United Fruit, CIA, Do Business with Guatemala, Cold War Style: 2) Democracy to Coup D’état

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Comparative politics, Economics and society,, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

CCACBF24-9484-466C-AD4D-9150E57E5250With the go-ahead from incoming president Eisenhower in March 1953, Allen Dulles and the CIA continued the covert plot to undermine and destabilise the Árbenz government. The highly-orchestrated assault on the Árbenz regime took place on several fronts. Washington blocked a much needed loan from the World Bank to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo on the country❈. The CIA forged an alliance of neighbouring states which were hostile or potentially hostile to Árbenz. The dictators running Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela didn’t require much persuading. Success by Árbenz in redistributing Guatemalan land could easily inspire the peasantries in their own countries to make similar demands, so the tiranos-caudillos were only too happy to get on-board with the CIA’s mission and pass on valuable intelligence about Guatemala to the US, and in the case of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Venezuela’s Jiménez, help finance and arm the anti-Árbenz rebels.

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⬆️ Dulles Bros Inc

Within the turbulent atmosphere of Guatemala CIA pursued a strategy of divide-and-rule. The US dangled the carrot of future armaments before the country’s military high command –  the arms withheld from them would be made available on the proviso that they were prepared to break with their loyalty to Árbenz. [Bowen, Gordon L. “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954.” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983): 88-102. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2633365].

Peurifoy and anti-communism in one country
At the same time the US State Department also utilised diplomatic channels to lever pressure on the Guatemalan regime. The State Department purposefully chose John Peurifoy as the new ambassador to Nicaragua. Peurifoy came with the right credentials to ‘help’ in Guatemala. As US ambassador to Greece in 1950 he interfered in post-civil war Greece to consolidate an anti-communist climate in the country. As Washington’s man-on-the-ground in Guatemala Peurifoy played a key role in destabilising the Árbenz government. The ambassador  approached the task of rooting out communists in Guatemalan politics very zealously, describing a meeting with Àrbenz thus, “I came away definitely convinced that if President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along, and that normal approaches will not work in Guatemala” [‘The Ambassador in Guatemala (Peurifoy) to the Department of State, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.com/]⧆. The CIA’s anti-Árbenz propaganda campaign also secured the assistance of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, whose priests infused their sermons with censure of the government.

Washington parachutes ”anti-red troubleshooter” into Guatemala
(New York Times) ⬇️


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Self-appointed gatekeeper of the Western Hemisphere
Historians have debated the reasons for Washington’s persistently determined pursuit of the Guatemalan democracy. In the early to mid-Fifties the mania of anti-communism was at its peak in America. Eisenhower had been elected in 1952 pledging to stop the spread of the “communist scourge” both at home and globally⌑. In such a charged climate the US Administration found itself very disposed towards seeing developments in Guatemala under Árbenz as evidence of a Soviet beachhead in the region, as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine◰, and therefore justification for Washington to intervene in Guatemala’s affairs [‘Upholding the Monroe Doctrine: American Foreign Policy in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup d’Etat’, (Nadjalisse C. Reynolds-Lallement), [Dr. Karen E. Hoppes HST 201: US History June 5, 2013], http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/].

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A symbiosis of political and economic interests?
The consensus among historians is that Cold War politics was the prime mover for the US, and that the economic interests and profitability of United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Guatemala always was secondary in the scheming – although as Gordon has argued, there was a reciprocal relationship between the two at play, the US’ government’s “Cold War and anti-communist hysteria provided public cover for government action on behalf of UFCo, (the company’s) personnel facilitated the CIA’s Cold War task of subverting the Árbenz government” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.”Science & Society 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401561].

Notwithstanding the fact that local communists held some sway over the Guatemalan labour movement, their impact on decision-making within the Árbenz government was at best minimal. Árbenz’ objectives on taking control were not doctrinal but pragmatically liberal ones – political liberalisation, creation of a middle class, modernisation of the country, to free the Guatemalan economy from dependency on world coffee prices and from control by foreign corporations𝄪 (Gordon). Try as they may, US apologists arguing that the intervention was saving the country from communism have failed to make any plausible, even indirect, connexion between the Árbenz government and the Soviet Union✧. Immerman’s view is that the State Department confused communism and nationalism [cited in Bowen)❂.

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⬆️  JF Dulles, Time’s “Man of the Year, 1954”

Isolating the Western Hemisphere’s outlier state 
With former UFCo lawyer John Foster Dulles guiding US foreign policy, the diplomatic isolation of Guatemala was complete when it cajoled the other members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) into accepting its anti-communist resolution in the region at the Caracas meeting early in 1954. The US, with assistance from the UK, also blocked Guatemala’s efforts to secure UN intervention against those seeking to destabilise its democracy.

