The New Shape of Foreign Policy

...Even if the Soviet Union and the United States were to enter into a tacit agreement to withdraw from areas of friction and to avoid confrontations, their respective clients would force them to remain watchful in world politics: Both are constantly involved in negotiations that concern the security of smaller nations and, by implication, their own...

...Today, when Acheson, Lilienthal, and George Marshall are being denounced by the absence of a defense treaty . . . grants immunity to aggression...

...A comparatively slight change in the pace of activism, a shift in the geographical direction of our concerns, an overhauling of the means and instruments used, any such alteration will be hailed or condemned as a fundamental change of ideological direction and basic philosophy, engendering enthusiasm or dejection...

...This is even more true of regional arrangements such as the Organization of American States, which for most of its life was a screen for U.S...

...Such information will not eliminate the causes of conflict but may prevent the escalation of its hostility...

...they would prefer a strategy requiring instant exchanges of nuclear rockets between the Soviet Union and the United States...

...whenever we find our policies checked somewhere, those who admit that "we cannot" make it sound like "we must not...

...There it described countries that feel the present distribution of power in the world gives them less influence than is their due...

...Under these conditions it is fair to predict that many who now are working hard to dismantle the alliances and to liquidate the Cold War will be even less happy under the new system of promiscuously antagonistic multi-isolationism...

...Yet, they are not completely in the "state HENRY PACHTER of nature," which Hobbes said is the state of nations with respect to each other...

...The strongest argument for Americanization of the Vietnamese war (in fact the only argument that seemed realistic in the framework of cold-war thinking) held that the U.S...

...he scored before a hostile Senate Foreign Affairs Committee by boasting that "this Administration has not undertaken a single new commitment...

...They must be overcome by institutions affecting the daily life of every nation—international boards dealing with the distribution of raw materials and the exploitation of energy sources, of traffic by sea and air, of money management, of health services and environmental conservation...

...It also is true that, to realize such a policy of solidarity, one had to have that generosity which is characteristic of leftwing politics: for instance, one had to spend money for development aid and identify with people of other races...

...Nevertheless, it is erroneous to treat the idea of collective security as a liberal ideology...

...the Korean war was "Truman's war" to its critics and the Indochina war is McNamara's or Bundy's or Johnson's war, but certainly neither General Westmoreland's nor General Abrams's war...

...Hence we were left with— (2) the bi-polar system: Two super-powers stood at the head of two alliance systems, again sustaining and containing each other while fighting over influence among the uncommitted...

...Nuclear weapons will continue to be the instruments of an arms race, but strategically they will be almost worthless since no nation can use them without bringing destruction upon itself...

...The Common Market will become a major power comparable to the United States and 10 An agreement to have a yearly bonfire of disposable arms should be the first desideratum for this decade...

...Yugoslavia and Austria did not acquiesce in Italy's possession of Trieste and South Tyrol...

...Experience shows that the quality of liberty suffers when its area is restricted...

...There have been interventions, sometimes appropriate and often ill-considered, though usually engaged in with great reluctance and after due agonizing...

...India might have fallen apart...

...There is no permanent security within the system...

...Some may find this picture shocking...

...Nor is it sufficient to criticize specific errors such as a certain formulation of the Truman Doctrine, an excessive reliance on nuclear power, the conclusion of alliances, and other measures of the "Cold War...

...As the interstate commerce clause in the U.S...

...defense perimeter shrinks and limited engagements become less practicable, the THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY price tag on this return to Eisenhower's strategy is said to be staggering...

...Under the old system of bipolarity the big powers had a good chance to call such adventurers to order...

...I don't expect an early abolition of national authority, but I hope that the course of developments will render it irrelevant...

...LIKE MOST GREAT debates in history, however, the battle between American globalists and isolationists is not being resolved by either party's victory but has been brushed aside by the events...

...Even DeanRusk, as secretary of state, was always at pains topoint out that "there are many kinds of Communism...

...The combination of Russian imperialism, intent on surpassing the Americans, with revolutionary nationalists who have accounts to settle with all Western powers has unsettled the old power equations...

...But the condition of continuing the equilibrium is that the checks be effective, i.e., that each of the participating powers plays its role to the hilt, not shirking the risks others might be taking too...

...When the restraining hands of the hegemons are no longer steady in their respective orbits, small wars may be impossible to localize...

...Whenever we are forced to intervene somewhere, those who say "we have to" find support from others who say "we ought to...

...The conditions of success for such a multi-isolationist system are manifold: to prevent the big from swallowing the small countries, large units should be broken up and no state should be larger than, say, Massachusetts...

...we urged them on Diem...

