Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (36 page)
Read Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 Online
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
The prime minister was still nervous, but Attlee’s letter was just the opening the activists in the Department of External Affairs were looking for. King was persuaded to send Pearson to Washington, and in early 1948 Canada and Britain set about seducing the United States into joining a formal alliance with Western Europe.
Mr Pearson’s cover story for his absence from Ottawa was that he was going to New York for a few days to help out General McNaughton, the Canadian representative on the Security Council, who was under the weather. General Charles Foulkes, the chairman of the Canadian Chiefs of Staff Committee, came in civilian clothes.…
The meetings were held in the War Room of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in the bowels of the Pentagon, and staff cars were sent to pick up the participants and to deliver them directly to a secret entrance in the basement of the Pentagon. The entrance was so secret that one Pentagon chauffeur got lost trying to find it.
Escott Reid
As far as the Russians were concerned, all the secrecy was a bit superfluous, since the second secretary at the British embassy in Washington, Donald Maclean, was a Soviet spy, and was providing Moscow with a “fairly full record” of the talks. But in the first couple of months this would not have occasioned much alarm in Moscow, for the negotiations did not go smoothly.
It was a miraculous birth.… Most informed observers at the beginning of 1948 would have said that a North Atlantic treaty was impossible.…
I can’t believe that one could have had the treaty if there hadn’t been two people at the State Department, not at the very top, who were enthusiasts for it—Jack Hickerson and Ted Achilles. Even though their superiors were opposed: George Kennan and Chip Bohlen and Robert Lovett.
Escott Reid
For a long time we were afraid to admit we were really negotiating a treaty. We were saying we were discussing common security
problems. As a matter of fact we didn’t even admit that we were talking privately with the Canadians and the British about it. There had been indications in Canada, by St. Laurent, by Mike Pearson and Norman Robertson, of interest in some Western defence agreement supplementing the United Nations. We knew they were thinking along these lines—as the British were. We thought that the three of us had a basically common approach.… We felt that anyone else might be approaching it from a nationalistic point of view.
Ted Achilles, director, Western European Affairs, U.S. State Department, 1947
It was, to begin with, very much the old Anglo-Saxon alliance of the war years revived: those excitable Europeans were too nationalistic, and they might have spies in their midst. But even this cozy English-speaking club might not have reached agreement if the first of the Berlin crises had not spurred them on. Only a couple of months after the secret talks began, the Western powers introduced a new currency in Germany, which meant, in effect, that the three-quarters of Germany that they occupied would henceforth be linked to the capitalist world economy.
Very few people in what was to become West Germany objected to this measure (which rapidly rescued the economy from the utter collapse in which it had been mired), and the Western powers had only done it after despairing of getting any agreement with the Soviets on a joint programme for German economic recovery. But Moscow interpreted it as a Western decision to divide Germany—which it was, in effect. The Russians struck back two days later, on June 24, 1948, by cutting off electricity to the Western-occupied sectors of the German capital, Berlin (which was located deep in the Soviet zone of Germany), and blockading the land access routes by which West Berlin’s food and fuel supplies arrived from the West. The U.S. Army briefly considered sending a convoy to fight its way down the autobahn to Berlin, but in
the end the Western occupying powers decided to circumvent the Soviet blockade by an airlift.
The blockade (which lasted almost a year, until the Russians finally agreed to reopen the land routes to West Berlin) was just what the secret NATO negotiations needed. It lent added strength to the view that the Russians were an unreasoning power that could only be dealt with by the threat of force. It was also a powerful propaganda tool—all those planes carrying food and supplies to a besieged population—to prepare Western public opinion for the alliance being secretly hatched in Washington. However, the increasingly militarized context of the secret discussions in Washington was disturbing to people like Pearson:
There is, I think, real danger of old-fashioned alliance policies dictated by purely military considerations.… [Ideally,
NATO]
would set forth the principles of Western society which we were trying not only to defend but to make the basis of an eventually united world, and not simply make us part of an American war machine against the Russians.
Lester Pearson,
“Mike”: Memoirs
, vol. 2
Pearson eventually managed to get Article 2 (the “Canadian article”) included in the
NATO
treaty, calling for economic collaboration, and social and cultural cooperation among the members as well as military guarantees. But Article 2 was mainly a sop to the fastidious and faint-hearted who didn’t want to admit to themselves that they were creating a military alliance. For the more robust and single-minded, the events of the past couple of years were ample proof that the Soviet Union was an inherently aggressive “outlaw state” that could only be stopped by force.
The Soviet Union was not on an expansionist rampage in the late 1940s, but it was behaving in a ruthlessly opportunistic fashion in what it considered its sphere of influence. This greatly facilitated the general round-up of stray nations that took place in 1948. As the secret tripartite talks progressed in Washington, the idea gradually expanded to a “North Atlantic” security pact that would embrace all the countries of Europe that weren’t under Communist domination. And even though the Russians knew all about the secret talks, the secrecy paid off in the end, for it allowed the stage to be thoroughly set before the Europeans and the U.S. Congress and public were invited in to contemplate the manifold virtues of a North Atlantic treaty.
