The Truman Administration's Policy Dilemma About the 1949 China

choi

Hal Brands, Through a Glass, Darkly; In 1949, Truman and US policy makers struggled to foresee the consequences of the Chinese revolution. Wall Street Journal, Sept 16, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-birth-of-modern-china-1505507988
(book review on Kevin Peraino, A Force So Swift; Mao, Truman, and the birth of modern China. Crown, 2017)

(a) Excerpt in the window of print: "The 'origin story' of our decades-long friction with Mao and our abiding commitment to Taiwan.

(b) Quote:

"The 1949 marked the final collapse of chiang Kai-shek's  Nationalist regime, a deeply flawed government that the United States had, nonetheless, supported out of necessity for many years, and the rise of Mao Zedong's Communist dictatorship, which would eventually become one of the bloodiest tyrannies ever to plague the earth. Although no one in a position of authority in Washington wished for Chiang's forces to be defeated by Mao, by 1949 the consensus among American officials was that Chiang's regime was simply too corrupt and incompetent to be saved. Meanwhile, Mao's dictatorial tendencies were clear enough, but his future geopolitical orientation -- whether he would lean decisively toward Stalin's Soviet Union or  take a more neutral course in the manner of Yugoslavia's Tito -- remained murky, at least to those watching anxiously in the West.  

"So how should the United States respond to the likely takeover of the world's most populous country by a communist movement at a time of intensifying cold war between Washington and Moscow? * * * As Mao's and Chiang's forces battled each other in China, he [Mr Peraino] writes, 'American policymakers battled one another as they struggled to shape a response.'

"The Truman administration had wrapped its call for the energetic containment of an expansionist Soviet Union in inspiring, universalistic rhetoric, and yet Truman's advisers understood that limited resources compelled them to choose carefully where America would actually make a stand. American strategists preferred -- correctly -- a 'Europe first' approach to containment, due to enormous geopolitical significance of that continent, but it was in Asia where communist movements were gaining the most ground.

" * * * the Truman administration pursued a policy that was itself uncertain and confused.  The administration moved progressively toward a break with Chiang over the course of 1949, for instance, and yet  it continued to send military supplies to his regime. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, sought to distance themselves from the Nationalists -- both to deflect blames for their collapse and to signal openness to a relationship with the Communists -- by publishing a white paper detailing the failings of Chiang's government. But that initiative also offended Mao by holding out hope for a restoration of 'democratic individualism' in China. Acheson and his chief advisers -- such as Policy Planning Staff director George Kennan -- hoped eventually to drive a wedge between the domineering Stalin and the equally headstrong Mao, but Washington simultaneously pursued policies -- such as covertly supporting anticommunist elements in Western China -- that seemed more likely to force the two Communist powers together, at least in the short term.

"Finally, Acheson's State Department favored allowing Mao to conquer Taiwan, the island redoubt to which Chiang Retreated, as a way of fully disentangling Washington from the conflict; the Defense Department and Gen Douglas MacArthur, by contrast, demanded that the island be held as a critical bulwark against communism in Asia. Throughout 1949, US strategy was more hesitant and contradictory than coherent and purposeful, and by the end of that year the civil war had concluded in precisely the scenario -- a Communist China seeking an alliance with Stalin -- that American officials had feared most.   

"In fairness, it is not clear that there were many better options available to US officials or that bad [US] policies -- as opposed to rotten circumstances [in China] were the root of America's problems in China. By 1949, there was no possibility of saving Chiang's government absent a major military intervention that would have consumed untold and badly needed American resources with scant chances of success. Nor, in retrospect, was there ever much hope for a positive relationship with Mao (some excessively State Department reporting to the contrary), who was a devoted Communist and deeply suspicious of the US. 'Third Forces' -- movements that were both anti-Chiang and anti-Mao -- were simply not strong or cohesive enough to exert much influence.  

"The trouble, as Kenan aptly put it in 1948, was that 'there are operating in China tremendous, deep-flowing indigenous forces which are beyond our power to control.' Under the circumstances, the policy toward which the Truman administration stumbled -- avoiding a quixotic military intervention on behalf of Chiang, shoring up the Southeast Asian perimeter through military and economic assistance to neighboring countries, and hoping that Communist ideology would eventually tear Beijing and Moscow apart rather than bind them together -- was not such an unreasonable course to follow. It reflected, as Mr Peraino writes, 'a dark, but coherent, worldview.'

"The story he [Peraino] tells will be largely familiar to those who have studied this period, for the book -- despite research in many of the relevant archives and sources -- breaks relatively little new ground in terms of argumentation or analysis.  

" 'A Force So Swift' is unsatisfying in some key respects. * * * Mr Peraino's focus on 1949 * * * means that crucial parts of the story get less attention than they deserve. Many of the key developments in both civil war and US policy came in 1947-38, when Chiang forces suffered disastrous military setbacks and the Truman administration deprioritized China -- with obvious implications for Chiang -- in order to focus on Europe. Similarly * * * he [Mr Peraino] curiously declines to say much about the ties between the 'Who Lost China?' debate that followed Chiang's flight from the mainland and the rise of McCarthyism. Not least, one of the most surprising outcomes of the Chinese revolution -- that the United States, which had tried so hard tcut Chiang loose, ended up committed to preserving his regime on Taiwan as a result of the Korean War -- is treated almost as an afterthought.

My comment:
(a)  The title of the book review -- a quotation from bible -- arises from the third quotation from the bottom: "a dark, but coherent, worldview."
(b) There is no need to read the rest.