THE COLD WAR: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENTS Summary Session on the Cold War and Eastern and FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 1971 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, SUBCOMMITTEE ON EUROPE, The subcommittee met. pursuant to call, at 10:13 a.m., in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John S. Monagan presiding. Mr. MONAGAN. We will call this hearing of the Subcommittee on Europe to order. I might say, incidentally, the chairman, Mr. Rosenthal, was unexpectedly called away to New York, where he had pressing business; therefore, he asked me, as a member of the subcommittee, to act as chairman. The subcommittee today concludes with this hearing a series which has attempted to illuminate the past 25 years of American policy in Europe. It has tried to ask certain questions and question certain assumptions concerning that period. We have proceeded by hearing, first, several eminent historians who have studied carefully, and with varying interpretations, the events at the close of World War II, which marked the start of the cold war. We have heard from policymakers present and past to understand better the specific circumstances of the decisions which the historians later analyzed. We have tried to hear a variety of viewpoints, both to wage a search for facts and also to guard against committing ourselves to unquestioned assumptions in this inquiry. We have also heard with great interest the views of a number of Europeans whose continent has been the scene for many of the actions of the cold war, and whose countries constitute the direct responsibility of this subcommittee in its consideration of American foreign policy. Today we are very pleased to have two distinguished American scholars, both of whom have acted in and studied the events and decisions of our country in the cold war. We are also privileged to have a visitor from France, a guest of our country, who will offer his views on the subject of today's meeting: future problems of the Eastern and Western alliances. We are pleased to begin today with the testimony of Prof. Fred Warner Neal, of the Claremont Graduate School of Claremont, Calif. Professor, we will be glad to hear your statement. STATEMENT OF FRED WARNER NEAL, PROFESSOR, CLAREMONT GRADUATE SCHOOL, CLAREMONT, CALIF. Political scientist; b. Northville, Mich., August 5, 1915. B.A. University of Michigan 1937; Ph. D. 1955; student (Nieman fellow 1942), Harvard 1942-43; student University of Karlova, Prague, Czec., 1949; Fulbright research fellow, University of Paris, France, 1950. Served as Washington correspondent for United Press and Wall Street Journal, 1938-1943; consultant, Russian affairs, chief foreign research, Department of State, 1946-48; assistant to president, University of State of New York, 1948-49; assistant to Chairman, Committee on Present Danger, 1951; assistant professor, political science, University of Colorado, 1951-56; associate professor, University of California at Los Angeles, 1956–57; associate professor of international relations and government, Claremont, Calif., Graduate School, 1957– 1960; professor, 1960 Rockefeller professor of international relations, University of West Indies, 1965–66; visiting lecturer, University of Michigan, 1950, 53-54; consultant, Center for Study of Democratic Institutions. Democratic nominee for Congress, 24th District, Calif., 1968. President, Albert Parvin Foundation. 1969 -. Co-author: The Politics of War, 1943: Titoism in Action; The Reforms in Yugoslavia after 1948, 1958; U.S. Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1961: Yugoslavia and the New Communism, 1962; War and Peace and Germany, 1962. Mr. NEAL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Fred Warner Neal. I am professor of international relations and government, and chairman of the international relations faculty at the Claremont Graduate School and University Center in California. Before World War II, I was Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal-in which capacity, incidentally, I often covered proceedings of this august subcommittee. During World War II, I served in the U.S. Naval Air Corps, mostly in Russia and Siberia, having earlier acquired some academic background in this area as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. After the war, I served first as consultant on Russian affairs in the State Department-where one assignment was to set up the Voice of America broadcasts to the Soviet Union-and then as Chief of Foreign Economic Research on Eastern Europe. After leaving the State Department, I studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Karlova University in Prague. On a visit to Hungary at the end of 1949, I was imprisoned by the Communists-briefly, I am glad to say-and on my return to the United States I found I had been denounced in the Slansky purge trials in Czechoslovakia as a "Western imperialist spy and saboteur." For what it may be worth, I have on occasion also been denounced by Izvestia, Radio Sofia, and the American Communists, as well as by some of our kookier right-wing groups. During the ensuing years, in