Robert Skidelsky: Hot, Cold & Imperial
The question of how the world should be run, and America's part in its running, is the subject of much academic and political discussion in Washington these days. The factual questions are: Is the United States on the road to becoming an empire like the Roman and British Empires before it? What are the prospects for such an enterprise in today's world? More speculatively, does globalization require an imperial underpinning? There are also questions of value: Is imperialism a good or bad thing? Should the United States sacrifice its republican institutions in order to fulfil an imperial vocation?[1]
Gregor Dallas's 1945: The War That Never Ended can be read as setting the scene for this discussion. The Second World War cleared away the European empires, actual and aspiring, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the two contending superpowers. The collapse of the Soviet Union concluded the "unfinished business" of the war, by leaving the United States the sole superpower and simultaneously creating a single world economy. The dynamics of postwar US supremacy and the question of whether they are pushing the United States toward formal empire are the subject matter of Charles Maier's Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors.
1.
World War II, according to Gregor Dallas, never ended: it just stopped where the armies of East and West met, and almost immediately morphed into the cold war. This was because although the Soviet Union had achieved its war aim-an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans-America had not achieved its aim, which, it will come as no surprise, was to convert the whole of Europe to democracy and free enterprise. The cold war started when Truman realized that "democracy" did not mean quite the same to Stalin as it did to the Americans.
That, in a nutshell, is the main argument of Dallas's discursive but fascinating book, made up of myriad fragments like a collage. Dallas justifies his method by quoting the Polish poet Czesl/aw Mil/osz: "You can only express things properly by details. When you've observed a detail, you must discover the detail of the detail." Nevertheless, underlying the book is an eminently sound proposition: that the war against Germany (Japan is scarcely mentioned) was simultaneously a struggle to control the post-Nazi future. Behind every military decision lay a political calculation. Indeed, Dallas's book is so much taken up with the jostling for postwar position that it sometimes loses sight of the fact that till 1945 a war was still being fought against Nazi Germany. But even in defeat, Hitler, too, influenced the shape of post-Nazi Europe, by his choice of where to fight, how hard to fight, whom to surrender to-and whom to kill. By the end, he preferred to have Germany conquered by Slavic communism than by the decadent democracies.
Dallas dates the turning point of the war to July 1943, with the German failure to push back the Russian salient at Kursk and with the Allied landings in Sicily. But Hitler may have realized that the war was lost-in the sense that he would not be able to impose his will on events by military force alone -as early as December 1941, following the disastrous German defeat before Moscow, one of the forgotten but decisive battles of the war.[2] Thereafter the most he expected from his armies was to achieve "temporary" victories to put him into a better bargaining position. He thought that the alliance between the West and the USSR would soon be torn asunder by conflicting interests, leaving him with room for a "political" solution. He was right to believe the Grand Alliance would break up, wrong to think it would happen before his own empire had been swept away. His aims, methods, and crimes had put him beyond the pale for the Western Allies.
Dallas suggests that Hitler would have had a better chance with Stalin. The main evidence for this is the Ribbentrop-Molotov, or Nazi-Soviet, Pact of August 23, 1939. By the terms of this pact, Hitler recognized half of Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia as being in the Russian "sphere." Most historians have regarded the pact as a marriage of convenience: Hitler avoided the danger of a two-front war; Stalin bought time. Dallas accepts the argument for Hitler -Hitler's sights were always set on the conquest and settlement of European Russia-but not for Stalin. Stalin looked on the pact as a long-term arrangement because, to put it brutally, Hitler could give him what the Western democracies could not: reconstitution of the tsarist empire and further gains for the future. In November 1940, he and Hitler toyed with the idea of carving up the British Empire between them. But this was not Hitler's dream, and he was probably leading Stalin on in order to keep supplies flowing from Russia till he was ready to strike.[3]
Dallas claims that even after the Germans invaded Russia, Stalin never abandoned the "fantastic perspectives" opened up by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. "In the spring and early summer of 1943, Stalin's representatives in Stockholm attempted to negotiate a revived Pact; it failed because Hitler insisted on holding on to the Ukraine." It was the Soviet victory at Kursk in July 1943, not at Stalingrad in December 1942 (which was followed by a successful German counterattack), that finally convinced him that Hitler had no more to offer. "As the Soviet armies rolled forward, Stalin could nourish the dream of imposing on Europe a novel kind of Nazi-Soviet Pact-one minus the Nazis."
