The question is how the United States could be a "giant" yet pitiful and helpless, the "richest and strongest" yet unable to have its way, in possession of the most superb military force in history yet unable to use it, the "greatest power the world had ever known" yet at the same time paralyzed. Why, if the United States has had no peer in wealth and weaponry, has it for more than a half-century been persistently, incurably complaining of weakness, paralysis, even impotence?

"Losing" Country X

McCarthy, of course, presented the "loss" of China as Exhibit A in his display of the deeds of his gallery of traitors. For example, in the Wheeling speech, he specifically mentioned John Service, of the State Department's China desk, and charged that he "sent official reports back to the State Department urging that we torpedo our ally Chiang Kai-shek and stating, in effect, that communism was the best hope of China." By such false accusations -- including the spurious allegation about the Communists in the State Department -- did McCarthy transpose the "lost" war in China to the domestic sphere, where the phantom saboteurs of American global hegemony were supposedly at work. Soon, the Communist tactic of the purge was adopted by the American government, with the result that many of those most knowledgeable about Asia, such as Service, were driven out of government.

As has often been pointed out, whether the United States "lost China" depends on whether you think the United States ever had it. The question has lasting importance because the alleged loss of one country or another -- China, Laos, Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Iraq -- became a leitmotif of American politics, especially at election time. In each of these cases, the United States "possessed" the countries in question (and thus was in a position to "lose" them) only insofar as it somehow laid claim to control the destinies of peoples on a global basis, or, as Fulbright said, an imperial basis. But if there is one clear lesson that the history of recent empires has taught, it is that modern peoples have both the will and the capacity to reject imperial rule and assert control over their own destinies. Less interested in the contest between East and West than in running their own countries, they yearned for self-determination, and they achieved it. The British and French imperialists were forced to learn this lesson over the course of a century. The Soviet Union took a little longer, and itself collapsed in the process. The United States, determined in the period in question to act in an imperial fashion, has been the dunce in the class, and indeed under the current administration has put forward imperial claims that dwarf those of imperial Britain at its height. It is only because, in country after country, the United States has attempted the impossible abroad that it has been led to blame people at home for the failure.

Fortunately, American involvement in China in the 1940s was restricted to aid and advice, and virtually no fighting between Americans and Mao's forces occurred. Now that the price of the military intervention in Vietnam -- a much smaller country -- is known, we can only shudder to imagine what intervention in China would have cost. Perhaps one of the few positive things that can be said about the Vietnam disaster is that if the United States was determined to fight a counterinsurgency war, it was better to do it in Vietnam than in China. But even without intervention, the price of China's defection from the American camp was high. The causes of McCarthyism were manifold, but in a very real sense, what the country got instead of war with Mao was the "war" at home that was McCarthyism.

The true causes of the Nationalist government's fall -- its own incompetence and corruption, leading to wholesale loss of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people -- were expunged from consciousness, and the lurid fantasy of State Department traitors and conspirators was concocted in their place. Then the delusion that Chiang could return from what then was called the island of Formosa (the Portuguese name for Taiwan) to retake the mainland was fostered by the China lobby. Delusion ran wild. Myths were created to take the place of unfaceable truths. The internal conspiracy to destroy the United States, said McCarthy, was supposedly headed by, of all people, Truman's Secretary of State, Gen. George Marshall. "It was Marshall, with Acheson and Vincent eagerly assisting," he said, "who created the China policy which, destroying China, robbed us of a great and friendly ally, a buffer against the Soviet imperialism with which we are now at war." And he added for good measure, "We have declined so precipitously in relation to the Soviet Union in the last six years. How much swifter may be our fall into disaster with Marshall at the helm?"

Impotent Omnipotence

Another event, scarcely more than a month before Mao declared the existence of the People's Republic of China, also fueled McCarthy's theme of thrown-away greatness. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb -- Joe-1, named after Joseph Stalin. At once, in an experience strangely parallel to the loss of China from America's sphere of interest, intoxicating dreams of atomic monopoly and the lasting military superiority that was thought to go with it shriveled up. Not superiority but stalemate was suddenly the outlook -- not dominance but the stasis of the "balance of terror."

The outlines of the new limitations soon took shape in the long, wearying, poorly understood and publicly disliked Korean War, in which America's atomic arsenal, whose use was considered but rejected, was no help. The theme of thwarted American greatness was sounded again, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who proposed using atomic weapons in Korea, announced, "There can be no substitute for victory," and was fired by Truman for insubordination. Meanwhile, a connection with the enemy within was discovered when Soviet spying on the Manhattan Project came to light. Scientists had long known that there could be no "secret" of the bomb--that the relevant science was irretrievably available to all--and that the Soviet Union would be able to build one. The Soviet timetable had indeed been speeded up by the spying, but now it seemed to McCarthy and others that the domestic traitors were the prime agents of the sudden, apparent reversal of American fortune. (Truman sought to compensate for the loss of the atomic monopoly with his prompt decision to build the H-bomb.)