A Case Against Interventionism

...There is as yet little evidence that it will be...

...The objection is to excess—to a failure of political judgment and discrimination...

...They will be brought together next year in a book.—EDITOas The intervention of nations into the affairs of others is one of history's inevitabilities...

...Bad policy will be reinvested in and reinforced out of the unadmitted need to vindicate the human and moral investments already made...

...Russia clearly is in a period of political disorientation—or reorientation—today, an aftermath both of the excesses of Stalin and the failures of Stalin's successors...

...Yet the existing community of foreign policy specialists and professionals is precisely that group most responsible for our present situation...

...The outcome, then, would undoubtedly be an eventual compromise —possibly under a Republican administration—which amounted to a disguised capitulation, not to the NLF so much as to the intractable realities of Vietnamese society...

...The first concerns the morality of our means...

...Interests collide and interlock...

...Much of the controversy in the United States over Vietnam is really an argument over method, not over assumptions or objectives...

...The second issue of principle has to do with the rationale for American interventionism...

...The "development" of the new nations is a matter which proceeds through the destruction and discrediting of established systems and cultural assumptions, the dislocation of human lives and beliefs on a scale obviously comparable only to the early industrial and nationalist revolutions in the 18th and 19th century West...

...the overriding Russian national interest was never lost sight of...

...There might, as one French critic has suggested, have to be an American "Algeria" in some such place as Brazil, before interventionism can die...

...A mobilization of any major part of the bitterly nationalist and reactive Third World under a single aggressive leadership is as much of a chimera as the Third World's unification under liberals...

...The way would still be open to national stagnation, self-laceration, and retreat...

...Thus we must take seriously those who can hurt us or out friends—as we have been hard and prudent towards Russia since 1945...

...Our power to help others in the matters that really count, in establishing decent and representative government, practicing humane social policies, achieving "development," is not very great: it necessarily is auxiliary to their own efforts and decisions, is warped by our own preoccupations, and is distorted by the very great problems of comprehending the character and rhythms of other cultures...

...It makes a sound argument, one of practicality rather than principle, and it probably is more persuasive for the omission, But there are two issues of principle involved in the present situation which are worth some attention for the light they throw on what may be expected from the future of this American world involvement...

...The disillusionment with Diem led the Kennedy Administration, intellectually representative, surely, of contemporary liberalism, to signal his overthrow but simultaneously to enlarge our intervention and restate its objectives in exceedingly ambitious terms...

...And in practice we have proven less aware of the practical limits of intervention than the Soviets, whose original challenge in 1945-1952 drove us into this game...

...There is precedent for this in other societies which have had an external mission repudiated by those whom they intended to save...

...The concern commonly expressed is that the war in Vietnam will grow bigger, that China or the Soviet Union might be provoked into counterintervention, and that major war or even nuclear war could result...

...Johnson wants, and share the same essential assumptions about America's responsibilities and role in Southeast Asia, but they want to do it all with clean hands...

...states want to change the conduct of others...

...Intellectual leadership remains the immediate problem because a new policy which does not deal with the established reality of American power and our inevitable involvement in the affairs of others would be fantasy...

...The public—which today clearly is highly volatile in opinion—can be expected to support the President so long as no convincing alternative to present policy is stated at the level of national politics and national candidates...

...Tolerance and patience are banal counsels—yet time steadily recasts the situations and ambitions of nations, and while this may be a matter for pessimism, it is also the ultimate argument for existential judgments...

...More plausible is an enlargement of the war which simply deepens our commitment and increases American frustration and domestic controversy, producing a further hardening of government policy at the same time that it produces a further erosion of the government's confidence and assurance...

...but the instinct of the Right remains conservative—resistant to ground wars on foreign soil, hoarding the peculiar treasure of Americanism...

...Vietnam is the fulfillment of a kind of vulgar liberalism which assumes that the political experience and aspirations of all men everywhere are essentially identical with our own, and that the desire for peace, democratic government, and material welfare are the dominant ambitions of men everywhere...

...But unless we are prepared to try to "solve" this problem by repression or destruction there is no alternative to restraint, and to prudent containment or deterrence of such threats as actually emerge—when they emerge...

...The judgment in these cases is that our methods are disproportionate to what reasonably can be expected to be achieved...

...Real threats from this area can come when such states as China (or Brazil, or India) achieve the national power Japan already possesses—if they succeed in doing so...

...Such a policy is intrinsically defensive...

...In these conditions a foreign policy of isolation gratified deep and complex impulses within American society...

