7.

Stability and Change in a Bipolar World, 1943-1980

Winston Churchill rejoiced when the United States joined the war. He later
explained that the fate of Hitler was sealed, that of Musolini also is sealed
and that the Japanese would be ground to powder and that all the rest was
merely the application of overwhelming force.


The Proper Application of Overwhelming Force

Churchill was correct.
The loss of Singapore was as a result of the British concentration of
aircrafts and trained divisions in the Mediterranean area. This altered the
overall balance of forces once the newer belligerents were properly
mobilized. The Germans and the Japanese continued their offensive, yet
the further they extended themselves, the less capable they were of
meeting the counter offensives which the allies were steadily preparing.

German and Japan leadership committed grievous political or strategical
errors after 1941. For example: The Japanese submarines and their
formidable torpedoes were misused, also the navy failed to protect its
marine. Japanese lost the battle of intelligence, codes and decrypts. One of
Germans mistake could be that about 3.9 million Germans were trying to
hold off 5.5 million Russians on the Eastern front. The fall of Berlin into the
hands of the Red Army and Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima and Nakasaki
symbolized not only the end of another war but the beginning of a new
world order in world affairs.

The New Strategic Landscape

While historians might quibble at the claim that nothing of a comparable
nature had occurred during the past fifteen hundreds years, it was
becoming clear the global balance of power after the war would be totally
different from that preceding it. Former Great Powers-France, Italy had
eclipsed. The German bid for mastery in Europe was collapsing, as was
Japans bid in the Far East and Pacific. Britain, despite Churchill, was
fading. The bipolar world had at last arrived; it moved from one system to
another, only the United States and the USSR counted, and of the two, the
American super power vastly superior. Most of the world at this time was
either exhausted by the war or still in a colonial stage of under
development.


The US was the only great power, which became richer because of World
War II. American power in 1945 was artificially high like Britain in 1815.
Even in absolute terms, the US was a mighty power accounting for two
thirds of the worlds gold reserves, half of the global manufacturing output
and a third of the worlds exports. Economic strength rapidly translated
into military power. The US soon found itself playing a more active role in
international affairs. The US belief was that unhampered trade fitted well
with peace. It was committed to a new world order built on the principles
of western capitalism. The Americans offered aid in return for currency
convertibility and more open competition.

Russia of 1945 was therefore a military giant but a the same time
economically poor, deprived and unbalanced. This growth of the Soviet
Empire appeared to confirm the geopolitical predictions of Mackinder
(founding father of geopolitics) and others that a gigantic military power
would control the resources of the Eurasian Heartland; and that the
further expansion of that state into the periphery or Rimland would need
to be contested by the great maritime states if they were preserve a global
balance of power. It would still be another few years before U.S.
administrations, shanken by the Korean War, completely abandoned their
earlier ideas of One Worldand replaced them with the image of an
unrelenting superpower struggle across the international arena.

The Soviet was identified with Marxian communism, while the U.S. with
liberalism.


The Cold War and Third World

A large part of international politics over two decades after the war was to
concern itself with adjusting to that Soviet-American rivalry, and then with
its partial rejection. It was initially focused upon remarking the boundaries
of Europe. Promoting the Communist world revolution was a secondary
but not unconnected consideration, since Russias strategic and political
position was most likely to be enhanced if it could create other Marxist-led
states which looked to Moscow for guidance.
Initially communist parties were controlled in most of Europe, in France
and in Italy. However the controlled policy became limited, as fast strategy
evolved two basic elements, one was to indicate to Moscow those regions
of the world which the U.S. can not permit to fall in to hostile hands, and
such states would be given military support to build up their power of
resistance, and a Soviet attack on them would be regarded as a casus belli.
The second was a massive programme of U.S. economic aid to permit the
rebuilding of shattered industries, farms and cities of Europe and Japan to

prevent those nations from falling into communist doctrines of class

struggle and revolution.
After the Berlin Crisis (Berlin Blockade) of 1948-1949, officials in
Washington and London sought ways by which European nations and the
U.S. could stand together in the event of hostilities with Russia. In theses
circumstances, event isolationist senators could be moved to support
proposals for the creation of what was to be the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, with full American membership, with its strategical purpose
being the provision of North American aid to the European states in the
event of Russian aggression. The NATO alliance did military what the
Marshall plan had done economically.

