• A Fray in the Iron Curtain: Locating the Aleutian Islands in the Truman Administration’s Cold War Strategic Calculus, 1950–1953

Perhaps the best-known fact about the Aleutian Islands, an archipelago sprawled across the Bering Sea, is that they are relatively unknown. This obscurity is especially bewildering if one recalls that it was the only invasion of the US during World War II besides Pearl Harbor. Historians of the Aleutians Campaign (June 1942–August 1943) argue that the Aleutians’ failure to pose a material threat to US national security left them apt to forgetting. Nevertheless, such conclusions were ultimately conditioned by the prevailing geopolitical context. For one, as the Cold War brewed into existence in the 1940s–1950s, the Soviet Union just across the Aleutians became the principal adversary of the US, and Japan, an ally. This change raises the question of whether the Aleutians remained insignificant in America’s Cold War strategic mind. 

Clues can be found in the peripheries of scholarship focused on post-war strategic planning. Mark Stoler argued that Pearl Harbor made the war into a “global and total war” that expanded the US’s “definition of national security”, necessitating a global system of bases. Melvyn Leffler termed this philosophy “defence in depth”, where the Aleutians were a constituent part. However, both scholars did not continue their analysis of the Aleutians beyond 1948. 

This paper addresses this gap by analysing how the Aleutians featured in the Truman Administration’s strategic calculus after 1950, when NSC-68, which marked the unprecedented militarisation of containment, was promulgated. By analysing CIA documents and Senate proceedings, I contend that the Aleutians figured prominently in three ways: (i) a secondary target that could have become a buffer zone and/or springboard for the Soviets to threaten Japan and the Western Pacific respectively, (ii) a primary target that could have enabled a larger Soviet simultaneous assault, and (iii) the corner of Leffler’s defence-in-depth security perimeter. Overall, just as an ‘innocuous’ fray may escape attention until it becomes an appreciable tear, the ‘peripheral’ Aleutian Islands proved to be a hidden danger that strategists knew could have unravelled the Iron Curtain.