...They merely disagree with the Administration (and among themselves) on the place where and the time when to use U.S...

...guarantees for Berlin and other threatened places might lose their credibility unless we made good on our promises to our Vietnamese clients...

...The Guam Doctrine—socalled, though it really says nothing a student would not learn in his first semester at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy—does not renounce force and does not abandon intervention as a means of U.S...

...The alternative between isolationism and interventionism is a false one, as will be shown later, and the meaningful choices will be discussed at the end of the paper...

...The nuclear weapons deter each other, but they do not deter an aggressor using conventional or political weapons...

...Australia...

...Through the accession of most countries now belonging to the Outer Seven, there may emerge a United States of Europe—U.S.Eu.--capable of holding its own between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, or of mediating between them...

...in this instance, an increase in subnational power was simultaneously an increase in transnational law...

...By now they suspect that our suggestions of "flexible response" to possible Soviet agression amounts to nothing but "Europeanization" of the war...

...Far from being starry-eyed philanthropy, that policy clearly was consistent with the long-range economic interests of the United States...

...But in the last resort a nation's power is not believable, and therefore is ineffective, without a minimum preparedness to use it in an emergency...

...Newsweek quoted Mr...

...foreign policy...

...We shall divide the charges into two categories: those directed against the ideology of internationalism or collective security, and those directed against the practice of interventions, which often is elevated to an alleged philosophy of "interventionism...

...but there is no "interventionism" from which flow the in 3 The word "revisionism" is used here, of course, in a sense different from that on p. 435...

...The security of many countries is based on the assumption that the United States cannot tolerate its impairment without jeopardizing its own security...

...Collective security was to be understood, not as a series of individual commitments, but as the readiness of all to prevent any change in the relations of international power anywhere and by whomsoever...

...and this must apply to foreign ministers as to other mortals...

...Two years later, the United States broke the alliance, and then Jefferson did speak contemptuously of "entangling alliances"—only to exclaim, another two years later, that "we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation...

...but that does not imply a renunciation of all involvement...

...A savage war may be fought in Africa over the question of who should unite the continent...

...that may still be unresolved at the end of the seventies or that may result in minor wars...

...Her young leaders' nationalism and energy are ferocious forces that may compensate for her lack of numbers, space, and facilities...

...But then, the policy was conceived as one of alliance...

...This is the main reason why the United States cannot simply go back to zero commitment...

...The country, far from being dedicated to pacifism, has always vigorously defended what it considered its "neutrality" in European affairs—but with two provisos, the first of which was spelled out 50 years after Washington's Farewell Address by William H. Trescott, a conservative Democrat from South Carolina: "Whereever the changes among European powers are such as to modify the respective weights of their colonial empires, we are directly interested in the resulting balance of powers...

...We have here an interesting reversal of previous U.S...

...While the system is not entirely chaotic, it is not self-adjusting and dependable...

...the only weapons ourgenerals have are those of total destruction...

...Proponents of retrenchment in foreign policy usually argue that our first business should be to "put our own house in order...

...Proposals that amount to this are as naive as the wish that presidents should adopt only policies with which pacifists can live...

...In this view, George Washington had committed the country to abstentionism in foreign policy, 1 but in the 150 years since his Farewell Address the world has shrunk and our conscience has been sharpened...

...Though the Soviet Union still may lag in consumer goods for its population, it will be first by all measurements of power...

...These new leaders might de clare themselves saturated and stop the arms race (which, once more, does not mean to reverse it...

...We would then have the choice of not rescuing Europe a third time, or of limiting our guarantee to certain countries...

...Their ideology of global responsibility— though propounded with the righteousness of liberal activism—served as a cover for the policy of containment which, besides saving Europe from Russification, also established an American hegemony in the Atlantic community...

...The complementary effects of subnational and transnational checks could be further enhanced if governments could be induced to sign an agreement on free international information or, as we might name it, cultural and moral disarmament...

...Apart from the fact that innocence, once lost, cannot be recovered, this country has never displayed any particular taste for Hegelian triads, and its foreign policy has been informed by need and opportunity rather than metaphysics...

...Other nations' indifference to what the U.S...

...Reviewing his options for the seventies, Willy Brandt understandably concluded that it would be wiser for him to seek an accommodation with the Soviet Union...

...Forwithout room for "flexible response," a war, once itbreaks out, can be neither stalled nor won...

...Paradoxically, this disgust with foreign policy, or perhaps with all politics in the established framework, was now named "realism" or even by the German word "Realpolitik...

...These sources of conflict are now visible...

...In this respect the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic are still new and unsatiated nations and act as the leaders of all other revisionist powers...

