Cold War In Latin America

THE AMERICAS SOCIETY


CONVERSATION CIRCLES

(New York, August 2002)







THE COLD WAR OR THE PAX AMERICANA



Luis Ricardo Dávila

(University of Los Andes, Venezuela/ New York University
E-MAIL: davilap@ula.ve)


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RETHINKING THE COLD WAR


The destruction of Berlin’s wall in 1989 and thedissolution of the U.S.R.R. in 1991, combined with the opening of large quantities of Soviet and USA archives and publications of other materials, have provided a new, creative, vantage point from which to assess and to rethink the Cold War in general, and its impact on particular regions of the world.

Not only do we have a historical ending, and verdict, on that process with the collapse of theSoviet bloc and all that was associated with it, but we also have a mass of new documentary, interview, and memoir material from which to rethink the forty-year conflict.

As putting in the words of the historian John Lewis Gaddis[1]: “WE NOW KNOW”: ABOUT THE COLD WAR IN A WAY THAT WAS NOT POSSIBLE BEFORE. However, there are many things that we still don’t know about the Cold War. That’s why itis very important to rethink the struggle in historical perspective.

From 1947 started a new kind of struggle between the liberal-democratic West and the Marxist-Socialist East usually known as the Cold War. It was a new kind of ideological conflict. As somebody defined it, the Cold War was a “battle for men’s minds”[2]. Following this battle, in the cultural arena, it was created a “consortium”drawing on an extensive, highly influential network of intelligence personnel, political strategists, the corporate establishment, and the old school ties of the Ivy League universities. The task of the “consortium” was double: First, to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism; and, then, to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad. The result was a remarkablytight network of people[3] who worked alongside the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to promote an idea: that the world needed a pax Americana, a new age of enlightenment, and it would be called The American Century (Ibidem, p. 2).


WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Let’s start saying something about the name COLD WAR. As we know, first is the word to name reality and then the word becomes reality, theword becomes flesh. This particular kind of war, that demands to stay ready to fight without fighting, or to fight by different means, was labeled the “Cold War” in April 1947 by Bernard Baruch:

“It was a situation that soon came to be known as the ‘cold war’,
a phrase I introduced in a speech before the South Carolina legislature
in April 1947 (...) I was indebted to Herbert Swope for thisgraphic expression,
which caught the public imagination and became a part of the language”.[4]

When the Second World War ended it was a power vacuum that the Soviets moved in to fill it. The United States reacted immediately: “it became clear that they were waging war against us. It was a new kind of war, to be sure, in which the guns were silent; but our survival was at stake nonetheless”[5].This war was unlike any other United States had ever fought. Some features can be presented:

1- It lasted a lot longer than any previous war, almost 50 years.
2- There is no consensus about the date of its starting point. It could be on August 6, 1945 when US dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and introduced nuclear terror to the world. Or it could also be when the Second World War was over.Also it could have started in 1947 when President Harry Truman proclaimed “the containment doctrine” or policy or strategy: A kind of liberation of communism through no room and role for diplomacy until communism was defeated. Containment was a kind of struggle, for decades of construction would say its defenders. Or in 1948 when the Soviets overthrew the elected government in Czechoslovakia?...