Foreign Policy at the Periphery

The Shifting Margins of US International Relations since World War II

Bevan Sewell, Maria Ryan, Bevan Sewell, Maria Ryan

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813168470
• eBook ISBN: 9780813168494
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

As American interests assumed global proportions after 1945, policy makers were faced with the challenge of prioritizing various regions and determining the extent to which the United States was prepared to defend and support them. Superpowers and developing nations soon became inextricably linked and decolonizing states such as Vietnam, India, and Egypt assumed a central role in the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. As the twentieth century came to an end, many of the challenges of the Cold War became even more complex as the Soviet Union collapsed and new threats arose.

Featuring original essays by leading scholars, Foreign Policy at the Periphery examines relationships among new nations and the United States from the end of the Second World War through the global war on terror. Rather than reassessing familiar flashpoints of US foreign policy, the contributors explore neglected but significant developments such as the efforts of evangelical missionaries in the Congo, the 1958 stabilization agreement with Argentina, Henry Kissinger's policies toward Latin America during the 1970s, and the financing of terrorism in Libya via petrodollars. Blending new, internationalist approaches to diplomatic history with newly released archival materials, Foreign Policy at the Periphery brings together diverse strands of scholarship to address compelling issues in modern world history.

1

THEMES

1

How the Periphery Became the Center

The Cold War, the Third World, and the Transformation in US Strategic Thinking

Robert J. McMahon

This chapter presents a critical examination of the relationship between the center and the periphery in US strategic thinking during the Cold War era. It argues that sharp and meaningful distinctions between the periphery and the center largely collapsed during the early Cold War years, leading US policymakers to conflate, and confuse, peripheral with vital interests. The impact of this pronounced shift in American strategic thinking was profound; it permitted countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, among others, to assume outsized significance in American foreign policy while drawing disproportionate US attention and resources.

After acknowledging the ambiguity and elasticity of the term periphery and exploring critically the different ways in which that term has been utilized in Cold War historiography, I examine the multiple ways in which the periphery came to be equated with the Third World in US strategic thinking and the process by which the Third World, in turn, came to be seen by American elites as a vast, undifferentiated space—a space populated by racially and civilizationally inferior peoples, wracked by political and social instability, yet possessing a treasure trove of crucial natural resources. Significantly, different parts of the Third World became important to US planners at different times and for quite different reasons.

Since virtually every corner of the Third World came to be viewed by American strategists as vital, or potentially vital, to the overall national security interests of the United States—by no later than the mid- and late 1950s—it is crucial to understand how this blurring of distinctions occurred. American policymakers maintained a clear hierarchy of importance among different Third World areas during the earliest years of the Cold War. The Middle East and Southeast Asia stood at the top of that hierarchy for a confluence of economic and geopolitical reasons; other regions ranked much lower. The present chapter seeks to explicate how that changed: how and why a globalist vision emerged in US policy circles that resulted in the gradual disappearance of distinctions between core and periphery along with the erasure of distinctions among peripheral regions and countries. Strategic, economic, ideological, political, and psychological factors seamlessly merged in US strategic thinking, I stress, making every corner of the world critical, or potentially critical, to the nation’s expansive global interests. That development carried far-reaching ramifications for the Cold War and for America’s international role.

Scholars of modern international history have increasingly utilized the term periphery in their work. I have bowed to that fashion myself, titling my book on US relations with India and Pakistan between 1947 and 1966 The Cold War on the Periphery.¹ In it, I deployed periphery both as a description of the region I was examining and as a construct and framework for my analysis.