The cold war scalation from Europe to the rest of the world was no
surprise at all. The perception of global advance of communism to many
parts of the world came to be understood. Another feature of the cold war
area was the increasing arms race between the two blocs, along with the
creation of military alliances. The enormous surge in American defence
expenditure for several years after 1950 clearly reflect the costs of the
Korean war which the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. became deeply involved.

If the projection of Soviet power and influence into the world outside was
far less extensive, the years after Stalins death nonetheless saw
noteworthy advances. Krushchev, it is clear, wanted the Soviet Union to be
admired, even loved, rather than feared; he also wanted to redirect
resources from the military to agricultural investment and consumer
goods. His general foreign-policy ideas reflected his hope for a thaw in
the Cold War. Overruling Molotov, he removed Soviet troops from Austria,
he handed back the Porkkala naval base to Finland and Port Arthur to
China; and he improved relations with Yugoslavia, arguing that there were
separate roads to socialism. Although 1955 saw the formal
establishment of the Warsaw Pact, in response to West Germanys joining
of NATO, Krushchev was willing to open diplomatic relations with Bonn.
He was also keen to improve relations with the S.S. although his own
volatility of manner and the by the by now chronic distrust with which
Washington interpreted all Russian moves mad a real dtente impossible.
In that same year, Khrushchev traveled to India, Bruma, and Afghanistan.
The Third World was from now on going to be taken seriously by the
Soviet Union, just when more and more Afro-Asian states were gaining
independence.

Third World was called to described as a third world precisely because
insisted on its distinction both from the American- and the Russian-
dominated blocs. This did not mean that the countries which met at the
original Bandung Conference in April 1955 were free of all ties and
obligations to the superpowers- Turkey, China, Japan, and the Philippines,

for example, were among those attending the conference for whom the
term nonalignedwould have been inappropriate.

The Fissuring of the Bipolar World

As the 1960s moved into the 1970s, there nevertheless remained good
reason why the Washington-Moscow relationship should continue to seem
all important in world affairs. Militarily, the USSR had drawn much closer
to the U.S., both were still in a different league from everyone else.
For all this focus upon the American-Russian relationship and its many
ups and downs between 1960 and 1980, other trends had been at work to
make the international power system much less bipolar than it had
appeared to be in the earlier period. Not only had the Third World
emerged to complicate matters, but significant fissures had occurred in
what had earlier appeared to be the two monolithic blocs dominated by
Moscow and Washington. The most decisive of these by far, with
repercussions which are difficult to measure fully event at the present
time, was the split between the USSR and Communist China. The trend and
conflict between Moscow and China showed that China had emerged as a
third super power after it had developed a hydrogen bomb and was on its
way to developing a nuclear bomb. The Gaulles (Charles de Gaulle)
campaign against American hegemony also added to the impression that
the 2 blocs were breaking up. France began to pull out of NATO and began
by expelling the organizations headquarters from Paris in 1966 and
closing down all American bases on French soil, after having developed
nuclear technology. At this time the relationship between France and
Moscow improved.

The Changing Economic Balances 1950-1980

In July 1971, Richard Nixon repeated his opinion to a group of news-media
executives in Kansas City that there now existed five clusters of world
economic power western Europe, Japan, and China as well as the USSR
and US. The recovery of war damaged economies, the development of new
Technologies, the drift from agriculture to industry, the harnessing of
national resources within planned economies, and the spread of
industrialization to the Third World all helped to effect this dramatic
change. Economic transformation after 1945 of Japan showed one of good
example of sustained modernization, outclassing almost all of the existing
advanced countries as a commercial and technological competitor and
providing a model for imitation by other Asian countries.

Half a century ago, Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, as far
as its capitalist strength was concerned, compared with the strength of

England at that time. Japan was similarly insignificant compared with

Russia.

Table: Shares of Gross World Product, 1960-1980