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⬆️  Rebel troops attacking Guatemala City
(Source: www.latinamericanstudies.org)

End-game: The putsch and its denouement
By late 1953 Eisenhower had given the “green light” to the invasion plan that became Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954. The US propaganda campaign intensified a few months later with saturation airdrops of anti-Árbenz leaflets across the country. Concurrently, the US Embassy in Guatemala City employed  blocking equipment to jam the government’s official wireless channels and replace it with misinformation discrediting the Árbenz regime (Bowen). The CIA chose a renegade, expat Guatemalan officer on the outer with Árbenz to lead the coup attempt. From Honduras, Colonel Castillo Armas, with a small force of Guatemalan exiles and mercenaries and financed largely by the CIA, invaded the country. At first repulsed by Árbenz’s troops, the rebels fortunes turned around after Peurifoy persuaded JF Dulles to provided them with air cover. US-piloted planes duly strafed Guatemala City and other towns. American intimidation and terror had a telling psychological effect on the population. Guatemalan army commanders, fearful of a full US military intervention, defected from Árbenz, and refused to allow the president to arm the peasant militia to resist the invaders, this prompted a demoralised Árbenz to resign his office in June 1954 and seek asylum in the Mexican Embassy. After some jockeying for power within the country’s military junta Castillo Armas emerged as the new (US recognised) national leader, hurling Guatemala once again into the void of a crippling military dictatorship [RABE, STEPHEN G. “The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (2004): 785-90. Accessed July 30, 2020.www.jstor.org/stable/24914824.]

⬇️ Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s graphic take on the Guatemalan putsch   

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❈ forcing it to seek arms from Czechoslovakia, allowing the US to fling further mud, characterising it as an evidence of Árbenz’s ongoing collusion with communism

⧆ revealingly, the New York Times at the time described Peurifoy as “a man of action rather than a diplomat”, The New York Times, 18-July-1954

⌑ as Moye has noted, the Guatemala crisis provided a convenient and fairly easy way for the Eisenhower administration to demonstrate its promised “victory over communism”  [MOYE, LAURA. “The United States Intervention in Guatemala.” International Social Science Review 73, no. 1/2 (1998): 44-52. Accessed July 31, 2020. www.jstor.og/stable/23883544/].

◰ a foreign policy position of the US, first enunciated in 1823, warning off European powers from interfering with the governance of existing countries on the American continent

𝄪  at the time of Guatemala’s to transition to a democratic state, the US accounted for 77% of its exports of 65% of its imports. UFCo functioned in Guatemala (and elsewhere in the region) as a “state within a state”, controlling 42% of the Guatemalan land and benefitting from light tax and import duty burdens [‘Background on the Guatemalan Coup of 1954’, www.umbc.edu/].

✧ Marks offers a contrary view, that the Árbenz government did pose a genuine communist threat, had a tendency towards authoritarianism itself and that the president had lost the confidence of the majority of Guatemalans by 1954 [MARKS, FREDERICK W. “The CIA and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, 1954: New Clues to an Old Puzzle.” Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (1990): 67-86. Accessed July 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24912032]. Although Rabe et al have countered that Marks’ conclusions rely on early State Department documents that have been discredited

❂ Getchell contends that in fact the USSR were “unwilling to prop up what they considered a bourgeois-democratic revolution” [‘Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”’, (Michelle Denise Getchell), Journal of Cold War Studies, 17(2):73-102. April 2015. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS a 00549]

1898, A Vintage Year for United States Empire Building

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Economic history, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

 

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ~ Mark Twain (attributed)✱

〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥

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The axiomatic nature of the above much-referenced quotation resounds most strongly in the year 1898. In that year the US expanded its offshore territorial acquisitions in different parts of the Pacific and in the Caribbean. It secured the islands of Cuba, the Philippines❂, Guam and Puerto Rico as a result of a short, opportunistic, one-sided war with a declining European power. At the same time Washington annexing the Hawaiian Islands, closed the door on four years of ‘independent’ republicanism which followed a successful coup by American businessmen against the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.

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🔺 Flag of the short-lived Hawaiian Republic


What triggered US involvement in a Cuban conflict against far-off Spain? The immediate pretext was the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbour. The explosion is generally believed to have been an accident but leading American newspapers (the Hearst press and to a lesser extent the Pulitzer publications) drove the charge of war jingoism within the country, declaring Spain culpable for the loss of life on the Maine. This and the ongoing reporting of the Cuban insurrection which deliberately exaggerated Spanish atrocities against the Cubans—examples of the “yellow journalism”◬ practiced especially by Hearst—helped to create a groundswell of popular support and agitation for war whilst boosting the newspapers’ sales.

