American Intervention And The Cold War

...Secondly, the exercise of our power sometimes leads to armed clashes in which American military or paramilitary forces fight against local insurgents...

...For there is nothing in the logic of international politics, or of third world politics, which forces us to fight that war...

...But this is not so...

...Nevertheless the familiar model of the cold war is still our fundamental criterion for judging current events and for planning American policy abroad...

...Even those vaunted Communist guerrillas, against whom so much of our present foreign policy is directed, have never overthrown a minimally effective national regime and have been particularly useless across national boundaries...

...Similarly, Chinese and Russian hopes for decisive influence in the third world also depend heavily upon the continuation and sometimes the intensification of the cold war...

...Thus, while unilateral intervention doubtless has its dangers, unilateral non-intervention is more dangerous still...

...All this is not to suggest that there are no economic or political criteria which might serve to determine what countries should get how much aid...

...Somehow we must save them, against their will if necessary...

...There would then be many more Communist countries in the world and, whatever differences they might have among themselves and despite the inability of either China or Russia to establish its hegemony, they would all be united in opposition to American interests...

...Russia and China can and of course do send propaganda, guns and even men into Africa, Asia and Latin America (though they can afford far fewer of all three than the United States), but this infiltration has not been at all successful...

...When the guerrillas represented a national minority, as in Malaya, even a colonial regime was able to suppress them...

...V Against the policy proposals just put forward three important objections can be made, which deserve to be considered in detail...

...These people pick up the vocabulary of the cold war and help to provide occasions for and justifications of American intervention...

...What it generates in fact is that familiar polarization which leaves no stable foundation for the American presence except local political rightists or military leaders...

...It carries with it excess intellectual and political baggage which makes the national effort more difficult and more painful than it might otherwise be...

...But new forms appear constantly and it is hard to tell what the future holds, especially hard because, even after twenty years of international activism, we know so very little about the internal politics of the underdeveloped countries...

...There is simply no reason to anticipate the success of Communist insurgents, especially if they are foreign, except in conditions of massive political discontent or total administrative breakdown...

...For almost twenty years now the United States has been fighting a cold war against the forces of "International Communism...

...2) a social revolution displacing traditional elites and various colonial ruling groups...

...We are still fighting the cold war today, though we now tend to focus our anxieties on China...

...The possible combinations are endless, as are the possible forms of independence, revolution, mobilization and development...

...And what that means in fact is that we measure our strength against the revolutionary movements of three continents...

...In the Congo, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic, for example, our actions have been consistently aimed at repeating earlier cold war victories...

...Here is the sort of dilemma from which conventional politicians, however skillful, cannot extricate themselves: because of popular feelings which elaborate petty "defeats" into political nightmares, it seems impossible to avoid or terminate cold war encounters, and yet the continuation or expansion of such encounters endangers valuable domestic programs...

...We have committed ourselves, as a nation, to the view that Communism is a monolithic ideology and that two great powers, Russia and China, accept this ideology and are bent on carrying out its messianic injunctions and expanding their own power at our expense...

...There have been well-meaning American statesmen who believed that we could do both these things...

...And yet the cold war imposes extreme limitations on domestic welfare measures, the expansion of education, urban renewal, and so on, not least because of the enormous and potentially escalating costs which it involves...

...But in most parts of the world, largely because of the new nationalism, the two tasks are incompatible...

...This is less because of the resistance of the world than because of our own misconceptions about the nature of international politics in the 1960s...

...The two views of a world at war reinforce each other: this is surely one of the most important forms of contemporary international cooperation...

...But in the years before the Japanese invasion, the Chinese Communists themselves were being defeated, and that by the weak and inefficient Kuomintang government...

...Thus, both the propaganda and, to some extent, the foreign policies of the Communist states strengthen America's own anti-Communist predilections...

...3) the mobilization of the population for cooperative political and economic activity...

...Very often in the future, as occasionally in the immediate past, the decision whether or not to transform a civil war into a full-scale international confrontation will lie with us...