It enabled the United States administration to pretend to Congress that the second stage of the negotiations, which began in July 1948 with France, the Netherlands and Belgium added to the original three [the U.S., Canada and Britain], grew out of the resolution of [Senator] Vandenberg’s which had been adopted by the Senate authorizing that kind of negotiation. Whereas, in fact, the State Department when it drafted the Vandenberg resolution was securing a legitimation of the results of the tripartite talks. The secrecy about the first stage of discussions also enabled the United States and Britain and Canada to pretend to France and the Benelux countries that they had participated in the discussions from the outset.
Q.
You didn’t tell them that there had been talks?
No, we pretended there hadn’t been. I’ve seen no indication that the French realised the talks had been taking place, or the Belgians or the Dutch. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t, but apparently the preservation of secrecy may have worked.
Escott Reid
The British and Canadian scheme was a brilliant success. By the time the talks concluded in early 1949, Americans generally believed
that
NATO
had been their own idea, and the Italians, the Portuguese, the Danes, the Norwegians and the Icelanders had also agreed to join. “It was a reversion to alliances and away from some of the universal aspirations we’d had,” fretted John Holmes, but for many people the pain of failure was eased by the rationalization that they were trying to stop another Hitler. This analogy was reinforced by the striking post-1945 linguistic fashion in the West to use the word “totalitarian” to describe both Nazis and Communists, implicitly putting them in the same category. (In the Soviet Union, the same political goal was accomplished by referring to both Nazis and Moscow’s current Western opponents as “imperialists.”)
Now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938–39 with Hitler. A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Franco Spain.… The oligarchy in Russia is no different from the Czars, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Charles I and Cromwell. It is a Frankenstein dictatorship worse than any of the others, Hitler included.
I hope it will end in peace. Be a nice girl and don’t worry about your Dad’s worries.
U.S. president Truman, letter to his daughter Margaret (then aged 24), March 1948
The Canadians who helped to create
NATO
in 1948–49 had no intention of dividing the world permanently: they saw the organization as a temporary measure designed to stabilize Western Europe politically while the Marshall Plan restored it economically—and in 1949 it was still possible to believe (with just a little effort) that we were not re-creating the alliance system. Although the
NATO
countries promised to consult politically in the event of any threat, and to come to the aid of any member under attack,
NATO
as created in 1949 involved no military command structure and no vast scheme of rearmament.
NATO was an alliance founded to stop an attack that wasn’t coming, by people who knew it wasn’t coming and were creating it for purposes of political morale-building among their own friends. That didn’t seem such an inexcusable crime to those who had to deal with the problems of the time, especially since one could hardly say that the Soviet Union was behaving in a more responsible manner. By the time the
NATO
treaty was ready to be signed, Louis St. Laurent had become prime minister. In 1947 he had publicly admitted that the proposal that eventually grew into
NATO
was “most undesirable,” but now both he and his new secretary of state for external affairs, Lester Pearson, believed it was a vital necessity.
I was present at the signing of the treaty. I remember Mr. Pearson stating the Canadian position, which was that this should not be just a military alliance, and that this required a consultation system which would try and align our policies as far as possible. At the time when the signature was taking place and Mr. Pearson had just made this speech, it happened that the Marine Band that was deployed by Mr. Truman for the occasion struck up “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” (laughter).
It seemed an appropriate comment.
George Ignatieff, External Affairs, 1940–62
The treaty was signed on April 4, 1949. Less than six months later, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb. Eight months after that, war broke out in Korea.
It was quite a quantum leap for the United States to go against the last will of Washington to keep out of European entangling alliances, as it was for Canada. But Korea was the explosive charge
which really exploded the world of uncommitment that Mr. King had depended on.
George Ignatieff
NATO
remained a paper alliance of mutual guarantees from April 1949 until June 1950. Then the coming of the Korean War stampeded its members into crash rearmament and the creation of a joint military command in Europe—with, naturally, an American as supreme commander. The arms race got underway in earnest, the Cold War entered its coldest phase and the anti-Communist witch hunt went into high gear in the United States. That was quite a list of repercussions for a war in a place that most Canadians would have had a hard time finding on a map in 1950.
Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1910, and after the Japanese surrender in 1945, it was occupied by both American and Soviet troops. The Soviets, arriving by land, took over the northern part of the peninsula, while the Americans, coming by sea, assumed control of the southern part. At a meeting of foreign ministers in Moscow in 1945, a joint commission of the United States and the USSR was set up to organize a “trustee” government for a period of five years. Once a freely elected Korean government had been established, the arbitrary border at the 38th Parallel would disappear and a unified Korea would re-emerge. Predictably, however, Washington and Moscow could not agree on how to run the elections.