Yet it bears emphasizing that periphery remains an elastic and ambiguous term. It is often used without a clear definition, and it sometimes means strikingly different things to different authors. The formal dictionary definition of the word—“the external boundary or surface of a body; the outward bounds of something as distinguished from its regions or center; [or] an area lying beyond the strict limits of a thing”—hardly hints at the wider meanings periphery has assumed among scholars of international history.²

For world-systems theorists, periphery (along with core and semiperiphery) constitutes one of the three interconnected spatial and functional constants in a world capitalist system that has existed from the sixteenth century to the present. In his adaptation of this theory to fit the history of US foreign policy since 1945, the historian Thomas J. McCormick describes the peripheral zone of the world system as one that specializes in the production of agricultural commodities and raw materials for the benefit of core countries. He sees periphery and Third World as synonymous during the Cold War era. Essentially, the periphery/Third World served as the “hewers of wood and carriers of water” for the system’s hegemonic power, the United States, as well as for its industrialized, high-technology fellow core states of Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. Throughout the Cold War era, McCormick contends, the Third World’s value to the United States derived from the high priority Americans assigned to “the economic integration of the periphery into core market economies—as investment opportunities, as sources of cost-cutting raw materials, as consumer goods markets.” During that period, a time in which the United States maintained its position as the world’s chief capital exporter, “the Third World absorbed one-third of [US] overseas investments[,] and that one-third generated more aggregate profit than the two-thirds invested in Europe, Japan, and Canada.”³

For scholars whose work emphasizes the strategic more than the material wellsprings of American foreign policy, periphery typically alludes to areas of the world considered to be of secondary or tertiary interest to US policymakers. Thus, foreign relations historians and international relations specialists alike routinely divide US interests in different parts of the world into those that are vital, meaning crucial, or essential, or fundamental (in other words, those that must be preserved in order to sustain the national security), and those that are peripheral, meaning decidedly nonvital, if not marginal, to the national security. The diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan captured this key distinction as well as anyone in several memoranda that he penned and speeches that he delivered in the early post–World War II years. That not all parts of the world were equally vital to American security formed his guiding premise. Rather, he wrote in August 1948: “We should select first those areas of the world which . . . we cannot permit . . . to fall into hands hostile to us, and . . . we [should] put forward, as the first specific objective of our policy and as an irreducible minimum of national security, the maintenance of political regimes in those areas at least favorable to the continued power and independence of our nation.”⁴

In a subsequent address at the National War College, the originator of the containment doctrine lent unusual specificity to this concept by identifying what he characterized as the world’s five vital power centers: the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, continental Western Europe (including West Germany), and Japan. Those, Kennan stressed, constituted the only “centers of industrial and military power in the world which are important to us from the standpoint of national security.” His reasoning flowed from his calculation that only in those five areas “would [you] get the requisite conditions of climate, of industrial strength, of population and of tradition which would enable people there to develop and launch the type of amphibious power which would have to be launched if our national security were [to be] seriously affected.”⁵

John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan’s prizewinning biographer and a leading scholar of the Cold War, has peppered his own prodigious scholarship with similar core/periphery, vital/peripheral distinctions. For Gaddis, those US Cold War diplomats who helped conceive and bring to fruition the soundest—and hence most realistic—grand strategies, such as Henry A. Kissinger and Kennan himself, followed this thinking closely. Their success derived in large measure from their recognition of the crucial distinction between the core and the periphery and from their concomitant unwillingness to permit a preoccupation with presumed threats to determine Washington’s fundamental interests and priorities. Such statesmen recognized that the ends and means of policy needed to be in balance; resources, since they were always finite, needed to be utilized for the achievement of the most essential policy goals. A multitude of scholars of US foreign relations, many proceeding implicitly from the theoretical assumptions associated with realism, similarly gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of different American statesmen and presidential administrations in terms of their grasp of the essential distinctions between core and periphery—and especially their ability to differentiate vital from peripheral interests.⁶

