CHARLES S. MAIER
Vice President Richard M. Nixon boasted about American color television to Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, during their famous "kitchen debate" of July 1959, but the early Cold War was fought in black and white. The issues were monochrome and so were the images: stacks of Marshall Plan flour on an Italian wharf, C-47s approaching Tempelhof airport over the ruins of Berlin during the blockade, films of blast furnaces with white sparks emitted against a night sky, and the photos of the American vice president and the Soviet first secretary debating the path to household affluence in a Moscow exposition hall. At stake in that model American kitchen was consumer affluence or collective prowess, suburban dreams of the Eisenhower years versus Khrushchev’s cocky promise from 1956, "We will bury you," rendered plausible a year later by the trail of Sputnik in the night sky.42
Still, when Nixon and Khrushchev debated their societies’ respective achievements, they agreed that peaceful competition was preferable to ruthless military or political confrontation. Peaceful competition meant primarily economic competition: the rivalry between capitalism and state socialism. Divergent economic systems should not be so menacing that they compelled a strategic arms race; the two sides had not organized extensive alliances just to defend private or state ownership of capital, the market or the plan. Nonetheless, distinctions between socialism and capitalism seemed fundamental to ideological identity and to bloc cohesion in the 1950s, as they would again in the 1980s when the state socialist economies showed evident signs of decomposition. Neither were the distinctions just a source of
Ideological identity, no more than the stake of economic rivalry was just household appliances. The two economic systems had to provide the resources to sustain the military confrontation and subsidize allies. National power depended on economic achievement - a point the American vice president recognized when he conceded that the Soviets still led in getting payloads into orbit.
Economics, therefore, was crucial to the history of the Cold War. On the Soviet side, domination meant constructing an economic bloc of centrally planned economies that was designed to resist the seduction of the Marshall Plan and a reemerging West European capitalism. In the case of the United States, leadership meant helping to modernize its allies’ economies and to integrate as much as practical the residues of older imperial economic zones - German and British above all - into a sphere of trade and exchange that posed no barrier to United States economic doctrines or ambition. National Socialist Germany’s economic domain had been shattered with Hitler’s defeat, but as much of it as feasible had to be reintegrated into the West. The Cold War’s division of Europe would facilitate the transformation of West German industry from a threatening prewar and wartime rival system into a major asset of an integrated Atlantic economy. With respect to the British system of imperial trade preferences, Washington faced a different choice. United Kingdom finances were strained by the great debts London had accumulated to fight the war, including those owed to its Asian dependencies, its "white dominions," and to Washington. To what degree the United States should compel Britain to liquidate its remaining international assets or help keep them intact for the sake of postwar partnership was an open issue, to be repeatedly debated in the administration and Congress.
American readiness to replace German and British international economic domination raised implicitly the parallel question of future American leadership in Asia. Washington had been drawn into the Pacific war by its unwillingness to surrender China to Japanese imperial control. With the defeat of Tokyo, Washington was potentially in a position to assume regional economic leadership in East Asia. US policymakers were concerned (as were Japanese conservatives) about the possible rise of a Marxist Left in defeated Japan and would soon seek to limit economic restructuring, just as they wanted to buttress the Chinese Nationalist regime against Mao’s movement in North China. But whereas a thorough integration of Japan and South Korea was to be achieved, any voice in postwar China was lost with the advent of the Communist regime.
Even if Washington policymakers did not envisage the expansion of American economic reach in imperial terms, the exhaustion of earlier economic hegemons - regional in the instance of Germany and Japan, transoceanic in Britain’s case - militated for a reorganization of global economic relations, which subordinated allies as well as opposing the emerging Soviet adversary. Believing the alternative to be the extension of Communist power, a bipartisan coalition in Washington repeatedly took on commitments from 1945 into the 1960s that consolidated a territorially extensive, though hardly universal, zone of trade, payments, and investments conducive to liberal capitalism. All these pressures - ideological, technological, and geopolitical - interacted to shape the economy of the Cold War, and this chapter will follow them in turn.
World History