...And this effect will not be achieved so long as America's primary political purpose is to ward off leftist transformations...

...In reality, however, it is extremely difficult to "export revolution" and it would probably make little difference in the third world if Russia and China continued to act in terms of their own cold war ideology...

...We look forward to relatively quick results, under the auspices of "responsible" politicians...

...Because the struggle is thought to be total, a conflict not of nations or interests, but "ways of life," all the battlefronts are intimately related...

...The other available ideologies are harder to categorize, but probably easier to choose...

...And fear and destructiveness have had damaging effects upon ourselves as well...

...The sorts of transformations involved can be suggested, but it is not possible even to sketch the shape of a transformed society...

...Unless present American policies are changed, we are likely to resist both types of challenges, often with armed force...

...Communist regimes might permit the establishment of Russian or Chinese bases on their soil, as Castro's government did in Cuba, but they are likely to do so only under extreme duress...

...The first holds open the possibility of insulating international politics, as far as possible, from the effects of local upheaval...

...for with the development of polycentrism there are indications that certain Communist powers would like, if they could, to pursue a less ideological, more traditionalist foreign policy, in the style perhaps of the French...

...Indeed, the two countries trumpet to the world their versions of the cold war ideology, driven now by their need to outdo one another in Leninist orthodoxy...

...There is no reason for us to credit their boast that this is "their century" or that "history is on their side...

...It should be added that the premise behind this objection, that if we stop acting in cold war terms, the Communists will not, is by no means certain...

...Thus, Russia has not been able to dominate any of those countries whose Communist parties came to power on their own...

...First of all, in countries where we have intervened most actively, in Greece, Iran, Guatemala, and South Vietnam, for example, the effect of our presence has not been simply to weaken Communism, but to weaken all revolutionary movements and sometimes, literally, to crush all modernizing initiative...

...We are often tied to reactionary forces abroad both by politics and economics, by a common commitment to the cold war and a shared interest in free enterprise, but the crucial tie is the first of these...

...This is the logic behind the domino theory...

...The main problem with American foreign policy today is that the basic perception which guides our actions, the cold war with Communism, is no longer either realistic or appropriate...

...In the world today, a defeat for one side is not necessarily a victory for the other side, because there no longer is a single "other...

...And it must be said that American policies have been relatively successful in reducing the power of Communist movements and in limiting Russian and Chinese influence in many parts of the world...

...Even when military escalation does not take place, the human cost of such "little wars" is terrible, far out of proportion to the actual victories gained...

...As a result, a broad program aiming at social change was sacrificed for that hit-and-run interventionism which we have pioneered...

...They range from modified Iiberalism and social democracy (India, Venezuela) through military nationalism (Pakistan, Iraq) to various forms of authoritarianism (Egypt, Guinea...

...Even more importantly, it will be challenged by the appearance of a great variety of movements and regimes, nationalist, generally leftist, committed to modernization...

...The idea of a cold war with Communism, however, remained central to American thinking and was gradually transformed from a set of possible perceptions into a collection of dogmas, a kind of rigidified consciousness...

...But it is almost always these same right-wing and militarist groups which pose the greatest internal threat to democracy...

...It is probably far too pessimistic...

...But it is one thing to help a people struggling to throw off an imperialist yoke and quite another to inject oneself into the middle of a civil war in which no other great power is actively intervening...

...Instead, China and Russia compete to lead one of the sides...

...To control those forces which resist revolution, which generally have a very small popular base and are fundamentally dependent on foreign support, is certainly much easier...

...Instead, modernization is literally an open-ended, or, perhaps better, an unending development...

...The effect of this would certainly be to produce new forms of national Communism, but by no means necessarily a stronger Communist alliance aimed at the United States...

...For such bases call the independence of the host country severely into question, and Communist countries seem to guard their independence, when they can, as jealously as non-Communist countries...

