UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 12 - Against the Status Quo - 01h 19m 14s

[0:00]

Was problematic last week but I changed the battery and the microphone is now working. If only I could just change the battery in the projector and have that work too, but we can't, so...Okay, we've got a fair amount to get through today, so let me you know try to begin and if we are able to resolve the technical issues with the projector as the lecture proceeds then we'll do that. Brian is, trying to find some technical solution.

[00:26]

So let me start by sort of returning us to the history of superpower intervention in the developing world during the Cold War. We talked last Tuesday, last meeting, about the stabilization of Cold War politics. We pay particular attention to the strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and we discussed the sort of asymmetric equilibrium that evolves in the Cold War during the 1950s, an equilibrium whereby the United States possesses superior resources of nuclear or strategic weapons and the Soviet Union possesses superior resources of conventional force.

[01:08]

And the two things, crudely, balance each other out. But of course a missile gap evolves during the 1950s and it's a missile gap that runs in the favor of the United States. That was something that one of the charts that we looked at towards the end of Tuesday's lecture illustrated fairly starkly. By 1960 the United States has many more missiles than does the Soviet Union. And this creates a position of strategic vulnerability perhaps for the Soviet Union.

[01:36]

And this is something that will concern Khrushchev and which Khrushchev will seek to remedy. And that's part of the explanation for the Cuban Missile Crisis. But another vital part of the story is the story of superpower interventions in the developing world.

[01:51]

And Cuba is where these two stories, the nuclear story, and the story of superpower interventions in the developing world, really meet and intersect. So let's recapitulate some of the you know sort of key themes in the history of superpower interventions in the developing world.

[02:07]

We'll talk first about Soviet interventions in the developing world. So, how interventionist is the USSR? Well, it depends which USSR we're talking about. Are we talking about the USSR. of Khrushchev or the USSR of Stalin because the Soviet propensity to intervene evolves over time. It should suffice to say that Stalin in the 1920s and the 1930s associates himself with the doctrine of socialism in one country.

[02:35]

Stalin in effect privileges the construction of a socialist state within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics over the export of the Bolshevik Revolution to the developing world. So a strategic choice is made to prioritize the accomplishment of the revolution at home over its export to the rest of the world.

[02:55]

Indeed this is one of the issues that differentiates Stalin from Trotsky. Left Trotsky associates himself much more with sort of cosmopolitan doctrine of exporting the revolution. Stalin by contrast stands for you know revolution at home.

[03:10]

Of course after the Second World War the Soviet Union will exert responsibilities, call them imperial, for the nations of Eastern Europe that are occupied by the Red Army at the war's end. It was clear that Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romanian, Bulgaria, Hungary and so on are assimilated within a Soviet sphere of influence. That much we've already discussed.

[03:34]

To what extent does this amount to a coherent program of ideological expansionism? It's really hard to say. Historians still debate the relative importance of ideology and geopolitics in the Soviet move into Eastern Europe at the Second World War's end.

[03:51]

It's probably most reasonable to say that for Stalin at least ideology served the purposes of geopolitics. Ideas served security rather than the reverse. Stalin did not make much of an effort to export the revolution beyond Eastern Europe.

[04:09]

This begins to change of course with Nikita Khrushchev from the early 1950s. Stalin dies in 1953. Khrushchev by 1955 emerges as the preeminent Soviet leader. We've talked about Khrushchev. Khrushchev was far more ideological than Joseph Stalin. That you already know.

[04:30]

As a ideologue, as a sort of true believer as it were, in the socialist revolution, Khrushchev will try to export socialism to the developing world.

[04:41]

Who is the major beneficiary of Soviet sort of material assistance during the early Khrushchev era? Which country, in which country does the Soviet Union intervene most directly?

[04:55]

(student response)

China. Absolutely. China is the key beneficiary. After 1953 Soviet assistance becomes a vital source of support for this, for the first Chinese five year plan which is initiated in 1953. During this period of state led economic development China attempts to emulate the lessons of Soviet modernization, and it does so with extensive assistance from the USSR. The USSR devotes substantial resources. Estimates of how much it spent on China amount to up to you know 7% of its annual GDP for the entire period of the Chinese, first Chinese five year plan, which lasted from 1953 through to 1958.

[05:38]

Besides providing material resources the Soviet Union provides China with extensive technical and scientific assistance, including assistance to develop an atomic weapons program, which is done covertly but is very significant in terms of the sort of future geopolitical divergence between China and the Soviet Union.

[05:59]

Why does Khrushchev favor intervention of this kind? Well, in part it owes to his ideological convictions insofar as Khrushchev believes socialism to be the wave of the future he sees the socialist project as having a sort of universal applicability. It's relevant to all peoples. Socialism is not simply a tool for maintaining his own power. Khrushchev is not cynical like that. Rather he believes that the socialist revolution can be accomplished you know sort of regardless of the national or cultural context in which it is implanted.

[06:35]

There are great opportunities, as Khrushchev perceives it, for advancing the cause of socialist revolution beyond China. Beyond the Northern Hemisphere even. The developing world, the postcolonial world, seem to Khrushchev to represent a sort of ripe terrain for the exporting of a Bolshevik model of Soviet revolution.

[06:55]

In part this owes to the receptivity of postcolonial elites to Marxist ideas. Why might this be? Why might postcolonial leaders be receptive to Marxian concepts?

[07:09]

(student response)

Absolutely. If you're looking at the world circa 1955, right, so it's the mid-1950s, the Soviet model looks pretty good by comparison with the Western model, after all, the Western capitalist model came apart during the depression. It didn't do terribly well during that time which is still you know relatively recent memory, the Soviet system accomplished remarkable industrialization.

[07:39]

Stalin succeeded, at great cost, but succeeded nonetheless, in transforming a basically agrarian peasant society, into a basically industrial society, in a very short span of time.

[07:52]

And he did this despite fighting a catastrophic war against Nazi Germany. So when you look at the two systems, from the standpoint of the sort of mid-1950s from the perspective of postcolonial leaders who preside over predominantly agrarian societies the Soviet model seems to hold certain advantages.

[08:15]

Of course it has major drawbacks which we've already discussed and which we'll come to explore in greater detail as we move forward. But those have not yet made themselves clear. Looking back at the experience of the recent past the Soviet model seems to hold certain advantages.

[08:30]

So this receptivity to Marxist concepts is really important. Of course it probably should be noted that the most astute leaders in the developing world, Jawaharlal Nehru for example, are not delusional about the nature of the Soviet political system. Nehru knows totalitarianism when he sees it and he does not want to emulate it in the Indian context.

[08:53]

So what Nehru will try to accomplish in India, and we've already talked about this, will be to appropriate aspects of Soviet style economic planning without the political authoritarianism that accompanied them in the USSR.

[09:08]

Nehru will try to construct a democratic socialist alternative as it were. But the Soviet Union under Khrushchev is well aware of the advantages and opportunities that are available for revolutionizing the Global South.

[09:24]

Maybe we have some technical assistance here so we can go to the slide show. I'll carry on talking while we try to figure this out.