addition to teaching at the Universities of Michigan, Colorado, and California, I was an associate of the American Universities Field Staff, responsible for research and lecturing on Eastern Europe to 10 major American universities, and later was and still am-consultant on international affairs for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. In this latter capacity, I arranged and directed the two international convocations in 1965 and 1967 on the theme of Pope John's encyclical Pacem in Terris, for which John's successor awarded me a Papal Medal. In serving in these various capacities, I have spent a considerable amount of time in the Soviet Union and Europe, both Western and Eastern, I suppose more time, if one considers my extensive stays in Yugoslavia, than almost any other native born American scholar. I have combined whatever expertise I have acquired in these areas with intensive study and observation of American foreign policy, which I consider literally, to be the most important subject in the world today. I have published several books and have written rather widely for scholarly publications, newspapers and magazines. Perhaps I should also add that I consider myself politically an undoctrinaire moderate. I was a Republican until 1960, having been brought up that way, and became a Democrat only because by that time the climate for Republican moderatism in California had become somewhat arid. In 1968 I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 24th California District-since 1970 represented by Mr. John Rousselot-and although I received more votes than any Democrat ever received in that district, I found an election is like baseball and foreign policy-missing by just a little means you don't get to base at all. I realize this is a theme to which you gentlemen may on occasion have given some contemplation. I apologize for going into so much detail about this background, but I did want to lay at least some claim to modest authority for what I have to say, and to indicate to you my general position in the political spectrum. First, permit me to congratulate the Foreign Affairs Committee, and in particular the Subcommittee on Europe and its distinguished chairman, on these hearings on the cold war. This is the first time, as far as I am aware, that Congress has attempted an investigation in depth on the underlying assumptions of our post-World War II foreign policy, and I think the effort is long overdue-say by about 25 years. There has been some excellent testimony presented to you. I would be less than honest, however, if I did not say that some of it-and I have, of course, not yet heard the testimony by my distinguished colleagues this morning-seemed to me to be bland to the point of obfuscation. Some of it merely repeated as "givens" the very assumptions your subcommittee is examining. Some of it tended to dismiss the cold war and the assumptions underlying our thinking about it as something now happily in the past and not still posing an important problem any more. Nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the fact. The cold war is alive, and it is in Washington, New York, the Midwest, the South, and in California. Since the roster of the Foreign Affairs Committee indicates that the competence of the Subcommittee on Europe "includes the European 'captive nations' "-which include inter alia areas legally, if unhappily, within the Soviet Union-one must conclude that the cold war is even in this chamber. In a longer and fairly well documented written statement submitted for the record, I have discussed some alternative concepts and alternative policies, and I earnestly hope you will give them some attention. They are indicative of the kind of approaches I think are necessary if our country and its ideals are to survive and flourish. They are in no sense radical departures; indeed, they represent only the first minimum steps in possible arrangements for better security. But there is no use even considering them or anything like them-until we get over the cold war hangups which, like hobgoblins in a closet, still haunt us. In 1840, that prescient and much-quoted Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that "when once an opinion has spread-over the United States-and has struck root there, it would seem that no power on earth is strong enough to eradicate it." What struck de Tocqueville during his travels in this country, he wrote: Was the difficulty of shaking the majority in an opinion once conceived or of drawing it off from a leader once adopted. Neither speaking nor writing can accomplish it. He said, and he concluded: Nothing but experience will avail, and even experience must be repeated. In this passage, M. de Tocqueville was not writing about the cold war, but he nevertheless spoke to the heart of the problem as I see it 130 years later. All one can say is, "le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose." The cold war stemmed from-and produced-a series of attitudes and assumptions about the nature of the world and America's role in it. Most of them concerned the Soviet Union and communism. In the years since World War II, the material