Winston Churchill titled the fourth volume of his history of the Second World War The Hinge of Fate because it covered a time period in 1942-43 when events and decisions created a turning point in the war. Looking back 80 years ago, it is arguable that 1946 was the hinge of fate for the post-World War II world. Events and decisions of that year set the course for the Cold War and, ultimately, the post-Cold War world. 

The essential decision-makers in 1946 were Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, China’s communist leader Mao Zedong, and U.S. President Harry Truman. The key events included the communization of Eastern Europe, a showdown in Iran, the resumption of China’s civil war, and a belated recognition by the Truman administration that the Soviets were not interested in peaceful co-existence except on their terms. 

During the Second World War, there had been warning signs that the postwar world would be one of ongoing geopolitical turmoil. In the early stages of the war, the Soviets annexed half of Poland, the Baltic states and parts of Finland. Later, the discovery of the Katyn massacre, Moscow’s conduct during the Warsaw uprising in 1944, and the negotiations at Yalta evidenced Soviet intentions to install “friendly” regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Some lonely voices in the United States, such as roving ambassador William Bullitt, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) analyst James Burnham, and Time magazine’s foreign news editor Whittaker Chambers, had attempted to warn the Roosevelt administration of Soviet perfidy, to no avail. Burnham noted in a 1944 paper for the OSS that anti-Axis communist resistance forces in Greece, Yugoslavia, and China had turned against non-communist resistance forces even before Germany and Japan had been defeated, signaling that the Cold War had begun during the latter stages of World War II. FDR, however, placed his faith for the future in his ability to persuade Stalin and the promise of the United Nations.

In late 1945, some of Truman’s advisers began to question Soviet motives. Admiral William Leahy and Ambassador Averell Harriman criticized Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, for his accommodationist attitude toward the Soviets. Republican foreign policy spokesman John Foster Dulles joined that criticism by accusing Byrnes, and therefore the Truman administration, of repeatedly yielding to Soviet demands since the end of the war. In February 1946, George F. Kennan sent his “Long Telegram” from the Moscow Embassy warning that there could be no modus vivendi between the Washington and Moscow, and Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who had been a chief critic of the Yalta Agreement, spoke in the Senate to denounce Truman’s lack of sufficient responses to Soviet actions in the Baltics, Balkans, Manchuria, Eastern Europe, eastern Mediterranean, and Japan. Vandenberg condemned what he called a “miserable fiction, often encouraged by our own fellow-travelers, that we somehow jeopardize peace if our candor is as firm as Russia’s always is.” 

Truman eventually replaced Byrnes and toughened the administration’s approach to Soviet actions in Europe and the Middle East. In March 1946, after missing a deadline to remove its troops from northern Iran, the Soviet Union announced that the troops would be withdrawn in six weeks. They did so in return for favorable oil concessions, though Truman later recalled that he had threatened military moves if the Soviets did not leave. But in China the story was different.

In his excellent book A Preponderance of Power,which detailed the Truman administration’s actions during the early Cold War period, historian Melvyn Leffler notes that in China in 1946, Truman’s government “pulled out most of the U.S. Marines, cut . . . military assistance, and distanced itself from Chiang Kai-shek.” Truman had dispatched George Marshall to China in December 1945 to mediate between Chaing’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists instead of pledging full support to Chiang, our wartime ally against Japan. Truman curtailed U.S. military assistance to Chiang, while Stalin increased Soviet support for Mao. Top U.S. military officials were appalled. So was Navy Secretary James Forrestal who argued within the administration that U.S. exclusion from China would effectively surrender it to the Soviet-backed Communist forces. The State Department, however, supported Marshall’s mediation efforts and its pressure on Chiang. In the end, Mao’s Communists won the civil war and took power in October 1949. 

In September 1946, Truman advisers Clark Clifford and George Elsey wrote what Leffler called “the first comprehensive interdepartmental effort to assess Soviet intentions and capabilities, analyze the Kremlin’s motivations, evaluate Russian behavior, and prescribe American measures.” The Clifford-Elsey Report was titled “American Relations with the Soviet Union.” It declared that the goal of Soviet power was “eventual world domination.” The Soviets, the report said, were violating agreements made at Tehran in late 1943, Yalta in February 1945, and Berlin in Summer 1945. Soviet ideology held that peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world is impossible. The Clifford-Elsey Report quoted extensively from Kennan’s Long Telegram. It reiterated the warnings of Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech. It warned about communist subversive activities in Western Europe and the United States. The report concluded that the United States needed to militarily, economically, and politically counter Soviet expansionist policies; in other words, containment.

The Clifford-Elsey Report included a few paragraphs on China and the Far East, but its focus was on the Soviet threat to Europe. It had, in other words, an Atlanticist outlook, which dominated Truman’s foreign policy until events in Korea and Vietnam reoriented Truman. But during the crucial period of the Chinese civil war, Truman’s focus was more on Europe than on Asia. The “hinge of fate” in 1946 meant that the most populous country in the world fell to the Communists. Thankfully, the Sino-Soviet split, which the Nixon administration brilliantly exploited, separated the two communist Eurasian giants, thereby enabling the United States under the Reagan administration to eventually win the Cold War. But the events in China in 1946 also set the stage for the current U.S.-China rivalry. 

The Truman administration usually gets high marks for its foreign policy: containment, the Berlin airlift, the Truman Doctrine, NATO, NSC-68. But those achievements were limited to Europe. In Asia, however, the Truman administration’s record was mostly one of failure. And its greatest failure was in China. The most immediate victims of that failure were and are the Chinese people, who suffered through the unspeakable horrors of purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the genocide of the Uyghurs, and “ordinary” communist repression. But that failure also had geopolitical consequences that the United States is dealing with today in the South China Sea and the broader Indo-Pacific.