[09:32]

So what does the USSR do to try to take advantages of these opportunities in the 1950s? Initially most attention is paid to the study of the Global South, new institutes are constructed for language training, for what we could call area studies knowledge, for the acquisition of it, so as to equip Soviet policy elites with the expertise necessary to engage themselves more fully in the Global South as the opportunities to do so present themselves.

[10:06]

The Soviet Union will also provide direct assistance to Third World revolutionaries. As Third World revolutionaries come to power and begin to contest power the Soviet Union will provide direct assistance in the form of funds, really important, and even weapons. Here of course the Cuban example will be an exemplary one.

[10:28]

During the 1950s however it is not the Soviet Union but the United States which is, at least overtly, the more interventionist of the superpowers. The Soviet intervention in China is gargantuan in scale but it doesn't capture a great deal of attention outside of the Sino-Soviet Bloc. In the sort of world's eye it is the United States that is the more vigorous interventionary superpower during the 1950s.

[10:58]

We've talked about two of the most consequential, perhaps, unfortunate interventions that take place during this period, the intervention in Iran in 1953 in which the CIA helps to orchestrate the overthrew of Muhammad Mosaddegh and the intervention in Guatemala in 1954 in which the CIA helps to orchestrate the overthrow of Árbenz.

[11:20]

In retrospect neither of those interventions seems necessarily to have served the long term strategic interests of the United States. Neither Mosaddegh nor Árbenz was a Communist. Overthrowing them created opportunities for political chaos that certainly in the case of Iran ended up having disadvantageous consequences over the long term.

[11:41]

But the commitment of the United States to intervene in the developing world, to thwart unfavorable outcomes, is clearly established by the mid-1950s.

[11:55]

Intervention does not always take the form of covert assistance to sort of reactionary elements within developing countries however. This is what happens in Iran and Guatemala. The United States provides covert support to enemies of sort of progressive regimes and helps you know to achieve sort of authoritarian coup d'etat.

[12:17]

That's the story of those two interventions. But intervention takes many different forms. In Vietnam for example we see a different kind of American intervention. And we should talk more about Vietnam because of course of where that intervention leads to during the 1960s.

[12:33]

What is the situation in Vietnam during the 1950s? We've talked a little bit about the contestation of Vietnam after the Second World War, the three way struggle between Vietnamese Communists and anti-Communist and the French colonial state. This leads of course to something resembling a civil war by the late 1940s.

[12:55]

The French try to set up a proxy regime: the state of Vietnam in the southern part of Vietnam. A Communist state is established in the north under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.

[13:11]

Relations between these two contesting sort of entities, North Vietnam and South Vietnam, are not really resolved instead an international conference at Geneva in 1954 simply establishes a temporary division of the country. So Vietnam much like Korea will be divided into two parts: Communist North, and an anti-Communist South.

[13:34]

[13:38]

The United States after Geneva takes substantial responsibility for the sustenance and indeed the development of the anti-Communist southern part of Vietnam. Military assistance is provided, but perhaps even more important, at least initially, developmental assistance is provided.

[13:55]

American economists provide technical aid to South Vietnam. American engineers will provide assistance to help build civil engineering projects, roads and so on, all of the sort of infrastructural elements of a modern state.

[14:12]

Building a modern South Vietnam is the sort of overriding purpose of American involvement in that country during the second half the 1950s. This is a very different kind of intervention from the intervention that occurs in Iran or Guatemala. Those were covert interventions, orchestrated without substantial direct involvement of United States assets. In South Vietnam it's very different.

[14:36]

The United States deploys a wide range of resources, technical material, and scientific to help develop a flourishing modern state.

[14:47]

What is the overarching strategic purpose of this? Why would the United States be particularly concerned to develop a modern state? A resilient society?

[14:58]

What is it to be resilient against?

[15:01]

(student response)

[15:06]

Absolutely. The Domino Theory which is articulated in 1953 by both Nixon and Eisenhower posits that if a country falls to Communism than its neighbors may fall next to Communism too. The Domino Theory identifies Communism as a sort of contagion as it were.

[15:24]

I mean the metaphor is literally one of dominoes being knocked over. But the way in which Communism is thought about is really you know more like an epidemic in American policy circles in the early Cold War.

[15:38]

So...

[15:43]

Sorry, it sounds like we have some technical problems which we're going to resolve.

[15:46]

So Communism is an epidemic. How do you protect against an epidemic? Well, there are different ways of doing it. You can fight the virus directly which is what the United States tries to do in Iran and Guatemala or you can try to inculcate resistance in a population that might be afflicted by it.

[16:07]

And that's essentially what the United States tries to do in Vietnam in the second half of the 1950s as it works to build a modern and dynamic and resilient society.

[16:17]

The logic is much the same as that of the logic of the the Marshall Plan. The United States will try to build up Vietnam economically and politically so as to make South Vietnam more resilient to Communist influence.

[16:33]

[16:39]

[16:44]

Just bare with me for a second I'm trying to alter the screen here so that I can see my notes.

[16:51]

[16:56]

Okay.

[16:59]

But the intervention in Vietnam in the second half of the 1950s is not so successful as the intervention to build up Europe in the second half of the 1940s had been.

[17:10]

The Marshall Plan is very successful. But of course it is implemented in a wholly different context from the context in which you know the intervention in Vietnam will be implemented.

[17:25]

In Europe the United States is working with societies with a long tradition of political democracy, effective you know bureaucratic governance, and so on and so forth. It looks like we have our slide show back so we can continue with the pictures.

[17:43]

Do you have any idea of what was the problem with the slide show?

[17:45]

(response)

[17:53]

Okay, great. I thought that the problem was with the cable but it seems like it was something else. Okay, good, well, now we can have the pictures.

[18:02]

So we've talked a little about the purposes of the American intervention in Vietnam. Let me, I'm sorry, let me just pause for a minute and try to figure this out. Because we need to get the images on the right screen and I need to be able to see what I want to see on this screen. So I'm sorry about this.

[18:27]

[18:31]

[18:35]

[18:40]

Does anybody have any idea what the resolution for the projector should ordinarily be is it...? It's not as high as this, right? It should be something more like 1280 by 960?

[18:57]

Let's try that and see. I don't know. It should do it automatically. That looks ... No, that doesn't look good.

[19:06]

(laughter from the class)

Um, hang on, hang on. Did it get -- I'm sorry did... somebody say something?

[19:12]

(student response)

[19:16]

Sixty hertz. Alright. So that's gonna be here, right?

[19:26]

That looks great. So let's do that there, and then on my computer I just want this to go to whatever the standard is which is ... hang on, hang on, which ones which?

[19:38]

I guess this is LCD. And I want that to be ... That one maybe? I don't know...

[19:48]

This is ridiculous. So... let's try this... and what I want to do is make sure that the things, um...

[20:03]

Here it is.

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[20:21]

Okay, this will do.

[20:24]

This is... I've lost about a third of my screen but hopefully I'll be able to get it back because this is a pretty small computer as it is. So if I've lost a third of the screen I have very little left to work with, but...

[20:34]

I'm sure it's resolvable. More resolvable probably than Vietnam was for the United States (laughter from the class) in the second half of the 1950s.

