Carter's Foreign Policy-A New World for the Russians
Luce, Clare Boothe
Carter's Foreign Policy —A New World for the Russians Fear of flying the B-1 bomber...and of building missiles, launching ships, planning defense, and remaining loyal to...
...The nearest the President came to defining it was to say that America's "historical role" is "to serve mankind...
...It was everything that a people subconsciously ashamed and afraid to stay on the road to Munich—but consciously more afraid to get off—wanted to hear...
...His only contribution to foreign policy (which may be fortunate), Carter's attempt to apply his human-rights crusade to the USSR has been a stunning failure...
...So for the Soviets and Cubans the military risks of expansion in Africa are negligible, while the material gains in controlling countries with valuable raw materials and the strategic advantages in securing coastal bases on the oil-shipment routes of the West are enormous...
...This "lesson," it seems, is that it is stupid and wicked for America to try to halt Communist military aggression with military means...
...Soviet leaders lost no time impressing upon,Citter the,fact that the U.S...
...foreign policy which had also made peace its supreme goal led America unprepared to Pearl Harbor...
...The principle that had orice guided our foreign policy was "a belief that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable, and must be contained," but in the "new world" right is stronger than might, and so this principle is no longer valid...
...The role-player hides a great deal of the total truth about himself behind the role he assumes, which is why puritan critics of the Elizabethan theater referred to actors as hypocrites...
...And that's good...
...Clare Boothe Luce Carter's Foreign Policy —A New World for the Russians Fear of flying the B-1 bomber...and of building missiles, launching ships, planning defense, and remaining loyal to allies...
...The United States," he declared, "will never waver from our deep friendship with Israel...
...John P. Sisk The Bitter Truth of Gossip "To know how bad we are in the condition of mere nature is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse...
...our total, absolute commitment to Israel's security...
...the end of hypocrisy, that is a good thing...
...Walter Lippmann once called U.S...
...The long-term gains of expansion in Africa were long ago pointed out by Lenin...
...Nor, it seems, could we any longer win a conventional war in Europe...
...Who controls Africa," the Father of the USSR said, "controls Europe...
...Ayear has passed since Mr...
...We can't fight a war in the Middle East, even though Israel's survival should depend on it...
...military strength, and supported by the people, it stood the test of Communist aggression in Korea...
...to cling desperately to our detente policy of trying to buy Soviet "friendship" with food, money, and technological goods...
...And with some reason...
...is fresh out of such pressures...
...In the Middle East, no amount of shuttle diplomacy or Arab and Israeli state visits to Washington can any longer conceal the inability of the U.S...
...Carter's capacity to ignore international realities, and his proclivity for confusing presidential prestige and rhetoric with military power and political action, were again revealed in the address he delivered last May on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel...
...Henceforth, America has no choice but to accept detente—and peace—on Soviet terms...
...In the lawless world of sovereign nations, the threat of force lies behind all international relations...
...The conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact now outnumber NATO forces three to one...
...War on the side of Israel would not only lead to the destruction of the oil fields, on which the economies of all the industrial democracies now rely, but the Soviets would "certainly" come in on the side of the Palestinians, Syrians, Libyans, and Egyptians...
...Despite our superior equipment and overwhelming firepower, we would get "bogged down" in jungles or mountains or savannahs or deserts, and the wily guerrilla tactics of the natives would wear us out and eventually drive us to a humiliating withdrawal...
...And, as everyone knows, "nobody can win a nuclear war...
...Ironically, this attempt has done even more than events in Africa or the Middle East to expose the impotence of Washington vis-a-vis Moscow...
...The substitution of the ideal of peace for the idea of security led an unarmed Britain to Munich in 1938...
...A nation can make no worse mistake in foreign policy than to substitute the ideal of peace for the idea of security...
...This speech epitomized all the intellectual ruses by which we have been concealing from ourselves—and hoping to conceal from the world—the spirit of appeasement and defeatism that now guides our East-West policy...
...The government of a sovereign nation has the right to treat its own citizens in any way it chooses...
...and to pretend to ourselves that our diplomatic concessions and military withdrawals, in any area of the world where we are faced with the slightest risk of "confrontation," are guided by "moderation," "restraint," and even (as in the case of Israel) by a wise concern for the "best interests" of our allies...
