The Cold War in Retrospect
Kaufman, Arnold S.
The Cold War may be a geopolitical conflict, but it is also, and importantly, religious in tone and intensity. Anne O'Hara McCormick expressed the deep, simple, sincere conviction of millions...
...The United States is virtually isolated in Southeast Asia...
...Opposition to the Suez adventure was not only consistent with protection of American oil interests in the Middle East, it actually promoted those interests by casting the United States in an unfamiliar and attractive role...
...But he believed, quite rightly, that this redemptive aim cannot be achieved by means of moral education, that revolutionary reconstruction of existing institutions is required...
...But the rise of an aggressive, powerful China has intensified tensions and dangers in Asia...
...They believed Russia's imperial ambitions threatened both vital national interests and cherished moral values...
...2. But we should redefine our vital interest so that it embraces first, security, and second, the defense of reasonably stable, mature, equitable parliamentary democracies...
...Suppose also it embarks on the revolutionary course all the same...
...I have ideas that they don't...
...Though vastly exaggerated by many Americans, the ideological aspect was present and legitimate...
...tior will occur without political revolution...
...is likely to act anyway—as we did in Iran and Guatemala, and as we tried to act in Cuba...
...We sent many men of good will and superior competence to Vietnam as members of the AID mission...
...In other words, the United States was not in a position of having to nourish tender shoots of freedom, or to pacify and teach the population of, for example, Great Britain, how to be free and democratic...
...The Moderate Cold Warrior continues to believe that the United States is obligated not only to shield societies in which freedom and democracy have stable institutional roots, but to carry these ideals to less hospitable climes...
...Consider, by way of contrast, our record in Vietnam...
...no more than that...
...Though new forms of tyranny inevitably result during each Communist society's postrevolutionary period, there is a difference...
...American policy-makers reason that to permit these forces to triumph in a new area of the globe will whet the appetite of major Communist powers for further "aggression...
...And even Japan had forged the economic base for a functioning democratic order...
...The only protection any society has had against our blundering incompetence has been due to the resilience and integrity of its own national institutions, the pride and courage of its members...
...The position just described has the ring of cool objectivity, prudence, realism...
...By contrast, there are those who view the Cold War as totally unjustified...
...But neither protection of oil, nor protection of these other interests, are essential conditions of the health of the American economy.8 Corporate interests have not been nearly as influential in the shaping of American foreign policy as some members of the New Left Opposition contend...
...and not every nation will sign...
...But they are the ones who give the men who do shape Cold War policy their firmest and most passionate public support...
...As Gilbert Burck recently described it in Fortune magazine, Both the Soviet Union and East Europe are in the arduous process of reforming their economies by introducing market forces, and in the bar gain they are vouchsafing their citizens increased personal liberty . . . (T)aking the movement as a whole, it is one of the most important events in world affairs since the end of World War II, and one of the most important economic happenings since the Bolshevik revolution itself...
...Rule of law and personal autonomy will be established...
...But the florid rhetoric in terms of which he justified his Cold War commitments persists in high places...
...We are a society that has used its technology to erect a gigantic screen through which filter only those images from around the world that will not unduly discomfort our people...
...In fact, changes similar to those that have occurred and are occurring in the Soviet Union are happening in every Communist state...
...are, conservatively, running at the rate of over $2 billion a month...
...For they believe that maintenance of a stable international system should be the central aim of American foreign policy...
...From their point of view, Communist nations have reacted with reasonable tactical restraint to Western efforts to roll back power the Communists had won during World War II...
...Other malevolent societies may have been wicked...
...U Thant is unlikely to have acted so precipitously in withdrawing the U.N...
...C. L. Sulzberger, New York Times columnist, is another sophisticated proponent of this position...
...And they think that Communist states, especially Russia, have been even too obliging in the face of American counterrevolutionary activity everywhere around the globe...
...For it is highly unlikely that the Israeli-Arab War would have erupted had it not been for America's unilateral intervention in Vietnam...
...To compete with the modern industrial nations, huge numbers of technicians are needed...
...Nevertheless, even at the outset there was exaggerated American emphasis on military response, and relatively niggardly release of our vast economic resources for more pacific purposes...
...For the first time a powerful adversary not only rejects our civilization but fights to destroy everything we value...
...To forestall such an outcome, the American government first tries to "pacify" the natives by offering them a carrot...
...If the ruling elites do not request aid, the U.S...
...Elizabeth Jager, in "Survey of Current Business," the Federationist, September, 1966...
...1. The American military force need not be dismantled...
...In Korea, by hurling American forces back to the Thirty-eighth parallel, China proved to the world that it is a power to be reckoned with...
...For if, in the long run, the peace of the world and the security of the United States depend on the maintenance of international stability, then frustration of revolutionary movements in underdeveloped countries might be a moral price that is worth paying...
...Moreover, reflective Communists reject Marx's doctrine of immiserization— i.e., the view that the working classes within capitalist societies are inevitably reduced to a subsistence level of existence...
...12 Stability or Order Recognition that stability as the focal aim of American policy has counterrevolutionary consequences, and that promotion of these consequences is presumptively immoral, does not itself justify abandoning the Moderate Cold Warrior's point of view...
...certainly not the United States, which underwent two revolutions...
...And again, this development has been due less to American policy than to reassertion of nationalist priorities combined with a maturation of the Soviet system that owes little to external pressure, and much to the dynamics of a growing industrial order...
...8 In 1964 the sum of $44.3 billion was invested directly overseas...
...The Moderate Cold Warrior no longer regards a Sino-Soviet war as a fantastic possibility...
...Americans supported Cold War policies that evolved after the Truman Doctrine was proclaimed in 1947 because they believed Russia was expanding aggressively...
...Hence every opportunity to rely on multilateral rather than bilateral relations ought to be pursued...
...but spiritually they favor liberation...
...involvement in Southeast Asia would embarrass the United States and make doubtful any serious U.S...
...Wherever else China has tried to play a controlling role—in Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America—it has suffered rebuff and humiliation...
...that is, on the effective balancing of powerful coalitions...
...worse still from the point of view of stability-seekers, in the long run it results in international chaos...
...I am not implying that the two polar opposite positions described are intellectually equivalent...
...But to call such a view "neo-isolationist" is to abuse the language...
...If this line of reasoning is correct, and recent history seems to support it, then it is not likely that social revolu...
...Wars of national liberation must be opposed, not primarily because they are intrinsically bad, but because they jeopardize international stability...
...The conclusion that forces itself on the industrialized nations, the United States in particular, is that they must work to close the affluencegap through supranational agencies where possible, through multilateral agencies where necessary...
