Bullet Diplomacy
‘Small Wars, Faraway Places,’ by Michael Burleigh
Photographs, from left: Haywood Magee/Picture Post—Getty Images; Rolls Press/Popperfoto—Getty Images
Soldiers of the Scots Guards patrol in Malaya, 1950; American Marines north of Da Nang, 1965.
By DANIEL LARISON
The New York Times Book Reviews: December 27, 2013
In “Small Wars, Faraway Places,” Michael Burleigh recounts the violent end of the British and French empires in Africa and Asia, and their partial replacement by the United States in its often ill-informed and costly efforts to combat Communism during the early stages of the Cold War. Burleigh surveys many of the major international wars and anticolonial insurgencies between 1945 and 1965, but opts to focus most on those involving America, Britain and France, and how they related to the rivalry with the Soviet Union. The result is a well-researched and readable account of two tumultuous decades. Burleigh judges most of these wars, both small and large, to have been futile and destructive. But while he clearly has no interest in defending or rehabilitating such conflicts, he nonetheless offers a fair, thoughtful assessment of the motives and interests behind them. He also takes care to understand and explain the grievances of the insurgents.
SMALL WARS, FARAWAY PLACES
Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965
By Michael Burleigh
Illustrated. 587 pp. Viking. $36.
Burleigh, the author of “The Third Reich: A New History” and several other books, begins with the collapse of Japanese rule at the end of World War II. Japanese conquest had briefly swept away the European colonial powers, which made it impossible for those governments to reimpose their authority over their former colonies for very long once hostilities ended. Burleigh proceeds episodically, jumping from one conflict to the next with each new chapter. Though this has the potential to be disorienting, he keeps the narrative moving along. He capably introduces each new subject without assuming too much prior knowledge, and uses brief biographical sketches of the key political and military actors to illustrate the experiences that informed their decisions. By the end of the book, the United States has begun its escalation in Vietnam, and is assuming much the same role that France had just abandoned.
Some conflicts from this period are inevitably left out or mentioned only in passing. For example, even though they began during the period covered by the book, the anticolonial wars against Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique are omitted. This is a deliberate choice on Burleigh’s part, which he explains as “favoring depth of field rather than a wide-angled focus,” and for the most part it succeeds. There is one short chapter on India and Pakistan that doesn’t seem to fit Burleigh’s subject all that well, but it doesn’t detract from the book as a whole, much of which is usefully concerned with the reconstruction of lesser-known conflicts in the postwar Philippines, Algeria and Malaya. All in all, Burleigh has synthesized a wide range of material to create a valuable introduction to the political and military events of the early Cold War.
Introducing a contemporary note, Burleigh makes several criticisms of current efforts to imitate the tactics of previous counterinsurgency campaigns, suggesting that “this may only involve selectively raiding the past to justify the prescriptions of the present.” For every limited and atypical “success” of counterinsurgency in Malaya, there were several extremely costly total failures. As he notes in his chapter on Vietnam, “there were actually few meaningful lessons to be drawn from Malaya, where the Communist insurgents were ethnic Chinese and the majority population Malay.” If there is a lesson to be drawn from these experiences, it is that no single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present. The particular circumstances of each country are far more important in determining the outcomes of wars.
Anti-Communist “domino” theories also come in for repeated criticism, since they were based almost entirely on an irrational alarmism rather than informed political analysis. Colonial governments had an incentive to stoke American fears of Communism among the insurgents, and American policy makers were inclined to imagine a monolithic global Communism that never existed. Because of this, the United States backed doomed efforts to shore up empires, and then ignored national differences that could, and later did, split the Communist powers. In a subtle nod to George Kennan’s criticisms of the time, Burleigh emphasizes that a belief in monolithic Communism was one of the main errors of American policy makers during this period.
His recounting of John F. Kennedy’s time in office, when the notion of monolithic Communism dominated strategic thinking, is notable for being quite negative. He is even more unsparing in expressing a low opinion of Anthony Eden and his handling of the Suez crisis of 1956. One of Burleigh’s recurring themes is how often postwar leaders blundered because they made misguided comparisons with appeasement at Munich. In the confrontation over Suez, Burleigh notes, “men with little or no knowledge of modern Egyptian history accommodated every assertive move by Nasser to a misleading Hitlerian template.” As it has done many times since then, a visceral fear of appeasement has led to entirely avoidable disasters. For Burleigh, the key to Britain’s role at Suez was that Eden failed to recognize global political realities had changed, and that Britain was no longer the great power it once had been.
While all of the relevant governments and leaders come in for their share of deserved rebukes throughout the book, Burleigh doesn’t seek to demonize any of the figures he describes. As he explains in the introduction, his is “not a work of advocacy history.” He consistently condemns both official and insurgent atrocities in no uncertain terms. Among the strengths of Burleigh’s account is that he has no interest in, and no patience with, romanticizing or whitewashing either side.
There is one curious remark in Burleigh’s discussion, however, that stands out as uncharacteristically inaccurate. It concerns the 1952 presidential campaign, when Dwight Eisenhower wrested the Republican nomination from Senator Robert Taft. Burleigh writes that Taft “was the last serious anti-interventionist presidential candidate in U.S. history, at least,” he adds, “until George W. Bush, who started out with such views.” This would surely be news to Bush, as well as to Taft’s admirers, since Bush would have rejected what Taft represented even before he became president.
The final chapters of “Small Wars, Faraway Places” inevitably focus on the increasing American involvement in Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In light of contemporary debates about Washington’s “credibility” in the Middle East, it is worth remembering that American officials issued the same warnings about Southeast Asia, insisting that a failure to act in Vietnam would undermine American credibility in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Burleigh wholly rejects this argument. It “was a lie. Britain and France opposed escalating the war, and de Gaulle was a firm advocate of Vietnam’s neutralization.” Appealing to credibility is often the last refuge of a policy maker who knows his argument lacks merit.
Burleigh concludes that the United States “profited little and lost much from its misconceived adoption of liberal imperialism.” But his book does a great deal to explain why Washington’s policy makers then — and perhaps now — couldn’t resist blundering into unnecessary small wars in faraway places.