...it is possible, for example, to imagine economic development led by an old elite, as in Japan, or the achievement of national independence without any subsequent attempt at popular mobilization, as in Nigeria today...

...In Cuba, for example, it was the American cold war response to Castro's radicalism which eventually helped to open the way for the placing of Russian missiles and the international crisis which ensued...

...There has never been a successful Communist revolt against an even moderately democratic government, except in Czechoslovakia, which had already been consigned to the Russian sphere of influence in a series of diplomatic agreements and where the Communist coup took place in the shadow of Russian guns...

...Even insignificant concessions or realistic adjustments to an everchanging balance of power are extremely difficult to explain and justify to a nation which has made the cold war its central perspective...

...The Russian hold on Eastern Europe and the American hold on the West have both been loosened...

...We are capable of participating significantly in the transformation of the third world...

...indeed, given our power, we can hardly help but participate significantly...

...The Russo-American detente has confirmed this view...

...What must be stressed is that neither counter-intervention nor collective intervention ought to aim at particular political solutions, nor ought either to serve to disguise anti-Communism rescue operations...

...It may more usefully be explored in terms of that revolutionary process which Western theorists call "modernization...

...Assume once again, however, that a few Communist governments do appear, thanks in part to American non-intervention...

...In fact, of course, the new nations of the third world have produced politicians as canny and tough as any ever raised in the West...

...Communism today represents one, or several, of the available ideologies...

...Objection 2: Even if subversion and infiltration are not real threats, Communist parties or movements may come to power through purely internal political struggles...

...The United States remains, as Johnson, Rusk, MacNamara and Bundy have said over and over again in the past year, unalterably committed to "preventing the spread of Communism...

...There is another reason for the readiness of Americans to impose cold war patterns upon the third world...

...This saves us from having to face the actual local consequences of economic exploitation...

...The main difficulty with such a policy, in addition to the wasteful expense of life and resources, is that it so obviously bears repetition...

...Thus our very power, exercised within a cold war setting, continually leads us to support and form alliances with reactionary social groups...

...Only implacable American hostility, as manifested at the Bay of Pigs, or some other threat like that which a resurgent Germany might pose to Poland, could force a proud, nationalist government to offer its territory to one or another of the great powers...

...And once a given ideology has been adopted, it will have a life and influence of its own, even as it is changed in accordance with local needs...

...It may be true that certain sorts of great power confrontations are inevitable, even in a world in which bipolarity has been surpassed...

...But whatever the precise nature of the criteria, the effect of the interventions should be clear: not to overthrow governments or defend a spurious stability, but to assist develop ment...

...Partly for this reason, the connections between any given political creed, especially one which claims universal validity, and the modernization process are likely to be extremely complex...

...Hence, it will probably continue to be true that only those governments will fall to guerrilla forces which are in any case both morally and politically indefensible...

...So, indeed, does the fact that there exist in every underdeveloped country local "men of substance" quick to serve their own interests by labeling every domestic disturbance as Communist-inspired...

...But there is a considerable difference between ordinary power competition and cold war intervention...

...These can be summed up very simply, whatever complexity their application would involve: we must be willing to help economically when we can...

...And as we strengthen such groups abroad we also limit the international significance of those very governments which even Washington acknowledges to be the brightest hope of the third world, such as those members of the OAS who objected to our recent Dominican intervention...

...Yet the American government functioned under an extraordinary cloud of insecurity...

...In part, such policies would simply commit us once again to the conventional procedures of international politics: diplomatic maneuvering and economic bargaining...

...But there is another question here, and that is whether the United States has any right whatsoever to assume responsibility for saving, not merely the world, but this or that particular country as well, from Communist control...

...It is nothing more than an open invitation to the Communist powers to overthrow non-Communist governments in the third world and to seize control of the modernization process everywhere...

...And it has not been the case, at least in the recent past, that the presence of American troops in a fiercely divided country generates any great desire for democratic institutions...

