The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake

This is the second part of a three-part article.   Read part one here.

The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian $1.7 trillion war budget in today’s dollars (FY 2025 $). But as we noted in Part 1, that figure had shrunk by a stunning 93% to just $125 billion by 1948 as post-war demobilization proceeded apace.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized, along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed by the marauding Nazi armies. In all, at war’s end tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been left destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland. And that’s to say nothing of maintaining bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

And yet and yet. Exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the inveterate out-of-power war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri. That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to a joint session of Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating web of entangling alliances that it fostered and the post-1947 American Empire that grew therefrom.

In light of all that was known then and which has transpired since, however, it can be well and truly said that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America. These long ago political skirmishes should get but a scant mention in world history books, and none at all in America’s.

That is to say, with respect to Turkey Stalin wanted a port on the Dardanelles, as had the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what? The only thing he could have choked off was his own minuscule export shipments from the Black Sea regions.

Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by a homegrown dictatorship during 1936 to 1941 (the Fourth of August Regime of Ioannis Metaxas) and then the Nazi, Italian Fascist and Bulgarian occupiers during WWII, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly exiled King George II whom the British put back on the Greek throne in 1946.

As it happened, the population of Greece at the time was 7.3 million and its GDP was barely $4 billion. Even in today’s dollars that would have been just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita. In short, Greece was a museum piece of western history that had seen its better days but by then was an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power absent Truman’s intervention – even with the help and aid of Stalin – that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.

As it happened, of course, the Truman Doctrine and its $400 million of aid in support of anti-communist causes in Greece and Turkey, which were really none of Washington’s business, was the handiwork of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. The latter was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling, who had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s and then came back as an assistant secretary of state for economic policy in February 1941.

From that perch he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo that cut off 95% of Japan’s oil supply and paved the way to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he was actually the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II when he unilaterally acted to shut-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.

Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled and politically fractured from WWII. So when in February 1947 the British Embassy informed U.S. State Department that Great Britain could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey, Acheson had sprung into action.

In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter between Congressmen and State Department officials, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.” He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if those two key states should fall, communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.

That was utter poppycock, but even then neither Iran nor India had any meaningful bearing on America’s homeland security. Should their people have made the stupid mistake of voting in the small but noisy communist parties that had taken root in both countries after 1919 it would have been of little note and no occasion for threats at all to the liberty and security of Americans from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

Nevertheless, the stunned legislators agreed to endorse the aid program on the condition that President Truman stress the severity of the crisis in an address to Congress and in a radio broadcast to the American people. So addressing a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman asked for the aforementioned military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, which amounted to the rather middling sum of $4 billion in today’s dollars.

Unfortunately, this misbegotten doctrine and the related “domino theory” would guide U.S. foreign policy around the world for the next 40 years. In fact, in a bald-faced repudiation of the no entangling alliances doctrine, Truman declared that even civil wars in marginal far-away places were now the business of US foreign policy:

“It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

Worse still, the subsequent sanctioning of aid to Greece and Turkey by a Republican Congress under the influence of the Vandenberg principle of stopping partisan debate at the waters’ edge gave rise to a long and enduring UniParty (bipartisan) Cold War foreign policy. Future presidential administrations readily employed similar reasoning to justify actions in Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, among countless others.

The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarms gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac, especially among the wartime dandies and policy potentates who had fashioned and led America’s global mobilization during WWII.

Accordingly, the modest start in the form of aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1948. Now the economic dislocations in France, Italy and elsewhere in western Europe and the resulting political gains of the communists and other leftist parties became the basis for drastically expanded US intervention.

Again, in today’s dollars of purchasing power the Marshall plan provided upwards of  $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951. Consequently, Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country relationships and intrigues of post-war Europe.

But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place at the time that a communist Italy or France or Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat—most especially as the United States still had a monopoly on the A-bomb.

Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history. This included 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and numerous other vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.

Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s homeland security in any material manner, even as it did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the world in the years ahead.

But while it did nothing for America’s homeland security, it did send off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike. Given the slippery, blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies – especially with FDR and Churchill gone – were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the US, England and France had attempted after WWI.

To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.

We will delve into that evidence in Part 3, but suffice it here to say that these documents prove the creation of NATO was a giant historical mistake, and that it was the error of this alliance-based approach to national security policy that inexorably led to the Washington-based Empire that now batters the world and burdens America’s very fiscal solvency.

It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s error in plunging America into the Great War, frequently begets another baleful turn. In this case, the necessity for Britain and America to align with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare after 1941.

Indeed, the need for this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent at the time to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin and promise of help in vanquishing Japan in the far east as well, the  Big Three principals at the conference reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe. This included countries like Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and parts of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Of course, the deal at Yalta also provided that free elections and democratic governments would be permitted to arise in areas then or soon to be occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR went to any length to provide the machinery and enforcement mechanisms to ensure this would happen. It was a case of Eastern Europe is your sphere of influence, Joe – by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.

For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward. Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from the land and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire”  from Stettin in the Baltic (Poland) to Trieste on the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged, so as to never again allow marauding armies from western Europe to invade and plunder the Russian motherland.

Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

So the Cold War was on and Washington soon became entwined in the business of entangling alliances all around the planet. And yet as the Soviet archives also show Moscow never had a plan of global conquest, there were never any dominoes to fall and Stalin’s real motivation was the fear that NATO’s actual purpose was to liberate the Eastern countries and demolish his cordon sanitaire.

Accordingly, the entire Cold War was an avoidable mistake as we will amplify in Part 3.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.