...Nothing so dark need be predicted for the United States for the weight of the precedent to be felt...

...and not with interventionism so much as with the possibilities of national action itself...

...The worst of America has proved stronger than the best, and the result is a war whose solution is not easily foreseen, conducted by a distracted and divided nation whose serious internal problems are ominously exacerbated by this war...

...The interventionism of the Republican Right is simply a caricature of liberal interventionism, addicted to the language of military solutions and near-Manichean in its political simplifications...

...More could be said about this, but for the purpose of illuminating the interventionism of American policy today it is enough to say that the American historical experience conduced us to a view of the United States as a society morally different from and superior to the rest of the world, and to a view of other nations as politically unredeemed, waiting —as Woodrow Wilson put it—to "turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom...

...Johnson's militarization of the intervention does not change the fact that they wanted, got, and presumably still support, a vast American intervention, as such, into the affairs of Southeast Asia...

...That prosperity and popular government are inconsistent with war is, of course, sheer myth...

...A serious foreign policy of containing Soviet power, and a decent national concern for the condition of our fellow men, have over two decades been allowed to degenerate into a program that is messianic, intolerant, and intellectually unserious...

...in Hawaii or California...

...Yet underlying all of this is a kind of universalism: we are threatened by world Communism, able to challenge "freedom" anywhere if it is not "taught a lesson...

...There is another possible outcome...

...It flourishes on both left and right of the political spectrum because the old American sense of moral separateness and superiority disposes virtually all in this country to an interpretation of international politics as essentially a struggle of values—and to the historicism implicit in such a notion of universal struggle (a struggle which both we and the enemy assume to be to determine the character of "the next and higher stage of history") . The principal controversy is simply over the particular form which intervention should take—economic, social, educational, military?—and in fact American foreign policy in the last two decades has used all of these instrumentalities...

...Contemporary interventionism—"globalism"—then is a democratic society's rejoinder to the transnational ideological challenge of communism...

...Corollary to this belief has been the conviction that when the conduct of peoples abroad contradicts these ambitions—which are our own, and should thus produce alignment with us—it must be the result of intimidation or evil, which must be fought, or deprivation, ignorance, or misunderstanding, which can and should be removed...

...But is this deep a pessimism warranted...

...The problem of interventionism as we today practice it is that we have made our objective in foreign policy a fundamental moral change in the condition of men in history...

...but our policies toward Europe and Latin America are also obsolete today, resisted by the most dynamic elements on both continents, and we show little interest in any policy changes except those which would reinforce the old ambitions and defend the old assumptions...

...or (as Mr...

...or by Asian Communism, potentially the vehicle of all "rural" Afro-Asian discontent...

...But by definition this is an ill assorted group, drawn from the Left, Center, and Right of national politics, and an effective alliance is not easy to imagine...

...Moreover, the Soviet leadership was prepared to be entirely ruthless in cutting losses, exploiting its allies and sympathizers, and dealing expediently with the enemy...

...They want the same objectives Mr...

...They simply want it to be carried out through aid missions, political counsel, and the Peace Corps, rather than with combat troops...

...For 16th century Spain, frustration abroad resulted in an internal hypocrisy and decline which was undramatic in its progress but decisive in effect, a failure of confidence that eventually rendered Spain irrelevant to modern Europe...

...The fact that our present foreign policy is under attack from as many different positions as it is today is a good sign...

...Against them are the "neo-isolationists," presumably including all of those who believe that an increasingly intense and intolerant mission to the world has come to serve for America as an evasion of domestic realities and domestic accomplishment...

...The Left, often enough, is contemptuous of the former arguments but inclined to accept the last one...

...For a nation which defined itself as marking a new stage in man's social organization, the present condition of the Soviet Union and of its international bloc must prove deeply demoralizing—however well disguised the political truth may be by goulash and ballet...

...Each was undertaken in a public mood of soberness and even of apprehension...

...No doubt this makes up an unsatisfying prescription for America in its hour of world preeminence...

...The founding of this country was an act of self-separation from the tradition of Europe, making a new "compact" among men which superseded the old forms of political society...

...Yet if there is to be a turn away from interventionism the national political leadership will have to come from here...

...Or it may be given a Realpolitik but question-begging statement which limits itself to arguments of past commitment or national prestige—we are there because we are there...

...Totalitarianism, political purges, and genocide, to say nothing of the mass slaughter of civilians by Allied airpower during World War II, ought to have given us a lively sense of the fragility of those standards which sustain civilization...

