Ambitions to direct and channel postcolonial aspirations, however, were soon disappointed. As they learned, often painfully, that the Third World was not nearly as malleable as they had assumed, both American and Soviet policymakers struggled to reorient their approaches. Chinese policy, consumed by domestic turmoil, also underwent a major shift. The result, by the end of the 1960s, was a sharp escalation in armed conflict and violence.
Much ofthe frustration experienced by the great powers stemmed from the fact that Third World elites were never simply passive recipients of modernizing or revolutionary models. While they certainly were attracted to the promises of accelerated development and state-building, postcolonial leaders often played the superpowers off against each other and adapted their ideologies for their own purposes. Where Soviet, American, and Chinese policymakers tended to see their models as complete, indivisible packages, Third World leaders displayed a remarkable proclivity for selecting and blending diverse elements while combining them with their own historically and culturally defined priorities.
American policymakers found that phenomenon particularly troublesome. Modernization, in their view, was a single, integrated process in which step-by-step advances in capitalist structures, psychological transformations, and political democracy would each reinforce the other. But leaders like Nehru, willing to "skip stages" and experiment in the pursuit of rapid change, eagerly combined ideas drawn from both Soviet and American experience. In an attempt to contain China and demonstrate its commitment to postcolonial Asia, the Kennedy administration provided substantial support for India’s economic development. The problem, however, was that Americans and Indians had fundamentally different understandings of what "development" itself meant. Nehru was deeply impressed by the Soviet record of rapid industrialization, embraced Soviet-style centralized planning, and strongly emphasized the production of steel, machinery, and capital goods. Indian planners also rejected the advice of American economists that instead of a crash drive toward industrialization, long-term development required greater attention to agriculture and balanced growth. Along with Nehru’s sharp criticism of US intervention in Vietnam, his leftward economic turn alienated many American supporters. US aid helped alleviate an Indian economic crisis, but the relationship between the two countries remained tense. Through Nehru’s death in 1964, the ideology of modernization prevented much of the US government from recognizing that Nehru’s interest in Soviet economics did not extend to Soviet politics.376
The internal contradictions and failures of modernization, experienced across different regions, also contributed to a reassessment of US Third World policy during the Johnson administration. Modernization, in the Kennedy period, was frequently considered as an alternative to the direct deployment of American military force, a way to promote structural solutions and win the Cold War in the Third World by speeding up the course of history itself. Lyndon Johnson and his advisers did not completely abandon that perspective, but they did determine that the risk ofCommunist gains and the potential damage to American credibility required far more immediate and coercive action. As scholars such as Nils Gilman have argued, the ideology of modernization was always ambivalent at best regarding the question of democracy, and by the mid-1960s it increasingly became “the intellectual equivalent of hitting the gas pedal on a skidding car: an attempt to accelerate out of a problem. As moderate solutions to development failed again and again, hard-core solutions found more and more advocates."377
In Latin America, Johnson responded to the failures of the Alliance for Progress by reorienting the program away from its original reformist ambitions. By the mid-1960s, few Latin American nations had reached targeted economic growth rates or made expected increases in popular living standards. A handful, such as Romulo Betancourt’s Venezuela, did reduce unemployment, promote modest agrarian reform, and increase the share of the national budget devoted to education and health care. But many Latin American liberals found that their ability to fund further reforms was seriously constrained by the declining terms of trade between exports of primary goods and the imports of manufactured products. The program’s economic contradictions were compounded by political ones. Kennedy had warned that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," but the idea of promoting “revolution" of any kind threatened conservative, anti-Communist oligarchs. In Guatemala, for example, Alliance-sponsored community leadership training, literacy programs, and financial cooperatives empowered Indians and poor peasants to challenge the dominance of merchants and landowners. At the same time, however, elites red-baited their adversaries and used the steady flow of US
I8. The body of Che Guevara. He was executed after being captured in Bolivia in 1967. Guevara was regarded as the most dangerous opponent of US influence in Latin America.
Counterinsurgency aid to make war against them. Johnson did little to correct these failings, and as US-sponsored repression gutted the developmental gains that modernizers had sought, anti-Communist anxieties killed the "peaceful revolution" in its infancy.378
The promotion of authoritarian regimes may not have been Johnson’s first choice, but as modernization ran aground in Latin America he concluded that such a policy would certainly be preferable to the uncertainties of long-term, democratic development. Thomas Mann, Johnson’s new assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, outlined the administration’s approach in 1964 by declaring that the United States would no longer make democratic reforms a condition for the delivery of US military and economic aid under the Alliance. In the struggle to prevent a "second Cuba," order and anti-Communist stability would have to precede
Progress. Accordingly, the administration moved quickly to recognize military coups against left-leaning governments in Brazil, Bolivia, and several other states. More dramatically, in April 1965 the Johnson administration invaded the Dominican Republic with 33,000 troops to prevent the possible return to power of Juan Bosch, a progressive who had been democratically elected in late 1962 and overthrown by a conservative junta ten months later. Although evidence of Communist activity among the pro-Bosch forces was very thin, Johnson concluded that the risk of subversion was simply intolerable.
