Episode 29: Losing China

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on George Marshall’s Less Glorious Mission

By U.S. National Archives - Groom, Winston (November 10, 2015): The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II. National Geographic. ISBN: 978-1426215490, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100899507

General George Marshall occupies a central place in the pantheon of American heroes. He helped lead the Allies to victory in World War II, and as the secretary of state, he championed the plan to rebuild Europe which would be named for him: The Marshall Plan. But Marshall’s record as a statesman wasn’t perfect. Tapped by President Truman to negotiate an end to China’s civil war, he proved unable to broker a lasting settlement and prevent the country’s Communist takeover.

In this episode, the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah concludes Season 3 of None Of The Above with a discussion of Marshall’s legacy with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the editor of Foreign Affairs and the author of The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947. As the United States deals with competing global challenges, from Ukraine to Taiwan, Daniel’s depiction of Marshall’s career—for all its triumphs and failures—holds important lessons on the limits of American power. Have a listen, and stay tuned for when we return in June for Season 4.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and host of the upcoming podcast, The Foreign Affairs Interview. Previously, he served in the US Department of State, where he was a member of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s policy planning staff. He is also the author of The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947 (2018).

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“The Marshall Plan That Failed” (Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The Atlantic, July 30, 2018)
The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947 (Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, April 10, 2018)

Archival:

THE BIG PICTURE "ARMY IN ACTION" MARSHALL PLAN EPISODE 9 74512 (PeriscopeFilm, July 6, 2015)
1950s CHINESE CIVIL WAR DOCUMENTARY MAO ZEDONG VS. CHIANG KAI-SHEK KMT VS CCP ARMY 88614 (PeriscopeFilm, March 25, 2021)
Senator Mccarthy Dead At 47 (1957) (British Pathé, April 13, 2014)

Transcript:

DANIEL KURTZ-PHELAN: George Marshall is a can-do man in a can-do era, and here, he is kind of accepting what can't be done. So, he sees the limits of what American power can do.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. In the arc of American History, first, the heroes of our national folklore shaped our country, and then, the way we talk about those heroes shape our collective perception of its history. Today, we're going to consider one of those American icons who we remember in something of a shining light, who also, however, had some shadows on his record.

KURTZ-PHELAN: George Marshall is one of the real towering figures of this crowd of mostly men at the time. And of that age, he was Army Chief of Staff in World War II and was one of the real leaders of the Allied victory in the war. It kind of created the modern American Army and took what had been a very different kind of power and turned it into a truly global military power. And then, we, of course, know him as the one of the chief architects and drivers of the Marshall Plan and the postwar American foreign policy when he was secretary of state.

HANNAH: That's Daniel Kurtz-Phelan. He's the executive editor of Foreign Affairs, a leading magazine on international affairs, which is currently celebrating its centennial. Dan previously served in the United States State Department in the policy planning unit, in fact, which is the very unit George Marshall himself founded. And you could say Dan is a bit of a marshall expert. But before we dive into a particularly critical moment of American history and of Marshall's career, for those of you who haven't been in a history class in a minute, let's go ahead and refresh your memory.

Interlude featuring archival audio

KURTZ-PHELAN: Marshall Plan is this very large American effort to help Europe recover after World War II, and it's motivated by fears of the Soviet Union and communist encroachment in Western Europe, but also driven—for Marshall—by these sites of economic desperation and starvation and poverty that affected most of Western Europe in the wake of World War II. So, it had both this strategic and competition dimension, but also a humanitarian one.

HANNAH: Because of that Marshall Plan, we got a whole new level of transatlantic security and cooperation, and George Marshall became a champion in the American zeitgeist—and rightly so, for his many wonderful attributes and qualities as a leader. He was the proverbial man with a plan, after all. But in his recent book, The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, Dan digs into a section of George Marshall's biography which spans from 1945 to 1947, which is—let's just say—underreported.

KURTZ-PHELAN: What really fascinated me about the China mission that I cover in the book is that it's a strange episode that comes in between two heroic achievements. He leads the Allied Victory in World War II. He became Secretary of State in 1947 and forges the Marshall Plan and is one of the architects of postwar American foreign policy. But in between, he spends this totally fascinating and equally consequential thirteen months in China taking on a mission that he fails at.

Interlude featuring archival audio

KURTZ-PHELAN: And that, to me, was part of what was so powerful about this. You take this kind of lionized figure from the golden age, and one of the most important things he does is a clear failure when you look at what he was charged to do at the outset and what he actually achieved.