...Without the strong, unambiguous backing of the U.S.—Israel's only ally—Israel's chances of securing defensible frontiers, either in direct negotiations with the Arabs or at the Geneva peace table, are virtually nil...
...With the shift in the balance of military power in favor of the USSR, and America's continued dependence on Arab oil, Israel can no longer count on this backing...
...They must choose, he said, between "confrontation and cooperation" (whatever that meant...
...Ellen Peck, founder of the National Organization for Non-Parents, has pointed out the extent to which the actions of parents must hypocritically contradict their true feelings because they cannot be their honest selves...
...cut back its military commitments to the NATO bone, and in the name of a "higher morality" of peace, abandoned the Cold War struggle...
...Washington "is not taking into account the growth of the forces of World Socialism," and when it does, it will see that "the concept of confrontation holds no promise in the long term...
...has with the NATO countries...
...Like the President himself, we are too enamored of the ideal of peace to focus on the idea of our own security—though it has now become a question of our survival...
...It succeeded in Western Europe where it has maintained peace for the longest period Europe has ever known...
...Carter) not only worsens their relations but invariably fails—unless it is backed by strong political, economic, or military pressures...
...Opinion polls would show that many Americans believe that any war fought in Asia or Africa would turn into "another Vietnam...
...Without public recognition that the "Shield of the Republic" is in desperate need of repair, America has little hope of avoiding World War III—or the alternative of acquiescence to Soviet hegemony...
...Two years later, a U.S...
...o what should we do when we begin to perceive that our vital interests are everywhere threatened by the advance of the enemy, but when at the same time we are certain that any military effort to defend them would end in nuclear destruction...
...It must be made in the jungle world of sovereign nations, where foresight, purpose, and resolve are more productive of peace and progress than noble visions and moral impulses, where firm actions speak louder than fair words, and where—in the end—mind more than heart, and might more than right, decide the fortunes of nations...
...And indeed, what is to prevent them...
...The corollary of this goal invariably becomes unilateral disarmament...
...The policy of containment perished in the long, ill-conceived, and badly fought war in Vietnam...
...And what is this miraculous "water" that will now quench the fires of Communist military aggression...
...This has been the most costly illusion of the democracies in this century...
...While the President fully understood "the limits of moral suasion, it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words....In the life of the human spirit, words are actions...
...The melancholy results for American security of the past six years of detente have now become apparent...
...Carter has gone on record that it is intellectually and morally reprehensible to "fightfire with fire" in far-off places with strange-sounding names...
...calls for a new foreign policy—a policy based on the consistent decency of its values, and an optimism in its historical vision...
...Soviet human-rights dissidents, and several Jews who had agitated to emigrate, were given show trials and sentenced to long years in prison, or hard labor in the Gulag...
...Carter unveiled his new-world, born-again foreign policy...
...Munich led to World War II in 1939...
...This is what Washington meant when he said in his Farewell Address that our foreign policy should be such that "we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel...
...foreign policy the "Shield of the Republic...
...And the ideal of peace, embodied in the policy of détente, once again became the supreme goal of U.S...
...But surely the President knew, even as he spoke, that not a dozen U.S...
...But alack for Mr...
...Shakespeare's Iago sums it up for both of them: "Men should be what they seem...
...The political and military vacuum that has existed on that vast, rich, disorganized continent since the end of European colonialism is not going to be filled by Washington hot air about human rights and majority rule...
...What has freed us of this "inordinate fear" is the "lesson" that the U.S., then the strongest military power in the world, learned from the licking it took in Vietnam at the hands of the Communists...
...The primary goal of a sound foreign policy is the maintenance of the nation's security, by peaceful or diplomatic methods if possible, but by war if necessary...
...Backed by predominant U.S...
...What we also have done is to elect a President admirably equipped by temperament, inclination, and inexperience to help us make a virtue of our political, military, and moral impotence...
...But the Soviets could be wrong...
...Soviet SALT negotiators have proved tougher than ever in their demands that the U.S...
...policy towards the USSR....The keynote of this assault [a Pravda editorial] contained unparalleled overtones of arrogance and contempt, as well as •Shortly after this, however, the administration approved the sale of a Dresser Industries welding machine to the Soviet Union.threats to peace if the U.S...
...Whether this means that Ms...
...Said the President, "We fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water...
...America's leaders do not seem to realize that America has "lost its strategic supremacy...