...We still fear the deadly threat of Communist expansion, still intervene against "subversion," still build up our armed forces, still proffer foreign aid chiefly as a buffer against Communism, and still maintain that any defeat would be a total disaster...

...Objection 3: Even if Communist governments pose and are likely to pose no threat to American national security, it is still our responsibility to establish or preserve democratic governments whenever possible and to intervene whenever necessary to save millions of people from the terrors of totalitarian rule...

...V1 In the aftermath of World War II, the United States extended a kind of hegemony over a large part of the globe...

...However, as the histories of these two countries suggest, Communism is by no means the "best" ideology for modernization (if such a thing could be found...

...Liberal politicians, especially, seem driven by such fear to a kind of international toughness— presumably for the sake of their liberalism...

...It no longer offers anything like a clear set of programmatic injunctions, but only a variety of national experiences to be imitated—as well as a variety of errors to be avoided...

...Neither country can give up the cold war perspective without also giving up (to the other) such hopes as it still has of maintaining its grip on foreign Communist parties and governments...

...For as the United States, Russia, and China have acquired allies committed to the same struggle in which they are actively engaged, they have come to see that their own leadership and the unity of their blocs depends upon the continuation of the cold war...

...at any rate, the blocs would be radically reconstituted...

...There is, of course, the possibility of open Russian or Chinese military intervention on the model, say, of American action in the Dominican Republic...

...And finally, of course, failure at all four is possible, and in some cases likely, though not a failure which prevents subsequent attempts...

...After World War II, guerrillas in South Korea (1948-50) and in the Philippines fared badly against relatively ineffective governments which nevertheless were able to muster some local legitimacy...

...indeed, every other ideology has by now been decisively modified by various sorts of ethnic, religious, and patriotic passion...

...The changeover from the Alliance for Progress to our intervention in the Dominican Republic bears witness to the futility of economic assistance based on cold war attitudes...

...Indeed, the American CIA, for all its much publicized ineptitude, has been far more successful in overthrowing governments than have any agents of "International Communism...

...This is that the frequently justifiable attacks upon American economic interests in, for example, Latin America, can most easily be explained by investors and property owners in terms of Communist subversion, and most easily resisted by our government once they have been so explained...

...Insofar as the United States, China, and Russia succeed in imposing the cold war on the third world and escalating local upheavals into international confrontations, they will succeed also in narrowing the range of experience and of possible ideological choices...

...First of all, it is very doubtful that there will be "many more" Communist countries...

...There is still no reason to assume that the local revolutionary forces will be controlled in any significant way by either of the great Communist powers...

...Objection 1: Even though we alter our policies, we have no way of making Russia and China alter their own...

...The record of their mistakes since World War II, in one country after another, is long and impressive...

...By the 1960s, partly as a result of the nuclear stalemate and the European detente, the focus of American foreign policy had shifted decisively from Europe to the "third world," the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America...

...Besides the grip of the past, the single most important reason for the dominance of the cold war model in Washington is that the Russians and Chinese also use it, though of course in a somewhat different form...

...Doubtless there are men in Washington who understand that what is happening in the third world is very inadequately described in cold war terms and doubtless, too, many of those who believe these terms useful know that they are not always applicable...

...For ideology has proved to be a vastly more successful unifying force in domestic than in international politics...

...The American belief in the almost infinite potentialities of Communist "subversion" is one of the more amazing aspects of cold war history...

...For there is no doubt that if we did not intervene militarily, many regimes considerably to the left of those now in power would be established and, occasionally, limited opportunities would open up for local Communists...

...It is inefficient because it focuses too narrowly on bolstering the army and the police and unproductive because it places money and power in the hands of those who guarantee order but who may oppose all change...

...They were successfully contained...

...But these have not been the only consequences of our strategies...

...So the argument for democratic intervention is not very plausible...

...The United States may well hope to repeat the success of the Marshall Plan and bring development and political stability to the third world nations...

...So far as American policy goes, then, there must be a choice between cold war strategies and those based on the realities of third world politics...

