Abstract
Curt Cardwell, NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011; xii + 298 pp.; £50.00 hbk; ISBN 9780521197304
‘Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.’ So said the American author and polymath, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., back in the late 1850s. In his challenging and path breaking study of the genesis, application, and legacy of US National Security Papers 68 (NSC 68), Curt Cardwell, a one-time historian of nineteenth century American History turned Cold War scholar, takes Wendell Holmes’ advice readily to heart.
A generation of prominent diplomatic historians, such as John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn Leffler, Cardwell maintains, has placed too much weight on the importance of geo-strategic factors in seeking to explain the onset of the Cold War. Challenging received wisdom, Cardwell suggests that NSC 68, and the militarization of the Cold War that followed in its wake, is better understood when interrogated through an economic lens.
Specifically, it is contended that in framing NSC 68 during the winter and spring of 1950, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (PPS), working under the direction of Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and PPS Director, Paul Nitze, were not motivated exclusively, or even primarily, by a fear of Soviet expansionism. Rather, Cardwell contends, the willingness of senior American policymakers to endorse the case for the military containment of communism, promulgated in NSC 68, and embark upon a massive programme of rearmament, was informed, in large part, by Washington’s realization that future US economic prosperity depended on closing a post-war ‘dollar gap’.
In short, the inability of the shattered economies of Western Europe and Japan to accumulate sufficient US dollars through the normal process of trade that they required to purchase US goods and services, risked an international balance of payments crisis. In turn, this threatened to clog the arteries of global trade, erode confidence in the capitalist free market system, and plunge the American economy back into a recession analogous to that experienced in the ‘lost decade’ of the 1930s.
By amplifying anxieties surrounding the Soviet Union’s purportedly expansionist intentions and capabilities, Cardwell postulates, NSC 68 provided the necessary intellectual capital for an experiment in ‘Military Keynesianism’. In rushing to spend US taxpayer dollars abroad, by accumulating stockpiles of strategic raw materials, such as rubber, and expanding the Pentagon’s network of overseas military bases, the Truman administration was concerned less with combating a largely illusory Soviet threat to US national security, and more on stimulating ailing global trade. In short, to co-opt a well-worn phrase from a more recent political era, Cardwell submits that historians of the early Cold War period have tended to overlook the fact that, ‘It’s all about the economy, stupid.’
Cardwell’s emphasis on the centrality of the political economy of the Cold War, as he readily concedes, owes a considerable intellectual debt to the earlier, pioneering work, undertaken by such ‘revisionist’ luminaries as William Appleman Williams, Lloyd Gardner, and Walter LaFeber. Much like these doyens of the historical ‘left’, Cardwell’s appetite for taking on ‘rough work’, and questioning the predominant geo-political approach to early postwar international history, is sure to illicit criticism from those who remain more in sympathy with the ‘realist’, or ‘orthodox’, schools of Cold War history. Not least, Cardwell deploys a commendable range of US official sources to make a strong case for the confrontational, anti-Soviet character informing much US policy in the immediate postwar period, whether through the Marshall Plan, or in relation to German reconstruction. Little credence is given, however, to evidence pointing to Soviet culpability for the collapse of the ‘Grand Alliance’. Many will question, for example, Cardwell’s assertion that Stalin was open to limited political and economic liberalization in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, while Washington and London rode roughshod over the agreements reached with the USSR at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.
Although understandable, it is a pity that Cardwell limits the scope of his study to Western Europe and largely excludes discussion of NSC 68 in an Asian context. Back in the early 1980s, William Borden produced a pioneering study of the ‘dollar gap’ and its impact on US- Japanese relations. It would have been illuminating to benefit from Cardwell’s reassessment of this important, and understudied, aspect of Japan’s path to post-war reconstruction. Likewise, while Cardwell’s extensive and innovative use of US archival material offers up many fresh and exciting perspectives on American policymakers approaches and attitudes to NSC 68, the European voice in his story is muted. Good use is made of archival material gleaned from the United Kingdom’s National Archives, but scant reference is made to valuable French, Italian, German, or for that matter, Soviet primary and secondary sources, in what is an essentially Anglo-American narrative.
Minor quibbles aside, Cardwell is to be congratulated for producing a meticulously researched and cogently argued re-examination of NSC 68 and its centrality to the history of early Cold War. Whilst Cardwell’s thesis is undeniably provocative, as an archivally rich (from an American standpoint at least) and carefully reasoned study, his book demands to be taken seriously, whatever the reader’s ideological outlook or Cold War preconceptions. Having elected to explore the politically charged landscape of early Cold War history, Cardwell avows, in the introduction to his work, ‘let us stick to the evidence’ (7). Amen to that. And hats off to Curt Cardwell, for sticking to the evidence with verve, in a highly stimulating book that contains much of value for students and scholars of Cold War history.
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham