Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (40 page)

As the UN forces retreated south through the endless Korean hills in bitter winter weather, stumbling into ambush after ambush, anxiety grew among America’s allies that Washington would try to turn the tables by sharply escalating the war, either by attacking China directly, or by using nuclear weapons, or both. Britain’s prime minister, Clement Attlee, consulted with the Canadian government and then flew to Washington for talks with Truman. He got an American promise to confine operations to the Korean theatre itself—but in return for American restraint in Asia, both Canada and Britain promised to beef up
NATO
’
S
defences in Europe (just as Acheson had intended).

By the time the first Canadian ground troops actually entered the line in Korea later that month, the front was forty miles south of Seoul, which was once again in enemy hands. The war of rapid movement was over, and the UN forces (which eventually included contingents from seventeen countries, but were always at least 90 percent American) were gradually clawing their way back up to the 38th Parallel in fighting marked by extraordinarily lavish artillery fire and bombing. But General MacArthur was growing increasingly restive under the constraints placed on him by President Truman, and was demanding that the Chinese be forced to the negotiating table by the aerial bombardment and naval blockade of China itself. By February 1951 he had also prepared a plan to block all further Chinese access to Korea by sowing a “defensive field of radioactive wastes” that would make the south bank of the Yalu impassable, to be followed by large airborne and amphibious landings at the upper end of both coasts of North Korea, perhaps using Nationalist Chinese troops from Taiwan to supplement his own forces. MacArthur’s idea was to close a “gigantic trap” on all the Chinese and North Korean troops in the peninsula, and he was prepared to risk almost anything to win his local war.

But that was not the point of the exercise for the U.S. government, which despite its momentary enthusiasm for reuniting Korea the previous autumn was really concerned mainly with building up
NATO
’
S
strength in Europe. It was ironic, therefore, that in the incident that finally got MacArthur fired—a letter to the minority leader in the House of Representatives that was read into the
Congressional Record
on April 5, 1951—the general got it so precisely backward. The Truman administration, MacArthur insisted in the letter, failed to realize that “here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest.… Here we fight Europe’s wars with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words.… If we lose this war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and still preserve freedom.… There is no substitute for victory.”

President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington also believed in the Communist conspiracy, but
they
believed that Korea was probably a feint to distract attention from Europe. Moreover, the war had now served its purpose in terms of galvanizing the American public and America’s allies into accepting large-scale rearmament programmes. With the front line now back around the 38th Parallel, armistice talks began in July 1951. They lasted for fully two years, while bitter, futile trench battles took a steady toll of men all up and down the line. It was in these two years that the Canadian troops took the bulk of their casualties—but Korea was a half-forgotten war by then, and nobody at home much cared.

The Korean armistice was finally signed in July 1953, after President Truman had been succeeded by General Eisenhower and the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, began to drop not very subtle hints that the United States was considering the use of nuclear weapons. The ceasefire line closely parallelled the pre-war border. The first United Nations attempt at enforcing the concept of collective security came to an end, leaving the concept itself discredited in many people’s minds. But in terms of turning
NATO
from a paper pact into a real military alliance, the Korean War unquestionably did the job very well. Three hundred and twelve Canadians were killed in combat in Korea, a few score more than in the Boer War, and it cost only about $200 million. But like the Boer War, it fundamentally changed Canada’s attitude toward international affairs.

St. Laurent was able to do what Sir Wilfrid Laurier could not: take a united Canada into foreign wars that really had nothing to do with the defence of Canada itself. The difference was that now there were only two empires left in the world, and in the fifties anti-Communism came as
naturally to French Canadians (for whom Communism was the enemy of the Catholic Church) as to English Canadians. Between 1950 and 1953 Canadian defence budgets doubled, and then doubled again. Our armed forces tripled in size, and Canada sent ten thousand troops to Europe. What’s more, we sent them there, for the first time, in peacetime.

When the Canadian troops arrived in Europe in late 1951, to a rousing welcome speech by the new Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had been brought back to fill his wartime role again in a deliberately symbolic act), there was indeed no intention in Ottawa to create a permanent presence of Canadian armed forces in Europe. As time passed, however, the European allies who had been “flat on their backs” grew to be as rich and industrially powerful as the North American allies whose troops were allegedly there to defend them—and vastly wealthier than the Soviets and Eastern Europeans from whom they were allegedly being defended. Yet the Canadian troops stayed there for forty-two years. Some of the American troops are still there today. Why?

Why, to be precise, did 300 million Western Europeans need the help of 265 million North Americans to hold off 280 million Soviets (who, after the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, also had a billion angry
Chinese at their backs)? The answer is that they didn’t
need
them. They were happy to have the help, since it meant that Western Europe had to take less responsibility for its own defence, but the Western Europeans were perfectly capable of looking after themselves militarily by the mid-1950s at the latest. There were no Soviet hordes and, as historian A.J.P. Taylor pointed out in 1951, there was no huge and unprecedented lurch in the balance of power among the European countries after the Second World War. Rather there was a reversion to a familiar and quite manageable pattern: “The one new thing between 1917 and 1941, which made it a freak period, was that Russia ceased to count as a Great Power [because of the revolution and its aftermath]; now the situation is more normal and more old-fashioned.”

Russia has been a major factor in the European balance of power for centuries: it was only the suddenness of its reappearance in 1945, after a quarter-century’s absence, that caused a level of panic sufficient to make the Western Europeans seek American help in peacetime. But the help was not free: that sort of arrangement is always a bargain with costs and advantages for both sides. By assuming the ultimate responsibility for the defence of Western Europe, the United States acquired the role and responsibilities of a “superpower,” the position of “leader of the Free World,” and various other titles, responsibilities and benefits, which, although mostly intangible, were very dear to a wide variety of people and interests in the U.S. government and society. And although the original NATO defence arrangements were not intended to be permanent, they lasted for over four decades because the continued U.S. military commitment allowed the Western Europeans to avoid the scale of military effort they might otherwise have had to put forth to balance Soviet power.

However, the American guarantee to Europe did not really depend on the presence of a mere third of a million U.S. troops on the continent; they were there mainly to reassure Western Europeans that the United States really could not avoid fighting in their defence if the Soviet Union ever attacked. The real military guarantee was the U.S.
Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, which would destroy the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. When Lester Pearson had asked U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson during the Korean War what would happen if the “Communists” launched a major offensive in Europe, he replied: “The free countries [in Europe] would have to do what they could to defend themselves from Russia while American air power was brought to bear on Russian cities and industries.”

As time wore on and the Soviet Union gradually acquired the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons too, that simple, ironclad U.S. guarantee became suspect: would the Americans really attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons and expose their own homeland to Soviet retaliation in order to “save” Europe in a crisis? To reassure the Europeans that yes, indeed, they would do that implausible thing, the Americans consistently tried to stay far ahead of the Soviet Union in the number and variety of their nuclear weapons.

But nuclear weapons cannot be counted like spears. Once the Soviet Union had acquired the ability to deliver a couple of hundred large nuclear warheads on American cities (which it had by 1965, in the form of unstoppable Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), then the number of nuclear weapons the United States possessed became quite irrelevant. It could have them by the million and it still wouldn’t be able to save the American population, no matter how thoroughly it could annihilate the Soviet Union. At that point, the American nuclear guarantee that lay at the heart of
NATO
strategy became logically inconsistent and, in the strictly technical sense of the word, incredible. In a rational world, this development should have led to the withdrawal of the U.S. nuclear guarantee from Western Europe, since it could only be fulfilled at the cost of seeing American society utterly destroyed. Alternatively, it could have been replaced by an enormous buildup of U.S. and allied conventional military forces in Europe, which would have freed
NATO
from its need to rely on nuclear weapons at every level.

But neither of those things occurred. The alliance continued to rely
on a fundamentally incredible nuclear threat to compensate for its deliberate and self-imposed weakness in conventional forces, maintaining only enough American troops in Europe to ensure that the United States would be irrevocably involved in any war there. Indeed, the fact that
NATO
blithely carried on for a quarter-century with a strategy that no longer made military sense, and that the Soviet Union was never tempted for a moment to call the bluff, demonstrated the fundamental and quite awesome stability of the post-1945 settlement in Europe. The partition of Europe between the superpowers was never seriously challenged by either side, and there was probably never a single day between 1945 and 1991 when either side seriously contemplated initiating a war there.

Indeed, the superpowers showed a good deal of tacit complicity, in Europe as elsewhere, in pursuing policies designed to reinforce the deeply entrenched bipolar character of international politics that gave each of them such a dominant position in their respective blocs. And although it was nonsense to claim, as people often did, that
NATO
(or the Warsaw Pact, for that matter) “kept the peace” in Europe for forty years, it was certainly true that neither superpower had the slightest incentive to break it, for they were the greatest beneficiaries of the status quo.

At one level, therefore, the
NATO
and Warsaw Pact alliances were simply the means by which the superpowers preserved and perpetuated the very agreeable division of power in the world that had come about as a consequence of the Second World War. But at another level, these familiar old alliances were not at all harmless. Although the confrontation between them was heavily ritualized, large numbers of people on both sides took their own propaganda seriously, and the fifty thousand nuclear weapons were quite real. Moreover, the fact that the industrialized world had been corralled into hostile military blocs provided the military-industrial complex on each side with an inexhaustible supply of “threat” images. And if the long period of relative stability in great-power politics had ever broken down, the alliances ensured that the ensuing crises would be faced by an extremely over-armed and hair-trigger world.