A Reply by Michael Walzer and John Schrecker
There are two sorts of polemics. The first aims at refuting an opponent's argument; the second aims to discredit it. The first requires a more or less careful presentation and critique of...
...Pachter's central conviction that Russians have horns is thus occasionally mitigated by his generalized scorn for the small, backward states of the third world...
...Our second "device" is to shift the discussion to the third world— which is not really as "ingenious" of us as Pachter suggests, since that was the subject of our article...
...there are no significant third powers...
...But we suspect that Pachter regards as endorsement anything short of ritual denunciation...
...Just what these events have to do with the cold war (which he has defined as a struggle between Russia and the U.S...
...The question of the European origins and sources of the ideology we treated with some am biguity...
...But a close reading of his text suggests that in fact only Russians and in some subordinate fashion Chinese seek power after power...
...Pachter doesn't bother to distinguish the two sorts...
...instead he demonstrates conclusively that the American intervention in Korea was unilateral, and insists that "according to the author's own criteria" we ought to have condemned it...
...acted upon a set of assumptions about Russian power which was more than simply "realistic...
...He doesn't say against whom, but one would be foolish to entertain doubts...
...And all right, what about Munich...
...At this point his generally odd use of quotations is superseded by pure creative writing...
...According to Draper, Ambassador Martin offered "to call for the U.S...
...We distinguish two different sorts of legitimate intervention: a unilateral response to fullscale invasion (Korea...
...4. The argument about topless bikinis is just funny...
...using anticommunism in its...
...Instead, he launches himself against a set of preconceived and doubtlessly long-stand ing enemies, and our sentences are hacked to fit his preconceptions...
...The first aims at refuting an opponent's argument...
...He seems to believe that it is impossible to make any legal distinctions, indeed any conceivable distinctions, between different sorts of interventions or between intervention and some different policy...
...We might as well be on the moon...
...a collective response to internal atrocity and chaos...
...nevertheless, their role was not untypical of American military missions abroad...
...need" an ally in South Vietnam...
...11...
...He is, after all, a nationalist, and may well have felt that he should be maintained in office or restored to power by his own people...
...He is convinced in advance that anyone who questions the cold war orthodoxies must be blind to Soviet aggression...
...First, it would not have been necessary to intervene in support of Bosch had we not previously intervened to undermine his power...
...If China is today involved, it is because we have once again pursued a policy which tends to drive unwilling but weak states into the hands of rival super-powers...
...A woman who wears one aims to provoke desire, not "sinful thoughts...
...Greece, however, at least with regard to the American intervention of 1947, seems to us a borderline case...
...The same point must be made against Pachter's assertions that there is no use suggesting general rules about intervention and that only "borderline cases" are important...
...Obviously we are not "offering" any third world ideology as an "alternative" to anything else...
...The U.S...
...Pachter suggests that we are "offering" an ideology called "radical nationalism" as (quoting us) "an alternative to Communism and antiCommunism...
...There is a lesson in all this: given a movement like Bosch's, only our wholehearted political and economic support is necessary if democracy is to survive...
...Our response is less dialogue than self-defense...
...At all the crucial points in his polemic we find everything necessary in serious argument missing: reasons, evidence, examples, coherence...
...Since they don't describe our position, they never appear in our article...
...We never discuss collective security...
...Pachter is in favor of "collective security...
...We must be blind to some link in his reasoning...
...A kind of intellectual nihilism lurks behind such sentences as these: "It belongs to the normal game of diplomacy that powers promote subversion next door...
...2. Pachter writes that we regard the cold war as a "phantom," a "fantasy," a "chimera...
...This may be right or wrong...
...I. The major argument of our article was that cold war ideology distorts American foreign policy in the Third World...
...the second aims to discredit it...
...Nor does he pay any significant attention to the arguments of our article...
...With the exception of governments under enormous pressure or with no local power base, we cannot think of any third world nation that has invited significant great power intervention in its internal affairs...