...But the mere recognition of its "right to exist" by the Arabs is not enough to protect Israel from the Arabs...
...The President's insistence that Moscow honor the human-rights provisions of the Helsinki accords, followed by his overt support of Soviet dissidents, provoked a violent reaction in Moscow...
...But diplomacy can be successful only insofar as it is backed by the triad of adequate military force—air, sea, and land power—and above all by the nation's will to use force, when diplomacy fails, to maintain its security...
...strip itself of its newest military "equalizers"—the cruise missile and neutron bomb...
...And what has happened to that other "total and absolute" presidential commitment—Carter's global human-rights policy...
...Central to idealistic, pacifistic, and, perhaps, democratic thought has always been the belief that armaments are the cause of war, and• that a nation that rejects the concept of force and unilaterally disarms will produce a similar "peace-loving" response from its enemies...
...8 The American Spectator October 1978 Consider that major address on foreign policy which Mr...
...And already his human-rights policy had begun to turn the evil tide of totalitarianism: "We can already see dramatic world-wide advances in the protection of the individual from the arbitrary power of the state....The spirit of confidence [in the democratic system] is spreading...
...senators would support a U.S.-Israeli military treaty, or for that matter, any kind of commitment to Israel that might involve us in military action against the Arab nations...
...to produce an Arab-Israeli peace treaty acceptable to both sides...
...In the toughest language to The American Spectator October 1978 9 come out of Moscow since the détente agreements were signed, they told President Carter that detente and SALT would not survive his interference in Soviet internal affairs...
...And two American Moscow correspondents, from the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun, were accused of slandering the Soviet state and fined for failing to reply to a Soviet court order to publish retractions...
...and its allies wish to avoid conflict with the USSR, or its surrogates, they must do so at the sacrifice of some of their vital interests...
...If the natives were supported or provisioned by the Soviets, we "certainly" couldn't win, since the very attempt to win would lead to a "confrontation" with Moscow...
...Overt interference by another nation with this right is always deeply resented, and (as any Class 4 Foreign Service Officer could have told Mr...
...We live in a new world," the President said...
...And in reprisal for Moscow's treatment of its own nationals, and ours, he called off several American technological missions scheduled to visit Moscow, cancelled the sale of a giant computer, and imposed an export-licensing system on sales of oil-related equipment...
...The President has responded to all of these developments with a few small slaps on the mailed fist of the Kremlin...
...She might have noted that it is in the nuclear family that children themselves learn this histrionic art, the implication of which is that the family as an institution, with its structural dependence on role-playing, is not only gossip-inciting but is the seedbed of the gossip impulse...
...There is a strong, stubborn current in America of anti-Communism which has now begun to surface again...
...The only way we could halt a Soviet blitz to the channel would be to employ tactical nuclear weapons...
...The policy of global containment was designed in 1947 to prevent this expansion...
...To me, it means progress towards peace...
...The address was, essentially, a peace-in-our-time rationalization of the long American Munich that began in Vietnam...
...The Soviet military build-up, in all weapon categories, including nuclear, has proceeded at the same furious pace as before the "new world" of democratic-totalitarian cooperation was created by presidential fiat...
...Carter delivered in June 1977, at Notre Dame...
...imperatives in the Middle East are militarily to strengthen the Saudis, Iranians, and Egyptians against the USSR and—at whatever costs to Israel—to maintain the flow of Arab oil to the West...
...Americans have been learning the hard way—thanks to Soviet actions in the last year—a lesson that it is not yet too late for President Carter to learn: that the foreign policy of a great nation cannot be made "in the realm of the spirit...
...any of its vital interests in order to avoid war...
...The "total, absolute commitment" of one nation to the security of another is something that calls for a formal military alliance—such as the U.S...
...But at the same time he reiterated his devotion to detente ("the road to peace and progress") and his desire for the consummation of a SALT treaty that is "fair to both parties...
...I believe in detente with the Soviet Union," the President said...
...This presumably is the post-Vietnam world in which all right-thinking nations have come to realize that armed resistance to armed aggression is not only futile, but immoral...
...Dismayed by the magnitude of the task to contain Communist ideological and military expansion, the U.S...
...And what is that "historical vision...
...Furthermore, "We are now free of our inordinate fear of Communism...