In Vietnam, Johnson also determined that America could not wait for modernization to produce its expected miracles. While deeply concerned about Communist gains, in 1961 Kennedy planners still believed that it might be possible to derail the Vietnamese revolution through a blend of development and counterinsurgency programs. As the United States increased the flow of arms and advisers, it also stepped up civil service training programs and urged Ngo Dinh Diem toward liberal reforms. The heart of the effort, however, unfolded in the countryside where the United States directed a massive plan to relocate the Vietnamese peasantry in "strategic hamlets" that would separate them from the insurgents and allow for government-sponsored development programs to win their loyalty and support. That ambitious mix of military tactics and social engineering failed miserably. South Vietnamese government and military leaders frequently abused the peasantry they were supposed to protect and assist, but the more fundamental causes were grounded in an ideology that ignored the realities of Vietnamese history and culture. Although US officials continued to define Diem as the root of the problem and hoped for greater success after his removal in late 1963, the National Liberation Front continued to gain ground and American pessimism steadily grew.
Johnson’s response was a forceful one. As Fredrik Logevall explains, Johnson feared that a withdrawal from Vietnam would do irreparable damage to America’s global credibility as well as his own domestic political power and personal authority.17 Development-centered counterinsurgency programs continued in South Vietnam, and in April of 1965 Johnson dramatically offered to build a Tennessee Valley Authority on the Mekong Delta. Yet, the president concluded that long-term, structural efforts at "nation building" were simply not enough. In early 1965, he ordered the sustained bombing of North Vietnam, and by 1967 more than a half million US combat troops were in the field. Modernizing ambitions did not vanish, but visions for structural change were largely eclipsed by a massive war of attrition designed simply to kill revolutionaries faster than they could be replaced.
In Indonesia, the United States also turned toward a more aggressive policy. By 1964, Sukarno’s political confrontation with British-supported Malaysia, his mismanagement of the Indonesian economy, and his declared promise to shift Indonesian politics to the left all alarmed Washington officials. Where US policymakers had previously tolerated Sukarno’s neutralism and seen his government as a viable alternative to the Indonesian Communist Party, they now began to work covertly for his removal. In 1965, when General Suharto and other Indonesian army leaders put down a revolt by junior officers and crippled Sukarno’s power, the Johnson administration was elated. The United States also threw its firm support behind the army’s relentless, sweeping campaign to expose and execute Indonesia’s Communists and suspected sympathizers. A resolute American stance in Vietnam, US officials concluded, had emboldened Indonesia’s military and might help promote a crucial turn throughout the rest of Southeast Asia as well.
In Vietnam, Latin America, Iran, and Indonesia, US policymakers also discarded even the tentative steps they had previously made to promote liberal reforms. By strongly supporting a string of dictators in Saigon, backing the Shah of Iran’s political repression, supporting an anti-Communist, military-driven bloodbath in Indonesia, and embracing right-wing coups across Latin America, the United States steadily turned toward "bureaucratic authoritarian" solutions. Modernization promised stability through long-term progress, but by the mid-1960s US policymakers concluded that the immediate preservation of anti-Communist order required a much more direct approach.
The Soviets also engaged in a revision of their Third World policy during the mid-1960s. Like their American counterparts, Soviet strategists were dismayed by the willingness ofpostcolonial elites to chart independent courses. Mao Zedong’s growing hostility, in particular, raised wider questions about the wisdom ofcommitting precious Soviet resources to build alliances with regimes that might refuse to follow the Soviet political line, or, worse, become potential adversaries. Soviet aid to self-proclaimed, non-aligned socialists like Sukarno and Nkrumah also raised doubts. Neither Indonesia nor Ghana had embarked on a disciplined "transition" to "scientific" Marxist socialism, and both governments had proven unstable enough to fall victim to military coups in the mid-1960s, a result that destroyed years of Soviet political and capital investment.
Frustrated relations with Cuba also played a significant role in triggering a Soviet reevaluation. Castro’s fury, when Khrushchev removed Soviet missiles from Cuban soil without consulting him, and his decision to block the international inspections intended to resolve the missile crisis alarmed Kremlin leaders. Protests by Che Guevara over the terms of Soviet aid, Cuba’s refusal to follow the USSR in signing the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, Cuban criticism of Soviet trade with its Latin American enemies, and state trials of members of the old, pre-revolutionary Cuban Communist Party all strained relations between Havana and Moscow. Where Soviet policymakers had once envisioned the Cuban revolution as a wondrous sign of socialist advance and solidarity, by 1966 they found themselves listening to a doggedly independent Castro attack the USSR for its failure to recognize the need for armed struggle in the cause of global revolution.