...Thus, willingness to permit revolutionary triumph is tantamount to "appeasement" on the model of Munich...
...Few thoughtful, knowledgeable individuals, East or West, accept any of these doctrines any longer...
...5 By contrast to almost all previous crises, the Vietnam intervention actually impairs vital American interests and threatens to undermine her security...
...Almost two decades later, in May of 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk reminded the American public of Truman's words: It is as important to defeat this type of aggression in Southeast Asia now as it was to defeat it in Greece nineteen years ago...
...While some virtually identified these ideals with defense of the free-enterprise system, others thought that the Amercian private-property system was not worth a limb of a single American soldier...
...forces from the Sinai border...
...In brief, we should abandon the Cold War, substituting for it reasonable national prudence combined with determination to help the world move toward social justice and a supranational order...
...The annual gross national product prior to the escalation in South Vietnam was about $1.7 billion a year...
...But, even more important, it is so amazingly fertile, it could have been made to explain the opposite of what happened as well...
...They want to get on with their main job—which is to crush, not pacify, the rebellion in the South...
...3 Things have not, unhappily for American policy-makers, worked to democracy's advantage in Greece...
...Such involvements generally undermine the growth of the institutional prerequisites of healthy self-rule...
...Imagine the outcry if the U.S...
...Successive U.S...
...For the exercise of freedom is contagious unless those who have it are insulated by feudal walls from those who do not...
...3. Moreover, our power should be deployed loosely...
...Nasser is unlikely to have taken the risks he did take...
...This does not imply that a regime subservient to the Communists of the North would be the best of all possible governments...
...At every critical juncture Hitler backed his bellicose language with steel...
...Would American civilians fare better...
...Finally, even if civilians had the will, the skill, and the cultural sensitivity to do an effective job, they would be undercut in their efforts at every juncture by a military force understandably preoccupied with its military tasks...
...From the fact that a given Communistdominated revolution is unjustified, it does not follow that unilateral American intervention—military or politico-economic—is right...
...Failure to act on the basis of probabilities rather than possibilities lies at the heart of the Vietnam catastrophe...
...Why should these people allow themselves to be peacefully ousted as long as they have the money to pay others to defend their interests...
...Thus, had Kennedy authorized the invasion, had we not tried to stop the Suez invasion, had we not proposed the Marshall Plan, had we not developed the Peace Corps, had we not tried to cut our losses in Korea—all this and more would have been even more easily explained in terms of the promotion of corporate interests...
...must try to deploy its affluence in ways that strengthen the scope and authority of multilateral and supranational agencies...
...1' I would take issue with the technician only in what he says about 11 Tung Chi-ping, "Growing Up in Mao's China," the London Observer, March 5, 1967, p. 11...
...At every critical juncture China has acted with prudent restraint—a fact that every student of that country admits...
...Marx's conviction that private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange as an essential condition of competitive institutions is important...
...During the past 15 years the two major triumphs of Chinese policy have been in Korea and Vietnam...
...Yet, since 1948, Eastern Europe has been the theater of unanticipated centripetal change and the emergence of a polycentric system...
...The Marshall Plan strengthened the area of the world that competes most vigorously with American business...
...The idea that, given the alternatives normally available to these societies, gradualism is typically preferable to revolution is morally fraudulent...
...Of the entire amount, oil and mining accounted for about 40 per cent...
...When I'm on the Central Committee I'll invite you back for a big celebration...
...Underlying such episodes are two factors that intensify developments promoting a state in which, in Hobbes's words, "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—increasing disparities in the wealth of nations and nuclear proliferation...
...It is a warlord regime committed to industrialization...
...Thus, Moderate Cold Warriors generally favor the American intervention in Vietnam, but anxiously urge the President to exercise restraint...
...We are the first people in human history to have produced a technology for creating institutional indifference, and then to have made of that institutional indifference an essential ingredient of our conception of the good and virtuous life...
...For the American populace is well insulated from the human agony that exists in underdeveloped lands— agony that, as Conor Cruise O'Brien points out, is unlikely to be eliminated without bloody revolution...
...In Europe, American efforts met with considerable success...
...They argue that the Cold War was, in its initial stages, fully justified by geopolitical considerations...
...The net result of the episode is that the credibility of American commitments has diminished as an indirect result of our engagement in an Asian war that is supposed to make our willingness to live up to our commitments more credible...
...5. We should often support and seldom oppose revolutionary movements...
...For though he developed an analysis of monopolistic capitalism, Marx was certain that an international capitalist system could never master what he called "the anarchy of production"— the internal dynamic that resulted in increasingly violent booms and busts...
...What the gnawing fact of the relative impoverishment of nations suggests, the threat of nuclear proliferation confirms...
...There will be an interim— prolonged by political realities—during which the United States will have to meet existing threats and crises...
...and that possession of the vastest material resources ever entrusted to one nation in the history of mankind makes America, and not the Soviet Union or China, the chief threat to the peace of the world today...
...against Greece produced the Truman Doctrine, a declaration of general policy of assisting other free peoples who are defending themselves against attacks or threats...
...And they base their support on a combination of geopolitical and ideological considerations which are each necessary and jointly sufficient to justify American policy .4 More specifically, Moderate Cold Warriors concede that the tensions and dangers of Cold War conflict, viewed even in exclusively balance-of-power terms, have rapidly receded in those parts of the globe where Russian power is concentrated...
...The prerequisites and consequences of a growing industrial order—principally education and economic sufficiency—will insure that this happens...
...Even bad revolutions are typically better than the results of unilateral American interventions intended to forestall them...
...By contrast, China is weak industrially, weak in terms of military technology...
...On the evidence available at the time the conviction that the Soviets threatened the territorial integrity of sovereign European states was amply justified...
...Stalin had overplayed his hand...
...It is for dominion over the soul...
...Unless this divergence is recognized, early support for American Cold War policies cannot be fairly assessed, the widening split among American Iiberals cannot be understood...
...Israel would have been as unlikely to doubt the credibility of quite definite U.S...
...they failed, utterly and completely...
...And an increase in the military threat to American security was virtually absent during the Cuban missile crisis...
...developed nations creates a presumption in favor of revolution...
...My security is based on the number of people whose status comes from taking credit for what I create...
...Moderate Cold Warriors are not opposed to revolutionary movements per se...
...It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms...
...In both years foreign investment was only about 5 per cent of gross domestic investment...
...I am not claiming that American corporate interests are either benign or uninfluential...
...it is constructed—to destroy targeted aircraft...
...Such defense need not always be as obvious as the employment of white mercenaries by the government of the Congo...
...Moreover, both kinds of power have often been used in ways that undermine liberal values...
...Any doubts political leaders may have entertained evaporated when Communists overthrew the regime of Benes and Masaryk in Czechoslovakia...
...At least, these are the conclusions that I shall defend in the rest of this essay...
...For it has become increasingly clear that "wicked" Communists are no better able to forecast and shape the future than are "benevolent" freedom-lovers...
...Everywhere the gap between arrogant Chinese pretensions and China's power to effect events has been the principal cause of failure...
...And what holds for the United States in this instance holds, in lesser degree, for all the other more developed nations of the world...
...Both Russia and the United States have a vital interest in re-establishing the fragile stability there threatened by irrational Chinese leaders...
...And this is my basic objection to the interpretation of the Gold War proposed by the New Left Opposition—it is at best a useful heuristic, a guide to the search for one, of the important determinants of American foreign policy...
...Ger many moved against societies that had mature parliamentary institutions...
...For intervention of even a nonmilitary sort is likely to lead to military intervention, and it surely cannot be obvious that bloodshed in putting down a Communist revolt is invariably better than the blood spilled in making the revolution...
...trends...
...In general, revolutions are the product of human misery sufficiently intense for men to put their lives and the lives of those they love in jeopardy...
...for they have the defensive power that makes them less liable to suffer vital injury through pursuit of this realistic goal...
...Also necessary was the further fact that, by and large, the countries we were aiding were parliamentary democracies in which liberal institutions had already been brought to a reasonably high pitch of development...
...of American officials is to defend American economic interests abroad, and that this intention is the decisive determinant of Cold War policies, there is another, more sophisticated analysis that deserves further consideration...
...the oil industry with its vital stake in Kuwait, Iraq, and other Arab countries...
...He writes: "In Vietnam, were the outcome of conflict to include the extension of Chinese power in Asia and among revolutionary movements there, this would not simply signify a defeat for America (and for the larger cause of political freedom...
...For once aroused, such passions come to live a life of their own—and to react back on the calculating politicians, reshaping their minds and spirits in unanticipated ways...
...Russian hegemony among Communist states made it plausible to claim that the Red world was monolithic...
...This is not the whole moral story...
...political revolution will be opposed by force, and cannot prevail without greater force.'° But, for the reasons O'Brien cites, the indigenous ruling class is not likely to be able to muster the force necessary to repulse the revolutionaries without outside aid...
...And this will tend to be so to the extent that the prerequisites and traditions of an authentically free society have been established...
...But the recent Middle East crisis makes it abundantly clear that even the short-term consequences of our adventurous effort to stabilize Asia have been chaos and disorder...
...For it constitutes an even greater involvement with other nations than is presently the case—but "involvement with," not "intervention in...
...Lest any American be left in doubt about the parallel he was drawing, Rusk continued,] The underlying crisis of our times arises from [a] fundamental conflict: between those who would impose their blueprint on mankind and those who believe in self-deter mination—between coercion and freedom of choice...
...Our main enemies in the world are not Communists—they are any forces that perpetuate poverty, racism, and those virulent aspects of nationalism both within and outside our country which promote disorder and undermine the efforts to build a world community...
...His prophetic insight has never been more poignantly relevant to international affairs...
...so dangerous, but the fusion of immaturity and vast power that exists here...
...Does it automatically follow that U.S...
...It is not Maoism to recognize that freedom and democracy mean little to people that remember too vividly the misery that has gone before...
...But the simple fact is that our efforts succeeded almost exclusively in those countries that already had the institutional and economic base essential to the nourishment of liberal institutions and values...
...Sweden, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, as well as Britain, France, Italy, and the United States reacted swiftly and strongly...
...Similarly, whatever mixture of causes may operate at any particular time, the constant and decisive determinant of American foreign policy is the aim for which our entire decision-making apparatus was constructed—to protect and promote American economic interests...
...I simply want to stress that from an authentically liberal point of view, given a narrow range of real alternatives, Communism would normally be preferable to supporting landlord regimes through force of arms...
...New York Times, May 21, 1967...
...We did help revitalize German and Italian democracy...
...They mean to eliminate Evil...
...Only ruthless oppression can block these liberalizing tendencies...
...These in ter- and intrastate changes have in turn strengthened centripetal ten dencies within the Western camp...
...First, the best of them are needed to complete the work of building a decent society right here in the United States...
...Hobbes insisted that men could not abolish the state of nature's "war of all against all," could not establish "peace" without creating civil society...
...It will soon be technologically possible for small nations to produce nuclear devices that can be carried into the Moscow subway by a Paraguayan agent or pumped into Boston by an Algerian submarine...
...The Munich analogy, which Rusk and Humphrey are so fond of invoking when defending American actions, rests on nothing more substantial than the fact that Hitler and Mao have both used an aggressive rhetoric...
...Everyone emphasized protection of freedom and democracy...
...but it is a part of it that needs to be reiterated and emphasized if false righteousness is to be avoided...
...The stability achieved in the short run promotes international chaos and imperils the survival of mankind in the long run...
...It seems to me that this kind of preponderant power made the additional military threat nonexistent...
...It is the maintenance of stability that justifies the bilateral and multilateral treaties into which America has entered wih over 40 nations...
...Moreover, even to conceive American policy in Southeast Asia on the model of economic imperialism is to engage in cold war metaphysics hardly less absurd than that practiced by fanatics of the Right...
...But the incredible concentration of U.S...
...ated by Communists...
...He was convinced that private ownership of capital is the necessary and sufficient condition of a competitive market economy...
...Those who favor this strong opposition to United States policies—which, for purposes of convenience I label "the New Left Opposition"— regard the entire history of American Cold War action as morally obscene...
...But whose ambitions...
...And these transformations combine to make the ideological dimensions of Cold War conflict decreasingly relevant to the shaping of sound American foreign policy...
...The facts of misery, eploitative power, and greed in the Third World argue against such a comforting illusion...
...None of this affects the basic explanatory point—that the functional goal of the entire mechanism is to serve those who control the American economic system...
...The landowners, usurers, sweat-shop owners, corrupt political bosses, and parasitic bureaucrats who now control in varying combinations most governments of the third world are precisely those people who must be deprived of their raison d'être if there is to be a social revolution...
...The chief constructive outcome of the Cold War in Europe for example, has been the reduction of traditional intra-European strife...
...To the contrary, stability is regarded as the summum bonnum by men who have forsaken the serious pursuit of an order that transcends the international system...
