A rejoinder to Michael Cox
1992; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0260210500118777
ISSN1469-9044
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics
ResumoIt is a great thrill to find that someone has picked up the gauntlet thrown into the arena at a time when the Cold War seems to many to be nothing but remote history. Here are my brief answers to Michael Cox's gallant repartee: Tito did not ‘defect’ he was expelled from the Cominform by Stalin. Moscow did not ‘stay put’ altogether; Tito's expulsion was supposed to be followed by a putsch by the Stalinist faction within the CP of Yugoslavia, which failed, however. Here, as with the Berlin Blockade and later in condoning aggression in Korea (hardly ‘cautious, circumspect’ policy decisions), Stalin made a great mistake. Western analysts did predict the attack on South Korea. In May 1950 Kennan himself thought Stalin was looking for an area to have a ‘limited war’, and thought Yugoslavia a likely danger area. Mr Kennan's later Memoirs and memory are here, once again, not very reliable. The Communist victory in China and the Soviet explosion of an atomic device, far from being of little concern to the West, caused Truman to ask for NSC-68 to be written. The economically weak USSR was far from inferior to the West in manpower, as Dr Cox rightly notes, and it should be remembered that the Red Army had held its own against the formidable Wehrmacht for quite a while. The massive rearmament of the satellites of the USSR only started in 1948. Matthew Evangelista's article only deals with the period up to 1948, and its findings can not be applied to the 1949–1953 period. Satellite rearmament took off in 1950, peaking in 1952. By 1952 Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria alone had as many forces (including small naval and air forces) as the 800,000 Western troops available on the Central Front in 1948.
Referência(s)