The Soviet investment in Egypt did not live up to Khrushchev’s expectations either. Starting in the 1950s, the USSR took significant steps to cultivate an alliance by providing funding for the Aswan High Dam and supporting Egypt during the Suez crisis. Nasser, however, held firmly to his policy of nonalignment and cracked down aggressively on Egyptian Communists, imprisoning many of them. After Cairo and Damascus created the United Arab Republic in 1958, Nasser spread his anti-Communist campaign into Syria and condemned Soviet support for Communist elements in Iraq as well. While Khrushchev hoped that Egypt would take a more radical turn to the left, Nasser angrily accused the Soviets of hindering the cause of Arab unity and interfering in internal Arab affairs. Although relations improved in the mid-1960s, serious tensions persisted over the terms of Soviet support for the Arab conflict with Israel. Egypt, moreover, never embarked on the kind of thoroughgoing revolutionary transformation that Khrushchev hoped for.
As Svetlana Savranskaya and William Taubman explain, the growing doubt with which Soviet leaders viewed Khrushchev’s revolutionary adventurism contributed to his downfall.18 Doubt also produced a political reconsideration. The "transition to socialism," many strategists concluded, was far more complex than Khrushchev had assumed. Feudalistic forces were more tenacious, peasants less politically mobilized, and the goals of rapid industrialization and land reform far more difficult to achieve than anticipated. Yet the USSR did not retreat from engagement with the Third World under Leonid Brezhnev, nor did Soviet policymakers cease to believe that history was on their side. Indeed, analysts, like Karen Brutents, argued that the USSR should pursue an activist approach. The key, however, would be for the USSR to direct its longer-term, comprehensive support more carefully to movements grounded in explicitly Marxist-Leninist ideology and to place a stronger emphasis on the role of “vanguard parties” in providing the political structure essential to drive revolutions forward and defend them against imperialist resistance.
As its aspirations for global revolutionary change were chastened, the Soviet Union also shifted its emphasis toward military aid and arms sales, a tool that it often used for shorter-term, instrumental purposes. During the Khrushchev era, the amount of funding for economic development that was offered to a broad range of anticolonial movements and postcolonial states had slightly exceeded levels of military assistance. By the late 1960s, however, the value of military aid surpassed that of development funding, a trend that strongly increased over the next decade. Under Khrushchev limited military capabilities prevented the USSR from playing a larger role in far-flung regions, but under Brezhnev the Soviets used new assets in air transport, shipping, communications, and naval vessels to intervene at much greater levels. Following the American escalation in Vietnam in 1965, the Soviet Union dramatically amplified its military assistance to its Communist ally there, providing the North Vietnamese with surface-to-air missiles, jet fighters, field artillery, and radar as well as technicians and pilots. Thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers and officers also trained in Soviet military schools. But Soviet arms sales, military aid, and advisers also poured into non-Marxist states and fueled wars fought by Egypt, Syria, India, and Iraq. In these cases, the USSR shelved its longer-term, historical vision in favor of the more practical goals of gaining leverage in diplomatic negotiations, obtaining access to naval and air bases, raising hard currency, and frustrating US efforts to build regional alliances. As ideological ambitions cooled, the Soviet Union, like the United States, placed an increasing premium on the utility of force.
From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, Chinese policymakers endured a series of setbacks of their own in the Third World. The 1965 overthrow of Algeria’s Ben Bella eliminated a regime that China had helped come to power and had seen as a model for further armed struggle in Africa. The coup against Sukarno and the decimation of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 and 1966 also destroyed a government China hoped would become part of a strong anti-Western alliance in Asia. Several moderate African governments broke relations with the PRC in protest over China’s support for insurgencies on that continent, and China’s confrontation with India alienated other members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Chinese officials also watched in frustration as their relationship with North Vietnam deteriorated. After Mao dismissed a Soviet proposal for a collaborative approach to assisting the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and Soviet arms shipments steadily increased,
Hanoi stopped criticizing Soviet “revisionism.” When Le Duan traveled to Moscow in 1966 and referred to the Soviet Union as a “second motherland,” Chinese officials were deeply angered. The DRV’s 1968 decision to enter into peace negotiations with the United States, over strenuous Chinese objections, also amplified fears of Soviet influence.
As China plunged into the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, Beijing’s Third World policy fell into disarray. While aid to North Vietnam continued, all Chinese ambassadors, with the single exception of the one in Cairo, were recalled to engage in studies of Maoist doctrine, effectively paralyzing the country’s diplomatic organization. When China finally emerged fTom the chaos, Mao and Zhou replaced their earlier, more flexible promotion of a broad anti-American, anti-imperial united front with an overriding and rigid insistence on the dangers of Soviet aggression. Alarmed by the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and worried that violent border clashes with the Soviets in 1969 might lead to general war, Chinese officials also began to emphasize the need for the PRC and the entire Third World to struggle against the “dual hegemony” of the world’s two superpowers. By 1973, after the famous meeting between Mao and Richard Nixon in Beijing, Chinese officials also downplayed armed struggle, deemphasized the cause of national liberation in favor of interstate relations, and subordinated their previous revolutionary goals to the overriding campaign against Soviet “social imperialism.”
World History