...Few nations in history have achieved a humanly tolerable stability based on industrial and cultural development without bloody revolution...
...In Vietnam China watches the Americans bleed, the Vietnamese grow increasingly disaffected, and the Asian masses grow more anti-American, without having to expend much of its material resources or any military manpower...
...My own view is that American security was indirectly threatened, our vital national interest seriously jeopardized, only during the brief period of post-World-War-II Russian expansionism...
...Anne O'Hara McCormick expressed the deep, simple, sincere conviction of millions of Americans when she wrote that "the crux of the Soviet battle is not primarily for physical things...
...NATO is sick...
...And in South America, Central America, South Africa, and elsewhere around the globe business interests influence our actions in significant ways...
...Hence, from their point of view, American policy-makers should operate on the basis of a presumption against revolutionary movements...
...these alone are important in stimulating creative, productive effort...
...Finally, there is every reason to believe that, given China's deep commitment to industrialization, its energies will be harnessed for internal tasks rather than outward mischief if some of the tremendous military and political pressure America exerts is relieved...
...it would serve also as a disastrous refutation of Soviet theories and policy, and would further undermine its already challenged legitimacy within the 'Socialist camp...
...That those who share this belief are politically powerful is one of the principal measures of our social immaturity...
...No nation in the world can afford to ignore the American power of consumption and production for very long—as the history of the Arab oil boycott after the recent war in the Middle East makes abundantly clear...
...The neo-isolationist charge is true if those who make it mean to imply that Radical Liberals ask the United States progressively to reduce its unilateral commitments to the vanishing point, and at each stage to re-inforce the power and authority of supranational bodies...
...Furthermore, the only things about American capitalism that are, from a moral point of view, worth protecting with American lives, are its competitive market mechanisms...
...In South Vietnam, if the only realistic choice were between a government dominated by Marshall Ky and his ilk or Premier Ho and his ilk, it is fairly clear that the differences would be, from a moral point of view, not sufficiently consequential to justify jeopardizing a single American life...
...The old Communist Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the Iron Curtain and shattered into pieces which Moscow can't put together again...
...For in the absence of genuine democracy, the United States will support the very elements within the revolutionary society which exploit and oppress the now turbulent masses...
...which Marx so prophetically called attention, can be eliminated by democratizing industry...
...Admitting all defects, American institutions are, in general, morally superior to Communist institutions...
...Thus most Moderate Cold Warriors support the Administration's Vietnam intervention because they maintain that it is necessary to deliver a stabilizing rebuff to China and, thereby, to serve the larger cause of political freedom...
...And those elites find ready allies among American military "advisers...
...So the people needed most by the regime are the most disaffected...
...By contrast, the view that the Cold War is a titanic struggle for the redemption of mankind, though enormously important in American politics, is so lacking in moral and intellectual merit that it is not worthy of serious examination...
...For by so doing, it is easier to define two intermediate assessments of the Cold War that have gradually gained prominence, and that express the rapidly widening split within American liberalism...
...12 On the Development of Peoples," The New York Times, March 29, 1967...
...Army was to be put in charge of flagging Head Start programs in Mississippi and Alabama...
...But to do any of these things, so far from being isolationist in spirit or substance, is just the reverse...
...For the views of the New Left Opposition normally are based on reasoned argument, on scholarly investigation that probes deeply into the origins and nature of the Cold War...
...It is not principally arrogance that makes the U.S...
...Revolutions may be cruelly wrong...
...The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority...
...And so on...
...Cit., p. 151...
...While it is probably true that the invention of the atomic bomb helped precipitate Truman's strong response to the Greek rebellion, it is also true that the ruthless use of Russian power in Czechoslovakia— a nation that had a strong parliamentary tradition, the second highest per capita income in prewar Europe, and that had become a symbol of appeasement—was the crucial factor in convincing all European nations not already overrun by Russian armies that defensive measures had to be taken...
...Op...
...Intervention typically compounds the mischief the revolution may itself be doing...
...Marx's early attacks on capitalism were based on his profoundly Christian belief that institutionalization of human conflict in a competitive market is evil...
...Conversely, even Americans who most devoutly believe in the virtues of the free enterprise system admit that Communist states can create free-market economies without reintroducing much, if any, private ownership of capital...
...And when liberals like Vice President Humphrey say, "I want to be tolerant, but I can't see the difference between containment of communism in Europe and Asia, "5 we who believe otherwise should be equally tolerant even while we relentlessly work to remove from office those who are so unreflectively, recklessly ignorant...
...The U.S...
...Strongly in support of Johnson's policies in Southeast Asia, he nevertheless had this to say about polycentric tendencies within the Communist world: "Moscow and East Europe now openly favor ideological coexistence— despite the harsh reactions of Peking...
...Only through the firm defense of the present balance can underdeveloped nations be saved from falling under the domination of Communist tyrannies...
...They must begin to channel resources in ways that replace stability with legal order...
...The explanatory scheme just described, easily handles apparent counterexamples, such as the Marshall Plan, opposition to the Suez invasion, the Point Four program, President Kennedy's withdrawal after the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Peace Corps, support of the Vietminh against French colonialism in the early stages of the Indo-China tragedy, and many other Cold War episodes...
...I want instead to make a more general theoretical point...
...Thus the national origin of the attack can be well concealed...
...For unilateral economic commitments create interests, demands, and conflicts that too often result in military commitments...
...And the main reason for these failures is, I believe, that American power is not matched by the necessary competence or wisdom...
...Of this total investment abroad, 60 per cent went to Canada and Europe...
...The point is absolutely fundamental in understanding why Cold War policies in Europe were mainly justified, but have proved absolutely disastrous almost everywhere else on this globe...
...To a considerable extent they identify America's vital national interests with the protection and prudent propagation of freedom and democracy, and they regard those who oppose their viewpoint as neo-isolationist...
...Since the death of Stalin and the conclusion of the Korean War there has been no ideological and little geopolitical reason to refrain from embarking on a whole range of initiatives for reducing the tensions of the Cold War...
...And suppose, finally, the revolutionary movement is Communist dominated...
...In all the, relatively developed Communist states aversion to competitive market mechanisms is disappearing...
...There was little prospect that internal change would de-fuse that German bomb before a German move to blow up the world...
...God only knows that war is what Sherman said it is—Hell...
...Mao`s China being simply another warlord regime...
...The Soviet Union, through its armies, achieved great successes in the postwar period...
...The dialectical movement in the direction of greater personal liberty will recommence...
...we are the first society in human history to have achieved automated amorality...