and political bases of the world in which the cold war burgeoned have substantially changed. Some of those who helped formulate the cold war concepts have repudiated or abandoned them. There has been penetrating challenge to them from a small but articulate segment of the scholarly community. Yet so deeply did the original cold war ideas come to be embedded in the public consciousness that today, a quarter of a century later, they still underlie much thinking, official and unofficial, about foreign policy. So deeply have they come to be embedded in the public mind that it is doubtful if there can be real foreign policy flexibility, or genuine new directions in foreign policy, until they have been exorcised. One reason for the persistence of cold war concepts is that there never has been real debate about them. There has been frequent and often impassioned discussion about tactics, but no public examination of the fundamental basis of policy of sufficient scope and depth to make an impact on the national consciousness. There is, indeed, almost no public awareness of the extent to which legitimate questions can be raised concerning the validity of these underlying concepts and assumptions. Meanwhile, these ideas have found their way into scholarly commentary and educational texts, news reporting and analysis, novels, movies and TV programs, and even the comics. As the cold war developed careers, bureaucracies and industries-large segments of the population-came to have a built-in proprietary interest in affairs as they were; to suggest doubts was to challenge a way of life. The resulting public rigidity became such that no national political leader, and very few lesser ones, have ever had the courage, and usually not the insight, to call for examination of the basic cold war concepts or suggest policies at variance with them. The essence of American cold war thinking, as I see it, has been as follows: The Soviet Union, by its very nature, posed a constant danger of physical, military aggression against us and/or the "free world." Bent on world domination and communization, the Soviet Union, when temporarily unable to expand by military means, would inexorably seek to further its objectives by "exporting" violent revolution to other countries via Communists whom it controlled. Thus, the Soviet Union and communism and revolution were all parts of the same whole, constantly threatening the United States. Our security, therefore, could be insured only by "containing" all three by superior military force wherever they appeared to threaten. Thus, American interests were perforce global, all of equal priority. These cold war assumptions were inextricably associated with further assumptions: The United States had and could maintain clear military superiority over the Soviet Union. Compromise with the U.S.S.R. was dangerous, both because it would only encourage the Russians to make further demands, and also because the Soviet Union was an untrustworthy power-really an international conspiracy-which would not keep its agreements. Therefore, negotiations were unwise. Because of our military superiority, they were also unnecessary. Foreign policy, consequently, was dominated not by diplomatic but by military considerations. There was also another cold war assumption, always implicit, sometimes explicit, that: The Soviet Union, and consequently communism as an international political force, were not permanent features of the world to which adjustment was necessary, but, rather, passing phenomena doomed to failure either by defeat in a war or as a result of internal upheavals. We had to be ready for the first by round-the-clock military preparedness sufficient for all eventualities; and we had to assist the second by constant manifestation of disapproval as a part of a campaign to tell the truth to peoples behind the Iron Curtain. This assumption amounted to a psychological nonacceptance of the Soviet Union and its system which permitted us to be afraid and contemptuous of them at the same time. From the very end of the war, and in some cases before, American decisionmakers interpreted Soviet ideology and statements and actions in this light. Originally the threat was seen as emanating only from Moscow. "One nation, and one nation alone," said President Truman, referring to the Soviet Union, was responsible for the world's troubles. When communism came to power in China, it was, thus, automatically assumed-in the face of facts, logic, and 4.000 years of historythat it was something the Russians rather than the Chinese had done. Soon the aggressiveness attributed to the Soviet Union was associated with China. And then, gradually, the threat came to be not just the Soviet Union or China, but international communism. And then it became revolution, and the aggression which had to be combatted became, in the face of verbal logic, internal aggression. The cold war posture of the United States had another side, of course. Our perceptions of Soviet actions as invariably aggressive and unjustified mirrored our perceptions of our own actions as invariably defensive and justified. There was, therefore, a certain built-in |