[20:44]

The problem for the United States in Vietnam was that the effort to build a you know flourishing, economically prosperous, politically stable, modern society in the context of postcolonial Indochina was always going to be a challenging one.

[21:05]

And that's probably to put the case a little bit lightly. Who was the United States to work with in South Vietnam? Who would be the indigenous rulers whom the United States could support and provide assistance to on whom the United States could depend to develop and modernize Vietnam?

[21:24]

In Western Europe of course the United States is able to depend upon very competent and experienced people -- people like De Gasperi in Italy, Konrad Adenauer in Germany, the postwar Labor government of Clement Atlee in Great Britain, these are you know serious and experienced democratic politicians.

[21:44]

In South Vietnam the range of potential American allies is far, far smaller. And the United States will end up depending primarily upon this man -- Ngo Dinh Diem.

[21:59]

Who is Diem? Besides being sort of the principle US ally in South Vietnam from the late '50s onwards? Diem has a strong record as an anticolonial political leader which is good. You can't build a postcolonial state around the leadership of a former collaborator with colonialism -- that wouldn't work. Such a person would not command the legitimacy or political support at home.

[22:24]

Diem had been a you know anticolonialist so that makes him a potentially viable leader for South Vietnam. He was also a fierce anti-Communist. This was really important. As a fierce anti-Communist who's a long time opponent of Ho Chi Minh -- the dominant but Communist leader of the Vietnamese nationalist movement.

[22:44]

His anti-Communism owed in no small measure to his staunch Catholicism which makes him all the more attractive to American political elites in the 1950s.

[22:55]

This is in some way an aside note but you might want to reflect upon the fact that Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, is a very religious man. He's a staunch Presbyterian and there is a sort of religious aspect to the Cold War.

[23:13]

It's not just a rhetorical trope when Communism is described by American leaders as godless. And the fact that Diem is a devout man is of some reassurance to his American patrons in the 1950s.

[23:30]

With Diem as the major beneficiary the US in the 1950s invests extensive resources in South Vietnam. South Vietnam in a sense becomes the world's preeminent laboratory for development economics. The United States will try to develop Vietnam and Vietnam is the sort of pioneering case study for what development economics can do.

[23:55]

And it's in Vietnam too that development economics and modernization theory encounts a sort of major structural obstacles. You know what are these obstacles? Why is it so difficult to modernize Vietnam from the top down?

[24:09]

Diem turns out to be part of the problem. He's corrupt. He's authoritarian. He's ultimately not a leader who is capable of implementing a sort of top down democratic modernizing revolution in Vietnam.

[24:26]

Diem is also something of a sort of religious bigot, and this is really important to remember. Catholics in Vietnam constitute a minority. The animosity, the historical animosity, between the Catholic population and the Buddhist population is very substantial.

[24:42]

Diem does not do a great deal to reconcile South Vietnam's Buddhists to his regime, and this religious fracture becomes a major source of instability and conflict within South Vietnam.

[24:55]

The Americans try to encourage Diem to behave more generously towards the Buddhist population, but it's not ultimately something that he is willing or even able to do.

[25:05]

The Americans become so frustrated with Diem that in 1963 the American ambassador to South Vietnam, a very powerful figure, because it's through the ambassador's office that most of the US aid to South Vietnam is orchestrated and discharged. The ambassador, who at that time is Henry Cabot Lodge,argues in favor of overthrowing Diem. The United States, Lodge argues, should facilitate a coup against Diem that will replace him with a more effective leader.

[25:35]

And with this the history of American interventionism in a sense turns full circle. Right, in 1953, in 1954, the United States intervenes in order to overthrow indigenous leaders so as to replace them with alternatives more amendable to US interests.

[25:55]

In 1963 the United States overthrows its own guy in order to replace him with a more effective guy, at least, that is the you know hope that animates the coup against Diem.

[26:08]

Kennedy very reluctantly gives approval for the coup -- just weeks before his own assassination in Dallas. Kennedy has many misgivings about intervening to overthrow Diem but he does so nonetheless in large part because the alternatives do not seem especially clear nor especially appealing.

[26:30]

The murder of Diem, he's murdered by domestic antagonists with the support and encouragement of the United States, marks a key turning point in the war. With the assassination of Diem the United States in effect assumes an expanded responsibility for the Vietnam War.

[26:49]

Vietnam becomes the most consequential site of American intervention in the 1950s. But it's not the only one. We've talked a little bit about the coup in Iran in 1953 and I've mentioned in conjunction with that episode the coup against Jacob Árbenz↗ of Guatemala in 1954. These two episodes are you know sort of forever joined by their chronological proximity.

[27:16]

But we could also see the Guatemalan intervention in 1954 as an episode in a much longer history of United States interventionism in Latin America. This is a history of course that transcends the history of the Cold War.

[27:28]

We could take the history of American hegemony, if we call it that, in Latin America back all the way to the 1820s. It's in 1823 after all that President Monroe articulates the Monroe Doctrine↗, a doctrine that was drafted primarily by John Quincy Adams, his Secretary of State.

[27:45]

The Monroe Doctrine affirmed on the part of the United States a special prerogative to intervene sort of in the affairs in the Western Hemisphere so as to preempt European meddling in the New World. The doctrine was really more of a defensive or protective doctrine than it was an offensive or interventionist one. But it's a doctrine that would be sort of interpreted as time progressed to legitimate American intervention in the affairs of the southern neighbors of the United States.

[28:18]

This intervention sort of increases fairly steadily in the years subsequent to the civil war by the turn of the twentieth century parts of Latin America, particularly Central America and the Caribbean, are you know sort of intensely penetrated by American influence -- the influence of American capital and American political influence too.

[28:40]

So Latin America is an arena in which the sort of history of United States interventionism goes a long way back.

[28:46]

And we could see the Guatemalan Coup in 1954 as simply the latest in a long chain of American sort of engagements in Latin America.

[28:56]

But there is a Cold War aspect to this too. And the Cold War aspect is really, really crucial.

[29:02]

It's crucial in part because the Guatemalan intervention in 1954 comes subsequent to a long phase in which the United States had been much more respectful of the sovereign rights of its Latin American neighbors. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 inaugurates a policy that becomes known as the Good Neighbor policy. And it's a policy that says that the United States will not intervene unilaterally in Latin America but will instead treat its neighbors with the respect that they are due as you know fellow sovereign states.

[29:33]

The Guatemalan intervention marks a reversion to older patterns. And it happens in part because the Eisenhower administration is fearful of the influence of Communism in Guatemala.

[29:45]

How legitimate is this fear? Well, to answer that question we need to talk a little bit about Jacob Árbenz -- the man who is deposed in the 1954 coup. Árbenz is elected to the presidency of Guatemala in 1951. What are his politics?

[30:00]

The man is a progressive reformer. He's not a Communist. He's not waving a red flag. But he does make tactical political alliances with the Guatemalan Communist party. He also receives material assistance from the Soviet Bloc. Specifically he purchases a small load of light arms from Czechoslovakia. But this arouses suspicions in Washington that Árbenz is a Communist.

[30:24]

It might also be noted that much of the land in Guatemala is owned by the United Fruit Company, a US based multinational corporation, a corporation that Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, has previously represented as a corporate lawyer. So there's an entanglement of interests between the administration and United Fruit which predisposes, at least the Secretary of State, to take a close and careful interest in Guatemala's affairs.

[30:53]

When Árbenz proposes nationalizing foreign owned land in Guatemala, specifically the holdings of United Fruit, so as to enable the redistribution of land to landless peasants, vested interests are challenged and these are interests with which Dulles is associated.

[31:10]

So there's a complex conjuncture of interests -- material interests and Cold War geostrategic interests that come together in 1954 and create a circumstance in which the Eisenhower administration decides to sponsor a coup against Árbenz.

[31:29]

This is not to say that the United States intervenes directly in Guatemala with its own military forces. What happens is simply that the Central Intelligence Agency provides a limited amount of assistance to reactionaries in the Guatemalan military -- some of them are pictured in this slide poking guns at a dummy with a cut out of Árbenz's face on it.

[31:52]

And these sort of reactionary elements within the Guatemalan military in '54 overthrow the president's, the president, with American support.

[32:03]

There are major costs in all of this, and those costs are borne in the most part by Guatemalans. The 1954 coup ushers in a long period of political destabilization which leads ultimately to a civil war that breaks out in 1960 and endures until 1996.

[32:20]

This is a very ideological civil war. It pitches sort of self-defined and self-proclaimed leftists, revolutionaries, Communists on the one side, against conservatives, Catholics, authoritarians on the other.

[32:33]

So it's a classic sort of Cold War conflagration. It's fought in this case in Guatemala with catastrophic violence -- up to 200,000 Guatemalans die in the course of their country's long civil war.

[32:49]

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the United States is solely responsible for this civil war. It's a civil war that owed primarily to indigenous consequences as you know as the case in sort of any civil war. It can't be attributed in the most part to an external power but the United States in the 1954 lights the fuse -- that will ultimately lead to Guatemala's implosion and to all of the mayhem that it produces.

[33:18]

This kind of interventionism is not pretty. It's not especially progressive. In 1960 when a new American President, John F. Kennedy comes to power he tries self-consciously to break with the pattern that Guatemala has set.

[33:35]

Kennedy articulates a new doctrine. He calls it the Alliance for Progress which identifies the United States not as a would-be intervener in the affairs of Latin America but rather as a benign power that will provide assistance to promote progressive political and social reform and development in Latin America.

[33:59]

If Eisenhower in 1954 aligned the United States with the Latin American right what Kennedy tries to do in 1960 is to align the United States with Latin American center-left -- to provide support to progressive reformers who will sort of over time make their societies more democratic, more prosperous, within a basically anti-Communist framework. This move attempts to emulate the successes of the Marshall Plan in Europe.

[34:31]

Only it's not very successful. Latin America in the 1960s will experience a wave of right-wing coup d'etat most consequentially perhaps in Brazil in 1964. The United States will itself intervene in 1965 in the Dominican Republic. Chile experiences a coup d'etat, one encouraged by the United States, in 1973 about which we will talk more.

[34:57]

Intervention it seems has its on self-sustaining dynamic. But for the purposes of today's lecture the intervention that counts most of all is that which occurs in Cuba after Cuba's 1959 revolution.

[35:13]

What do we need to know about the Cuban Revolution? For the purposes of this class not a whole lot. What happens in Cuba in 1959 is that a corrupt pro-American authoritarian regime, the Batista Regime, is overthrown by the man pictured in the slide on the right of the photograph: Fidel Castro.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro

[35:35]

Castro was a professional revolutionary who had been fighting a tiny, tiny guerilla insurgency against Batista since 1956. In 1959 this revolution is finally successful. Castro and his small band of revolutionaries come down out of the Sierra Maestra Mountains and seize power in Havana.

[35:56]

With their seizure of power left wing nationalism in Cuba is ascendant. But what kind of revolution is this? Could this be described as a Marxist revolution? You know perhaps but that would really be a stretch -- at least in 1959. Fidel Castro is not himself a Marxist. It's not to say that he's not familiar with the writings of Karl Marx but he is not in 1959 an avowed Marxist.

[36:20]

Moreover Cuba really doesn't have a viable Communist party. There are very, very few Communists in Cuba in 1959. It is significant for the future of the Cuban Revolution that some of Cuba's staunchest Communists are close confidants of Fidel Castro.

[36:38]

Che Guevara is a paid up Communist already in 1959 as is Fidel Castro's brother Raul Castro. So Castro is close to Communists though he is not a Communist himself but he is a sufficiently savvy political operator to understand that the ideological base for Communism in Cuba is not a deep one.

[37:00]

Nonetheless Cuba quickly tilts left after 1959. And this is a tilt which owes to some extent to sort of ideological impulses that are already present in the Cuban Revolution. It owes to the sort of influence to people like Che Guevara and Raul Castro who want to push the revolution leftwards but it also owes to the history of American intervention in Cuba after 1959.

[37:28]

Because the United States does not take the Cuban Revolution as a very positive development. Instead the United States first under Eisenhower and then under Kennedy will concoct a series of plans to intervene in Cuba to reverse the outcome of the revolution -- to overthrow Castro and to replace him with somebody who will be more sympathetic or accommodating to United States interests.

[37:56]

Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 inaugurates Operation Condor↗ which prepares a plan for a military invasion of Cuba that will overthrow Castro and replace him with a pro-American regime. This is not an intervention that is to be conducted by the military forces of the United States. Rather it is to be orchestrated and implemented by anti-Communist Cuban exiles.

[38:25]

After Castro's revolution opponents of Communism, anti-Communists, flee to the United States and what Operation Condor envisages doing is providing them with training and equipment that will enable them to stage a landing on Cuba that will sort of overthrow Castro and seize power in Havana.

[38:44]

This becomes the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. It's an attempt to land Cuban exiles on Cuba with the purpose of overthrowing the Castro regime.

[38:58]

By April 1961 of course Eisenhower who initiated the planning for this operation is no longer President. John F. Kennedy is President and he has serious doubts about the viability of the whole thing. He's concerned that it may not succeed. He's concerned about the reputational costs to the United States of sponsoring an overt military invasion against a small vulnerable neighbor.

[39:20]

But despite these misgivings Kennedy goes along with the plot. He is after all a relatively new and inexperienced President. To step in at the very last stage of the planning for this military operation and to stop it would put Kennedy in conflict with an intelligence and military bureaucracy that is already well advanced in its plans to orchestrate this thing.

[39:44]

So Kennedy goes along. But he imposes some restrictions on the operation and specifically Kennedy determines that the United States will not provide air support to cover the Cuban exiles as they land on Cuba.

[40:00]

Without air power the invasion is doomed. And the Cuban exiles land and they are quickly sort of rounded up, shot and killed, or arrested by Castro's forces. The whole thing is a debacle, a real catastrophe.

[40:16]

It also has a consequence of pushing Castro leftwards. The Bay of Pigs invasion signifies that the United States means business so far as Castro is concerned.

[40:31]

Having you know come very close to you know being invaded by anti-Communist forces sponsored by the United States Castro now begins to edge closer to the Soviet Union.

[40:43]

Castro perceives his own vulnerability to the United States and in order to sort of protect himself and to protect his revolution he will edge closer to the Soviet Union.

[40:54]

After all if you're threatened by one superpower in the Cold War world what do you do? You edge closer to the other superpower who might be able to protect you against the antagonistic one. So Castro in November 1961 declares himself a Communist. This is the first time that Castro you know goes on the record and says I'm a Communist. He says more than that. He says Moscow is our great leader and our great brain.

[41:18]

And with that Cuba's Cold War alignment is made clear. The United States doesn't stop trying to overthrow Castro. Kennedy just takes a different route to the same destination. Or at least the same prospective destination. Whereas Eisenhower had favored an overt military intervention by Cuban exiled forces Kennedy prefers more covert means.

[41:44]

The Kennedy Administration creates a new operation. It's called Operation Mongoose↗ and it tries to devise you know sort of covert methods to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime. This operation is led, at least initially, by President Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States.

[42:05]

It doesn't ever amount to very much but it sort of concocts and contemplates a whole range of schemes including even poison cigars to get rid of Fidel Castro. Ultimately none of this is successful. It's harder than you might imagine to overthrow covertly a leader of a you know sort relatively weak state.

[42:26]

What about the Soviet role in all of this? The United States has intervened in Cuba. It's going to push Cuba leftwards. Cuba has edged in search of protection into the arms of the Soviet Union. But has the Soviet Union been a you know bystander in this process? Or has the USSR played an active role?

[42:51]

What are the Soviet Union's interests in Cuba? What do the Soviet Union have to do with Castro's leftward tilt?

[43:00]

First point that you want to contemplate is that Khrushchev is in no position to defend Cuba militarily. At least not by conventional means. Cuba is just ninety miles away from Key West. It's very, very close to the United States.

[43:15]

As a outward sort of protrusion of the Eastern Bloc it would be very, very vulnerable. Think about how vulnerable West Berlin is to Soviet military power in Europe. Well, Cuba would be far more vulnerable than that as a Soviet client. What can the Soviet Union do to protect Cuba from you know 4,000 miles away? Not a whole lot. But despite the extreme military vulnerability of Cuba Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 commits to defend Cuba.

[43:55]

And as he does so he secretly decides to send nuclear weapons to the island. Why? What is the rationale for sending nuclear weapons? Well, we might understand the decision in terms of Cuba's extreme military vulnerability to the armed forces of the United States.

[44:13]

Insofar as the Soviet Union is wholly incapable of defending Cuba by conventional means nuclear weapons do offer potential method to accomplish what Khrushchev has committed to do -- which is to defend Cuba against the armed forces of the United States.

[44:29]

But there are other reasons too why Khrushchev might have chosen to send nuclear weapons to Cuba. Remember the missile gap: the real missile gap as it exists in the early 1960s. The United States, in the early 1960s far out powers the Soviet Union in terms of its strategic firepower. Well, by sending missiles to Cuba the Soviet Union gets a quick and dirty fix to the missile gap.

[44:58]

The installation of medium range ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba gives the Soviet Union the capacity to project nuclear weapons against the continental United States with great rapidity and ease.

[45:13]

So the installation of missiles on Cuba allows the Soviet Union to close the missile gap with existing resources -- it doesn't have to go and build a whole lot of new missiles. It can simply put medium range missiles in Cuba from where you know virtually all of the territory of the continental United States will be exposed and threatened. So that's one of the rationales which may have animated Khrushchev's decision.

[45:39]

There are other concerns too. Insofar as China and the Soviet Union are by the early 1960s at odds, we are going to talk about that in just a moment, aligning the Soviet Union closely with Castro preempts the possibility that Castro will tilt towards Mao Zedong and China.

[45:59]

So the Sino-Soviet split has some implications for Cuba too. Khrushchev is you know very much aware by the early 1960s that the struggle for the Third World has become a three way struggle in which China and the Soviet Union are antagonists and not allies. To explain why that is the case we need to talk about the Sino-Soviet split which we're going to do later in today's lecture.

[46:22]

Finally having missiles in Cuba asserts a symbolic equality between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, right. The United States after all has missiles in Turkey, which is a neighbor of the Soviet Union, by putting Soviet missiles in Cuba the Soviet Union would assert that it is you know just as great a superpower as the United States -- that its freedom of maneuver, its freedom of choice is no less than that of the United States.

[46:49]

So there are symbolic aspects to the decision too. For a variety of reasons then, it's very difficult to ascertain exactly which was paramount in Khrushchev's mind, Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, in the summer of 1962 initiates Operation Anadyr↗ which is the Soviet military operation to install nuclear weapons in Cuba.

[47:10]

These weapons are discovered by a US surveillance aircraft, a U-2 aircraft, in October 1962. The revelation that the Soviet Union has medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba is stunning for the Kennedy administration. After all it puts American cities in range of Soviet offensive nuclear forces. Of course there was already a vulnerability of US cities to intercontinental bombers and ballistic missiles but in 1962 we're still in the early stages of the ICBM race.

[47:49]

What the missiles on Cuba do is to make American cities very immediately and very obviously vulnerable to a Soviet nuclear strike.

[48:01]

How to respond? This is the dilemma that weighs upon the Kennedy administration immediately following the discovery of the Soviet missiles. A number of different responses are considered. Should the United States initiate a surgical air strike to take out the Soviet missile strikes? This is one possibility.

[48:19]

A second possibility might be an all out air offensive against Cuba. A wave of bombings to you know sort of devastate Cuba's military and even civilian infrastructure such that Cuba could no longer be a base from which offensive operations against the United States could be launched.

[48:38]

A third possibility would be a ground invasion. Why not send US troops to Cuba? Do the job properly, get rid of Castro for once and for all and ensure that Cuba could never again be a base from which Soviet power could be projected against the continental United States.

[48:54]

The fourth option is not a naval blockage as this slide suggests but a naval blockade. These are different things.

[49:03]

It would involve establishing a naval cordon around Cuba to prevent the shipment of additional Soviet missiles to the Caribbean island. Blockading the island would not of course do anything about the Soviet missiles that are already on Cuba. It would only prevent the Soviet Union from delivering additional supplies via boat to Cuba.

[49:26]

Each of these options is fraught with risk. A ground invasion is you know for obvious reasons the riskiest of all. There are already Soviet forces on Cuba -- not a large number of Soviet forces but there are technicians, and some you know military personnel. If the United States were to attack Cuba using amphibious forces it would put American and Soviet forces in a shooting war for the first time since Korea.

[49:57]

To do that would risk the escalation of the Cold War into an all out exchange of firepower including nuclear firepower. Kennedy is very, very wary of doing this.

[50:12]

Kennedy's advisors on the other hand conclude that the optimal options are the military ones. They don't concur around a specific military option. There are some people like McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, who favor a surgical air strike. Others like Curtis LeMay the chair, the head of Strategic Air Command, favor an all out invasion. But Kennedy's advisors overwhelming come down on the side of military action.

[50:42]

President Kennedy for his part is very skeptical. He's skeptical because he is very fearful that initiating any military action, any direct confrontation with Soviet forces, could lead to unplanned and unpredictable consequences. Kennedy has read enough history to understand that leaders who initiate war cannot control its outcome.

[51:07]

He thinks in particular of the analogy of August 1914. He thinks of the European leaders, David Lloyd George, and so on, who initiated a war with the expectation that it would be over by Christmas. That it would be a short and relatively inexpensive confrontation. And Kennedy does not want to plunge the world into a third world war -- a thermonuclear crisis.

[51:30]

So he engages in a sort of secret deal with Nikita Khrushchev -- a deal that proposes to remove American nuclear weapons from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet weapons from Cuba. This is a deal that is brokered by his brother Robert Kennedy through a series of secret contacts with a KGB representative in Washington.

[51:56]

It's a deal that ultimately succeeds in resolving the missile crisis without a shooting war taking place. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev in the final analysis feared that the potential for escalation and the potential costs of escalation far outweighed any benefit that either party might have accrued by holding firm -- by using military force.

[52:23]

The crisis, the missile crisis, was a transformative crisis in the history of the Cold War. Both superpowers came very close to the brink of outright confrontation. Kennedy after the crisis had been resolved estimated that the odds of all out war were about one in three. Kennedy perceived that the United States came very, very close to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

[52:46]

Later sort of historical reconstructions of the crisis including evidence from the Soviet side certainly corroborate Kennedy's estimate of the risk and would perhaps put the risk even higher than Kennedy did.

[52:58]

We now know for example that Soviet forces on Cuba were equipped with tactical nuclear weapons. American decision-makers did not know that at the time. Had US forces tried to invade Cuba it's very likely that they would have been met with tactical nuclear weapons. That Soviet ground commanders who had the authority to use these weapons would have fired small-scale sort of battlefield nuclear weapons against incoming American forces.

[53:25]

What would happened after that is all conjecture, but you can sort of imagine how things might have escalated.

[53:31]

So Cuba was a moment of clarification for the Cold War. It laid manifest the Cold War's instability and it motivated leaders on both sides to initiate a process of Cold War stabilization.

[53:45]

Kennedy was himself sort of preempt...deeply troubled by the experience of the missile crisis. Kennedy perceived that the brush with catastrophe had been a close one and he undertook to do what he could subsequent to Cuba to diminish tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union -- to lower the risk of nuclear war.

[54:09]

The two superpowers after Cuba will begin a slow and incremental process to improve their relations, to make the bipolar world safer and more secure than it had been in the 1950s. So for this reason we can see the missile crisis as a really significant turning point in the history of the Cold War, a moment that makes leaders on both sides, particularly Kennedy and Khrushchev, sort of wake up to the possibility and the awful prospect of accidental escalation and to initiate efforts to guard against such an awful, awful prospect.

[54:46]

What does Kennedy do then? We understand why Kennedy moves to try to stabilize the Cold War after Cuba but what in substance does he do?

[54:55]

He moves with Khrushchev to conclude a treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty↗, that prohibits the testing of nuclear weapons in the earth's atmosphere. This does not prohibit all testing of nuclear weapons, it's still possible to test nuclear weapons underground. But it will no longer be permissible for signatories of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which is concluded in 1963, to test nuclear weapons in the earth's atmosphere.

[55:22]

This is a small move to reduce the intensity of the Cold War arms race. It's also a move that has beneficial consequences for the earth's environment. Think about the amount of radiation that nuclear testing unleashes in the 1950s. It's not an inconsequential problem in the Pacific in particular where a great deal of nuclear testing is done by the United States. So the Limited Test Ban Treaty has beneficial environment consequences too.

[55:50]

Besides undertaking preliminary efforts to control the nuclear arms race the two superpowers after Cuba create a hotline, a special telephone link, between the White House and the Kremlin. The purpose of this is to facilitate conversation and dialog in the context of crises like the missile crisis.

[56:11]

In during the missile crisis it was really difficult for Kennedy and Khrushchev to dialog with each other directly. They had to go through a back channel that Robert Kennedy opened to Khrushchev via a KGB agent in Washington. With the hotline it will be much easier for the superpowers to talk directly to each other as they struggle to manage unpredictable and unexpected crises.

[56:34]

During the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt for example the Moscow-Washington hotline is utilized so as to coordinate superpower reactions and to inhabit the escalation of the crisis. Kennedy even talks about becoming the first American President to visit Moscow.

[56:54]

He makes very clear that he wants to go to Moscow. He wants to do what he can to bring the Cold War to an end.

[57:00]

In June 1963 he gives one of the most consequential speeches of his career when he delivers a commencement address at the American University in Washington, D.C. In this address Kennedy talks about the need to transcend the Cold War, to work with the Soviet Union to make the world safer and more secure and more peaceful, to establish a stable relationship, a peaceful relationship between the two superpowers.

[57:23]

So after the missile crisis the move is you know sort of bold and clear. Kennedy will try to transcend the Cold War, to stabilize and even normalize relations between the superpowers.

[57:37]

Kennedy of course is assassinated in Dallas in November 1973. But there are real continuities and policies subsequent to the assassination. Lyndon Johnson perseveres with the policy of Cold War détente that he inherits from Jack Kennedy. Cooperative contacts will continue to be pursued during the 1960s.

[57:58]

In 1967 Johnson will meet with the Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. He doesn't meet in Moscow as Kennedy has proposed to do. He meets in New Jersey instead at Glassboro. But the thrust of the policy is a continuation of the one that Kennedy had sought to initiate after Cuba.

[58:19]

Let's look at the aftermath of Cuba from a Soviet perspective. What happens here? Khrushchev is the major victim of the missile crisis -- rather Khrushchev's political career is the victim of the missile crisis. Khrushchev is blamed within the Politburo for having created the crisis. It was Nikita Khrushchev after all who decided to send Soviet missiles to Cuba. This was a idiosyncratic decision on his part and after the crisis his colleagues on the Politburo berate him for it.

[58:50]

Khrushchev is not only blamed for having created the crisis. He's also blamed for having backed down in the, at the height of the missile crisis. This opprobrium leads in fairly short order to Khrushchev being ousted from the leadership of the Soviet Union in 1964. Khrushchev is sort of pushed aside and forced into retirement, a retirement that resembles sort of house arrest which is how he lives out the rest of his life.

[59:20]

The Soviet leaders who take over from Khrushchev, a new period of collective leadership is initiated, learn a different set of lessons from those that American leaders had learned. Whereas Kennedy's takeaway from the missile crisis is that the Cold War is very dangerous and needs to be transcended Soviet leaders learn a different set of lessons. They conclude that the Soviet Union got pushed around because it was weak.

[59:45]

And they undertake after Cuba to ensure that the Soviet Union will not be pushed around again.

