"The cold war was largely an excuse for CIA actions, not the reason. Just take a look at operations like the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala or the coup in Iran in 1953. In both cases the reason for the intervention was big business. In Guatemala the democratic government had stepped on the toes of US Company United Fruit and in Iran the government nationalized the oil and kicked out foreign oil companies."
The Cold War was both.
The Soviet threat to Europe wasn't a bluff. The way history played out in real life, I don't think there was ever much of a threat that they'd invade. But if the U.S. Army hadn't been stationed in every West European country after World War Two, if we'd simply gone into isolation like we did in 1919, things would have been pretty different and I can easily see the Soviets subverting, bullying or outright invading their neighbors until the entire continent was theirs, leaving Britain and America isolated and vulnerable.
Was America ever threatened by communism? No, but that's probably because it was doing everything it could to make sure of that (e.g. containment doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO and all the rest). So the Cold War was real. At the same time, there were people in Britain, America and elsewhere who also found it convenient to use Cold War rhetoric to justify things that had nothing to do with the Cold War (see the coups against Mossadegh, Arbenz and Lumumba).
Actually, these coups probably harmed the actual Cold War effort more than anything. They destroyed potential allies (and unlike the thugs we replaced them with, these leaders actually had the support of their people and thus the alliance would have been a lot more long-term and substantive; if there hadn't been a coup in Iran in 1953, there wouldn't have been a revolution in 1979). They convinced third world nationalists that we were no different than the Brits and other colonial powers, and drove them right into the arms of the Soviets. They destroyed some of the Third World's earliest democratic experiments, and in so doing made it possible for the local Reds (and later islamists) to claim that democracy had failed and was too weak to protect them.
But what the hell; the people who supported these coups made sure they were accompanied with a drumbeat of Red Scare rhetoric that drowned out any considerations like the ones I just listed, so it went down in history as part of the Cold War. To this day, the hard right in America is still convinced that Mossadegh was a commie and that supporting Pahlavi was the noblest and most democratic thing we ever did in Iran. Not the most reassuring thing ever, but there you go.
Keep flying, son. And watch that potty mouth!
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rmancassman
15 years ago
This discussion reminds me of the old saying "when you step in s**t you get s**t on you" which is probably a cruder variation of the saying "if you play with pigs...” By that I mean regardless of your opinion of the morality or immorality of U.S. foreign policy, particularly during the Cold War covert or otherwise, the regions the U.S. involved itself in were dysfunctional third world messes long before U.S. involvement and that will probably be the case long after the U.S. is gone or her influence has waned. There are serious systemic problems affecting these regions that go way beyond the U.S., or some other power, supporting some local strongman El Presidente type. As a buddy of mine use to say it’s all about who gets to wear the shaded sunglasses and beret.
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