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🔺 “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” (source: www.pri.org) 

Humanitarian concern for the Cuban people?
In response to the charge that the US engineered the war as a grab for territory (á la Mexico 1846), apologists for the US intervention clothed the action in the garb of a humanitarian attempt to free the Cuban people from the colonial yoke of imperial Spain [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020]. The McKinley Administration in Washington DC also justified it as an imperative to act given the political instability in Cuba, so close to US soil, and certainly Washington as the hegemonic regional power with a self-appointed role as regional ‘policeman’ had an interest in ridding the Western Hemisphere of the remnants of an old European colonial power [‘The Spanish-American War, 1898’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

Contemporary criticisms of aggressive US foreign policy
Washington’s rapid trajectory towards war in 1898 drew a skeptical response internationally. Keir Hardie, British labour leader, stated that he “cannot believe in the purity of the American motive”, seeing rather the hand of “trusts and Wall Street financiers intent on extending American dominance over Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East”. The French government agreed that the professed humanitarian concerns were “merely a disguise for (US) commercial desires” to conquer the Caribbean and Latin America. Non-mainstream press in the US  like the socialist The People and the New York Tribune argued that the US government ’s real aim was to ”divert attention from economic evils at home” and to protect the US’s extensive interests in Cuba [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020].

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An economics-driven war
In fact economics was the principal driver of America’s intervention in Spanish Cuba. First, the US was massively invested in the island in the 1890s, importing sugar (predominantly), plus tobacco and minerals from Cuba…the US’s Cuban business ventures were valued at about $50 million in 1895 [‘American Business in Cuba 1898-1959: A Brief Overview’, (Lisa Reynolds Wolfe), Havana Project, 17-Aug-2011, www.havanaproject.com]. The Maine was in Havana harbour to protect these same American interests when it met with disaster. So, rather than a humanitarian motive to aid the beleaguered Cubans, the intervention can be seen as pure economic self-interest: “halting a nationalistic revolution or social movement that threatened American interests” and the subsequent withholding of sovereignty to Cubans (and to Filipinos) [Paterson, Thomas G. “United States Intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War.” The History Teacher, vol. 29, no. 3, 1996, pp. 341–361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4944551 . Accessed 21 July 2020].

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🔺 President McKinley

The contemporary state of the American economy was a factor in America’s timing to act. Economic depression and unemployment was plaguing the country. New markets needed to be found for US goods, this meant not only Cuba and the American ’backyard’, but even extending to the Philippines and the lucrative Chinese market (Paterson). Tom Fiddick argues that the real reason President McKinley backed by the American capitalist class opted for war—having seen Spain‘s failure to pacify the Cuban rebels—was to make certain that the insurectos did not succeed in liberating the island and thereby pose a threat to US business interests in Cuba [Fiddick, Tom. “Some Comments on Philip S. Foner’s “Why the United States Went to War with Spain”.” Science & Society 32, no. 3 (1968): 323-27. Accessed July 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401358].

 

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🔺 Battle of Guantánamo Bay (Cuba)

US strategy thinking around imperialist objectives was evident prior to the move to war in 1898 – plans were already afoot for the establishment of naval bases in the strategically important Caribbean and in Hawaii, a precondition to expanding economically further into Latin America and into Asian markets. This “game plan” also envisioned US control of the Isthmus of Panama, an objective secured a few years after the victory over Spain (Foner).

Underpinning ideology for upping territorial expansion
The hawkish US foreign policy in 1898 accords with the prevailing 19th century belief of “Manifest Destiny”, a view that settlers in the US were destined to expand inexorably across the continent of North America◙. Correspondence between key players (T Roosevelt and HC Lodge) disclose that the McKinley Administration was committed—before the outbreak of hostilities—to  “intervention in Cuba as a stepping stone for expansion in the Far East through the acquisition of Spain’s Pacific possessions”. Foner notes that Cuba comprised the ‘fulcrum’ providing the opportunity for US occupancy of the Philippines as “a base at the doorway to China’s markets” for US capitalists. Also shaping this was the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis—the idea that American democracy was defined by a moving frontier line—if America’s frontier at home was closing off as was thought by some, then the most viable course may be to seek new frontiers abroad. The increasingly dominant current in international thought, social Darwinism, was also informing American thinking…the national assertiveness shown in 1898 can be seen as a quantum leap in the “deliberate, calculated pursuit of United States’ greatness” (Paterson).

🔻 Battle of Manila Bay (Phil.)