[59:52]

How do they do this? After 1962 the Soviet Union rapidly expands its nuclear missile fleet. The 1960s are a period of impressive stunning military construction so far as the Soviet nuclear weapons program is concerned. By the end of the 1960s the United States has as many strategic weapons as the United States does.

[1:00:22]

The missile gap is closed. Thereafter the Soviet Union will possess many more nuclear missiles, intercontinental nuclear missiles, than does the United States. From sort of the early 1970s onwards, the United States though it is preemptively in you know most criteria of international power, economic, capacity to project conventional force and so on, will arguably run beyond the Soviet Union in its ability to launch nuclear weapons.

[1:00:53]

This is not a predicament that American leaders are excessively concerned about however. And the reason that they're not excessively concerned is that they have by the end of the 1960s diagnosed a new international sort of condition -- an unprecedented international condition -- in the military balance between the two superpowers.

[1:01:15]

This is a condition that becomes known as MAD or mutual assured destruction↗. What is mutual assured destruction? It is to put it really simply a predicament in which war would annihilate both parties -- the victim and the aggressor.

[1:01:34]

MAD exists once both nuclear superpowers possess sufficient firepower that a war would be catastrophic for both of them.

[1:01:46]

How does this state of affairs, MAD, come to be? What are its preconditions? And very simply the precondition for MAD is two nuclear superpowers each of which has enough nuclear forces to be able to withstand a preemptive attack and to retaliate with sufficient force as to devastate the attacker.

[1:02:08]

This becomes known in the strategic parlance of the day as a second strike capability. The first strike is the aggressive one and the second strike is the retaliatory one. Once both superpowers have sufficient military capability to be able to withstand a first strike and to launch a retaliatory second strike that would inflict catastrophic and unacceptable damage upon the aggressor then a condition of mutual assured destruction can be said to exist.

[1:02:40]

This is a predicament that Robert McNamara, a Berkeley graduate as well as the Secretary of Defense, articulates in a 1967 speech, a landmark speech on American Cold War strategy. In this speech McNamara makes the distinction between first strike and second strike capabilities.

[1:03:00]

And he argues that by 1967 both superpowers now possess an unambiguous second strike capability. Each superpower is capable of absorbing a preemptive attack by the other with sufficient strategic nuclear forces intact so as to be able to retaliate with catastrophic firepower against the aggressor.

[1:03:22]

And for McNamara it's very, very clear by 1967 that both the Soviet Union and the United States possess this capability.

[1:03:30]

Does this mean for McNamara that the two superpowers are dancing on the edge of the apocalypse? No. Quite the opposite. McNamara argues that a world in which two superpowers both possess second strike stability will be a fairly stable world. Because it would not be rational for either superpower to initiate war against the other. If going to war would lead logically and necessarily to your own inevitable doom then there is no incentive to go to war. Nothing in a sense becomes worth waging war over.

[1:04:05]

And this for McNamara is the stabilizing sort of implication of mutual assured destruction. It makes the Cold War world far safer and far more secure than it had been in the 1950s back in the days of asymmetric deterrence.

[1:04:21]

The arrival of a MAD world, of a world in which mutually assured destruction is a real prospect and possibility, at least in theory, if not in practice, has serious consequences for the Cold War alliances -- particularly for the Western Alliance↗.

[1:04:38]

Let's think about the nature of American commitments to Western Europe as they emerge in the late 1940s. With the NATO treaty of 1949 the United States in effect commits itself to go to war to defend its West European allies against Soviet aggression.

[1:04:55]

This is, I don't know, the accomplishment of the NATO treaty: collective security. During the 1950s the United States determines that it will depend upon nuclear weapons to defend its allies. That is to say that the United States commits to retaliate against any Soviet attack, including a conventional military attack on it allies, with nuclear force. The threat of an American nuclear retaliation is what inhibits the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe during the era of asymmetric deterrence in the 1950s.

[1:05:30]

The arrival of mutually assured destruction challenges this basic presumption of American Cold War strategy because the question has to be asked would the United States really put its own cities, its own society on the line in order to defend Western Europe?

[1:05:51]

If the Soviet Union were, for example to seize West Berlin, would the United States really initiate strategic nuclear war with full knowledge that this would involve the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans? Surely not.

[1:06:08]

At least it's, you know plausible to argue, that the United States would not, when confronted with a conventional Soviet attack, on for example West Berlin, that it would not retaliate with nuclear weapons. If doing so would mean the end of civilized life as we know it? Surely no rational statesman would initiate such a -- such a catastrophe.

[1:06:30]

So the arrival of mutually assured destruction brings into question the commitments that the United States has previously made to defend its West European allies.

[1:06:41]

Because nuclear retaliation can no longer be plausibly countenanced as a means of collective defense for the Western Alliance. And this is the fundamental issue with which American Cold War strategy grapples during the 1960s. How can the United States make a credible commitment to defend its West European allies in a world of mutual assured destruction?

[1:07:05]

A variety of you know sort of stopgap measures are introduced during the 1960s to try to solve this credibility problem. One of them is called flexible response and it involves the deployment of more conventional US forces in Europe.

[1:07:20]

The United States you know will during the 1960s expand its conventional force commitments to Europe. The logic being that if the Soviet Union were to attack Berlin by conventional means, using tanks and artillery, the United States could retaliate in kind, and the conflict could be waged at a subnuclear level.

[1:07:41]

So conventional weapons during the 1960s will be necessary to offer plausible defense against the prospect of a conventional offensive. But that's not all that the United States does. Also initiates new programs to share American nuclear weapons with its allies. During the 1960s NATO devolves operational responsibility for tactical nuclear weapons to allied military forces. You know German war planes for example will be equipped to deliver American nuclear bombs.

[1:08:16]

And this is really important because it gives the Germans a plausible deterrent of their own. They can't have nuclear bombs in practice -- it would not be acceptable for Germany to have a nuclear program -- but if the Germans can have operational authority over American nuclear weapons then they have a plausible means to retaliate against a Soviet attack on their territory. So NATO will devolve operational responsibility for tactical nuclear weapons in the '60s in order to provide American allies with a plausible deterrent.

[1:08:48]

This might seem on the face of things to represent a dangerous proliferation of nuclear forces. But the intent underlying it could not be more contrary to that. The United States is very concerned in the 1960s that without nuclear weapons of their own the West European states will be so fearful for their security that they initiate nuclear weapons programs and create their own nuclear weapons so as to be able to deter Soviet offensive action.

[1:09:19]

It's in order to preempt the proliferation of nuclear weapons that the United States agrees to share operational responsibility for nuclear weapons with its allies.

[1:09:32]

I was going to show you a clip from Dr. Strangelove but thanks to the technical interruption that we had earlier this is just going to have go online. Last time I showed you a video clip I ended running beyond so I'm not going to do it again, and I'm going to blame the technical team for that.

[1:09:47]

Meanwhile the Soviet Union and the United States undertake sort of preliminary efforts to improve their relations -- a summit in Glassboro, New Jersey which I've already mentioned produces few tangible results but it seems to represent a new atmosphere of cooperation between the superpowers. Lyndon Johnson talks publicly in 1966 about the need to build bridges to the East.