...Because stability is the Moderate Cold Warrior's fundamental concept and central goal, it is important to examine his views about this subject carefully.9 I am convinced it is here that one finds the nerve of disagreement that today divides American liberals on foreign policy...
...Liquidation of American interests abroad would produce only minor dislocations in the American economy...
...He sought to replace an industrial system based on conflict by a system based on Christian love...
...Germany was a highly developed military and industrial power...
...The United States government cannot escape the duty, imposed by the very fact that we do live in a Hobbesian jungle, to maintain its power so as to defend its vital interests...
...and such ruthlessness would prove industrially self-defeating...
...A presumption in favor of revolutionary movements has been defended...
...When the diplomat told his friend that these views made him want to stay too, the technician replied,] Please don't...
...The United States did not have to coax NATO into existence...
...This method is less conspicuous than the Congolese method, but it is also less reliable because the danger of defection and mutiny is inescapable when national forces are used in a revolutionary situation...
...In these circumstances neither Russia nor the United States are likely to deliver a nuclear reply to Paraguay or Algeria respectively...
...Daniel B. Suits, University of Michigan...
...Nor does it matter whether, in the perspective of history, Russia or the United States was more to blame for the rapid build-up of tensions...
...Nevertheless, it is convenient to contrast the two positions...
...Though many on the New Left argue as if they believed that the conscious aim...
...Anyone who refuses to acknowledge the basic soundness of this analysis, who is willing to permit those who control liberation movements to win by default, in effect counsels that the United States abandon historic responsibilities...
...For many it is, indeed, a probability fraught with incalculable terrors...
...But a world state is not going to emerge, like Venus,, from the sea of our present discontent...
...It lacks intellectual basis because it destroys all significant distinctions...
...The thrust of these remarks is that there is a presumption in favor of bloody revolution in lands in which massive exploitation and tyranny transparently occur...
...From even the legitimate claim that a given revolution is morally wrong, it does not follow that preventive intervention is morally right...
...But "neo-isolationism" is in this sense perfectly compatible with the demand that the United States apply its vast power and resources to the solution of grave international problems...
...The men who inspired our early actions thought primarily in terms of geopolitical considerations...
...And once having intervened, Americans are further protected from grasping the full extent of the additional suffering caused by their armies...
...In my case, there are a growing number of politicians who take my ideas as their own...
...They admit that Keynesian manipulation of key economic levers can, when combined with welfare programs, mitigate the worst forms of social discontent, thereby reducing the danger of violent revolution to the vanishing point...
...But statesmen should base the main lines of policy on reasoned probabilities, not outside chances...
...Indeed, that is precisely what happened during nine futile years prior to escalation...
...all sorts of qualifications to be made...
...The world has undoubtedly changed since President Truman announced the doctrine that bears his name...
...may falter in particular situations, prospects for political democracy are closely identified with American national interests...
...But even if America did acquire the political will, which she presently lacks, to meet this historic responsibility, she would be in a bind...
...In fact, stability and the balance-of-power theory that underlies its adoption as the most important goal of foreign policy are irrational because they are self-defeating...
...Whatever the actual intentions of historical actors may be, statesmen must base their policies on reasonable presumptions, not wishful thinking...
...but there is no morality in it...
...A theory that is that strong is empty...
...member states developed the defensive alliance with enthusiasm...
...The Vietnamese intervention was required, not only in order to stabilize power relations by containing China, but also to prove to the Chinese that the Russian policy of peaceful coexistence is correct...
...For these alone contribute to the growth of liberal institutions...
...At the same time, the geopolitical dimensions of conflict persist and are of great importance...
...the demand for freedom will grow...
...It is simply that the military command wants to eliminate any source of conflict with their armed struggle against the National Liberation Front...
...Moreover, such radical liberals believe that the Vietnam tragedy magnifies a fact that was evident to all detached observers during McCarthy's heyday—that the United States is underdeveloped morally and intellectually, and therefore politically...
...A nonproliferation treaty is a useful step toward inhibiting such dangers...
...The theory the New Left Opposition puts forward is so resourceful, it can be made to explain any apparent counter-example...
...13 But the mare's nests in Southeast Asia and the Middle East is only an example of the jungle environment in which nations live...
...By contrast, those who adopt the religious view are, by and large, mindless and bigoted...
...For careful analysis reveals that each apparent counter-instance is actually explainable in terms of the functional aim posited in the theory...
...But once President Truman announced that the contest was between the free world and a world enslaved, ideological rather than great-power considerations increasingly dominated popular and, to a lesser extent, governmental attitudes about the Cold War...
...and it would have been foolish for the leaders of any parliamentary democracy to have concluded that Russia had no further aggressive designs...
...But memories die, and tyranny produces new discontents, new forms of personal insecurity...
...The Third World plays major conflicting power coalitions off against one another...
...And, despite the undoubted advantages of peaceful, self-determined industrial development within tolerably democratic societies, no nation has developed its economic potentialities without enormous human suffering...
...A "cultural revolution," a purge or reign of terror, will occur...
...They recognize that capitalist systems can eliminate the anarchy of production without abolishing private ownership of the instruments of production...
...at first, in limited spheres and only precariously...
...15 In the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, interview with Saul Pett, April 10, 1966...
...The world's history tells of too many madmen who have frustrated rational calculations that justify belief in the probability that certain things will happen...
...the world would be teetering on the brink of nuclear holocaust...
...Few who oppose the American intervention in Vietnam have many illusions about the quality of political life that would result if the National Liberation Front comes to power in South Vietnam...
...We should recognize that our market power is a much more effective and desirable means of protecting legitimate American interests than our military power...
...Both are, in any event, limited in their power to control the future...
...For democratic practice in both those countries is restricted by law and by custom to small, white, fantastically exploitative minorities...
...Stalinist tyranny was cruel and oppressive...
...On the other hand, the hopeful parliamentary systems of India, Ceylon, and Israel, among others, deserve our support, and when all else fails, our unilateral protection against genuinely foreign aggression...
...Beyond that the differences end...
...government had used the sums it spends to pursue the war on a program of peaceful pacification, it could probably have bought all the land in South Vietnam at full value, distributed it equitably among the peasants—with enough left over to resettle and provide pensions for any landlords and political masters whose lives might be endangered by the consequent reconstitution of South Vietnamese political life...
...It is, however, immoral and ultimately imprudent...
...The noose of steel we have constructed around China is, whatever our intentions may be, objectively provocative and aggressive...
...Yugoslav thinking and initiatives are gaining acceptance...
