drives of liberal nationalism: for expansion, for paternalism, for maximum profit. These nationalist ambitions have always been presented to the public in the guise of protecting national security or promoting peace or defending other nations against aggression or helping backward nations to modernize—justifiable objectives that have lent moral passion to the most ferocious technology of death ever devised. In the actual practice of American policy, this combination of moralism and technology has supported a willingness to use massive violence, to break the peace, to exhaust the national resources, and, finally, to threaten the internal cohesion of the United States itself—in other words, to have effects totally different from those promised.
The remainder of this chapter summarizes some of the major aspects of American foreign policy in the postwar period. They are discussed under the general headings of Intervention, Economic Penetration, Militarization, Vietnam. All are discussed in the light of the discrepancy between liberal rhetoric and liberal nationalism in action.
I. INTERVENTION
A. Korea, 1950–1953
On June 25, 1950, the armies of Communist North Korea crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea; the next day, President Truman, presumably to help the South Koreans defend themselves against the attack, announced the use of American air and sea forces in Korea. His announcement was made in response to a UN resolution asking the invaders to withdraw to the 38th parallel. “A return to the rule of force in international affairs would have far-reaching effects,” said Truman. “The United States will continue to uphold the rule of law.”
If the rule of law was represented by the United Nations, American military action stretched it to the breaking point. The UN resolution on Korea had recommended “such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore peace and security in the area.” The United States, with General MacArthur in command of a largely American “United Nations” force, went further; after pushing the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel, it moved all the way up through North Korea to the Yalu River, on the border of China—-an action that provoked the Chinese into entering the war. They swept southward until the war was stalemated at the 38th parallel.
To call American intervention a blow to “the rule of force” must have seemed bitterly ironic to the Koreans, North and South; in three years of war, American bombers reduced Korea to a desolate, corpse-strewn shambles, with perhaps two million Koreans, North and South, dead. Napalm was used, and a BBC correspondent described the result:
In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus … He had to stand because he was no longer covered with a skin, but with a crust-like crackling which broke easily … I thought of the hundreds of villages reduced to ash which I personally had seen and realized the sort of casualty list which must be mounting up along the Korean front.
The war was a catastrophe for the Korean people. America’s intervention illustrated, once again, the common moral failure of international diplomacy, as true of liberal capitalist nations as of others: that transgressions—certain transgressions, of course—must be punished, even if it means supporting an undemocratic regime, and even if the punishment falls with devastating effect on the original victims of the transgression. The effect of intervention in Korea was not rectification but destruction.
Not only was it ironic that America should castigate “force,” it was deceitful that it should talk as the champion opponent of aggression. Other cases of aggression in the world did not prompt such a drastic response from the United States. When Arab states invaded Israel in 1948, the United States did not mobilize the UN and its own armed forces for intervention. The fact was that in Korea the United States had a political stake: the dictatorial regime in the south of Syngman Rhee was an American client. Furthermore, America wanted South Korea as a military base on the Asian mainland. It had an eye on Communist China, and it was still operating on the balance-of-power concept that Roosevelt in 1945 thought was outmoded.
Truman’s statement of June 27, 1950, announcing the use of American military force to help South Korea, simultaneously ordered the Seventh Fleet to defend the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan. It also directed more military aid to the French forces fighting against the Communist Viet Minh insurgents in Indochina. When the long-range effects of the Korean intervention are considered, on the Korean nation and its people, on Sino-American relations (postwar treaties had assumed Taiwan belonged to China), and on the American attitude toward the French imperialists in Indochina, it is difficult to see how the declared aim of the intervention—to bring peace and stability to Asia—was furthered.
B. Guatemala, 1954
What Truman had said at the start of the Korean intervention about the United States upholding “the rule of law” as opposed to the “rule of force” was utterly contradicted in 1954 by the American overthrow, through force, of the legally elected reformist government of Guatemala. On June 18 an invasion force of mercenaries, trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency at secret bases in Honduras and Nicaragua and supported by four American P-47 Thunderbolts flown by American pilots, invaded Guatemala from Honduras, and put into power Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who at one time had received military training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The Guatemalan intervention was a violation of the United Nations Charter, which in Article 2, Section 4, says: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. …” According to the 1968 edition of the Manual of International Law, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “an indirect involvement of a government in an armed venture outside its territory constitutes a use of force and is governed by the same law as is applicable to open hostilities directed against another state.” When an attempt was made to put the Guatemalan invasion on the agenda of the UN Security Council, the United States delegate to the UN, Eisenhower appointee Henry Cabot Lodge, who was then president of the Security Council, kept it off, arguing that it was an internal affair and not within the jurisdiction of the UN.
The rationale for the Guatemalan invasion was supplied by President Eisenhower. “There was a time,” he said, “when we had a very desperate situation, or we thought it was at least, in Central America, and we had to get rid of a Communist government that had taken over.” But the government the United States got rid of was the most democratic Guatemala had ever had. Communist influence in it was small—only four of the fifty-six seats in Congress were held by Communists, and no member of the presidential cabinet was a Communist—and throughout the country no more than four thousand persons, in a population of three and a half million, were Communists. Communists did hold important posts in the land-reform and education programs. It may be, however, that what really irked the United States was not communism but the actions of the government of Jacobo Arbenz against the United Fruit Company and American oil interests. In one region of Guatemala, Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by United Fruit; he offered compensation for the unused land, but the company turned it down, terming the offer “unacceptable.” Meanwhile, Arbenz began action to expropriate 173,000 acres of the company’s land in another area.
The ten years of reformist government in Guatemala that preceded the American intervention were described as follows by Ronald Schneider in his study Communism in Guatemala, 1944–1954:
While Guatemalans in general had enjoyed more freedom during the 1944–54 period than ever before, the working class had particular reason to feel loyal to the revolutionary regime. For the first time in Guatemalan history labor enjoyed the right to organize freely, bargain collectively
