Review: Interpreting America's Failures in the Third World

Reviewed Work(s): Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1980
by Gabriel Kolko
Review by: ROBERT J. McMAHON
Source: Diplomatic History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter 1991), pp. 131-136
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24912112
Accessed: 05-12-2017 08:46 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Diplomatic History

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
FEATURE REVIEW

Interpreting America's Failures

in the Third World

ROBERT J. McMAHON

Gabriel Kolko. Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy,
1945-1980. New York: Pantheon, 1988. xiii + 332 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. $24.95 (cloth). $15.95 (paper).

As remarkable as it might seem, Gabriel Kolko's Confronting the Third.

World represents the first comprehensive interpretation of American
postwar policy toward the developing world. To be sure, scholars have
produced a plethora of bilateral and regional studies covering important
aspects of this larger story. But none has attempted a study so daring or
ambitious as this one.
Kolko's goal is to stitch together the various strands that constitute
American policy toward that huge, complex, and diverse grouping of nations
commonly called the Third World—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East,
and most of Asia. As important, Kolko seeks to identify common as well as
divergent themes across time and space, to set U.S.-Third World relations
within the broader compass of changing American global interests and
policies during this tumultuous thirty-five-year period, and to assess the
impact of U.S. policies on the political and social structures of several
emblematic Third World countries. Confronting the Third World talis well
short of those ambitious objectives. Its modest evidentiary base simply
cannot sustain the book's sweeping generalizations. Kolko has, nonetheless,
given us another important work, one that abounds—as do all his books—
with provocative insights and one that sketches a broad, conceptual approach
to a topic of cardinal importance.
Few historians of American foreign relations have been as prolific as
Gabriel Kolko over the past two and a half decades. One of the earliest Cold
War revisionists, Kolko jolted conventional interpretations of American
policy during World War II and the postwar era with two important books,

131

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 132 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

1 ne routics oj war ana ine Limits oj rower tuie tatter written wnn Joyce
Kolko). In The Roots of American Foreign Policy, he offered a provocative
analysis of the economic wellsprings of modern American diplomacy. More
recently, his major study of the Vietnam War, the product of more than
twenty years of research, travel, interviewing, and analysis, presented
significant new perspectives of that most studied of recent conflicts.1 During
the past twenty-five years, few historians of American foreign relations have
produced a more challenging, wide-ranging, and original body of scholarship.
Yet few scholars have seen their work vilified in print—or worse,
dismissed—as often as Kolko has. Undoubtedly, the uncompromising stance
of historian as committed radical that he so proudly assumes accounts for
some of the criticism that his work has drawn. Hostile to the Marxist
theoretical framework that informs Kolko's work, as well as to the radical
political agenda that he advances, many critics have found his books
reductionist, the regrettable but predictable result of a historian's effort to
use the trappings of scholarship to serve political, rather than scholarly, ends.
Others point to stylistic deficiencies, rightly complaining that Kolko's prose
is often wooden and ponderous; one reviewer went so far as to call Anatomy
of a War virtually unreadable. Kolko, who shuns the academic mainstream,
has increasingly found his work either blasted or ignored by much of that
mainstream.
Historians of American foreign relations cannot afford such cavalier
disregard for Kolko's work. His is a voice that speaks with power and
originality. The voice may not always speak with clarity. It may at times
resonate with too much passion. It may often fail to persuade. But it is a
uniquely independent voice. Those who listen to it carefully will find that it
has much to say; those who ignore it do so at their own peril.
Anatomy of a War presents an excellent case in point. For the most part,
the historical community responded harshly—and unfairly—to the book.
Beyond the stylistic attacks made by nearly every reviewer, critics chided
Kolko for an analysis that they found alternately unoriginal, one-sided,
predictable, repetitive, and ideologically motivated. Unfortunately, in their
haste to condemn and dismiss the book, most reviewers failed to note the
strikingly original contributions that it offered to students of the Vietnam
War. Kolko, for example, demonstrated conclusively the critical relationship
between the dollar/gold crisis of early 1968 and the Johnson administration's
post-Tet decision to set a ceiling on American troop levels and to open
negotiations with North Vietnam. Previous authors had almost entirely
ignored that relationship. Kolko, in addition, offered a richly detailed account
of the South Vietnamese regime, emphasizing its limited class base, economic
dependence on the United States, and inherent structural limitations. Perhaps
most impressively, he discussed at length the multiple ways in which the
American presence altered the social structure of South Vietnam and

See Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy,
1943-1945 (New York, 1968); idem, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign
Policy, 1945-1954 (New York, 1972); idem, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (New Yoik,
1969); and idem, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical
Experience (New York, 1985).