HANNAH: What does it mean to fail at this mission, though? It wasn't just the insurmountable goal of helping China choose a new leader and keep them on a path to democracy and essentially broker a big civil conflict and major political infighting in that country. In a lot of ways, it was about, quote unquote, “losing China,” but it wasn't exactly America's to lose, was it? This moment from the past can be instructive for the current moment. The US is still far removed from the war in Ukraine. President Biden has reiterated that he does not plan to send American troops there to fight. But we continue to run the risk of involving ourselves up to a point where Ukraine suddenly feels like it's ours to lose.

KURTZ-PHELAN: So, in the Ukraine debate—without saying this is exactly what Marshall would think, but to the extent the dynamics are similar—you have people arguing on one side that, people would say, “If we'd only taken on a little bit more risk in what we were willing to do to deter Putin, we could have prevented this outcome.” Or, “If we send MiGs or whatever it is, we can kind of fundamentally change the equation here.”

I think the Marshall version of this in China is to say: “Look, it wasn't like we could have been a little bit more diplomatically open to Mao and the Communists and fundamentally change their orientation. They were ideologically aligned with Stalin. They were true believing communists, and in a world in which the Cold War divides were coming into place, there wasn't a kind of diplomatic opportunity at that point in time to peel off Mao and the Communists, as some people in this debate started to believe in the aftermath.” Similarly, there wasn't some American military commitment that would have been—and this is important qualifier—worth the risk and worth the cost that could have prevented a Communist victory.

HANNAH: So, where does George Marshall fit into the pantheon of historical American figures? And what can Marshall's impact be today as we think back on that history? And importantly, how do we avoid the mistakes of the past?

KURTZ-PHELAN: You spend all this time with the Marshall Plan and the great achievements of this era that are being held up to you as the thing you should be emulating. And the Marshall Plan captures this better than anything because both columnists and your bosses are constantly saying, “Well, we need a Marshall Plan for every problem out there.” So, it's: “We need a Marshall Plan for the Middle East. We need a Marshall Plan for Central America. We need a Marshall Plan for a post-COVID America. We need a Marshall Plan for Ukraine.” And most of what you're actually dealing with is limitations and failures and problems that can't be solved and limits you're running up against. And it struck me in some ways as more useful than studying just these heroic achievements or the massive failures like Vietnam, for example, that we also spend a lot of time looking at and seeing how figures from this period reckoned with the limits and thought about failure. It seems to be much more instructive when it came to what you're actually doing in foreign policy.

HANNAH: It has become a venerable tradition in American statecraft to view every problem confronting the United States as something that can essentially be solved with its own Marshall Plan. But as Dan writes, George Marshall himself might have disagreed. While it was the right response, perhaps, to the challenges facing the United States in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, George Marshall didn't see his plan as a one-size-fits-all solution.

KURTZ-PHELAN: The big thing that comes out of the Marshall lesson when you look at this period is that there are always going to be more demands and more priorities and more worthy causes or challenges the United States wants to take on than it's able to, and if you want to succeed at any of those, you need to be pretty disciplined about where you focus your investment and energy. Marshall, in facing the early Cold War, sees challenges everywhere, and they're in the feverish politics of that period. You could kind of point to communist threats anywhere in the world, and Marshall says, “Look, we need to be really disciplined and clear-eyed about where we can make a difference, where we have partners who can help, and where those challenges are most significant to us.” You need to focus your investment in a place where it's going to work and where it's going to be meaningful, not kind of assume you can do everything. And for Marshall, that was, at the time, Western Europe and that was the Marshall Plan. But the notion that you could make that kind of investment and make that kind of difference everywhere was, to him, the thing others got wrong. And he would say, “Look, do it where you can. But if you try to do this everywhere, it's going to work nowhere.”

HANNAH: George Marshall not only saw the need to differentiate threats and challenges, he understood America's ability to make a difference had its limitations. Dan writes that Marshall would often repeat that it “was only the Europeans themselves who could finally solve the problems of Europe.” In other words, American assistance was not sufficient. And whereas he saw the Europeans as willing and able, Marshall did not see the same in China's nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek.

KURTZ-PHELAN: He spends thirteen months in China trying to, first, broker some peace in the civil war between the nationalist and communists, between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao. And that's important to him because he sees a limit to what can be achieved militarily with US military assistance. That seems to be working for a period of time and then falls apart. And as 1949 approaches, and it looks like a Communist victory is becoming more likely, there's a big debate in United States about what the US can do to prevent this Communist victory in China—to save China from communism as the thinking in many camps went at the time.