The strength of Dallas's hypothesis is that it helps explain the movement of Stalin's armies, and thus links the Nazi- Soviet Pact to the origins of the cold war. ...
Read entire article at NY Review of Books
Gregor Dallas's 1945: The War That Never Ended can be read as setting the scene for this discussion. The Second World War cleared away the European empires, actual and aspiring, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the two contending superpowers. The collapse of the Soviet Union concluded the "unfinished business" of the war, by leaving the United States the sole superpower and simultaneously creating a single world economy. The dynamics of postwar US supremacy and the question of whether they are pushing the United States toward formal empire are the subject matter of Charles Maier's Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors.
1.
World War II, according to Gregor Dallas, never ended: it just stopped where the armies of East and West met, and almost immediately morphed into the cold war. This was because although the Soviet Union had achieved its war aim-an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans-America had not achieved its aim, which, it will come as no surprise, was to convert the whole of Europe to democracy and free enterprise. The cold war started when Truman realized that "democracy" did not mean quite the same to Stalin as it did to the Americans.
That, in a nutshell, is the main argument of Dallas's discursive but fascinating book, made up of myriad fragments like a collage. Dallas justifies his method by quoting the Polish poet Czesl/aw Mil/osz: "You can only express things properly by details. When you've observed a detail, you must discover the detail of the detail." Nevertheless, underlying the book is an eminently sound proposition: that the war against Germany (Japan is scarcely mentioned) was simultaneously a struggle to control the post-Nazi future. Behind every military decision lay a political calculation. Indeed, Dallas's book is so much taken up with the jostling for postwar position that it sometimes loses sight of the fact that till 1945 a war was still being fought against Nazi Germany. But even in defeat, Hitler, too, influenced the shape of post-Nazi Europe, by his choice of where to fight, how hard to fight, whom to surrender to-and whom to kill. By the end, he preferred to have Germany conquered by Slavic communism than by the decadent democracies.
Dallas dates the turning point of the war to July 1943, with the German failure to push back the Russian salient at Kursk and with the Allied landings in Sicily. But Hitler may have realized that the war was lost-in the sense that he would not be able to impose his will on events by military force alone -as early as December 1941, following the disastrous German defeat before Moscow, one of the forgotten but decisive battles of the war.[2] Thereafter the most he expected from his armies was to achieve "temporary" victories to put him into a better bargaining position. He thought that the alliance between the West and the USSR would soon be torn asunder by conflicting interests, leaving him with room for a "political" solution. He was right to believe the Grand Alliance would break up, wrong to think it would happen before his own empire had been swept away. His aims, methods, and crimes had put him beyond the pale for the Western Allies.
Dallas suggests that Hitler would have had a better chance with Stalin. The main evidence for this is the Ribbentrop-Molotov, or Nazi-Soviet, Pact of August 23, 1939. By the terms of this pact, Hitler recognized half of Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia as being in the Russian "sphere." Most historians have regarded the pact as a marriage of convenience: Hitler avoided the danger of a two-front war; Stalin bought time. Dallas accepts the argument for Hitler -Hitler's sights were always set on the conquest and settlement of European Russia-but not for Stalin. Stalin looked on the pact as a long-term arrangement because, to put it brutally, Hitler could give him what the Western democracies could not: reconstitution of the tsarist empire and further gains for the future. In November 1940, he and Hitler toyed with the idea of carving up the British Empire between them. But this was not Hitler's dream, and he was probably leading Stalin on in order to keep supplies flowing from Russia till he was ready to strike.[3]
Dallas claims that even after the Germans invaded Russia, Stalin never abandoned the "fantastic perspectives" opened up by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. "In the spring and early summer of 1943, Stalin's representatives in Stockholm attempted to negotiate a revived Pact; it failed because Hitler insisted on holding on to the Ukraine." It was the Soviet victory at Kursk in July 1943, not at Stalingrad in December 1942 (which was followed by a successful German counterattack), that finally convinced him that Hitler had no more to offer. "As the Soviet armies rolled forward, Stalin could nourish the dream of imposing on Europe a novel kind of Nazi-Soviet Pact-one minus the Nazis."
The strength of Dallas's hypothesis is that it helps explain the movement of Stalin's armies, and thus links the Nazi- Soviet Pact to the origins of the cold war. ...