...Nor is it necessary to assume that they would pose any serious military threat...

...Assume for the sake of argument, however, that in a given country Communist guerrillas, with some minor assistance from China or Russia, seize power...

...It is in the interest of the United States, then, to act to increase the number of choices, so that Communism is not one of two, but one of many possible ideologies...

...For American anti-Communism conceals, or rather does not quite conceal, chauvinism and condescension...

...The cold war ideology thus poses a permanent threat to rationality in our foreign policy...

...It is only in the context of the cold war that "victories" become absolutely uniform items in a deadly competition, added, subtracted, and multiplied by increasingly hysterical bookkeepers...

...And this result seems to follow from our policy as a whole and not from occasional or local stupidities...

...and 4) a systematic national effort to achieve sustained economic growth...

...none of the fears of American policy makers in the late 1940s ever materialized...

...Once again we encounter that strange phenomenon of the cold war, the tendency of Americans to accept uncritically the ideology and propaganda of the Communist leaders themselves...

...We have seized and maintained strategic positions, negotiated alliances, built up our armed strength, given economic aid and extracted political concessions, fought wars and contrived at coups and revolutions—all in the name of the cold war...

...IV Thus the cold war has its price and this is far higher than we should be willing to pay, far higher than we need to pay...

...It would be very difficult for us to relinquish either the power or the responsibilities which that leadership entails, and so we are driven continually to reassert its rationale and to rediscover the crisis in which it was born...

...Obvious ly, these four elements need not all appear together...

...We will argue that any weakening of American power is necessarily a strengthening of international Communism...

...Their only goal is to create or restore the necessary conditions for local self-government...

...It is time to bring our policemen home...

...indeed, it will have to be repeated over and over again, because it is incapable of generating either progress or stability...

...The idea that a local anti-Communist vanguard, working in the shadow of American military power, can rally popular support and modernize its country is one of the most unfortunate of cold war myths, unfortunate because it has led so many liberals to support policies which in fact had nothing to do with modernization...

...It has and probably will continue to have certain resonances with the revolutions in the third world, due largely to its historical connection with the Leninist attack on imperialism and its association with Russian and now with Chinese modernization...

...But now our power is measured in a new way...

...There may occasionally be reasons for some genuinely collective use of force which cuts across ideological lines, as by the UN in the Congo after the incomplete Belgian withdrawal or, perhaps, in South Africa in the foreseeable future...

...Nor that such criteria would have nothing to do with international competition...

...The triumph of leftism or neutralism in, say, Latin America, would not be a "defeat" for the United States, unless we so recognized it and responded to it...

...Indeed, united action may well be hampered by Marxism-Leninism which, with its doctrine of a single truth, makes the cooperation of equals and the toleration of even minor differences of opinion extremely diffi cult...

...Such an extraordinary assumption of responsibility ought to stimulate all those capacities for ironic and detached comment which were once employed against the somewhat similar notion of a "white man's burden...

...it is uniquely dependent upon popular acceptance...

...Whatever happens, however, Communism will remain a possibility for all the third world countries...

...A let-up in the cold war, dictated by a variety of reasons which together overrode the desire to maintain the old alliance system, this detente has contributed to the re-creation of a multi-national power structure in Europe...

...IN Cold war strategies were presumably designed to meet the threat of Communist expansion...

...In the third world, however, the rival powers still hope to construct a two-camp system, and so treat neutralist regimes with deep suspicion...

...Given half a chance, they will guard their own...

...Nor again that decisions about aid do not constitute interventions in the third world...

...Fourthly, our present strategy involves us in unnecessary confrontations with Russia and China...

...nationalist feelings almost immediately overwhelm Communist "internationalism...

...And it would be sheer folly to attempt to force all the upheavals, advances, and retreats which accompany modernization into just two categories, depending on whether they bring the country involved nearer to Communism or to some stable anti-Communism...

...And they will enormously increase the dynamism and rigidity of the chosen ideologies...