[1:10:14]

Relations between the blocs improves steadily during the second half of the 1960s -- at least through to 1968 which we'll come to.

[1:10:22]

Earlier in 1968 the two superpowers sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This is a landmark treaty in the history of nuclear weapons. It commits it signatories not to transfer nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states.

[1:10:22]

The nuclear sharing program within NATO is somewhat anomalous but it doesn't count under this clause of the Non-Proliferation Treaty because it's not an actual transfer. Weapons are simply being temporarily made the responsibility of foreign military forces, but the weapons, and the technologies for producing them more importantly, are not transferred within NATO's nuclear sharing program.

[1:11:03]

The NPT, Non-Proliferation Treaty, commits non-nuclear signatories not to build nuclear weapons. If you're a non-nuclear country and you sign the NPT you are committing yourself never to build nuclear weapons.

[1:11:15]

All of the signatories, nuclear and non-nuclear states, also commit themselves to pursue global nuclear disarmament as a long term objective.

[1:11:26]

The Non-Proliferation Treaty is enthusiastically supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States and by an array of small militarily inconsequential countries. The two countries that propose the NPT at the United Nations are Ireland and Finland.

[1:11:43]

It's the countries that come somewhere between the United States and the Soviet Union and Finland that are more skeptical of the NPT -- the so called middle powers↗. Neither France nor China signs the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both France and China dispute the Non-Proliferation Treaty and they see it as an effort by the two superpowers to consecrate their own preeminence in the international system.

[1:12:09]

They see it as a cooperative move by the superpowers to establish a permanent differentiation between the superpowers and everybody else.

[1:12:17]

This has serious consequences for the two Cold War blocs. Let's run very quickly through some of the transformations that occur within the Cold War world during the 1960s that seem to point in the direction of bloc disillusion.

[1:12:32]

First of all the Sino-Soviet split: why did it happen? There's a historical debate on this. Some historians emphasize ideology. They argue that the Chinese revolution was developing in a direction quite distinct from the Soviet socialist model and that ideology was the ultimate cause for estrangement between the two Communist powers.

[1:12:52]

Other historians point to irreconcilable national interests: geopolitics. There's a debate. It has hardly been resolved yet. How did it happen? How did the Sino-Soviet split come about?

[1:13:04]

It begins fairly early. Mao objects to Khrushchev's Secret Speech↗. Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin seems to Mao to represent revisionism -- conservative turn in the socialist revolution. Mao's Great Leap Forward↗ from the late 1950s on the other hand seems to represent from a Soviet standpoint a reckless radicalization of the Chinese revolution.

[1:13:27]

International differences exacerbate the split. During the 1960s, particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union moves to repair and improve its relationship with the United States. Mao by contrast depends upon animosity with the United States to sustain the legitimacy of the socialist revolution in China. Whereas Mao wants a confrontational relationship with the West the Soviet Union prefers to improve relations with the West and this basic divergence underlies the widening disagreement between the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1960s.

[1:14:06]

The two Communist superpowers will struggle for influence in the developing world too. The beneficiaries of this struggle include Third World revolutionaries who are able to play China and the Soviet Union off against each other to ensure more and more supplies of military and material assistance.

[1:14:23]

The split begins in the late 1950s. By 1969 it has become absolutely manifest. China and the Soviet Union will even exchange gunfire over the Ussuri River -- the river that marks their common border.

[1:14:36]

It's not only in the East that the Soviet Bloc seems to be coming apart. Czechoslovakia erupts in a revolt in 1967/68. Czechoslovakia was always something of a special case within the Soviet Bloc. Has a larger you know sort of bourgeois population, a larger sort of intellectual world. In 1967 a series of street demonstrations erupt in Czechoslovakia. Brezhnev decides that Czechoslovakia needs a coherent program of reform so he appoints a man, Alexander Dubček, to be the leader of the Czech Communist Party.

[1:15:13]

Dubček initiates a program of reform that ends up being political as well as economic. It ultimately goes far further than Brezhnev wanted. When Dubček removes all press censorship and introduces a more sort of politically open culture Brezhnev decides that the experiment in reformed Communism has gone too far -- that Czechoslovakia risks jeopardizing the unity of the Eastern Bloc.

[1:15:39]

In the summer of 1968 the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia. It sends you know hundreds of thousands of troops into the country to occupy it and to restore sort of Communist orthodoxy. Later on Brezhnev will articulate what becomes known as the Brezhnev Doctrine↗. It's a doctrine that claims for the Soviet Union a prerogative to intervene in Eastern Europe to correct ideological deviations from Communist orthodoxy.

[1:16:06]

So in Czechoslovakia the sort of Czech reform Communists seem to be going their own way and the Soviet Union intervenes to stop them. Skip that slide because we've already talked about the sort of logic of you know nuclear credibility and its erosion in a MAD world. Let's just talk very quickly to wrap up about the West.

[1:16:28]

In the West similar kinds of centrifugal pressures manifest themselves. Here the best case is France. France during the 1960s is led by Charles de Gaulle -- a staunch nationalist a man for whom it is very important to establish an independent course in foreign policy. De Gaulle in the early 1960s initiates a series of sort of revolts against the logic of the Cold War.

[1:16:54]

He challenges American leadership in a number of areas. France conducts its first successful nuclear test in 1960. Thereafter it begins to build up its own independent nuclear deterrent -- the so called Force de frappe↗.

[1:17:06]

In 1965 France challenges the dollar's primacy in the international monetary system -- something we're going to talk much more about when we return to the international political economy theme.

[1:17:16]

In 1966 de Gaulle leads France out of NATO's unified command structure. Beside challenging American leadership of the West de Gaulle pursues an independent opening to the East. In 1964 France normalizes relations with China. In 1966 de Gaulle visits the Soviet Union and talks about France and the USSR as having a common community of interests.

[1:17:38]

It's not that de Gaulle is trying to lead France out of the West Bloc and into the East Bloc. On the contrary de Gaulle believes that the basic division of Europe is so well established, is so you know resolute, that France can pursue an independent foreign policy within it.

[1:17:54]

The Cold War superpowers, de Gaulle perceives, have become so entrenched in their antagonism that their antagonism has ceased to be relevant to the affairs of the world. And that France, he argues, ought instead to pursue a more independent foreign policy, a foreign policy subordinate not to the interests of the United States, but which will serve a French definition of French national interests.

[1:18:18]

And with this we see the emergence of what we might call centrifugal pressures within this Cold War world. We'll come back to Vietnam. The key point is a structural one, and it is this. By the late 1960s on both sides of the Cold War it begins to look as if the logic of Cold War politics is coming apart.

[1:18:36]

The Vietnam War of course contributes to this sense of division and breakup but it is the primary cause of it. The primary causes of it are more structural than that. They have to do with nuclear weapons, with the achievement of a condition of mutually assured destruction.

[1:18:52]

But the consequences are profound. The bipolar world seems to be fracturing, fragmenting, transforming itself into something more complex, something less controllable, and perhaps also something more interesting. And it's to this world that we will turn when we reconvene after the midterm. Instructions on the midterm will be forthcoming via email.

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