...The great immigrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries were almost entirely made up of people who rejected Europe and wanted to cut themselves off from the past...

...Described as a policy of limit, this is perhaps better understood as an existential policy, dealing with international realities as they exist and with nations as they act—not as they conform to purported historical imperatives...

...And the more benign interventionism of the rest, committed to a belief in the power of social and economic reform to dissolve conflict, expresses an American moral isolation—our innocence of that experience of civil devastation, betrayal, popular aggression, and mass political hysteria which has dominated the history of much of the world these last fifty years...

...This is a problem whose growing urgency threatens to burst the obsolescent political structure established twenty years ago...

...And the prospect for a reform of policy, for a constructive or progressive remedy, seems to me rather bleak...

...It may be that the American historical experience all but precludes a sustained foreign policy of limited objectives and assumptions...

...11 The Vietnamese intervention is hardly intelligible outside this intellectual framework which makes the political fate of a weak and remote society crucial to our own affairs...

...A new American policy cannot abandon a commitment to values and to moral influence in world affairs, but would be skeptical in its expectations and would understand that its primary obligation is to defend the international conditions which secure a civilized domestic society—for the United States, and by indirection for others...

...a world of better life for all mankind...

...What is important, then, is whether the alternative put forward in 1968—or even in 1972—will be serious, an intellectually responsible alternative...

...I do not think it necessarily would turn Right, either, or at least toward the Right now politically recognizable as such, although a hardening of American attitudes, a deepening intolerance towards the world abroad, is plausible enough...

...For the CIA simultaneously to support leftist trade unionism abroad and sponsor rightist military cliques should not be surprising, for these merely are aspects of a general American effort, supported by nearly all the elements in our society, to bring about a world-wide "conversion" to the values we embrace...

...Yet history simply is not susceptible to solutions, any more than the essential anxieties and frustrations of individual life can be "solved...

...In Asia (and Africa and Latin America) a new policy would isolate and neutralize conflicts and the inevitable disorders of a part of the world which is going through a profound upheaval which nonetheless— so long as the great powers keep, or are kept, out—is of intrinsically limited consequence...

...None of that series of major commitments made in the early years after 1945—the Truman Doctrine, the rearmament of Germany and establishment of NATO, the commitment to a permanent program of foreign aid, the intervention in Korea—was accepted with enthusiasm by the American public...

...They backed his programs of national unification and social reform in the 1950's...

...The roots of isolationist policy lay very deep in the American consciousness— in the experience of physical isolation, of ocean barriers, but much more important, in the peculiar American historical experience of repudiation of Europe...

...This much of the lesson the United States did not learn—perhaps to our credit, though not to our advantage...

...Yet even here the result is likely to by a creeping sense of American failure which obstructs domestic reform, a growing social stagnation...

...This strain of messianism in American political attitudes found gratification, but also a practical check in a foreign policy of isolationism...

...If sentimentality, messianism, an egregious lack of realism, have increasingly marked American conduct and resulted in the present crisis, this must ultimately be accounted the failure of an intellectual class...

...Without attempting a scholastic determination of when it may be licit to kill in a political cause and when not, it ought to be a counsel of mere prudence—given the record of violence in recent history—to err on the side of restraint...

...But collaboration to protect one another's super-power status, however well rationalized it might be as preserving the peace or controlling arms, would amount to a neo-imperialism which genuinely deserves that epithet...

...There are less bleak possibilities, the best probably being a series of half-failures of American policy—including a Vietnamese settlement on bad terms—which we refuse to acknowledge as failures...

...Liberals, after all, supported our early intervention on behalf of Ngo Dinh Diem...

...The policies we adopted in Europe and the Near East, and subsequently extended in Asia (and even later, in Africa) were a series of improvisations in the face of what were understood as major crises...

...Their interventions in Eastern and Western Europe during the early Cold War were unsentimental, backed by plausible military threats and, in Eastern Europe, by rigid police controls...

...IV These are two outcomes which are plausible within the present course of American foreign policy...

...For America's] flag is the flag not only of America, but of humanity...

...This, it seems to me, is a more plausible course for "convergence" between Soviet and American societies than any convergence in social demlocracy...

...But the more likely turn in American attitudes is inward...

...What I suggest, then, can happen as a result of the Vietnamese war is a profound American disillusionment...

...III Let me deal first with what the outcome of present trends might be...

...A general collapse of American policy is not out of the question...

...And indeed the appeal to messianism was one instrument by which the change was effected: the public was constantly told that ours was a "unique" challenge, a responsibility to create, in Secretary of State Dean Rusk's formulation, "A world free of aggression...

