which was supposed to have diminished its aid to the Papadopoulos regime in the midst of the horror stories that came out of Greece, was now resuming full-scale military aid. In return, Greece was to institute a “liberalization” program, ending the special military courts. The military junta, however, would maintain the state of siege in order that security cases could still be referred to military courts. Two weeks after the Times report appeared, the release of formerly secret testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by State and Defense department officials disclosed that the United States had sent $168 million worth of military aid to Greece during those three years in which the government had publicly announced a selective arms embargo against that country’s military rulers. The committee transcript includes the following exchange between Robert J. Pranger, deputy assistant secretary of defense, and Senator J. William Fulbright, committee chairman:
FULBRIGHT: Do we supply the Greeks with ammunition?
PRANGER: Yes, sir. …
FULBRIGHT: You have no practical way to prevent the Greek forces from using your ammunition for internal security purposes, have you?
PRANGER: Sir, as far as the ammunition which we are supplying today, no.
FULBRIGHT: In other words, we can supply the bullets which they used to kill their own citizens, can they not? I mean, we do.
PRANGER: Well, sir, that is not our intention.
The statement “that is not our intention” tells the story of modern civilization, which has so institutionalized cruelty that it takes place without “intention.” It also tells the story of American foreign policy after World War II. Behind a liberal language so persuasive it often gulled its users lay the working creed of the United States: the drive to extend its power—national, economic, and political—into other parts of the world, and the use of “such means” as it deemed “fit” to do it successfully. For the public, American aggressiveness was rhetorically disguised as “stopping communism” or “saving the free world.”
What this verbal device concealed was that Americans came to use the word “communism” to represent a wide variety of situations: actual Communist invasions, such as those by Soviet Russia in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; civil wars between Communist and non-Communist areas, as in Korea; popular Communist uprisings, as in China and Vietnam; and left-liberal movements, as in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Americans have used the phrase “the free world” in connection with a few western democracies, but they have also applied it to dozens of military dictatorships in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
This same contradictory relationship between promise and performance was to characterize American foreign policy in the twenty years following intervention in Greece. And this was true—with slight variations in language, or in tactics—whether the administration in Washington was Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal. The parallel between American intervention in Greece and American intervention twenty years later in Vietnam is striking. Although the Greek intervention was on a much smaller scale, it had begun with a small group of “advisers” and military aid to prop up an unpopular, corrupt, dictatorial government. In Greece the United States took over the imperial burden from the British, in Vietnam from the French. In both cases, the justification was based on the need to suppress a Communist-led rebellion, one reason being that if Red uprisings succeeded in one country, they would trigger revolts in others.
The policy of the United States toward China is another example of the breach between the promises of its rhetoric and the results of its working creed. In his memoirs just after the war, Secretary of State Byrnes said:
If we regard Europe as the tinderbox of possible world conflagration, we must look upon Asia as a great smoldering fire. There, civilization faces the task of bringing a huge mass of humanity, the majority of the people on this earth, from the Middle Ages into the era of atomic energy.
Through the rhetoric of a secretary of state, America is here citing the usual task of Western imperialism in its more paternalistic mood: to “civilize” backward peoples, in this case Asians. No doubt the secretary missed—as the survivors of Hiroshima would not—the tragic irony of mentioning the need to bring Asia “into the era of atomic energy,” but his statement exemplifies the kind of official justification used to support the tyrannical regime of Chiang Kai-shek while “stopping communism” at the same time.
China after World War II endured four years of civil war between the Nationalist government of the Kuomintang party, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist forces spread out from the north central province of Shensi, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. At the end of 1945, Truman sent General Marshall to China to negotiate peace between the Communists and the Kuomintang, and to try to establish a coalition government under Chiang Kai-shek. The mission did not succeed; distrust between the two forces was too deep. Moreover, as Kenneth Latourette, an authority on Far Eastern history, put it in explaining the subsequent victory of the Communists: “A major reason for the Nationalist defeat was that the Kuomintang, the national government run by it, and Chiang Kai-shek had completely lost the confidence of the Chinese people.”
The State Department White Paper on China, issued at the time of the Communist victory in 1949, declared:
The historic policy of the United States of friendship and aid toward the people of China was, however, maintained in both peace and war. Since V-J Day, the United States Government has authorized aid to Nationalist China in the form of grants and credits totaling approximately 2 billion dollars. … In addition … the United States Government has sold the Chinese Government large quantities of military and civilian war surplus property with a total procurement cost of over a billion dollars. …
Further along, the White Paper also describes the Nationalist government as “a Government which had lost the confidence of its own troops and its own people.” Thus, American “friendship and aid toward the people of China” was translated into several billion dollars for the Nationalist government of China, which, according to official documentation, was not supported by the people of China. The reason for the nonsupport was that the Kuomintang was brutal, corrupt, inefficient, and dictatorial. It was dominated by the rich and the reactionary, and it was subservient to Western power—all those factors that the Chinese Nationalists themselves had hoped to eradicate after the 1911 revolution.
The “historic policy” of the United States had not been one of “friendship and aid to the people of China,” as the White Paper asserted. Long before the Communists came to power, American policy was based not only on strategic interests but on commercial interests, as the treaty arrangements following the Opium War and the “Open Door” policy testify. What was abhorrent to the United States about the Communists running China was not that intellectual and political freedom were limited—this was certainly true under Chiang—but that a powerful independent China, which the Communists were creating, would lend itself neither to the West’s traditional commercial dealings with the huge China market nor to political and military control.
After Mao’s victory, United States policy toward China remained consistent through five administrations. Its principal elements were: maintenance of a military base on Taiwan, to which Chiang had fled and where he now planted a dictatorship over the eight million Taiwanese; pressure on smaller states in the United Nations to keep Chiang in China’s seat on the Security Council and to keep Communist China out of it; refusal to give diplomatic recognition or economic aid to Peking; construction of a ring of military bases around China, with American troops, planes, and weapons, in Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and Thailand.
America’s China policy was not conducted in a vacuum. All major episodes of American foreign policy in the postwar period show the same fanatical anti-communism. This obsession was due less to ideological-moral disagreement
