colorings, not just the
black and white ones usually used in depicting the cold war. It should be added
immediately that Fontaine is eminently qualified to do this tableau. He is
familiar with all the latest sources on the subject, and as a journalist with Le
Monde since 1947 he has followed most of the day-to-day developments of the
cold war and met many of its leaders.
The
very scope and detail of his account have enabled Fontaine to make two major
contributions not easily possible in a shorter work. He has exposed more of the
historical roots of the cold war, and he has included many more of its
interrelated facets: contending personalities as well as contending ideologies,
differing national characteristics and outlooks, and varying views of strategy
and policy. By taking his story back to 1917, Fontaine shows, in his account of
events immediately after World War I, how the naïve and powerless new Soviet
state was victimized by most of the other powers, which in the process
reinforced once more old Russia’s fixation about defending itself from
external attack and foreshadowed something of her subsequent paranoiac attitude
vis-à-vis the West. From the Locarno Pact, to Munich, to the Marshall Plan,
Fontaine shows that the Soviet Union was always seeing a “conspiracy” aimed
at isolating and excluding it from the rest of the world.
It
has not been customary in the West to perceive the Marshall Plan as anything but
white in the usual black-or-white terms of the cold war. But Fontaine,
contributing one of his shadings, gives something of how it looked to the other
side: the Soviets could not accept Marshall Plan aid, desperately as they needed
it, because they feared it would mean interference in their internal affairs and
loss of their economic and national independence. He suggests that “by making
the division of Europe concrete, it [the Marshall Plan] sounded the death knell
for Benes and Masaryk’s attempts to preserve good relations with both
sides.” (Vol. 1, p. 342) In fact, he sees the whole cold war division of
Europe—the U.S. clients on the one side, the Iron Curtain millions on the
other—dating from the month of July 1947, the month the Soviets rejected
Marshall Plan aid and the month George Kennan’s article on “containment,”
which was to have such wide influence, appeared in Foreign Affairs. (p.
331) The Soviets’ rejection of Marshall Plan aid in 1947, incidentally, is
probably not unrelated to their current fear that growing capitalistic influence
would be too great a threat to their own economic system—as evidenced in their
invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Another
significant factor that comes out in Fontaine’s history-in-depth is the
continuity of Russian aims. These seem to remain the same as under the czars:
security of indefensible borders and warm-water ports to assure supplies and
aid. The demands are essentially identical, whether put to Hitler in the 1939
pact negotiations or later in the endless negotiations with the Allies. Somewhat
similar is the continuing attraction—in spite of all—that Russia feels toward
Germany. After World War I they were drawn together in shared ostracism by the
rest of the world, and they collaborated in many ways. Even at the height of the
World War II atrocities, Stalin could still separate the “German people”
from the sins of their leaders. Since then some modus vivendi has always
been pursued, and although West Germany’s entrance into NATO
was seen as a
final hardening of the whole West against the U.S.S.R., Khrushchev resumed the
Soviet wooing of Germany in the years before his exit; and today his successors
appear to be taking up where he left off.
By
the very nature of his extensive examination of the cold war, it is difficult to
sum up the many-sided aspects of Fontaine’s treatment. One has heard, for
example, of the influential role of the main participants, particularly
Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s differing views on how to run the war in Europe
and what its ultimate aims should be. Here, particularly, Fontaine mines a very
rich vein in explaining the intensification of the cold war after World War II.
If Churchill’s
strategy had been followed and the Western military forces had been used to
achieve more of a geographical balance with the Soviets, many of the problems
over Berlin, Vienna, and Prague would probably not have assumed the proportions
they did. On the other hand, if Churchill (unknown to Roosevelt) had not made
his own famous October 1944 arrangement with Stalin—giving him primacy in
Rumania and Bulgaria in exchange for British predominance in Greece and a
fifty-fifty interest in Yugoslavia and Hungary—there would probably not have
been such highly inflamed U.S. reactions against Soviet moves in those areas. It
is certainly significant that Roosevelt appeared to fear resurgence of British
and French colonialism more than he did the Soviets, being genuinely
scandalized, for example, at British intervention in Greece. Fontaine admirably
brings out the contrast between Roosevelt’s emphasis on and faith in both the
Atlantic Charter and the United Nations and Churchill’s almost desperate
insistence on hard pragmatic factors like getting Western troops into Berlin and
Prague. Similarly, the change from Roosevelt to Truman as chief U.S. spokesman
must have been like changing from a warm to a cold shower for the Soviets. A few
lines of Fontaine concerning pre-Truman negotiations with the Soviets will help
illuminate this:
Roosevelt and Churchill . . . constantly yielded
without gaining anything in return except fine words that, . . . if they meant
anything at all, certainly it was not the meaning the Western allies gave them.
Worse yet, when Stalin had a complaint
against the West, he aired it so bluntly that he was frequently ill-mannered.
But Roosevelt and, to a degree, Churchill and their lieutenants, felt obliged to
address Stalin circumspectly, never saying all they thought. This strengthened
the dictator’s conviction that he was dealing with weaklings and hypocrites
forever ready to yield to pressure and happy to settle for empty promises. This
experience probably explains his post-war conduct. On the other hand, the way in
which he achieved his ends contributed largely to the doubts that Western
leaders subsequently entertained as to the usefulness of trying to negotiate
with a partner in such flagrant bad faith. (p. 256)
Fontaine
ends his history with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the signing of the
nuclear test ban treaty a year later. He deems that the latter signified an
“armistice” between the two great powers and the provisional termination of
the cold war. He acknowledges that, technologically, the test ban treaty was of
minor importance but that politically it signified the first time the Soviet
Union put accord with “imperialism” before maintenance of unity in the
Communist bloc. Coinciding as it did with the first Soviet denunciation of
Mao’s heresy, this action demonstrated the primacy of national interest over
ideological solidarity, which until then had been the rule. Fontaine believes
that neither of the super powers won the cold war in the sense of making its
“way of life” paramount over the other; that their armistice has confirmed
the failure of the claims of each.
In
an epilogue to this English translation of his work (originally published in
French in 1965), Fontaine expresses rather more pessimistic views of both the
United States and the Soviet Union and their claims to being able to solve the
problems of the twentieth century. He is particularly concerned over the
internal crisis in the United States and fearful that a lack of order could
jeopardize its values
or even lead to some kind of fascism. In the Communist bloc, he sees the devaluation of both Russia and China by
the tyranny of their bureaucracies as having made them increasingly hopeless as
models for the rest of the world. Perhaps not unexpectedly, for an editor of Le
Monde, Fontaine ends by suggesting—after repeated acknowledgments
of Europe’s past culpability—that maybe a united western Europe could
try to overcome Europe’s partition and “speak to the world in the language
of justice and freedom with enough authority and yet without being suspected of
wanting to dominate it.”