On "Containment" in Asia
Brand, H.
A qualified victory in Southeast Asia was recently claimed by C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times (January 29, 1967). The containment of China—assertedly the basic objective of U.S. policies...
...wrote Kennan in his famous Foreign Affairs article in June, 1947—about the time when the Marshall Plan was conceived, and long before Germany was rearmed...
...One may surmise that the fallaciousness of counterinsurgency theories is being recognized...
...The overall strategic situation into which the Vietnam war must be fitted has . . . radically changed," in favor of the U.S...
...No doubt, Washington's costly experience in Vietnam has taught some lessons...
...The Romans, too, in their time possessed seemingly unchallengeable superiority in military technique and organization...
...The struggle in Vietnam, Sulzberger implies, is merely a battle in the Cold War against China—a battle in which victory in the field matters less than time gained to overcome the enemy on other, broader fronts...
...These ruling classes are generally alienated from the population at large and frequently inept and corrupt...
...The East," however, conveys none of the social and cultural homogeneity associated with "The West...
...More generally, it is Russia's, not China's, presence that has prevented a widening of the war in Southeast Asia...
...China herself is torn by debilitating strife...
...Such allies cannot provide a political base for containment comparable to that created in Western Europe after 1947, even if containment were a feasible policy to begin with...
...Johnson is an American Anthony Eden...
...American planes over North Vietnam are shot down by antiaircraft guns and missiles supplied by Russia...
...Even North Korea re• fuses to toe China's line...
...Moscow progressively relaxed its hold over Eastern Europe...
...In this sense, Vietnam represents the American counterpart to Russia's forcing Hungary to remain within its sphere of power in 1956—except that Russia's self-interest was more patently involved in Hungary than is America's in Vietnam...
...He will not perceive, or at least adapt to, the reality that attempts at dominating the people of industrially less developed nations cannot work...
...But Sulzberger, defending the policies of the Johnson Administration, imputes a rationality to them which they do not, by the evidence, possess...
...Vietnam demonstrates the practice of containment in Asia: whatever internal political bases existed there, they rotted away under the very impact of the American presence—which favored the authoritarian Diem and his militaristic successors over existing representative institutions and fostered an urban-oriented consumer economy over peasant interests (see John McDermott's "Welfare Imperialism in Vietnam," The Nation, July 25, 1966...
...And indeed, like the Romans, Americans are reluctant imperialists, and seek to extend welfare standards as the Romans extended citizenship to their subjects...
...In the nineteenth century the doctrine bore some fruit and had some plausibility: it helped make the U.S...
...Johnson's policies will fail of their own contradictions...
...Manifest Destiny," which pointed westward and across the Pacific, has in a sense been revived...
...Eisenhower at least attempted to disengage from continental Asia...
...True, Communism is not necessarily a less serious problem because of the Stalinists' demise...
...a geographic entity, enhanced its sense of national unity, lent impetus to opening up the Far East to American trade...
...If, as some on the Left believe, American capitalism is neo-colonialist in tendency, Johnson hardly acts in its interest...
...Yet they met fateful defeat at the hands of primitive Germanic tribes in the forest of Teutoburg in 9 A.D.—a defeat which permanently checked their advance into Central Europe and beyond...
...Johnson finds strongest support among those who have material and ideological stakes in expansionary policies—the military and its allies in industry, and the technological elite...
...It has also become evident that "forces in being," presumably needed for rapid response both to nuclear attack and brush fire wars, cannot be maintained at relatively stable levels, as the Pentagon had figured, but may prove uncontrollably fluid, requiring resources which even a rich country, where foreign "police actions" are broadly supported, will not yield up without difficulty...
...Containment assumed that Commu...
...This is particularly true in the Philippines, Thailand, South Vietnam, and South Korea, the only Asian countries that participated in the Manila Conference, which was meant to place a multi-national seal on the policy of containment in the East...
...It was a political proposition...
...Its ruling classes, except for those of Japan, ding to as cient privileges, justified by protective functions which became extinct long ago...
...Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy...
...Whatever the evils of our era, the end of empire has been a positive good, an indispensable prelude to shedding shackles of resentment, and to self-development...
...It can hold few attractions to American business, and certainly no prospect of order to its intended beneficiaries...
...Johnson's policies will fail in time, 144 as did Eden's—not because they carry the threat of world war (I do not believe they do) but because their disastrous results will have been bought at increasing sacrifice of men and resources...
