America on War and Diplomacy: Introduction

...Strategic nuclear policy was shaped in large part by scientists who believed that technology had created the nuclear problem and that appropriate technology would permit the solution of the problem...

...Our actions should be guided by older conservative axioms...

...Astute as his policies were, he seemed to have forgotten that traumatized nations need something beyond competence if they are to recover...

...Third IUorld policy was understood as a matter of diverting the attention of Third World leaders away from "wasteful" military spending and foreign policy adventures toward international trade and economic growth...

...we were hopelessly indifferent to the actual capabilities of our military...

...To begin with, these theories were remarkably apolitical...

...Many of these theories, as they were implementedq revealed characteristic weaknesses...

...War will be deterred by the existence of a stable nuclear balance...

...Nor will an anti- Communist ideology necessarily prevent the American people from deciding that the safety of the West and the safety of America are two dif]erent things...

...This gap created severe problems at/some in the 1960s...

...Conservative foreign policy, as near as can be seen, rests on the development of American military power and on uncompromising hostility towards Communism...

...we can, at best, hope to ameliorate those conditions...

...If the people were not willing to fight, he would not ask them to...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...

...This ideology will face many problems, not the least of which will be that anti-Communism and support for liberal regimes abroad do not always seem to be synonymous...

...For the last 15 years American thinking about nuclear war ha~ been dominated by an idea that by now seems as natural as it is simple...

...The second generation of American foreign policy analysis would accept the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 7 ideological bayis of the conservatives, but would moderate it by acknowledging that our foreign policy should not focus primarily on fighting and winning World War III and that for the forseeable future the Soviet Union is going to remain a powerful and hostile force in the world...

...These calls and Kissinger's strategy have both failed to understand what Senator Moynihan has long pointed out: Men wtll not vote to go out and get themselves killed unless they have a vivid idea of-what the fight is about...

...Some efforts to establish a policy of neocontainment seem to call for containment without the ideology of the Cold War...

...Assuming that the enemy had also adopted assured destruction, war would be based on attacks against undefended civilian targets and would involve no clash of opposing armed forces...

...Beyond being apolitical, these theories were remarkably abstract...

...For both, nothing is so demoralizing as incompetent leadership that squanders lives and money with no visible success...

...sr America on War and Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Rosen HIDING FROM THE NUCLEAR AGE In American strategic thought, MAD policies of convenience are a bad substitute for serious defense planning...

...They need an explanation of why it is reasonable for them to send their men out to die...

...13, NO...

...In addition, because of their familiarity with missile and aircraft engineering and with the physical effects of nuclear explosions, assured desti'uction would give the scientists a distinct advantage over the generals in any political struggle for influence in thearea of strategic polity...

...Cities would simply stand still while attempts were made to destroy them...

...Neither competence nor ideology can take the place of a sense of national honor...

...longer in a dominant strategic position, it is necessary to restore realism to American strategic planning...

...Before we can reasonably expect the revival of American morale, the United States must first choose new leaders who are able to make a convincing case that they will not repeat the mistakes of the past...

...Unlike the unpredictability of conventional wars, assured destruction promised a simple war...

...Abroad, as at home, there are no permanent remedies for the pains of our political condition...

...The limits to American power and the permanence of international conflict were considerations very much in the mind of Henry Kissinger as he began his attempt to reconstruct American foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War...

...That is to say that they had a cheerful disregard for prudence and the intractability of reality...

...The unintended consequences of foreign policy, as of domestic policy, are likely to be as or even more important than the desired ones...

...In the area of internatio~aal politics, assured destruction offered the scientists the realization of their dream of world peace through world harmony...

...This abstraction was related to, but separate from, the apolitical nature of American policies: IUe were not indifferent to politics when we asked the American Army to fight in Vietnam...

...Assured destruction thus meant that military competence would become, all at once, superfluous...

...In all of these areas the primary military and political questions--who would win wars and who would rule--were almost completely ignored by American analysts who, at bottom, wanted to create a world in which force was not a tool of state policy and in which economics would replace politics...

...This is surprising...

...11 / NOVEMBER 1980 AMERICA ON WAR AND DIPLOMACY Introduction by Stephen Rosen Nations that have suffered military reverses require the same things that defeated soldiers require if they are to recover their selfconfidence and spirit...

...To the extent that nuclear weapons policy was not made by scientists, it was made by economists who looked at the problems of nuclear war and peace as if they could be solved by determining the cheapest way to deliver a given amount of equivalent megatonnage on target...

