O A Westad
Cold Hands, Warm Heart
Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
By Frank Costigliola (Princeton University Press 544pp £24.95)
What role does emotion play in modern diplomacy? Would the US reaction to 9/11 have been different if George W Bush had not needed to act as a Texas cowboy in order to hide his privileged East Coast upbringing? Would the Serbs have got a better deal in the post-Yugoslavia settlement if Slobodan MiloševiĆ had had less of the dark about him? And would the Cold War have ended peacefully if not for Ronald Reagan's immense personal charm and ability to fuddle the issues?
All historians worth their salt have accepted the role that emotion and personal politics play in international as well as domestic affairs. Sitting around the table negotiating with other world leaders is, after all, not so very different from being at a company board meeting or (God forbid) discussing an inheritance with relatives. In each case anger and confrontational behaviour close down possibilities, while smiles, flattery and (on occasion) liberal amounts of alcohol open them up. Getting anything done is dependent on getting along, or at least on continuing to talk.
The start of the Cold War was no different, claims the eminent US historian Frank Costigliola in Roosevelt's Lost Alliances. President Roosevelt had been able to hold an unlikely wartime coalition together because of his ability to charm his partners, including the surly Russians. When Roosevelt's successor Harry Truman replaced charm with an angst-filled desire to discipline and punish, the alliance collapsed and the Cold War ensued. Had FDR been in charge the Cold War could have been avoided. With Truman (and his key advisers, Averell Harriman and George Kennan) taking over, the form the conflict with Moscow took was if not unavoidable, then very predictable.
Costigliola's challenging book is much richer than this one conclusion, of course, but it is the author's main message, and he brings together a wealth of evidence to prove it. FDR treated the Soviets as he treated reluctant senators or hesitant love-interests at home: he bamboozled them, overwhelmed them and left them thinking they had established a very special personal bond with the President. 'The President is a MAN - mentally, physically, & spiritually - What more can I say,' one of his girlfriends wrote.
But there is of course more to say. Stalin may have been given to the President's charms, and he certainly appreciated the respect, confidentiality and apparent even-handedness of FDR's approach (so different, in Stalin's eyes, from the narrow-minded and sometimes slighting approach of Winston Churchill). Even so, as Costigliola admits, the Soviet leader was a prisoner of his own thinking and his own ideological background. Trust was not easy to build with a man who had murdered millions of his own countrymen simply on suspicions of disloyalty. And some of Stalin's postwar actions - the behaviour in Eastern Europe and occupied Germany and the demands on China, Iran and Turkey, for instance - undermined trust among the allies as much as any action taken by Washington or London.
The issue of whether a Cold War that was to last forty-five years could have been avoided in 1945-6 is therefore much more complex than just the question of FDR's (or Harry Truman's) own policies. Costigliola is right in criticising those who have ruled that the Cold War was unavoidable. The global situation as the Second World War came to an end was fluid and changeable, with a number of very diverse issues on the table, not all of which pointed towards a Soviet-US confrontation. The Soviet Union needed not only peace, but a stable international environment in which to rebuild from the devastations of war. Furthermore, Soviet sources show clearly that Stalin did not intend to launch a Cold War; he remained hopeful that some form of Soviet-American cooperation could be rebuilt well into 1947.
But Stalin knew even less about building trust than Harry Truman knew about the intricacies of international affairs. Soviet behaviour towards its neighbours as the war ended set off alarm bells among leading groups in all countries from France to the far coasts of Asia. Few of them had forgotten Stalin's inter-war purges, his pact with Hitler or, in the case of socialists, his many attempts at breaking the non-Communist Left. The origins of the Cold War can be traced as much to these countries opting for an alliance with the United States in order to stave off potential Soviet aggression as they can to the changing perceptions in the United States itself - even though the two, of course, are linked.
The other reason why even FDR's continued presidency would have been an uncertain measure against the Cold War is the approach to international affairs that the United States had developed since the late nineteenth century. Americans, as Robert Kagan puts it (approvingly!), saw themselves as a 'dangerous nation'; US foreign policy elites believed in values that were incompatible with how the world had functioned before. Sovereignty or national pride meant little if they stood in the way of market access. A belief that countries could get along even if they subscribed to different social systems was very far from the regular US approach. FDR had managed to develop an alliance with the Soviet Union because of the extraordinary trauma of Pearl Harbor. Come peace, most Americans were likely to return to their general universalist predilections.
In spite of this, Costigliola is probably right that there was a chance, however limited, in 1945-6 that the Cold War could have been avoided or at least postponed. What would a non-Cold War late 1940s have looked like? The United States would almost certainly have withdrawn its forces from Europe, leaving the Soviet Union the predominant military power there. The nuclear arms race could have been avoided through multilateral agreements. Parts of Eastern Europe could have avoided full Sovietisation. Communist parties in Italy and France could have come to power through free elections. It would have been a very different world, though not necessarily a more peaceful one.
Frank Costigliola is absolutely right in focusing on the decisions of individual policymakers in explaining historical outcomes. His preoccupation with gender theory and emotional belief systems does not get in the way of his writing (though it is there in the notes for anyone who wishes to consult them). The lessons of postwar personal politics, as presented in this excellent book, are instructive for all students of international affairs, especially those looking at the early twenty-first century, a time when emotion often seems to overwhelm all other aspects of policymaking.
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O A Westad's Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 will be published in 2012.