Interlude featuring archival audio

KURTZ-PHELAN: Marshall had a real sense of the limits of what the US could do that was informed by the thirteen months he spends on his China mission, and that's in large part because he sees a lack of capacity or willingness by the US partners in China—by the Nationalists—to take steps he thinks they would need to take to make a key difference. And that, to him, is one of the differences between China and Western Europe. Part of it is that he sees Western Europe as the more important theater strategically at the time, so that's one major consideration for him. But he also sees partners who are willing to take steps towards economic reform, towards cooperating with other countries. This is one of the origin stories of the European Union and European cooperation. So, he sees those as kind of necessary preconditions for even massive American assistance really making a difference. If there are partners who are willing to take those steps, then he is willing to make a case for really enormous amounts of American aid economically at this point and militarily at other points. But without those partners, he does not think American aid on its own can fundamentally change the situation.

HANNAH: Now, fast forward to the present. Seven decades later, Europe is embroiled in another crisis, and the United States has authorized monumental levels of military aid to Ukraine, though considerable pressure persists domestically and internationally to do more. Doing more is not a strategy in and of itself. I asked Dan, knowing what he knows of George Marshall's thought process and the dilemmas he faced seven years ago, how he thinks Marshall would have responded to the pressure Biden is now under to do more in Ukraine.

KURTZ-PHELAN: The most remarkable thing about Marshall is that he was really kind of an empiricist. He would look at each situation and look very carefully at the details and dig into those details and make an assessment based on that. So, he was really resistant to the kind of crude imposition of analogies. He would say, “Look, just because this didn't work in X context or in recent American foreign policy, that doesn't mean it's not going to work in Ukraine.” Or, “Just because it did work in this other context historically, it does mean it's going to work in Ukraine.” So, he would spend a lot of time if he were in a military kind of setting with Ukrainian defense officials and experts making an assessment case by case rather than saying, “This is what I did in my last great success,” or, “This is what I failed at recently. So, I'm going to just impose that lesson in a kind of blunt way.”

But a few things that I think informed his responses and his inquiries when he would approach a situation—the one he'd spent a lot of time in World War II talking about or complaining about in dealing with what he called “Localitis,” which was a commander in every front, in every battle, each one of them saying, “I need more troops. I need more weapons. I need more gasoline. I need more ammunition.” And they were making those calls sincerely because they were focused on the fight at hand or the front they were in charge of. And Marshall was the one who had to say, “We have a we have limited resources. We have a limited amount of transport. We have a limited amount of industrial capabilities. And I'm the one who has to listen to all these demands, every single commander on the ground screaming that if I don't provide it, we're going to lose this battle, and that's going to be fatal to the war effort.” And Marshall's hearing that from dozens of people, each one of whom are saying it sincerely and for very understandable reasons. Marshall is the one who has to say, “a couple dozen might get everything they need. And most people will have to settle for less, and I'll have to make that case for them.”

So, he's always kind of looking at the global picture, knowing whether it's the head of a government the US supports that is calling for more assistance or a commander on the ground, he needs to kind of step back and weigh those estimates knowing the global picture. So, that would certainly inform the way he thinks about this.

HANNAH: When one thinks of how foreign policy was made in the early Cold War, it's easy to imagine decisions made in a smoke-filled room with statesmen who were pretty much unconcerned about public opinion. But George Marshall was sensitive to public opinion. He believed public support was an important element in sustaining foreign policy. I wondered if Dan thought the Biden Administration had a Marshall-like sensitivity to popular will, and if it did, would it be able to sustain support for its Ukraine policy?

KURTZ-PHELAN: The war on Ukraine could go on for a long time. So, this could certainly change, and the pressures will change over time. But the Biden Administration has been fairly attuned to this, at least thus far. It's paid a lot of attention to escalation risk, even in the sanctions debates, I think, thinking about how you sustain those over the long term, even if Americans who might be willing to pay more for gas for a few weeks, when it comes to three or four months from now, if gas prices are still high and people are struggling to drive to work every day, will they continue supporting sanctions? These are questions the White House certainly seems to be attuned to. And I think for Marshall, that would not be a crass political question. That would be something that needs to be factored into these questions of strategy. And when he thought it was important, he was willing to go out and make the case really, really actively to lots of people who are not usually the targets of messages from senior foreign policy leaders. When he was trying to get the Marshall Plan passed, trying to get Congress—also at a time of inflation and economic struggles—to send a lot of money to these shattered societies and starving communities in Western Europe. He would fly around the country talking to, not just people in foreign policy, but also local business groups and the cotton growers and the Small Businessmen’s Association and the Women's Club of Chicago. And he saw that as, really, an essential part of how we understood the politics, and you had to get that kind of support if you wanted to send American assistance. But even during the war, he would spend a lot of time saying, “We need to explain to Americans why this fight is necessary and why they or their sons or husbands or fathers or brothers are going to fight.” That, to him, was a really essential part of foreign policy and strategy.