...To the extent thata search for the roots of our failure in Vietnam would revive the ideological bad blood of that time, it might well be deferred...

...But what if deterrence fails...

...America's foreign policy was in disarray long before Jimmy Carter became president, and recent efforts to create a policy of neo-containment have avoided explicit discussion of why old containment blew up in our faces under Presidents Johnson and Nixon...

...But an examination of the deve!opment of American strategic thought reveals that an emphasis on what ought to be done if nuclear war did break out was often thought necessary...

...The strategic theories of the 1960s were suitable for the 1960s, and the emphasis on deterrence was proper when the chance of war was small...

...Kissinger dealt with the collapse of the American will to fight by isolating, as far as it was possible, the conduct of American foreign policy from the public and by relying on diplomacy...

...The new theories were levers with which to pry out the men who insisted that war was still the most important element of international politics...

...The limitations on political action, in short, mean that prudence is the most necessary quality in a statesman, something both left- and right-wing Americans have forgotten in their efforts to solve the problems of world politics by ending world politics...

...It does not really reconcile its legitimate hostility to the internal policies of the Soviet Union with the need to avoid the kind of major war that would be necessary to put an end to that regime...

...Since World War II, the major groups involved in American strategic planning, the scientists, the military, and, later, the civilian strategic analysts, have traditionally displayed a striking sobriety when real danger was in the air...

...To a surprising extent, the attention of men like McNamara was fixed on seizing power within the American government, on reducing the influence of the traditional military elites...

...Secret, shuttle diplomacy did not require popular or congressional support when the going was good...

...In its own way, it is just as unrealistic and apolitical as the liberal approach that it opposes...

...The articles in this issue suggest ways in which competence can be restored to the conduct of American foreign policy, but it is the ,evival of the anti-Communist ideology that will provide the rock on which our morale and future efforts can be based...

...This can only be created by genuine leadership, by men who ask whether after two hundred years of republican government and two world wars, ours will be the generation that turns its back on civilization...

...Systems analysis played an analogous and equally pernicious role in shaping our conventional war capabilities by reducing battle requirements to issues of administration and resource allocation...

...At the outset of the Cold War, the American scientific community would have preferred that problems caused by the emergence of nuclear weapons be resolved through international agreements regulating the use of atomic power...

...When diplomacy failed, however, and American foreign policy required the expenditure of lives and money as in Angola in 1975, the weaknesses of Kissinger's style o f cabinet diplomacy were revealed...

...Certain technologies made for arms races and "instability" while others were more benign...

...Similarly, we were not only inattentive to Soviet foreign policy objectives when we created our nuclear weapons policies, but were also blind to the fact that the Soviets thought about war in ways completely different from o~r own...

...We were indifferent to politics and reality not because we were more stupid than most countries, but because the immense power of the United States in the period during which these theories were developed allowed the new American foreign policy elites to indulge their domestic ambitions and international pipe dreams...

...Military theorists such_ as Bernard Brodie had already articulated the essential elements of assured destruction and the doctrine is one with obvious allure to the scientific mind...

...But in many eases, the flaws in the old policy of containment stemmed from intellectual inadequacies in the theories of war and diplomacy that we developed in the first flush of our globalpower...

...Once Third I~'orld leaders overcame their vainglorious political objectives, the economic attractiveness of the USA would give us unrivalled influence in Asia and Africa...

...Critics of the present administration should recognize, however, that although a change in leadership is possible and even likely, it is less clear that conservatives and anti-Communist liberals have actually come to terms with the failures of the containment policies of the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...The logic of conseruative foreign policy is to get ready for the big war with the Soviet Union, win it, and then come home...

...The saving grace of the bad times in which we live is that the necessity for collaboration with less than perfect governments is now more visible because the Soviet Union is stronger...

...hit is possible to isolate the errors of the first generation of liberal foreign policy analysis, that does not mean that we can find ready answers among the conservative political thinkers in the United States...

...With the United States today no Stephen Rosen is a research fellow in the National Security Studies Program at Harvard University...

...It seemed 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980...

...Yet when efforts towards this end quickly proved impractical, the scientists did not immediately turn to assured destruction, the doctrine with which they would later become closely associated...

...The idea of a mutual hostage relation among nuclear powers is simple and logical, far more so than the messy, inelegant theories that had emerged from conventional military operations...