...But in practice they tend to oppose revolutionary movements, because in a world in which great powers contend for position, revolutionary disorder normally upsets the precarious geopolitical balance essential to stability...
...One way or another, American policy re-inforces counterrevolutionary efforts to maintain existing injustice—all in the name of stability, freedom, and democracy...
...the oppressed are not minorities but the masses, and they are confronted by ruling classes that cling avidly to their traditional large share of scarce resources...
...Hence, some alternative way of meeting her obligations must be sought by the United States...
...The important question is whether Western statesmen were, at the time, warranted in believing that the U.S.S.R...
...Anyone trained to the necessary degree of technology, however, can see through their mumbo-jumbo...
...And that makes all the difference...
...Corresponding with the loosening of our military hold on certain areas there should be an effort to educate the American public so that it can think more flexibly about the nature and threat of Communism...
...Hence, he viewed capitalism as a great engine for inflicting harm on human beings...
...Cold War perspectives are typically irrelevant to problems of the Third World—a position acknowledged, for example, by Pope Paul in an encyclical on problems of underdeveloped nations...
...In the sections that follow I shall develop these lines of argument, comparing them throughout with two of the other three positions briefly described in this section: those held by Moderate Cold Warriors and by the New Left Opposition...
...For bread is provided, and industrial development is promoted...
...The creation of a world state is no longer the Utopian aspiration of idealistic politicians, 'but the urgent, practical, realistic requirement of statesmanship in a Hobbesian world...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien elegantly analyses the problem that confronts the United States in any such situation: In the poor world...
...As the Moderate Cold Warrior sees it, American security is ultimately dependent on the stability of the international system...
...Benevolent men may participate in operating the policy-making apparatus...
...We did help the established parliamentary democracies in Great Britain, France, the Benelux countries, Denmark, and Norway to recover from the brutal punishment that had been inflicted on them during World War II...
...And they believe also that though the U.S...
...3 Remarks by Vice President Hubert H. Humhprey before the Democratic National Committee luncheon, Washington, D.C., March 9, 1967...
...efforts to solve the crisis in the Middle East...
...Nor is it obvious that the sins committed by rebellious forces justify greater sins by counterrevolutionary armies...
...9 For example, Paul Seabury thinks that stability in Asia depends on our convincing the Chinese that the Soviet convictions about peaceful coexistence are right...
...For, in truth, they are after bigger game than forces opposed to freedom and democracy...
...The full weight of its massive power must be placed behind the effort to induce the nations of the earth to pass from the state of nature to civil society...
...The menaces to peace today are founded less upon political philosophy than on outright power rivalries and strategic positioning...
...This is so even if the revolution is dominated by Communists...
...Assuming that most of this portion of the total went to areas outside Canada and Europe, it becomes clear that an enormous percentage of the small investments that went to the Third World, were made by oil and mining industries—principally oil...
...Nor should it be precipitously removed from the various strategically important areas of the world...
...Burck goes on to make a claim which would be surprising when found in any magazine, and is astonishing when it appears in one of the leading journals of American capitalism: Yugoslavia may yet boast more of a market economy, as Adam Smith broadly conceived of a market economy, than any other nation on earth...
...Thus the Marshall Plan was meant to forestall a massive threat to the entire system of free enterprise...
...And while American statesmen like to think that these diplomatic defeats are primarily a result of their cunning policies, the facts are typically otherwise...
...governments have consistently underestimated the potentialities of Communist systems for change and diversification...
...The thrust of American moral concern was, however, quite ambiguous...
...must learn to apply this wealth so as to reduce the already dangerous and unjust, but still widening gap between industrial nations and the impoverished nations of the Third World...
...I don't care...
...Indeed, the New Left can argue that American middle-class policy is dictated by old-fashioned imperial ambition...
...Occasionally policy may miss its mark...
...In most of the countries of Europe which we aided we had much to learn and little to teach about the processes of liberal society...
...intervention may have staved off Communism, but it has not scored notable success in building liberal communities...
...The central claim made by more sophisticated defenders of America's Vietnam policy is that international stability required the intervention...
...In them, Prudence and Godliness engage in a gigantic spiritual struggle...
...For in each a liberalizing dialectical process, rooted in a common commitment to industrialization, is taking place...
...Only in Asia is the precarious balance that was achieved seriously threatened by a fanatically aggressive China...
...Russian expansion was a hypothesis fully warranted by the available evidence...
...The emerging conclusion is that among available alternatives the United States may best serve both its interests and liberal values by supporting or at least not opposing, revolutionary movements domin...
...A revolutionary movement, almost inevitably containing some Communists, moves to take power...
...This claim lies at the core of the Administration's insistence that it really seeks peace...
...If the U.S...
...Kennedy refused to invade Cuba because doing so would have destroyed the fledgling Alliance for Progress that was designed to serve larger corporate aims...
...Unfortunately, de Gaulle, like Hobbes, fails to look beyond international anarchy to civil society...
...While the Rusks and Humphreys proclaim opposition to tyranny, United States' actions destroy prospects for political selfdetermination...
...Nor should it surprise anyone that the United States, which after 100 years has failed to bring the blessings of freedom and democracy to the overwhelming majority of those liberated from slavery, should also fail to bring those blessings to societies much less ready to receive them...
...The scientific and technological communities will be the first to hold an oppressive regime to ransom—and the ransom they will demand will be not only affluence, but relief from arbitrary power...
...But those refinements are the business of another essay...
...2 As if to punctuate the Secretary of State's restrained language with an exclamation point, Vice President Humphrey more recently poured his soul onto the (luncheon) table for the Democratic National Committee, exclaiming: Don't run from this issue [Vietnam...
...There is nothing inevitable about such developments...
...Truman assured the American people that his decision to combat Communism in Greece and Turkey was forced by the necessity of choosing between alternative ways of life: One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political repression...
...In other words, the United States ought to become "neo-isolationist" if by that phrase is meant the progressive reduction of unilateral commitments in favor of multilateral action where that is the best alternative open to us, and support supranational efforts whenever possible...
...NATO provided an indispensable shield for weakened parliamentary democracies...
...Revisionism has resulted in internal changes that have pacified and liberalized many Communist states...
...It is absurd to suppose that the CIA-sponsored Guatemalan coup was engineered by United Fruit, or that our interventions in Cuba and the Dominican Republic are principally to be understood as efforts to protect American economic interests...
...The argument that Russia was motivated solely by desire to establish defensive buffers has a peculiarly scholastic flavor...
...But such efforts almost inevitably fail...