...In the past there have been indications that government leaders wished to rationalize certain aspects of our policies, particularly our relations with China, but have refrained from doing so because of the fear of domestic repercussions...

...Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, all these backward peoples, we suggest, are likely to be deceived, subverted, infiltrated, and duped by Communist agents...

...Except in cases like these, there is neither reason nor excuse for a unilateral military response...

...Given this theory, every political or military encounter, however minor, becomes a powerful magnet drawing endless quantities of men and materials and imposing commitments over a wider and wider field...

...This would do more than simply decrease the likelihood of Communist success...

...But the United States is a far more powerful nation than France and need not be so concerned as are the French with national independence and prestige...

...it creates nations out of committed individuals, but not blocs out of committed nations...

...But in republican Spain and Weimar Germany, and over and over again in Latin America, democratic regimes have been overthrown from the right...

...Thirdly, even beneficent intervention, such as foreign aid, is distorted as a result of the cold war...

...But just as the Communists are not omnicompetent subversives, so they are not omnicompetent politicians...

...President De Gaulle's activities during the last few years suggest what this involves, and it must be said that after the frenzies of the cold war, there is something very attractive in De Gaulle's intransigent conventionalism...

...But here the lesson of Hungary in 1956 ought to be clear: given the cold war polarization, there is nothing that the United States can do in such a case...

...it is relative to its purposes, effective or ineffective within a perceived context...

...The notion that every domino must fall as soon as the first one is knocked over has been presented to us as a strategic doctrine relevant most recently to the Caribbean and to Southeast Asia, but in fact it has no specific or necessary geographic reference...

...In fact, they have only succeeded in the very special circumstances arising out of World War II, when they fought against German or Japanese occupation forces and then moved into the political vacuum left by the withdrawal of the conquerors...

...But that vocabulary carries conviction in Washington not because of the character of the local situation, but because of the genuine belief that international Communism, inherently expansionist, enormously powerful, with a worldwide network of zealous, disciplined agents, poses a deadly threat to American security...

...From the beginning, American economic, military and political power was vastly superior to that of the Russians, and once the battle was joined there should have been little doubt as to its outcome...

...Yet it is a nation increasingly unable to apply its power effectively or in a manner satisfactory either to itself or to the rest of the world...

...For in a world freed from the compulsions of the cold war, nationalist adaptations even of American, Russian, or Chinese sponsored ideologies would not improve the position of any of the great powers—precisely because they would be nationalist and they would be adaptations...

...Numerous ideologies are available to a country entering upon the modernization process...

...Indeed, if the German question were ever resolved, both powers would probably lose their European blocs altogether...

...The development of this perspective was partially the cause and partialIy the result of the power struggle with Stalin's Russia which began at the end of World War II and was fought out, largely, in Europe— although both the Korean War and the Cuban Revolution provided occasions for crucial confrontations...

...The paradigm cases might be the role of the Italian army in Spain after 1936 or the full-scale invasion of South Korea in 1950...

...Based on ideological distortions and motivated by a needless fear, they have frequently had needlessly destructive effects upon third world countries...

...Nevertheless, the maintenance of the responsibilities which we have incurred in the past twenty years constantly pushes us toward these types of clashes: so many "anti-Communist" governments have received American support and now must be defended when they are challenged by domestic radicals...

...And so our assistance tends to veer away from the goals of moderniza tion...

...We cannot win the cold war in the third world, and so it has no end...

...And that choice should be clear...

...The United States, on the other hand, often acts as if our national survival depended on opposing every expression of indigenous radicalism, in part because we can bring our people to the fore and need not take the risks which nationalist or left-wing politics inevitably involves...

...In such conditions of ideological combat, all intelligent strategic planning becomes impossible...

...or we can provide massive economic and technical aid for modernization whenever that aid is requested and without regard for the political auspices under which development takes place, so long as it does take place...