...No society with as much vitality as America's will long tolerate lack of success stemming from inability to adapt to new conditions...
...The forces that would do the containing lack coherence...
...The theory of the U.S...
...Asia's social structures have suffered decay for 150 years...
...141 And this is indeed being accomplished: Indonesian generals, taking heart from America's stand in Vietnam and Thailand, have seized power in their country and inflicted a fatal blow to China's hope for a puppet regime in Djakarta...
...Mendes-France and de Gaulle cut loose from untenable colonial positions...
...as an Asian power was the tacit point of President Johnson's Manila tour, as it has been the 143 explicit point of Vice President Humphrey's eloquence about a Great Society for Asia," writes Arthur Schlesinger in his new book, The Bitter Heritage...
...If the adversary in Vietnam has not as yet been brought to his knees, time has nevertheless been gained, facilitating China's containment...
...For unlike Rome, whose basic resource was, after all, simply manpower, Washington possesses limitless technical means of destruction...
...Judging by postwar experience, neo-colonialism (let us assume we know what the term stands for) would seem to presuppose disengagement and a minimum of, or no, direct intervention—and, surely, low or no visibility of the military attached to the neo-colonialist power...
...There is no significant recent history of Chinese territorial aggression...
...Perhaps most important, technological and organizational superiority has failed to defeat a poor, backward but determined enemy...
...However, such adaptation has always been preceded by severe internal crises...
...North Vietnam is increasingly falling under the moderating influence of Moscow and rejecting Peking...
...McMillan, replacing Anthony Eden, put an end to British forays into post-imperialist ventures...
...Chinese expansionism is a fiction...
...Johnson, however, has moved in an opposite and profoundly reactionary direction in Asia and Latin America...
...Optimism in this respect is scarcely warranted...
...Johnson has committed this country to playing a role as an Asian and not merely a Pacific power...
...or they derive wealth and status from a newly evolving state capitalism which, 142 in its nature, emphasizes personal ad• vancement over public responsibility and deepens the gulf between rich and poor...
...and common civilizational impulses, such as the term "The West" connotes...
...it will require at least a changing of the guard...
...Johnson's search for a durable detente with Russia and his relatively passive European policy (which is a condition of detente) have facilitated his trans-Pacific ventures and the resurrection of some of the ugliest features of Yankee imperialism in Latin America...
...additional aid flowed from Russia's East European allies...
...What he or the Administration mean by containing China is not comprehensible...
...American soldiers, civil servants, and other travelers often like to think of themselves as "modern Romans...
...This commitment cannot but be construed by the people of Asia as a continuation on a broader front of the defense of white Western, rather than indigenous Asian, interests...
...Repression by military means, itself a more and more expensive undertaking, becomes the price of a specious success...
...the forces to be contained, far from presenting a monolithic threat, are themselves disintegrating, losing whatever homogeneity they had to begin with...
...Kennedy, by aborting the Cuban invasion, signaled disengagement from Latin America, as F. D. Roosevelt had done when he refused to intervene against Mexico's nationalizing her petroleum resources...
...Containment also presupposed, on the part of those engaged in its practice, interrelated economies, framed by loosely articulated institutions...
...Naturally, broad strata of American society would not want to see American power diminished...
...Johnson's policies do not meet these conditions...
...policies in Southeast Asia, reaffirmed as such by Secretary of Defense McNamara in his annual statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee—is said to be in the process of succeeding...
...nism was monolithic...
...The crisis became defined in the militarization of the conflict and the repression of oppositionist groups...
...But who can fathom the function of an "Asian commitment" today...
...Thus, while it may be that in Vietnam unique political and military factors have been at play, giving rise to a situation unlikely to be repeated elsewhere, Johnson has refused or been unable to draw basic political lessons from the experience: his new commitments presage quaginires worse than Vietnam...
...Indonesia, had the Communists won the upper hand there, would no more have turned out to be China's puppet than would any other state with a history of militant nationalism...
...Whatever truth there was in this under Stalin, it has long ceased to hold...
...Russia, not China, renders major outside aid to Hanoi: last year, an estimated $1 billion worth of war materiel and fuel was shipped by Moscow...
...Containment, when it was first formulated by George Kennan as a policy alternative to 'liberation," was a thoughtful, if conservative reaction to the Russian expansionism of the midforties...
...Vietnam may well turn out to have been the Americans' Teutoburg, unless Washington is prepared to reduce half the world to a state of barbarism in order to assert its dominance...
...but containment cannot deal with it...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