...This is why the decision of the United States to bypass the United Nations in Vietnam is perhaps the greatest of the many tragedies of that pointless war...
...They are, therefore, properly labeled "neo-isolationists...
...The extent, nature, and remediability of chronic suffering in under 10 "The Counterrevolutionary Reflex," The Columbia University Forum, Spring 1966, p. 21...
...intervention is justified...
...Some members of the New Left Opposition contend that American policy can be explained in terms of the protection and promotion of corporate interests, in much the way that the demolition of an airplane by a sidewinder missile can be explained...
...Thoughtful Communists increasingly believe that without economic competition intolerable inefficiencies persist— and that the worst moral consequences of competition, those to 5 For example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes that at the time of the crisis, because the United States had a "2 to 1 superiority in nuclear power targeted against the Soviet Union, the shift in military balance of power would be less crucial than that in the political balance" (A Thousand Days, p. 796...
...Both are amply endowed with arrogance, ignorance, and stupidity...
...For we live in a jungle—a Hobbesian state of nature...
...Directions for Policy Yet we must live in the world as it is...
...I have already explained why I believe that the United States has neither the power nor the competence to promote freedom and democracy in societies in which prerequisite institutions have not sufficiently matured...
...But this in no way requires us to maintain the incredible concentrations of power, the capacity to "kill" all nations of the world many times over...
...Its armies moved across frontiers without provocation...
...The interests of the ruling classes are simply not consistent with any social change in the interests of the people as a whole...
...It is almost inconceivable that any revolutionary movement can succeed unless underlying discontents are so intense, forms of exploitation and oppression so severe, that general popular sentiment has reached a boiling point...
...Meanwhile get as far away from here as you can...
...The amount of national resources it allocates to the problem of world poverty must be multiplied many times over...
...And should this highly probable judgment be true, it would give the liberal dialectic a greater chance to function...
...Even if Moderate Cold Warriors are inclined to accept the view that the United States is not competent to promote, freedom and democracy in societies that lack institutional prerequisites, they may feel— and rightly—that the spine of their general position has not been fairly revealed...
...But in any and all circumstances the U.S...
...Referred to by Michael Harrington, in "American Power in the Twentieth Century," DISSENT, September-October 1967, pp...
...And in this respect few aims are more important than mutual tension reduction and disarmament...
...The Marshall Plan was in balance a creative, constructive, and responsible application of American resources to the problems of European reconstruction...
...4. We should make it clear to the peoples of the world that there is not a single American economic interest abroad that is so vital as to justify military intervention in the affairs of another sovereign state...
...He believes that this has been the greatest accomplishment of America's Cold War containment policy: all around the globe, powers were brought into stable balance...
...But, as often deployed, even by very scholarly individuals, it is vacuous because it explains too much...
...in 1965, $49.2 billion...
...But one does not have to romanticize the rebel cause to oppose an American military onslaught that enlarges and intensifies the suffering of the Vietnamese people, diminishes rather than enhances their prospects for a good life, despoils their land and threatens us all with nuclear extinction...
...We have no obligation to defend parliamentary democracies like those that exist in South Africa and Rhodesia...
...Liberal progress may, therefore, receive many setbacks...
...In any event, the present rulers of Greece have informed the world that Grecian freedom requires the overthrow of parliamentary government, control of the Greek Orthodox church, censorship of the press, suppression of political opposition, and the issuance of a ban on miniskirts and, for a brief period, beards...
...Within the framework of the analysis there are all sorts of distinctions to be drawn...
...But as soon as repressive measures begin to prove industrially harmful, counter-repressive social processes will develop...
...It all sounds like a program for totalitarian control of Greek life...
...Men engaged in a shooting war, exposed to a totally different cultural experience, are being asked to teach the Vietnamese how to achieve stability, freedom, and democracy...
...And there is no reason to doubt its sincerity...
...But on these points, thoughtful individuals of every political persuasion are revisionist...
...Though wary of unilateral commitments, it should be fully acknowledged that the country's vast economic resources thrust inescapable responsibilities upon America...
...But even Stalinism and the facts that supported the hypothesis of Russian aggressiveness were not sufficient to justify the American claim that it was defending freedom and democracy...
...They think the Cold War is entirely explicable as an expression of Western corporate greed and lust for power...
...Rather we shall have to take short steps in its direction—one following another, patiently, but insistently...
...The functional meaning of "stability-operations" for the industrially underdeveloped world is counterrevolution...
...They display little respect for the human capacity to reason and to learn the truth...
...The growing gap between the affluent, industrialized nations of the world and the have-not states will be a source of inevitable future conflicts—conflicts that are all the more likely to occur because material wealth correlates so highly with color of skin—unless creative efforts are made to avoid these long-term consequences...
...Communist China would probably have failed had the United States disappeared from the face of the earth...
...was dangerous...
...Every, effort to create and utilize supranational agencies ought to be made...
...Russia is unlikely to have encouraged Nasser...
...We have automated and computerized bourgeois misperception—we have created great technological engines for preserving our complacency...
...Nor am I suggesting that the posited alternatives do exhaust America's present options...
...643-44...
...And Vietnam only reveals in a particularly crude and outrageous form the incompetence and insensitivity of American efforts to convey freedom and democracy to peoples around the globe...
...But those who, in some degree, supported the American position, disagreed sharply about what "freedom and democracy" meant...
...How should it do so given the analysis of the Cold War that has been developed in this essay...
...over the potential benefits of revolution...
...The notion that their efforts hold any promise of success is nonsense on stilts...
...When a bitterly disaffected Chinese technician was recently asked by an equally disillusioned diplomat friend who had decided to defect whether he too would leave China if he had the chance, the technician replied: Despite my supposedly unacceptable background and despite the fact that my immediate superiors know fairly well what my sentiments are, they will do nothing against me...
...Now it would be futile to argue each particular case...
...American civilian "advisers" are unable, even with the best will in the world, to persuade ruling elites to relinquish their exploitative power...
...Undoubtedly, however, the more rabid architects of America's Cold War policies will find some way to (convince the American people that tyranny is freedom and military dictatorship is democracy...
...And our China policy has been nothing but a political ransom paid to the most fanatical and unreflective portions of the American public...
...The demand for institutions that mitigate oppression, promote human dignity and personal development, is reasserted...
...wrong from the start, a sinister conspiracy against the havenots of this country and of the world...
...And they infest centers of military power...
...They acknowledge that gradualism can be a dogma and that revolution may be justified...
...The reason for the shift of authority from civilians to army in Vietnam is not that anyone really believes military men are likely to do a superior job...