...This means limiting conflicts, not enlarging them in the name of an ultimate ban ishment of conflict from the world...

...And one source of the crisis within Vietnam is the very impact of the alien political and social forces which mass government and industrialization represent...

...For too many elements in the opposition are against Mr...

...The objection to the latter definition is, first of all, prudential—such is the course of ideological politics, unlimited in ambition and expedient in method...

...In this case the trend would be an enforced retreat from commitment but without the harsh decisions and sharp reactions of the first of the possibilities I have discussed...

...The personal analogy can be pursued...

...The fact is that nations and societies work out their own fates, and while outside powers can help them or crush them, true national successes (like national failures) result from the character of the society itself...

...Yet the effort must be renewed...

...What is interesting—and perilously relevant— is why they do it, what means they use, and how far they are prepared to go...

...I began with the remark that some measure of intervention is in evitable in the relations of nations...

...In the immediate perspective I think that it is...

...I hardly think that in these circumstances public opinion would turn Left...

...In American policy today, the great controversy arises not so much from the fact that we are intervening abroad as from the scale and character of our interventions...

...or by multiple factors of poverty, racism, and human discontent which manifest themselves in Vietnamese Communism at this moment but will break out in some other violence elsewhere unless they are contained here and ultimately disarmed by energetic world-wide programs of social reform and political development...

...and that is precisely our problem...

...In Vietnam, in Latin America, in Western Europe, an American political intervention was well established, supported by an American public consensus, and tolerated (or even welcomed) by the greater part of the international community, long before the present policy crisis...

...The government officials, the American diplomats and agents in Vietnam, the troops, who have felt themselves compelled to bloody their hands in the service of this American enterprise, may be forgiven for rewarding this kind of criticism with anger or indifference...

...The public has faithfully supported the foreign policies of the last three administrations as it accepts Mr...

...Rostow now puts it) by "romantic revolutionism" derived from 1789 and about to be given a final blow in Vietnam...

...The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had to fight for these programs in Congress...

...as in Europe where a settlement which can get Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe, will open up further the European Communist states to the creative political forces of contemporary Western Europe, and redefine Germany's status on terms the Germans and their neighbors can live with...

...Interventionism could be persisted in and reasserted in collaboration with a Soviet Union whose own political messianism is today badly shaken...

...A justification may be argued in domino theories or indefensible analogies with Europe in the 1930's, or warnings that if we don't fight here we soon will have to fight (the miraculously amphibious Chinese...

...We have adopted a sentimentalized reversal of our opponents' ideology, a kind of counterfeit Marxism equally committed to universal struggle for historicist goals...

...a world which moves toward the rule of law...

...The evolution of our foreign policy since the 1940's has not been wholly deliberate, and the commitment this country made to international "leadership" after 1945 was accompanied by much domestic controversy...

...Foreign policy is fundamentally a means by which the American nation is protected, and it is not an appropriate vehicle for the reform or revolution of foreign societies...

...native revolutionaries...

...That the war will get bigger before it can be ended seems a virtual certainty...

...That such a policy, once established in the early Cold War years, should have been undermined and then transformed by the enduring forces of American optimism and isolation, is a cautionary sign...

...We print below another in a series of essays, from various points of view, concerning American foreign policy...

...That it will produce a nuclear confrontation with Russia seems much less likely—because of the spirit of withdrawal, of isolationism, evident among the present Soviet leadership, and because the intellectual weight of the Pentagon today is almost wholly on the side of nuclear prudence...

...But while officially there would be neither victory nor defeat, it would be a self-defeat for the United States, and the domestic reaction could, I think, be very bitter, self-laceration ac companied by vengeful public controversy and a repudiation of the individuals, the party, the foreign policy advisers responsible for cre ating the conditions for this debacle...

...Isola tionism remains very close below the surface of both Left and Right in this country today...

...And the last is a matter in which the United States is notoriously weak...

...Vietnam represents the fullest expression of the interventionist spirit...

...We would take seriously the unstable situations today which involve the commitments of powerful states...

...Johnson's leadership today, and the foreign policies of all these administrations have fairly faithfully reflected the counsel of the foreign policy establishment—in the universities, the foreign affairs institutes and policy centers, the government departments concerned with international relations...

...The nations that count in history are those which civilized themselves, establishing a standard of justice, and of social, intellectual, and artistic accomplishment...