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERPRETING AMERICA'S FAILURES 133

spawned wrenching demographic changes that trans

both the nature of the struggle and the land in whic
other American or Asian historian has advanced such
analysis of the war's impact on Vietnam.
Confronting the Third World grapples with m
Kolko explored in Anatomy of a War. Unlike man
who typically focus substantial attention on
bureaucracies that formulate policy, Kolko alway
forces and structures, both within the United State
countries that Americans seek to influence. For him
modern capitalist system provide the dominant, if n
American foreign policy, ensuring its "astonishing
since 1945. Rejecting the importance of bureaucratic
"most of these larger policies can easily be predi
assume that their continuous recurrence is simply t
or arbitrary bureaucratic processes is grossly to beg
power, interests, and purposes that underlay all U.S
(p. xii).
Readers of Kolko's earlier books will hardly be surprised to learn that he
considers the goals of American policy in the Third World straightforward
and unchanging: To expand American trade and investment, to secure access to
critical raw materials, and to integrate Third World economies into the
world capitalist system. Kolko places much greater emphasis in this study,
however, on the nonmaterial and symbolic factors that increasingly
influenced American actions in the Third World, especially in the period
following the Korean War. One of those symbolic considerations was
credibility. Kolko argues convincingly that American leaders often
overcommitted themselves in marginal parts of the Third World because of a
deep, if misplaced, conviction that they needed continually to assure allies
and adversaries alike of U.S. power, resolution, and reliability. The domino
theory constitutes another nonmaterial influence on American actions in the
developing world. U.S. policymakers invariably linked the stakes in any
MHglÇ 11111U VYUI1U 113UU11, ICgiUUlCSS U1 Ulm SUUC 5» 111U111MU CCUI1UII11Ü
importance, to the broader value of the entire surrounding region. Thus Ko
writes of the Kennedy administration: "The symbolic importance of
credibility of power inherited from its less articulate predecessors, and of t
interrelated nature of changes in one nation to events all around it and in t
world, had become fixations transcending a reasoned assessment of
sources of internal tension and change" (p. 129).
Economic interests, Kolko insists, determined America's overall
approach to the Third World, but psychological, symbolic, and geopolitical
variables often joined with or even eclipsed material factors in count
specific cases. That assessment represents a significant modification of the
monocausal interpretation of U.S. foreign policy that Kolko has presented
the past. Indeed, his emphasis on the psychological determinants of gr
power behavior shares more ground with John Lewis Gaddis's analysis

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 134 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

American strategy than eith

Kolko's incorporation of n
paradigm certainly sugges
complexity in the examinati
dangers of prematurely pig
continue to evolve in new directions.
Kolko's explanation for the failures of U.S. policy in the Third World
remains consistent with his previous work. In the broadest sense, Washington
proved unable "to reconcile the inherent tension between its diverse aims in
every corner of the earth with its very great but nonetheless finite resources"
(p. 292). Because American resources were limited, U.S. policymakers needed
to rely on cooperative leaders and regimes—"collaborators" or "clients,"
according to Kolko—to advance American interests. Ironically, the
collaborating military leaders and dictators that Washington sought to use
as its instruments, men such as the shah of Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in South
Vietnam, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the Somozas in Nicaragua,
tKnt iiltimotalt; nn^arminorl knfK

the American position and their own legitimacy. Americ

dependence on repressive, unpopular, and unstable regimes, in
ensured that when nationalist opposition emerged it woul
imperialism correctly as one of its principal enemies. He
inevitability in this process. Those nations in which the U
greatest experienced the most severe socioeconomic disrup
economic penetration, then, invariably strengthened the Left
fundamentally contradictory and counterproductive natu
quest for hegemony in the Third World.
But how does a scholar gauge with reasonable precision the
impact of American policies on an area so huge and diver
World? What, in short, are the theoretical, empirical, and
foundations for the grand conclusions that Kolko reaches?
areas, Kolko's work disappoints. Not only does he fail to break
ici ma ui uic uicaji y aiiu nituiuu uiai 11^ uiiuga ikj uns diuu;, uui 111 aii ^vui