...Consider the policy pattern the United States typically pursues in its efforts to maintain international stability...
...I should add here that I have encountered this point of view, not only among members of the New Left Opposition, but also among small businessmen to whom I have occasionally spoken about the war in Vietnam...
...And this obligation falls most heavily on those nations that are currently most powerful...
...The proportion of Communists in the revolutionary force may be tiny, as it was in the Dominican Republic, or significantly large, as it is in South Vietnam...
...But the Moderate Cold Warriors acknowledge, even insist, that since those early days of conflict basic changes have occurred within the Communist world...
...These internal developments have combined with the gradual emergence of two great, but conflicting, power centers to produce what has come to be called the polycentric Communist system...
...Suppose a given society is better advised to take the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary path...
...Here it is my intention only to develop the broad lines of an analysis that, in a number of important respects, runs counter to the conventional American wisdom about revolutionary movements...
...They welcomed the Marshall Plan with equal warmth...
...Second, the typical civilian is ill-equipped to understand the problems of a proud Asian people who have had a totally different cultural experience...
...nor Britain, France, or Russia...
...Russia was aggressive and expansionist...
...And stability must always take precedence 4 Paul Seabury, in his recently published book The Rise and Decline of the Cold War (New York and London: Basic Books, 1967), articulates this general point of view exceedingly well...
...For the task of policing such a treaty would be enormous...
...The second intermediate position, the one I defend in this essay, starts from the admission that American Cold War policies had considerable justification at their inception...
...This also is the sober judgment of almost every China expert outside of government...
...The other War," the effort to "pacify" the countryside, is, after 11 years and many billions of dollars spent, still "at the beginning of a beginning"—to quote Senator Mike Mansfield"s words...
...Whatever particular causes may operate at a given time, and however often other missiles may miss their mark, the constant and decisive determinant of the path of a sidewinder is the functional goal for which 7 Computed from statistics avaiable in the United Nations Statistical Year Book, 1966...
...The United States is itself a morally and politically underdeveloped society...
...I have offered a general analysis...
...They are after Satan himself...
...1 Ideological fervor was perhaps whipped up by cold and calculating politicians who wished to secure support for essentially geopolitical aims...
...The proper course for even a poor nation may be evolutionary rather than revolutionary...
...The Cold War may be a geopolitical conflict, but it is also, and importantly, religious in tone and intensity...
...And a theory that explains every possibility explains noth ing...
...But over time new seeds of discontent will be sown...
...but no more than a tiny step...
...6 Moreover, as Michael Harrington has pointed out, the history of the Cold War demonstrates that American foreign policy need not bow to economic interests...
...14 Computed on the basis of statistics available in the United Nations Statistical Year Book, 1965, by Dr...
...The millions of Americans who think of the Cold War entirely in religious terms have little difficulty in accepting the assurances of Greek and South Vietnamese dictators alike...
...And the ideological issues, while of diminished and subordinate importance, are still significant...
...military expenditures in South Vietnam 6 "East Europe's struggle for Economic Freedom," Fortune, May 1967, p. 125...
...The first of these intermediate positions is held by those I shall call "Moderate Cold Warriors...
...American intervention in Europe at the beginning of the Cold War did serve the cause of freedom and democracy...
...The oil industry still exerts decisive influence on certain aspects of American policy...
...America's Korean intervention was a partially defensible episode...
...It does not matter...
...They believe that the only defensible aim of American policy is personal salvation for the millions who would otherwise be damned by Communism to eternal perdition...
...China is only tenuously connected to either North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front, has not moved its armies across the contested frontiers unless provoked, and is not subverting or seriously threatening established parliamentary democracies...
...The tribe that lives on the margin between famine and survival may feel justified in killing a certain percentage of newborn infants...
...Hence, failure of American "stability-operations" are setbacks for liberal causes...
...They argue, had we not acted in firm though limited ways in Southeast Asia, the precarious balance of Cold War power would have been disrupted...
...But I will tell you what's worse, Tyranny...
...It is all well and good to claim that those who have such view's do not make American policy...
...Rulers of most poor countries, by reason of that very poverty, can recruit mercenaries from among their own people...
...power enlarges her potential for international mischief many times over...
...Putting to the side other long-term benefits, it is not at all clear that the cost in human misery of British or American industrial development exceeded that imposed on the Russian people by its Stalinist masters...
...For the emphasis placed on stability in practice leads to counterrevolutionary action...
...A stability orientation is not a requirement of an intelligent, properly realistic foreign policy...
...The possibility that the Communists will take power causes the United States to view these revolutionary developments as a threat to international stability...
...If Americans think they can avoid the worst during their own lifetime, they should consider the prospects of the yet unborn...
...2 The New York Times, May 25, 1966...
...It is not simply that we are a bourgeois society—with all the defenses bourgeois societies have for making human suffering invisible...
...Moreover, the facts of Stalinist tyranny buttressed the American moral position...
...The United States has about 6 per cent of the world's population and more than a third of the world's productive resources.14 In justice and in prudence she therefore bears the heaviest responsibility for reversing world-wide economic 13 I wrote this passage before General de Gaulle analyzed the larger meaning of the Mideast crisis in similar terms...
...Small errors, which would have negligible consequences when made by weaker nations, are capable of producing nuclear catastrophe when made by the United States...
...The aggression 1 In "Faith for a Troubled Christmas Time" (New York Times Magazine, December 2, 1950...
...They may acquiesce in a policy of containment...
...Elsewhere in the world, U.S...
...Our leaders have established a simple, old fashioned warlord autocracy using witch-doctor mumbo-jumbo...
...Yet the recent decision to transfer authority over pacification efforts to the American military command in South Vietnam is no less ludicrous...
...And then the fat is in the fire—as it presently is in Vietnam...
...At the same time the United States, given its desire to stabilize the situation and its further tendency to view the threat of Communism as absolutely inimical to the growth of freedom and democracy, is quite responsive to a request that it buttress its pacification efforts with military assistance...
...The idea that affected American corporations dominate Cold War policy through imperialist calculations of economic interest is blatant nonsense...
...In Korea, the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel was a wholly unjustified application of military power...
...commitments—had they not all thought that the unilateral U.S...
...The arrogance of our policies is, in this respect, surpassed only by the ignorance of those charged with implementing them...
...But the American counterrevolutionary posture in the world is a greater evil, and reflects a deeper domestic disorder, than failure to acknowledge our limitations...
...So the ruling elite turns to the United States, and that powerful nation responds by providing her suppliants with a stick...
Vol. 14 • November 1967 • No. 6