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Hawaii, a foothold on the “American Lake”
The groundwork for the US’s absorption of the Hawaiian islands as part of the Manifesto Destiny credo was laid five years earlier when a group of American sugar planters under Sanford B Dole✦ overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, replacing the monarchy with a provisional government with Dole as president. The coup was tacitly recognised by the US government (with US marines despatched to Hawaii to protect US citizens), although President Cleveland tried unsuccessfully to reinstate the monarchy. His successor William McKinley, recognising the strategic importance of Pearl Harbour as a naval base in the war with Spain, “rubber-stamped” the formal annexation of the islands by the US in August 1898 [‘Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy, History, www.history.com/].

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🔺 US sailors and marines in Honolulu c.1894

Footnote: A “Spanish-American War”
Thomas G Patterson notes the exclusionist nature of the name given to the 1898 conflict – the omission of reference to Cuba and Philippines in the title—in effect “air-brushing” the native populations out of the conflict—was (Paterson suggests) an attempt by the victors to obscure uncomfortable truths, the denial of full-fledged independence to Cubans and Filipinos once freed from Spanish control, and to try to avoid America’s role in the affair being labelled as ‘imperialist’ (Paterson).

🔻 1900 map (Source: Pinterest)

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PostScript: The Filipino insurgency
After the Spanish defeat Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo asserted the Philippines’ independence (proclaiming the First Philippine Republic) in 1899. This action was opposed by the US and a conventional-cum-guerrilla war ensued until 1902 when US forces finally subdued Aguinaldo’s army and the Philippines were made an unincorporated territory of the US (although a number of splinter groups of local insurrectos continued to fight the US military occupation for several years) [‘The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

🔻 Flag of the República Filipino


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✱  this famous but elusive quote has also been attributed, in slightly modified form, to Ambrose Bierce

❂  the US government paid Spain $20 million, compensation for the loss of infrastructure in the Philippines  

◬ characterised by sensationalism (eg, eye-catching headlines) typically with scant regard for accuracy

◙ US business giant Standard Oil for instance talked about its ”Manifest Destiny being in Asia” (Foner)

✦  calling themselves the “Committee of Safety”

Remembering the “Forgotten War”: The Korean War, 70 Years On

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the first shots fired in anger of probably the most consequential of the numerous forgotten wars in modern history – the Korean War (25th June 1950).

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Prelude to the conflict
Tensions between the north and south of the Korean Peninsula can be traced back to the 1930s and the Japanese occupation of Korea. Japan’s dominance prompted a resistance movement which included future communist leader and dynasty patriarch of North Korea Kim Il-sung. Some Koreans willingly collaborated with the Japanese invaders including fighting for it against the Korean guerrillas trying to liberate the country (one such agent of the Japanese was a former South Korean president, Park Chung-hee, assassinated in 1979) [‘Collaboration with Japanese hangs over South Korea’, Taipei Times, 08-Mar-2019, www.taipeitimes.com].

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(Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images)

At the end of WWII, Korea was divided into two zones of military occupation, north (with Kim as leader under the tutelage of the Soviet Union) and south (under US control☼ but eventually with right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee installed as president), with the demarcation line quite arbitrarily defined at the 38th Parallel (38° N) by two American officers . The leaders of both Koreas held ambitions for reunification of the peninsula but with very different kinds of political outcomes in mind. The US’ withdrawal of almost all its military forces from the South in the late 1940s decided Kim on putting the communist reunification plan into action. With USSR and China agreeing to support it, North Korean forces attacked the South in June 1950✧. The ensuing three years saw the opposing forces push each other back and forth along the peninsula (the South’s capital Seoul was captured on four separate occasions) resulting in a stalemate.

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⇧ Chinese Volunteer Army crossing the Yalu River (Source: www.goodfreephotos.com)

The Korean War was both a Korean civil war and a proxy superpower war militarily pitting the US v Communist China – as well as an early chapter of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and America wrestling for influence over strategically-positioned Korea. The response to North Korea’s invasion was a UN-sanctioned “police action” comprising sixteen nations including Britain and Commonwealth countries but led by the US. After initial defeats and a re-consolidation of its position, the US army drove the North Korean forces back into the northern border with China—at one point the US army captured and held the communists’ capital Pyongyang for eight weeks—this prompted China to enter the conflict with a massive manpower commitment, throwing over 250,000 troops against the Americans and allies and forcing them back deep into South Korea [‘The US Army once ruled Pyongyang and 5 other things you might not know about the Korean War’, (Brad Lendon), CNN, 24-Jun-2020, www.amp.cnn.com].

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⇧ MiG-15 fighter: the Korean War saw the first appearance of  jet vs jet ‘dogfights’—American F-80s & F-86s fought Russian MiG-15s (manned, first by Russian, and later Chinese and North Korean pilots) with aerial combat taking place in a section of North Korea and the Yalu River that became known as “MiG Alley”

A heavy toll including civilians and MIAs
All together, somewhere between three and four million people died in the conflict. The US army lost nearly 37,000, the South Koreans nearly 138,000. The North Koreans lost up to 400,000 soldiers and the Chinese forces, over 180,000. The MIA tally (missing in action) was very high, over 300,000 from both sides combined. The toll on the civilian population was greatest – the US military unleashed a relentless bombing campaign on North Korea resulting in excess of 280,000 casualties. Virtually all of the modern buildings in North Korea were levelled by the 635,000 tons of US bombs dropped (Lendon).

⇩ Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951)

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A Cold Warrior blueprint from the Pentagon
The US’ involvement in Korea was a key plank in the overall strategy of containing communism in Asia – known in the Pentagon as “Forward Defence”. With the postwar map of Eastern Europe encompassed within the Soviet empire and China under communist rule, Washington saw intervention in the peninsula as fundamental and essential to prevent South Korea from becoming another fallen ‘domino’ to communist infiltration of Eurasia…the same logic that held sway a decade later when America stumbled into an infinitely harder regional conflict to disentangle itself from in Vietnam.

A “limited war”
Mindful of the risk that the Korean War might escalate into a wider Asia conflict or even into “World War III”, US president, Harry S Truman, ordered the US military not to extend it’s aircraft raids into Manchuria and Chinese territory, even though the Chinese were using its north-east provinces to amass its forces to enter the Korean war-zone. This also ruled out using atomic weapons in the conflict, Washington’s reticence to do this was sharpened by awareness of the Soviet Union’s recent demonstration of its own nuclear weapons capability [’Never Truly Forgotten: The Lethal Legacy of the Korean War’, (Rebecca Lissner), War on the Rocks, 25-Jun-2020, www.warontherocks.com].

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Korea’s Cold War reverberations for America 
An armistice in 1953 brought an end to the hostilities on the peninsula but left the issue unresolved. A demilitarised zone (DMZ) was set up between the two Koreas – a ‘contained’ hotspot which threatens periodically to spill over and reignite hostilities. The conflict in Korea prompted a radical transformation in US defence thinking. To secure its regional forward defence perimeters the US in the early Fifties forged defence alliances with the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. And with this came a diverse mushrooming of US overseas military postings and bases in the Asia-Pacific region. Most significantly, the war reversed an earlier contraction of US defence spending, by 1951 it’s spending skyrocketed to $48.2 Bn, setting a pattern for future US military expenditure, including a large standing army in peacetime and an increasingly-funded CIA which expanded its surveillance activities across the globe (Lissner; Cummings).

⇩ a US M-24 tank crew, Nakdong River, 1950

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Out of sight …
Why was the Korean War consigned to history’s back pages so swiftly? Timing is part of the answer. WWII ended less than five years earlier, it was still fresh in people’s minds and they had had enough of war. The Korean War, when it came, was an unpleasant reminder of that world-shattering, traumatic episode [Eric McGeer, quoted in Toronto Sun, 21-Jun-2020]. Korea was “overshadowed by the global conflagration that preceded it and the nation-rending counter-insurgency campaign in Vietnam that followed it” (Lissner). But the Korean War’s unresolved conclusion has “kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs” [Shiela Miyoshi Jager, “5 US Wars Rarely Found in History Books’, ( Jessica Pearce Rotondi), History, 11-May-2020, www.history.com]. Since the ceasefire in 1953 the peninsula has remained a potential world hotspot, a state of tension persisting to the present thanks largely to the periodical bellicose threats of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un to use nuclear warfare against South Korea and the US.

End-note: Perpetual state of war

Though hostilities ceased on July 27, 1953, technically the Korean War has never ended as no peace treaty between the combatants was ever signed.

PostScript: A reprieve for Taiwan 🇹🇼 
The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula presaged a change of fate for Taiwan. In 1949, Mao Zedong, having emerged triumphant from the Chinese Civil War against Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, had amassed a force of troops on the mainland ready to invade and “take back” Taiwan. Korea turned that seeming fait accompli on its head! With fighting starting, Truman, fearful of the war spreading across east Asia, positioned the US 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Stymied, Peking jettisoned its plans to invade Taiwan and relocated the formation of soldiers to the Korean front (Lendon).

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☼ during the three years of direct US military administration of South Korea to 1948, the US injudiciously misread the political situation and employed despised Korean officers of the former Japanese colonial police to impose security – leading to an open revolt in the country (Cumings).
✧ although the conventional view is that Pyongyang was the aggressor and initiated the fighting by invading the South, some observers have noted that in earlier encounters on the border in 1949, South Korea arguably initiated the bulk of the fighting (Cumings)

 

India v China, the Road to War, 1962: An Early Flexing of Regional Muscle by Two Future Asian Superpower Rivals

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Political History, Regional History

Just last month there was a border flare-up on isolated Himalayan territory between northern India and China (Tibet)…one with familiar echoes of the past. A seemingly random clash of troops on the banks of Pangong Tso (eastern Ladakh) apparently initiated by the Chinese, some injuries, accusations of trespassing and of illegal building of defence facilities, a serious face-off between two bodies of troops 〚’China vs India: Beijing troops take control of border accusing India of trespassing’, (Brian McGleenon), Express, 18-May-2020, www.express.co.uk〛.

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Nathu La border, 2020  (Photo: AFP / Getty Images)

Though the incident is concerning of itself—two Asian military superpowers with nuclear empowerment going head-to-head—this is nothing new, there have been a number of such “minor incidents“ between the two countries over the past six decadesφ. Similar incidents to this occurred in 2017 at the same location and at the Doklam tri-junction (India/Tibet/Bhutan). Small incursions across the contested borderlands by both sides have long been a common occurrence 〚‘Chinese Troops Have Entered Disputed India Territory Several Times in Recent Days’, (AFP), Business Insider, 19-Aug-2014, www.businessinsider.com〛.

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Asian brotherhood – before the strains
Independent post-colonial India and the People’s Republic of China both emerged in the late 1940s. Initially the relationship between them was cordial, India even fulfilling a role as a diplomatic go-between for communist China to voice the isolated Peking regime’s concerns on world bodies like the UN〚‘India-China War of 1962: How it started and what happened later’, India Today, 21-Nov-2016, www.indiatoday.in〛. Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru pursued a pragmatic approach to the gigantic northern neighbour, entering into the Panchsheel Pact (“Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”) with China, eventually even recognising Peking’s right to rule Tibet. Nehru’s expression or slogan for the relationship during these “glass half-full” days was Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai (Indian-Chinese brotherhood) (India Today).

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Deterioration of Sino-Indian relations
In 1959 the relationship started to turn for the worst. The Lhasa Uprising and the Dalai Lama’s subsequent exile into India didn’t endear India to China and its leader Mao Zedong. But much more permanently troubling has been the ongoing spat between China and India over their shared and disputed borders. India inherited one nightmare of a border mess from the British colonials⌫…on two separate fronts – in the northwest of the country it has several contested boundaries with Pakistan and China (ranging over Kashmir, Jammu and Kashmir,  Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand), and in the northeast with China (Arunachal Pradesh (“South Tibet”), Assam, Sikkim).

Border clashes and the road to war
In 1959 there were clashes on India’s North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) – at Kongka Pass, Ladakh (nine Indian and one Chinese soldiers killed) and at Longju, on the disputed McMahon Line (one Indian border guard killed). Both sides argued that the other transgressed into its territory first, a standard refrain in the Indo-Chinese confrontations. Mao was rebuked by Soviet leader Khrushchev at the time for harming the relationship with India〚’China’s India War: How the Chinese Saw the Conflict’, (Neville Maxwell), May 2011, www.chinaindiaborderdispute.files.wordpress.com〛.

From sabre-rattling to open war
Within three years the continuing border fracas developed into a full-blown border war between China and India…in October 1962 the Chinese People’s Liberation Army attacked the concentration of Indian border posts in Ladakh. The brief war itself was an unmitigated disaster for New Delhi and Nehru. The Indian army was badly led, out-manoeuvred and out-fought by the disciplined, efficient Chinese soldiers. Having spectacularly pushed the Indians back, Peking unilaterally called a ceasefire after one month of fighting and withdrew to the Line of Actual Control (a demarcation line separating the territory controlled by each side) leaving China in control of Aksai Chin (the location of Peking’s principal claim).

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The Sino-Indian war subsumed within the broader context of the Cold War
As India licked its wounds and tried to compose itself after the shock of the military debacle, Nehru set about portraying China as the belligerent aggressor and India as the aggrieved party merely trying to defend its own territory. Given the prevailing political climate of the time, the US and the UK readily agreed with New Delhi’s assessment of  China‘s actions as “bellicose and expansionist”. Peking was almost universally depicted as the villain in the piece with many Western countries adopting the “knee-jerk” anti-communist response, automatically denouncing Chinese aggression and offering support for the victim India. Both the US and the Soviet Union, who had just emerged from a superpower nuclear stand-off over the Cuban Missile Crisis, funnelled  lavished amounts of aid to India in the war’s wash-up〚Gregory Clark, Book Review of ‘India’s China War’, www.gregoryclark.net/; Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (1971)〛.

“Forward Policy”
The subsequent investigative work of Anglo-Australian journalist Neville Maxwell on the lead-up to the war turned this hitherto-accepted view of the conflict on its head. Maxwell obtained a copy of the top-secret, classified Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report⊗ leaked from an ‘insider’ and published its findings in a book in 1971. Maxwell and the HBB Report exploded the “convenient military mythology” of the 1962 war as being caused by China’s unprovoked aggression 〚’National Interest: Who’s afraid of Neville Maxwell?’, (Shekhar Gupta), The Indian Express, 22-Mar-2014, www.indianexpress.com〛.

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Aksai Chin  (Source: www.thediplomat.com)

The documents revealed that India from the end of the Fifties pursued “Forward Policy’, an aggressive strategy of military patrolling of disputed land claimed by China (provocatively and repeatedly setting up military posts ever more forward, so that the Indian post troops found themselves eyeballing the Chinese ones✦), Also disclosed was the folly of India’s complete unpreparedness for war at the time 〚’Burying Open Secrets: India’s 1962 War and the Henderson-Brooks Report’, (Shruti Pandalai), The South Asia Channel, 02-Apr-2014, www.archive.org/〛. The classified report and Maxwell show an ill-conceived plan from go to woe on India’s part…Nehru and members of the government pushed the military into a course of reckless adventurism on the northern borders (with Nehru urging the Indian army to drive the Chinese invaders out of the Dhola Strip)(Clark).

Peking showed itself willing to negotiate border disputes with it’s other southern neighbours, working through obstacles and doing so amicably with Burma, Nepal and Pakistan (the latter only too happy to reach a settlement with the PRC, seeing it as buying an insurance policy against it’s number one enemy, India).

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(Image: www.differentbetween.info/)


Failure of diplomacy, a negotiating cul-de-sac 
In negotiations with India, China made it clear that it was prepared to exchange it’s claims to NEFA in it’s entirety for New Delhi’s recognition of it’s claim to Aksai Chin (important to China as a route between it’s northwest province Xinjiang and Xizang (Tibet)). Eminently fair and reasonable as that appeared, Nehru was unwaveringly intransigent and refused to budge on an inflexible, previously-stated position that the frontier and boundaries were already delimited. Nehru presented the Chinese with what was tantamount to a fait accompli, saying effectively, this is what we insist upon, agree to this and then negotiate the rest. Or equally unhelpfully Nehru would insist that the Chinese evacuate Aksai Chin but without making a reciprocal concession on India’s part (Clark).

An alternate view to Nehru’s refusal to countenance any degree of compromise at the negotiating table (Maxwell) has it that at least up until 1959 the Indian PM was favourably disposed to Chou En-Lai’s Aksai Chin/NEFA exchange proposal (Clark).

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Chou En-Lai in India  (Source: www.indiandefencereview.com)

A calamitous miscalculation
The approach of Nehru and his defence minister, Menon, was predicated on the assumption that Peking under no circumstances would resort to war¤ — this transpired to be a fatal misreading of the Peking mindset. Equipped with this (false) sense of security the Nehru government felt free to push the envelope as much as it liked, getting closer and closer to the Chinese posts, raising the stakes each time. Premier Chou from the Chinese side tried repeatedly to negotiate a solution with the Indian PM, while all the time fortifying China’s military position on the disputed borders. 

Extra-cabinet Policy-making
Nehru, intent on projecting an unwavering show of strength, insisted that the retention of “India’s territories” were non-negotiable, a question of “national prestige and dignity”. With the domestic opposition egging on the government to take an even more aggressive stance on the border issue, Nehru set the stakes too high, as the situation proceeded relentlessly, he could not back down without risking great loss of face. As India plunged deeper into the diplomatic crisis, Nehru monopolised decision-making in his own hands,  often by-passing cabinet and parliament altogether  (‘India’s China War‘).

Ultimately, a frustrated Peking lost all patience with such bloody-minded stonewalling by the Indian side and took the drastic step that to Nehru and New Delhi had been previously unthinkable 〚’China Was The Aggrieved; India, Aggressor In ‘62’, Outlook, (Interview with N Maxwell, 22-Oct-2012, www.outlookindia.com; ‘India’s China War’〛.

 

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(Source: www.firstpost.com/)

India’s ”Pollyanna approach” to the military situation
India blundered into a war it was wholly unprepared for. As Maxwell pointed out, India’s championing of a non-aligned position in world politics and the prestige that afforded it, led it to let it’s guard down defence-wise. During the Fifties the strength of the country’s armed forces was allowed to become depleted. The complacency circa 1960 was manifest in Indians’ characterisation of the border confrontations with the PRC as a “police action”, and in Nehru’s comments that the Himalayas represented an “effective barrier“ to stop China. The effortless annexation of Portuguese Goa in 1961, against hardly any opposing forces, further lulled India into an unrealistic assessment of its own military capability. Signs of hubris even! When it came to the actual conflict in October 1962, the contrast was stark. India had maybe a quarter of the strength of China stationed in the conflict zone. India was deficient to the Chinese in many other areas: in weaponry (shortage of tanks and artillery; it’s jawans (soldiers) lacked the warm clothing essential for the weather and were unacclimatised to the altitude; the Chinese had the advantages of location and communications; and the Indians underestimated the difficulty of the terrain 〚’’Reassessing the Soviet Stand on the Indo-China conflict’, (Arun Mohanty), Russia Beyond, 25-Oct-2012, www.rbth.com; ‘India’s China War’〛.

Blame for the military fiasco also lands heavily on the generals themselves…Lt-General Kaul in particular comes badly out of the report’s findings. The politicians did not get realistic advice from the military commanders on India’s capacity to handle the border conflict, in part because they themselves had dismissed the unfavourable but accurate advice they were getting from subordinate officers at the front concerning the army’s clear lack of combat readiness (‘India’s China War’).

Drifting away from non-alignment
There had been an Indian eagerness to engage in reckless war rhetoric in the lead-up to the Himalayan war. India was awash with a mood of nationalistic jingoism…following Pandit Nehru’s lead very few were talking about negotiation, inside and outside the government. This, together with it’s swift recourse to warfare to secure Goa just ten months earlier, lost India credibility in the eyes of other countries in the non-aligned camp, and as Nehru was very much the embodiment of non-alignment statesmanship, this diminished him as well⊟. The fracturing of Indian non-alignment was further underscored with the country gravitating towards both Moscow and Washington at the conflict’s end (‘India’s China War’).

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As we have seen since 1962, the posturing and muscle-flexing by India and China on the mountainous border continues to the present. These fracas may on the surface be ‘contained’ shows of bluster, but the geo-strategic importance of the China-Indian border, and its proximity to another unresolved latent border flashpoint in Kashmir (India v Pakistan), remains a very real concern for all three players to avoid the errors of the past 〚’India’s two-front conundrum’, (Shahzad Chaudhry), The Express Tribune, 31-May-2020, www.tribune.com.pk〛.

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PostScript: An emerging rift in the “fraternal socialist states”
The Indo-Chinese War had piquant ramifications for the Soviet/PRC relationship. When the conflict took a serious turn, China’s expectation would be that it’d get the support of its fellow socialist state against a capitalist democracy, but the USSR annoyed Peking by adopting a neutral stance (a sign to the PRC of emerging “Soviet revisionism”)◊. Moscow’s position shifted over the course of the conflict, initially tilting slightly toward the PRC then back more openly toward India. The Soviets saw friendship with India and Nehru as useful—in a Russian global strategy that was moving towards a peaceful co-existence with the capitalist world—culminating in the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. The war signalled the emerging ideological gap between the two communist powers which would splinter further apart in 1963 (Mohanty).

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Φ the former Indian army chief VK Singh has stated that he is unconcerned by the most recent fracas, attributing Chinese aggression to an attempt to deflect attention away from it’s current problems at home〚’Amid India-China border stand off, Army Commanders Conference begins’, The Hindu, 27-May-2020, www.thehindu.com〛
⌫ “(India) inherited frontiers…(but) no boundaries”, as Maxwell pithily put it
⊗ the report to this day has not been officially released by any Indian government, it is said, due to its “extremely sensitive” nature and “current operational value” (Pandalal)
✦ in the sensitive Chip Chap Valley almost 40 Indian posts were positioned on territory claimed by China.
¤ this was a massive fail on the part of the Indian bureaucrats too. The Congress government was acting on advice from Intelligence Bureau director BN Mullik who assured it China would not react militarily to Indian advance movements.
⊟ in the trauma and shock of the catastrophic military reversals, a despairing Nehru tried to talk the US and Formosa (Taiwan) into attacking China. As Maxwell noted of India’s curious dualism in this: to Nehru the use of force was “reprehensible in the abstract and in the service of others, but justifiably both politically and morally when employed by India in disputes” (‘India’s China War’)
◊ the USSR had its own boundary disputes with China in the Far East which weren’t resolved until the early Nineties