...What about Munich...
...carrier Boxer to deter the military conspirators...
...There have indeed been concessions of influence, but rarely of such a nature as to affect the international balance...
...Pachter's one example is worth discussing briefly...
...In any case, Pachter ignores our argument: that there was once a civil war in Vietnam which the U.S...
...He didn't so much read our article, we conclude, as search in it for ideological cities...
...He is certain, however, that the search for collective security is difficult, for "the term cannot be as easily defined nor its meaning exemplified as the authors assume...
...but they are never his primary concern...
...They may have been acting against the State Department as well as against the Bosch government...
...We say no such thing...
...Nor does he even consider the possibility of local or domestic explanations for either event...
...It was about the latter that we wrote that "the legal procedures for such collective intervention are only just being developed...
...there is no "give" in the system, no mediation, no mitigation of what was and is an absolute conflict...
...in Hungary...
...what...
...10...
...But Pachter, in the most infuriating paragraph in his polemic, not only imputes an opinion about Greece to us, but contrasts it with a misquotation about Hungary, and then concludes that our "way of being consistent" is to oppose American but not Russian interventions...
...9. Pachter writes: "one cannot be sure that non-intervention will in all cases be in the interest of peace...
...He accuses us of applying a double standard, which is, in fact, entirely his own invention...
...ought to intervene whenever necessary to create or sustain democracy—the mind boggles at the possibilities...
...6. We fail to recognize, says Pachter, that "weak governments solicit outside support," that "local politicians seek international backers...
...We are blind, he insists, to Czechoslovakia, Berlin, Hungary, etc., and so guilty of hopeless naivete, if not something much worse...
...Pachter notices none of this...
...he quotes us as saying that the American conception of the cold war "was partly the cause . . . of the power struggle with Russia," and then accuses us of absolute blindness to the reality of "Soviet aggression...
...This is not to say that he doesn't touch upon interesting and difficult questions...
...But there is a more important point here, and one central to our argument...
...Assuming for the moment that he is right about our opinion on Greece, he could have stated the moral parallel: that American intervention in Greece and Russian intervention in Hungary were both wrong...
...Pachter is always an ideologist) 5. In Pachter's discussion of Vietnam, a third power appears (surely it is secretly an agent of one of the big two...
...a denial which, if it were serious, would considerably surprise most students of American foreign policy...
...If these statements are more than truisms, Pachter seems to be suggesting (though it contradicts his earlier description of the cold war) that power struggles are started by unstable little countries which "lure" the great powers into a dangerous competition that they would avoid if they could...
...12...
...13...
...or, he could have stated the factual parallel: that Stalin could not act effectively in Greece, nor the U.S...
...We are attacked for failing to recognize that the war is a pure power struggle in which the Chinese are "using" communism as an ideological weapon in their expansionist drive (and the U.S...
...for the theory behind Pachter's view of international politics must be that great nations seek power after power endlessly...
...S. In fact, he doesn't know...
...he doesn't say...
...the phrase does not appear in our text...
...We wrote only that cold war ideology was developed in the post-war years and that it was "partly the cause and partly the result of the power struggle with Stalin's Russia . .." W'e meant to suggest a cautionary note: that Russian power wasn't the only or independent cause of cold war theorizing...
...He doesn't say precisely what they would then be fighting about...
...If, on the other hand, no democratic movement exists, it cannot conceivably be created by military intervention...
...Or rather, in a fit of perfect tougllmindedness (to contrast with our naivete...
...Pachter cannot grant us the complexity of our position...
...Pacluer never discusses it...
...every event in international and domestic politics must be a victory or defeat for one or the other...
...Since polemics of this sort are occasionally taken seriously, some response is obviously necessary, but we don't write with any hope of enlightenment or clarification...
...This need is not explained or defended...
...escalated into an international power struggle because we failed to grasp its civil, that is, local, significance and believed mistakenly that it was an international power struggle from its very beginning...