...At the same time, many Americans fear that unless we do avoid war—war anywhere—we will risk nuclear annihilation...
...On the détente road to Munich as it winds through the Middle East, Israel is likely to become a victim...
...This approach failed, South Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty...
...John, that the truth will make us free...
...Israel's demands for security are now seen in Washington as an "obstacle to peace...
...Words being actions, the President had acted—he had "reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy...
...Israel has two imperatives: legitimacy and security—the recognition by its Arab neighbors of its right to nationhood, and its desperate need for defensible borders...
...Washington strategists would be well advised to understand this...
...A sound foreign policy is the shield that protects a nation's vital interests abroad, its territorial integrity, its political independence, and the lives and fortunes of its people...
...And, to the dismay of all except the congenital isolationists and spaced-out doves, like George McGovern, and the Black Africa-Firsters, like Andrew Young, the Soviets together with some 40,000 Cubans are off once again lighting new fires in Africa...
...The first thing we should do is to recognize that we have come a long way down the road to Munich since Vietnam...
...Linking the current appetite for gossip with the spirit of the late sixties, he has been quoted as saying: "It seems to me you can't pretend anymore to be something you're not...
...The triad of diplomacy is persuasion, negotiation, and compromise...
...Barbara Howar agrees: "Let public officials be just what they represent themselves to be, or let them take the consequences...
...The Soviets do not ignore the reality of the vast potential strength of the U.S...
...In its notes on U.S.-Soviet affairs, the Advanced International Institute summed up: "Carter's Annapolis speech...evoked a Soviet frontal assault on all major areas of U.S...
...But what we have done instead is to deny to ourselves that our vital interests and our national security really are threatened by the growing might of the USSR and its slow but steady geopolitical advance...
...And that would "certainly" escalate into nuclear war...
...C.S...
...Carter—and alas for America—the Communists have shown no willingness to be baptized in the salvific waters of Carterian rhetoric...
...Obviously, this "new world...
...Perhaps he has more than this to say about the subject (certainly the Bradlee of All the President's Men would have had more to say), but the statement as we have it is hard to take a stand against: If we have indeed come to John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...
...Why, the water of words, specifically, a flood of pietistic presidential rhetoric...
...At Annapolis in June he warned the Soviet leaders against further adventurism in Africa...
...The accusation has far-reaching consequences...
...interests, guided by justice, counsel...
...foreign policy...
...did not 'mend its ways.' " The gist of the "frontal assault" was that the "objective reality" is now a preponderance of military and ideological power in Soviet hands, and short of initiating a suicidal nuclear holocaust, there is nothing the United States can do to prevent the USSR from accomplishing its world revolutionary mission...
...Peck (to say nothing of Benjamin Bradlee, Barbara 10 The American Spectator October 1978...
...Lewis With this subject one must begin by conceding what must be conceded: Gossip, whatever else must be said about it, is an expression of the urge to tell the truth with the expectation, following St...
...If, as everyone seems to agree, we are living in a particularly gossipy time, then the likely thing is that the desire to know the truth is a special mark of this time, or that this desire is especially easy to satisfy at this time, or both...
...And that could lead to a nuclear war...
...And that, too, would lead to nuclear war...
...Dynamic Soviet imperialism has begun to fill it...
...But their confidence in the ultimate triumph of a Soviet-dominated world is based on the belief that the American people have lost the will to resist, and that our leadership is too confused, vacillating, and indecisive to develop policies, strategies, and capabilities to restore the balance of power to the West...
...In the Soviet view, America can no longer "choose war or peace," as U.S...
...Since the end of World War II our interests and those of our allies, "guided by justice," have constantly counseled that we should contain, at every step, the expansion of Soviet imperialism, by peaceful or diplomatic means if possible, but by war if necessary...
...Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee apparently inclines to the first explanation...
...What Bradlee and Howar are doing is relating gossip to everybody's put-down term, "role-playing...
...To emphasize further their displeasure, the Soviets charged F. J. . Crawford, a Moscow-based executive of International Harvester, with illegal currency manipulation and popped him into prison...
...Today the American people are beginning to realize that if the U.S...
...A nation has security," Lippmann wrote, "when it does not have to sacrifice Clare Boothe Luce is a former congresswoman, former ambassador to Italy, and playwright...
Vol. 11 • October 1978 • No. 10