...However extravagant the American faith in military power to achieve political solutions, a vast system of intellectual and institutional inhibitions have been built up in Washington against risking direct challenge to the Soviet Union...

...They are no less ambitious in what they believe can and should be accomplished by an American foreign policy...

...Behind much of the outcry against the American course in Vietnam is an instinctive (or historically conditioned) reaction against a casualness about violence, against an advertised "tough mindedness" about the established conventions of war and international law, which are literally demoralizing to international society...

...Here is per manent achievement, where the United States thus far has done not badly, but not so well as to earn that world leadership which our foreign policy so insistently asserts...

...It is, rather, to argue that these will not be promulgated by means of propaganda, military action, or—except minimally—by foreign aid and diplomacy...

...In Vietnam an American preoccupation with the freedom and wellbeing of other men, morally inspired but sentimental in its analysis of real possibilities, has converged with an American fear of Communism which naively exaggerates the unity, power and threat of the Communist movement...

...The objection is to the use of war as an instrument of intervention in Vietnam, largescale military intervention in a Caribbean political crisis, the kind of pressures we have employed to attempt to isolate France and to affect West German policy...

...Yet beyond agreeing that we should get out of Vietnam, the New Left, the civil rights movement, the disestablished liberals, the literary Left, the neo-isolationists, the academic "realists," and the Robert Kennedy governmentin-exile have little enough in common, and in some of these cases it is not at all clear that they understand what they should expect, or want, of a foreign policy...

...But it is also a practical argument...

...The ensuing retreat could be an American popular retreat from internationalism, from liberalism as well, and a renewal of an intolerant American messianism that becomes wholly exclusivist, directed inwardly to national self-reassurance...

...What seems to have gone wrong is that the United States has crossed a threshold of acceptable means...

...And the discrepancy between claim and achievement has grown disquietingly large, with a danger in this to others, but primarily to ourselves...

...But when the events of the last two decades forced an American policy reversal, that messianism inevitably sought expression in the new policy...

...Yet clearly the more creative elements in American society reject what existing policy has come in practice to mean...

...The messianism of Lenin, looking beyond the borders of Russia to a world-wide class struggle, and of Mao Tse-tung, preaching the revolutionary unity of the "rural" peoples, today confronts the liberal messianism of America...

...Johnson's Vietnamese policy yet are committed to the same assumptions of universal crisis and universal goals which underlie that policy...

...Their opposition is not, alone, enough to bring down the Johnson Administration...

...And the practical obstacle to gaining this imposing objective is no mere nation or nations, but an ideology—a force which itself purports to be universal in relevance and morally inspired...

...If such is the meaning and goal of American foreign policy, what compromises are plausible...

...The values of American society are relevant to the world beyond America: to call for a limited foreign policy is not to discount the im portance of the constitutional and social achievements of this country...

...and together the individual programs amounted to a reversal of a one-hundredfifty-year-old American policy of isolationism...

...That many of these same people now object to Mr...

...It is conventional today to warn about the limits of power, yet the warning seems hardly comprehended even by the government officials who issue it...

...The Vietnamese war should then be understood as the end-point of a policy of sentimentality and intellectual complacency, rather than as an example of neocolonialism...

...Proposals for SovietAmerican collaboration to settle the war in Vietnam over the heads of the Vietnamese, to contain China, to contain nuclear proliferation and check the arms race, imply the possibility of collaboration to "contain" a good many other forces in the contemporary world whose collective effect is to reduce both Russia and the United States to the place of mere nations among nations...

...A dramatic failure of interventionism could bring down the Johnson Administration, but this is politics by provisional catastrophe and, moreover, the successor administration could be worse—intellectually...

...isolation is no longer an American policy option, even for neoisolationists...

...The revisionist arguments that find the source of cold war in Truman Administration aggressiveness seem to be unconvincing —as well as reflecting, often enough, a willful sentimentalization of the Roosevelt era...

...It means dealing with the ideological attacks of others in terms of what those states actually do and can do to harm us, rather than adding our own voice to the clamor of rhetoric and hysteria which embitters international relations...

...It means containing and isolating the disorders of international affairs, not inflating them and intervening in them on ideological—and ultimately historicist—arguments It means strengthening the established institutions and conventions of interna tional arbitration and legality, not breaking them...

...The outcome of it all seems to me to include more disturbing possibilities than are ordinarily understood...

...And this failure is a sobering one—for our world power and world involvement cannot be repealed...

...Elements in American life which are indispensible to serious government, to a serious national political consensus, have gone into opposition, even if it is a largely incoherent opposition...