HANNAH: I loved the thing you wrote at the end about how he didn't keep a journal or a diary and the reasons he did. And the way in which his day-to-day decision-making might be muddied by a look at his legacy. And we talk about leaders who are attentive to their legacy or presidents who are thinking about how history will judge them. He, either genuinely or as part of his stoic persona he seemed to have cultivated, rejected that and didn't keep a journal and didn't actively try to defend himself in these debates about losing China. What did you make of his sort of abstention from getting into the ring of these kinds of policy debates and also debates about his performance and his legacy? Was that genuine?

KURTZ-PHELAN: It's this really interesting tension in Marshall. And I think you're right that the kind of stoic persona was, to a significant degree, something Marshall cultivated and adopted for his own self-preservation reasons. He was very focused on doing his duty, completing his mission in the moment without spending too much time thinking about how history was going to remember his role in it. And in China, this becomes extremely damaging, not just to him, but to American politics, to American society, to the American foreign policy debate. After Mao wins in 1949, the question becomes: Who lost China? How did America, which seemed to have a foothold in Asia, let it go communist as if it was ours to ours to save? And this became a major political current, certainly through the 1950s. We all remember McCarthyism and the poisonous affect that had on American politics and American foreign policy.

Interlude featuring archival audio

KURTZ-PHELAN: A lot of the McCarthyist furor was sparked by the loss of China, and Marshall's China mission was seen as one piece of evidence of a place where America had betrayed the fight against communism in Asia. So, George Marshall is this great war hero. He's been Secretary of State. He's created the Marshall Plan. He was one of the key figures in forging this American global leadership of this period. And McCarthy goes after him for being either a traitor or a communist sympathizer because he, quote unquote, “lost China.” And that was a moment when Marshall wouldn't defend himself. He thought if he spent too much time thinking about the effect on him personally, it would distort the way he approached these issues in the moment. So, you can see, in China if he'd been worrying about what the political reaction would be years later and how it would treat him, you can imagine how that might have distorted the way he approached these questions.

HANNAH: Viewing geopolitics as a struggle between individuals can help us make sense of conflict. And in many ways, my conversation with Dan has been about individuals and their personalities and how their successes and failures have shaped the course of history. But is history really driven by individuals, or are other forces at work?

KURTZ-PHELAN: The story of his mission is really him seeing the limits of what individuals can do. The line that kind of captures it in the book is: He's a can-do man in a can-do era, and here, he is kind of accepting what can't be done. China was totally devastated during World War II by just years and years of a really brutal Japanese invasion, and the dynamics are such that, even Chiang Kai-shek doing everything he could do might not have changed the outcome. There are currents here that go beyond what even a Chinese leader can achieve. So, Marshall's really attuned to the limits of the individual in those contexts, and that's really one of the lessons he takes away from the mission.

At the same time, I think the way Marshall might matter here most is when it comes to the American policy debate. Marshall is this figure with incredible bipartisan credibility in the American political system. So, when you get this debate about what the US should do in China and the lead up to 1949, the fact that Marshall has been in China, the fact that he is relatively skeptical of US military commitments and their ability to change the situation on the ground—that, to me, is where this question of whether the individual changes history becomes most interesting and most challenging. And as Ernie May—great diplomatic historian—would say, “If you take Marshall out of this equation, then US policy in China could have gone in a totally different direction that would have changed the course of the Cold War and would have potentially changed the course of Chinese history.” That, to me, is where you see this tension. You can imagine policy debates about both China and about the Marshall Plan could have gone very differently had you not had Marshall playing the role he did.

HANNAH: At a time when the United States is being pressured to do more around the world, Dan reminds us there are indeed limits to what American power can accomplish. And his research on George Marshall—including what I now know about the infamous China mission after having read Dan's terrific book—is so very instructive for knowing how, and perhaps when, America should lead in the world today.

Thanks so much, Dan, for joining us.

I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thanks go out to our producer, Caroline Gray, and our associate producer and editor, Sarah Leeson. Special thanks to EGF’s Lucas Robinson and Zuri Linetsky for their help with this episode. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thank you for joining us. Stay safe. See you next time.

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