In his sweeping account of the national security strategy of the Harry S. Truman administration, Melvyn P. Leffler appropriates such a framework to appraise the combination of wisdom and shortsightedness that he attributes to America’s actions in the early Cold War years. While he heaps praise on Truman administration planners for conceiving and implementing policies that strengthened core industrial states while orienting them toward the United States, he faults them for exaggerating and distorting the importance of the Third World periphery. Washington policymakers “attributed excessive value to the Third World,” he charges, becoming “ever more determined to preserve stability and thwart the rise of revolutionary nationalism on the periphery.” He decries the fact that senior diplomatic and defense officials in the Truman administration became so “obsessed” with the presumed Communist threat to peripheral areas that they even displayed “a willingness to risk atomic war over the periphery.” They grievously “misconstrued the intrinsic value of even the most important of these countries,” Leffler contends, concluding: “For prudent men to have attributed so much importance to the periphery, for them to have possessed such exaggerated notions of Soviet capabilities in the Third World, and for them to have invested so heavily in strategic overkill was foolish indeed.”⁷

Periphery has thus become a veritable synonym for Third World among scholars of the Cold War. The initial prospectus for the conference that inspired the present volume well captures that common understanding. “By the early 1950s,” the conference organizers noted, “it was becoming clear to officials in both Washington and Moscow that the location for much of the Cold War was going to be the developing world—or, as political scientists would subsequently label it, the periphery.” Hence, in this standard formulation, the terms developing world, Third World, and periphery are interchangeable.

Yet the assumptions undergirding this common conceptual usage also suggest a problematic notion of the Third World as undifferentiated space. This reductionist usage implies a false comparability between places as diverse as Southeast Asia, Korea, the Middle East, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

A partial explanation for the inclination to lump together all Third World territories can be found in the upsurge of recent scholarship in international history that highlights themes of race, development, and culture. In racial terms, the Third World/periphery was of course overwhelmingly nonwhite. US officials, especially during the early phase of the Cold War, frequently thought in terms of racial hierarchies and regularly disparaged nonwhites. Dean Rusk, who worked closely with Secretary of State Dean Acheson and later ascended himself to the top position at the State Department, once observed that Acheson “did not give a damn about the brown, yellow, black, and red people in various parts of the world.”⁸ And that perception, however harsh, captures the combination of disdain, condescension, and racial stereotyping with which Acheson and an entire generation of US policymakers approached the non-Western world.⁹ For his part, George Kennan regarded “states with colored populations” as “the neurotic products of exotic backgrounds and tentative Western educational experiences.” As vice president, Richard M. Nixon once remarked that the people of Africa could hardly be taken seriously since they had only recently come out of the trees, and an Africa specialist in the State Department dismissed African freedom fighters as “black baboons.” Those examples can easily be multiplied many times over and just from a modest examination of now-declassified US diplomatic records. More than one scholar, accordingly, borrowing from the cultural theorist Edward Said, has suggested that Americans internalized an Orientalist view of Third World peoples.¹⁰

In developmental terms, US elites inside and outside the government reflexively equated the non-Western world with the planet’s poorest and least-developed parts—whether those areas had been independent for generations, as had most of the Latin American republics, or were just emerging from decades of colonial subjugation. Hunger and poverty plagued the diverse peoples who inhabited the peripheral areas of the Global South, according to most Western observers. The non-Western portions of the globe thus appeared conceptually unified, not just by their subordinate economic status relative to the advanced, industrialized West, but by their desperate need for modernization and development. The very existence of those near-uniform conditions of underdevelopment, accordingly, lent additional support to the image of the periphery as an essentially homogeneous space.¹¹

Culturalist work in international history points us toward a set of even broader prejudices feeding US perceptions of the Third World as a locale whose common attributes far outweighed any local or regional distinctions. “To the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies and subordinates, the Third World was by definition an undifferentiated space,” emphasizes Andrew Rotter. “It was filled with vital natural resources but inconveniently wracked by instability, presided over by leaders whom First and Second World officials generally considered to be racially or civilizationally inferior to themselves.”¹² The culturalist wave in international history points to a wide range of analytic constructs—from gender, race, and religion to language, emotion, and identity—that serve to underscore the subordinate position that the entirety of the periphery held for most US policymakers throughout the Cold War decades.

Yet, if we focus on US perceptions and plans regarding the value of peripheral territories to the overal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1. Themes
• Part 2. Case Studies
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index