...In order to escape these hard truths, writes Pachter, we use two "devices...
...He cites as evidence two events of recent history: the Chinese attack upon India's borders...
...It amounts to an acceptance of the rationalizations of the great powers themselves...
...Theodore Draper's recent Commentary piece, "The Dominican Crisis," makes it clear that Pentagon officials in Santo Domingo had some part (how big a part is not certain) in the military coup...
...According to the rules which we tentatively put forward, Quemoy and Matsu, and Berlin are quite clearcut...
...What then is Pachter talking about...
...the second depends on caricature and attack...
...Secondly, Bosch apparently did not ask for American intervention once the coup had begun...
...the issue is not communism, but Chinese power...
...Sometimes he quotes us using these words...
...Pachter insists that great powers must accept these invitations because they "need aIlies...
...The first is to suggest that there are no longer only two powers in the world...
...Pachter would apparently prefer that both sides drop their dishonest ideologies and just fight it out...
...Pachter's call for an American crusade is simply irrelevant to the problems of sustaining democratic government...
...Yet it was one of our central points that such explanations are often more realistic than ritual invocations of cold war theory...
...We are certain that non-intervention will not in all cases be in the interests of peace...
...Our comments follow the order of Pachter's polemic...
...In what sense and for what purpose does the U.S...
...The first requires a more or less careful presentation and critique of a moral or political position...
...If he recognizes no general rules, how does he know which are the borderline cases...
...Power, presumably...
...We have heard that question so often during the past year...
...sometimes he paraphrases us...
...But he obviously intends to raise a more general issue here...
...he comes very near denying the significance of ideology altogether, especially in "pluralistic" societies like the U.S...
...But this is not a tenable position...
...Pachter is, of course, certain that the cold war is as real in the third world as it was and is in Europe...
...We don't believe anything we wrote can reasonably be construed as a specific endorsement of regimes like those of Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah, etc...
...The only purpose of military intervention would be (and was) to destroy such a movement...
...Ile takes us to task for some qualified praise of dc Gaulle, but says nothing about the European detente, nothing about the breakup of the alliances and, more amazingly, nothing about China...
...7. Pachter's discussion of Korea requires a complete distortion of our meaning, achieved by juxtaposing short phrases from different parts of a long paragraph...
...We are only pleading that all such ideologies be viewed as local products or local adaptations of international commodities, and not as weapons in a world conspiracy...
...that from the beginning the U.S...
...Pachter, perhaps, has no appreciation for such a sentiment, but it seems to us entirely appropriate...
...About this two points need to be made...
...even countries which wish to stay 'neutral' are intervening in the affairs of others by their own actions or by their inaction...
...Finally, Pachter invites us to join him — in supporting democratic movements and regimes throughout the world...
...If these statements are true then the vocabulary which Pachter himself uses is meaningless...
...Henry Pachter's polemic is of the second sort...
...We do indeed make that suggestion, and Pachter never says what he thinks of it...
...We should have intervened in the Dominican Republic in September, 1963, he writes, to prevent the ouster of Bosch...
...We described the theory of the cold war as a distorted ideological view of a real power struggle...
...They always claim to have been invited wherever they intervene, though the invitations are generally composed in their own capitals...
...but doubtless there is some polemical value in simply reciting it...
...3. Pachter is, in fact, totally committed to the cold war ideology: every word lie writes is a token of the pervasive and insidious power of such reigning creeds, There are two superstates in the world, he tells us...
...once he had found his clues, he knew what we really said or meant, whatc%er we actually wrote...
...it is a difficult subject, and not ours...
...The odd juxtaposition which he offers instead would be utter nonsense were its political purpose not so obvious and disturbing...
...the Indonesian departure from the U.V...
...Sometimes he is so wrong as to be unanswerable...
...Pachter manages to make its serious import unusually un clear...
...They are really at the root of the trouble...
...Bosch's response is not given, but it seems that he did not accept the offer...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