more elementary sense he fails to present the evidence neede

of his major themes. One research strategy, of course, would h
heavily on the rich secondary literature now available on
policy and Third World societies. The other logical, if mo
approach would have been to conduct extensive orig
systematically examining printed collections such as the F
series as well as relevant unpublished materials housed in pub
archives. Remarkably, Kolko pursues neither strategy. Inst
judgments on a highly selective reading of the secondary lite
with a smattering of primary sources, the latter heavily
documents available through the Declassified Documents Refe
Faithful readers of Diplomatic History might be dismay
Kolko cites in his notes and bibliography not a single article

2John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of

National Security Policy (New Yoik, 1982).

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERPRETING AMERICA'S FAILURES 135

journal, tiunareas 01 scnoiars wno nave wniien oooks anu arucies reievani
to Kolko's topic will likely be more than miffed to find their work ignored.
Overall, Confronting the Third World rests on such a thin and superficial
documentary base that even the most sympathetic reader may question where
the author has gained some of the information on which he builds his broad
generalizations.
Kolko's reluctance to learn from the work of others leads as well to
some unusual interpretations and surprising omissions. In his early sections
on the Middle East, for example, he concentrates almost exclusively on
Anglo-American rivalry for control of the region's oil resources. He ignores
entirely the equally important theme of American support for Israel, a theme
stressed in the work of probably every other scholar who has written on the
subject. Kolko claims that the initiative for forging a pro-Western alliance
among the region's "northern tier" states emanated from London, and that it
left Secretary of State John Foster Dulles "extremely irritated at the
aggressive, unilateral British leadership in producing the alliance" (pp. 79
80). Most recent studies make clear, however, as do the documents printed in
tne foreign neiations series, mat me uagnaaa fact was irom me nrst
Dulles's brainchild.3
Kolko at times places too much weight on dubious sources. He asser
for example, that U.S. policies in the Third World "were revealed m
clearly both in theory and practice" in the Philippines, and hence "it is th
one case I shall systematically examine throughout the postwar era" (p. 25
Yet he relies heavily for some of his more damning judgments about
policy toward the Philippines on Joseph B. Smith's, Portrait of a C
Warrior, the sensational but unverifiable recollections of a disgrun
former CIA operative.4
Those empirical deficiencies are mirrored in Kolko's treatment o
America's impact on the Third World. Measuring the impact of one natio
another presents daunting methodological problems, to be sure. In Anatom
of a War, Kolko was able to surmount the enormous obstacles inheren
such an exercise largely because he could utilize the extensive statist
records compiled as a byproduct of the Vietnam War. In addition, he brou
to hpflr an p.xnortisp. ahnnt Viptnamp.«*. snripfv that ramp, from HrraHrc of rlocr

study. Comparable statistical records do not exist for the Third World as a
whole, nor can any one scholar claim expertise about such an enormous part
of the planet. However suggestive some of Kolko's arguments about the
impact of American actions may be, then, they lack the impressive empirical
foundation that made his earlier observations about Vietnam so compelling.
The wide-ranging conclusions that he presents go too far beyond the primary
sources that he cites and the secondary literature that he draws upon to
convince any but the already converted.

3See, for example, Robert J. McMahon, "United States Cold War Strategy in South Asia:
Making a Military Commitment to Pakistan, 1947-1954," Journal of American History 75
(December 1988): 812-40.
^Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York, 1976).

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
136 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

Yet, for all its flaws, Confron

It is a book of startling bread
insights. To be sure, the book
previous work and will almost c
But Kolko's analytical framew
reexamine their assumptions
policy toward the developing n
to other scholars: They can eith
support Kolko's interpretatio
alternative framework for com
Third World. The synthetic in
clearly remains to be written.

This content downloaded from 202.65.183.201 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 08:46:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms