Antibolshevism and American Foreign Policy, 1919-1939: The Diplomacy of Self-Delusion

Abstract

ANTIBOLSHEVISM HAS CAST A LENGTHENING SHADOW ACROSS RECENT American diplomacy. In the years following the second world war, revolutionary and reformist movements around the globe were almost always interpreted as manifestations of Soviet subversion. Alleged Russian involvement in the Greek civil war was the basis of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Eastern European arms sales to the reformist regime of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala prompted a coup planned by the CIA in 1954, rumors of a communist takeover in the Dominican Republic led to the dispatch of thousands of United States marines in 1965, and fears that a left-wing uprising in Lisbon might open the door to Soviet influence within NATO inspired an American quarantine of Portugal in 1974. Although most scholars have acknowledged that anticommunist ideology has played a central role in shaping American foreign policy since 1945, few appreciate fully the impact of the fear of bolshevism upon American diplomacy during the interwar period. To be sure, as early as the 1950s historians such as William Appleman Williams and Robert Paul Browder pointed out that mutual ideological antagonisms had ensured frosty Soviet-American relations from 1917 to 1941. Recent works by Joan Hoff Wilson, Daniel Yergin, Martin Weil, and Thomas Maddux have confirmed that antibolshevism predisposed State Department officials and Foreign Service Officers to adopt a hardline approach to the Soviet Union between the world wars. Yet what most observers fail to realize is that during the 1920s and the 1930s antibolshevism shaped United States relations with Latin America and southern Europe as well. Robert Bowers, Robert Freeman Smith, and Hugh DeSantis have treated this issue briefly, but without emphasizing how fears of Soviet subversion affected American attitudes toward politi-