...Once that polarization is overcome, however, the intervention itself becomes less likely and numerous opportunities for a bold and inventive diplomatic response are opened up...

...But the prospects for success in the third world are not very good...

...nor is it likely that China could dominate a Communist Vietnam...

...Our purpose in this essay is to defend an alternative set of perceptions and to suggest the radically different uses of American power which would follow from them...

...Modernization involves: 1) the winning of national independence, politically when that is necessary and economically when that is possible, and the creation of a unified state...

...Alternative and better foreign policies are available to us, if only we are willing to accept modernization as a complex and open-ended process and third world insurgency as a local phenomenon...

...Moscow is finding it increasingly difficult to control even those East European governments raised to power by the Red Army...

...1I It is always possible to find third world politicians willing to act out the cold war both at home and abroad, but in fact third world politics has very little to do with the struggle between Communism and antiCommunism...

...In any case, the varied foreign policies of the present Communist states, which have developed in spite of the cold war, indicate that thL.re is no reason to expect a monolithic attitude toward the United States in the future...

...Here is the real moral issue of our time, and also the issue far more likely than the cold war to determine the politics of the next century...

...We, and perhaps we alone, are capable of sustaining a major commitment to the modernization process itself...

...But the ideological defense of private property abroad only serves to reinforce, it does not itself establish, the cold war perspective...

...Today the United States is far more willing to underwrite shortterm, or supposedly short-term, counterinsurgency operations than longterm economic development...

...The United States should renounce unilateral military intervention and also CIA counterinsurgency...

...Most important of all, although Communist ideology is no longer tied to a coherent international movement, it still implies a degree of subservience to a foreign power incompatible with modern nationalism...

...For example, with the establishment of SEATO and CENTO and the reorganization of the OAS—all as openly avowed cold-war blocs—American leadership has been recognized over vast areas of the third world...

...Here is the clearest example of how the cold war imposes an utterly unrealistic urgency...

...The second tends to absorb local into international politics, thereby destabilizing both...

...In practice, this second sort of intervention is likely to prove incompatible with its supposedly democratic purposes...

...This is not true, but it will often seem true if the third world is viewed only through the spectacles of cold war ideology...

...Our country and the rest of the world will be no less safe when we do...

...Viewing the third world as a whole, it would appear that non-liberal, non-Communist ideologies predominate and are likely to continue to do so...

...That cataclysmic view of the cold war was never tested, for the Russians won none of their bets...

...And cold war logic presses American leaders towards a kind of political, if not always military, escalation...

...Yet it appears absolutely necessary always to be winning it...

...As President Johnson said in his important speech at Baylor University (May, 1965), civil wars and international wars have very nearly ceased to be distinguishable...

...it would also minimize the significance of such success when it occurred...

...what happens is quite different, and is usually disastrous...

...It simply doesn't happen that way...

...Indeed, so long as we are determined to fight the cold war, we have no choice but intervention...

...But if this consensus between East and West has its primary basis in the two symbiotic ideologies, it has developed a secondary basis in interest, in the shared desire for undiminished national power...

...As Acheson argued eighteen years ago, a loss anywhere entails defeat everywhere...

...Still, a number of new governments hostile to the United States might appear and there is no reason to be happy about such a prospect...

...we must not interfere militarily...

...The split between the two Communist powers has not caused either one to call into question the reality of the international civil war...

...Today the initiative is clearly in our hands...

...In transferring the cold war to the third world, the United States has had to identify all the internal convulsions of the underdeveloped countries with the long-term struggle between what President Johnson calls the "forces of freedom" and the "forces of slavery...

...But there is also no reason to believe that the hostility of such new governments would be permanent, particularly if the United States had not been involved in opposing their accession to power...

...And in Latin America, at least, the rightwing rebels have often included army officers and police counterinsurgents trained in the United States for the war against totalitarianism...

...To hold the reins on a popularly supported revolutionary leadership is virtually impossible...

...Yet even that is difficult enough, as we ought to have learned from our experience with Rhee in Korea and Diem in Vietnam: in both cases we became the prisoners of our own kept men...

