THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR ----Episode 7

IN THE EARLY MONTHS AFTER WORLD WAR II, OUR
GOVERNMENT BEGAN TO DEVELOP INTO A BULLY BECAUSE WE HAD THE ATOMIC BOMB AND
THE REST OF THE WORLD DIDN'T 

During the early postwar years, Truman vacillated in his attitude toward Stalin, often likening him to Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. Others did likewise. Even Averell Harriman, a fierce critic who worked with Stalin as ambassador during the war, recognized the complexity of his personality : 

     It is hard for me to reconcile the courtesy and consideration that Stalin showed me personally with the ghastly cruelty of his wholesale liquidations. Others, who did not know him personally, see only the tyrant in Stalin. I saw the other side as well----his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing . . . I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders. . . for me Stalin remains the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have ever known. 

   With tensions over Poland having eased, Germany would provide an early test case for postwar cooperation. After Germany's surrender, the Allies divided the country into Soviet, U.S., British, and French zones. Roosevelt had first supported the Morgenthau Plan for "pastoralization" of Germany to ensure that it never again posed a threat to its neighbors. "We have to be tough with Germany," Roosevelt told Morgenthau in August 1944. "We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past." But the United States revered itself once it became convinced that restoration of the German economy would be key to overall European recovery. This placed the Western powers at odds with the Soviets, who feared German revitalization and were busy stripping the eastern zone of assets to ship back to the Soviet Union. These conflicting interests impeded the creation of a unified Germany, thereby planting the seeds for later conflict, while Germans struggled to eke out a living regardless of which zone they lived in. 
  The first major superpower conflict erupted in the Middle East, not Europe, as Stalin moved to expand Soviet influence in Iran and Turkey at declining Britain's expense. The Middle East had assumed increased strategic significance following completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the introduction of long-distance air routes in the early twentieth century. English historian Arnold Toynbee described it as "the shortest route between the two chief concentrations of population and power in the world of the twentieth century" : India, East Asia, and the Pacific on the one hand, and Europe, America, and the Atlantic on the other. He explained that "command of the Middle East carried with it the power of keeping open the direct routes between those two geographical poles, or closing them, or forcing them open again." The Soviet Union had long coveted the Turkish Straits, which would have allowed it access to the Mediterranean, and Stalin believed he had won that concession from Roosevelt and Churchill during the war. He now pressured Turkey to build joint military bases in the straits. The ensuing conflict, like everything else in the Middle East, revolved around oil. At the start of the war, the United States accounted for 61 percent of overall world oil production. Great Britain controlled 72 percent of Middle Eastern oil, the United States only 10 percent. The United States now sought a bigger share in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia held the key to U.S. ambitions. In 1943, the United States extended lend-lease aid to the oil-rich sheikdom. The following year, Saudi King Ibn Saud granted the United States permission to construct an air base at Dharan. 
   In a 1944 meeting with British Ambassador Lord Halifax, Roosevelt drew a map of Middle Eastern oil holdings and informed Halifax that Iranian oil belonged to Great Britain, Saudi oil to the United States, and Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil belonged to both. The following year, Roosevelt concluded a deal with Ibn Saud pledging U.S. support in return for EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to Saudi oil. Truman understood the importance of maintaining U.S. control of this vital resource. In August 1945, Gordon Merriam, Chief of the State Department Near East Division, alerted Truman to the fact that Saudi Arabia's oil resources were "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in human history." 

   MUCH MORE TO COME