...This might occur if anti-Communist revolts broke out in North Korea or, again, in Eastern Europe...

...We can devote our energies and resources to modernization, to the struggle against misery and poverty in the third world...

...For democ racy obviously requires a local foundation...

...Marshall Plan aid was given to nations already developed, which only required capital in order rapidly to rebuild their economy...

...Thus, Communism is not today an easy choice to make, unless one of the great powers contributes to simplifying the alternatives, as we did in Cuba...

...Leaders cannot simply choose the ideology which pleases them most, nor can they simply use the ideology they have chosen...

...The use of this common term ought not to suggest, however, that this is a process necessarily culminating in something like American or Russian modernity...

...In the third world, on the other hand, complex political and social changes are required if development is to take place...

...Finally, it must be pointed out that we have become involved in what is really a very strange sort of conflict...

...In the past, critics of United States foreign policy have often accused the government of merely reacting to Russian or Chinese moves instead of itself seizing the initiative...

...America's capacity to act in the third world is unequaled by that of any other great power...

...In an age of revolution, the difference may be only one of degree, but it is nonetheless crucial...

...For though the United States shares with both China and Russia a deep-rooted distrust of genuinely nationalistic radicalism, the two Communist powers often find it in their interest to support such radicalism, whether or not they can bring their own adherents to the fore, as they generally cannot...

...Military intervention in the third world is only justified when it is really counter-intervention, that is, when it represents a response to overt military action by one nation within the borders of another and not to so-called subversion or infiltration...

...The only question is what form our involvement will take...

...But that is another matter, and the legal procedures for such collective intervention are only just being developed...

...We can function as policemen only at the risk of alienating all those social forces genuinely committed to transformation...

...Both are ways of responding to aggression, aimless violence, and atrocity...

...They will often require our economic and technical assistance, but only rarely our political advice and never our political policeman...

...There is probably no country in the third world where internal Communist success, such as it is, can be attributed to external subversion...

...It is no longer sufficient to be stronger than Russia or even than Russia and China...

...The Russians have placed any number of bets," Dean Acheson is supposed to have told a secret Cabinet session in 1947, "if they win any one of them, they win them all...

...Economic aid cannot and should not be expected to yield results overnight, and it would be disastrous if such aid were used to stave off the necessary transformations...

...It is a deduction from the cold war ideology...

...We can, if we have the proper vision, accept the coming reduction of America's cold war position as an opportunity to open up the most varied political possibilities throughout the world and to apply our vast economic resources to the most significant problems facing humanity today...

...But the cold war model demands political stability and "responsibility" and gives both priority over economic development whenever a choice must be made...

...There have indeed been interventions in history which, while not primarily altruistic, assisted the triumph of liberal or democratic regimes, like the intervention of the English in the sixteenth century Dutch war of independence and of the French in the eighteenth century American war of independence...

...Their theorists, statesmen and generals believe, or at any rate argue, that an international civil war is going on between the forces of imperialism led by the United States and the forces of nationalism and revolution, the leadership of which is disputed by Russia and China...

...In the coming years this hegemony is going to be challenged by the competing activities of other great powers...

...For power is not an absolute quality...

...It has the simultaneous effects of breeding in the American people an extreme readiness to acquiesce in military solutions to complex political and diplomatic problems and of bolstering domestic conservatism and reaction...

...Their choice is the product of local traditions, experiences, and struggles (the last of these probably having little to do with the great power conflicts...

...Nor is Communist ideology an exception to this general rule...

...We can inject ourselves into the third world as an uninvited anti-Communist policeman, with all the consequences that entails...

...Nationalism is the most obvious of these and has been universally adopted...

...The crucial rationale for our resistance will be the cold war ideology...

...This was the background of Tito's victory in Yugoslavia, of the nearsuccess of the EAM in Greece, and of the two Communist triumphs in Asia: China and Vietnam...