...The question is, how long can this process of disengagement be continued without creating utter chaos in the international balance of powers...

...First, Hitler and Tajo forced us to intervene again...

...But even NATO resolutions are not necessarily carried out by all partners—except when they have been so carefully watered down as to be acceptable even to the most independent members...

...Helms's war...

...An increasing involvement in "world politics" had become inevitable...

...Its saturation then may transform it from a destroyer into a defender of the status quo...

...positions...

...IV T T HE IDEOLOGY OF INTERNATIONALISM ruled for 25 years, though it was not always matched by practice .e It came to grief, not 6 It was not liberal, for it required us to support regimes no liberal would touch with a pole...

...LET us ASSUME that at some time during the seventies the United States will have withdrawn the last GI from Vietnam, that other GIs are preparing to leave Germany and Japan, that Taiwan is again Chinese, Okinawa Japanese, and most other overseas bases either have been abandoned or are under heavy political fire...

...A new version of such false "security" arrangements is the Soviet proposal to convene a "European Security Conference"—a device to sever Western Europe from the United States...

...Unfortunately, the paradox may even extend into another region...

...At best, the SALT talks might result in a stabilization of the present balance of terror—an agreement to add no further weapons of the ABM, MIRV, ULMS, FOB types to the present arsenal—perhaps a tightened test ban treaty prohibiting more experiments with newer weapons, and a tighter nonproliferation treaty restricting nuclear weapons to the present owners of such weapons...

...after 1945 the UN Security Council was constructed as such a "concert" where England, France, China, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S.A...

...The resulting dynamism continues to negate any new equilibrium in the world...

...If America's border is to be the Continental Shelf, our military can have no strategy except "massive retaliation...

...As a remedy to this, the obvious appeal must be to change "the system," which may be defined as either the capitalisticimperialistic, or the military-industrial complex...

...Yet there is no denying that in the past 30 years we have intervened directly with American might where it would have been preferable to work through proxies or to allow the dust to settle of its own accord...

...In the May 1971 treaty the U.S.S.R...

...Having gained the valuable, if costly, experience of interventions that backfired, our future policy-makers probably will go through more prolonged agonizing sessions before they engage in another direct intervention...

...Japan will have restored—without military, through commercial conquest—her old Pacific empire...

...Even before we have abandoned the role of protector, we are running out of nations that wish to be protected...

...Neither of them will have much political or industrial weight, but put together they may manage independently the resources that foreign masters were once able to monopolize...

...hegemony in this area, or the Warsaw Pact, which permits Soviet intervention in other countries...

...Shall the unfreezing of the Cold War restore the old merry-goround of diplomatic jealousies and rivalries...

...power—and as we shall see, there is a good chance that the Administration will adopt more of their advice, even though it may not say so either...

...Having assumed that our foreign policy must be more beautiful than that of any other country, they were shocked to discover that it was just as ugly...

...To the new nations, HENRY PACHTER however, rising political influence matters more than social and economic gains...

...If some Europeans still think that the American troops in Germany serve as a trip wire to unleash instant massive retaliation in case of a Russian attack, very few Americans today are likely to agree that this is a realistic assumption...

...The protesters charge that our policy was shaped by the Pentagon, yet the realists deplore that it was conceived without due regard to our military capabilities...

...but they are straining at the leash, too...

...Previous examples of such an unstable concert are not too encouraging...

...Perhaps this fanaticismis best mobilized when the war is also racial: the Czechs are no less devoted to freedom than the Vietcong but they do not wish to destroy their own country...

...With a larger population than the United States, it is bending all its energies and resources on the attainment of its strategic aims...

...THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY national boards...

...It will strive for atomic superiority and try to expand its influence in the Third World—possibly even over some countries of Central Europe which today are officially neutral...

...If once we had one enemy in the Kremlin, we shall now have any number of potential enemies the world over...

...Global responsibilities were costly for the United States taxpayers and therefore at all times difficult to sell to Congress...

...The question is whether the development of international consciousness and of international organizations can create a situation where governments may have to revise their priorities...

...Yet even in periods when the official philosophy was isolationist, as under Herbert Hoover, we did not turn our face away from Europe, but were one of the principals in the quest for disarmament and for a solution of the reparations question...

...THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY dividual interventions as milk flows from the cow or as fantasies about secret conclaves flow from the fertile imagination of extremist politicians...

...a The 9 American military doctrine states that the strategic equilibrium can be maintained only if the balance of forces is asymmetric: the defender always needs more power than the aggressor, who can concentrate his forces on a point of his selection...

...The liberals used the idealistic language of collective security to defend military policies they might have attacked under different circumstances...

...unforeseen forces have become visible in the meantime, and the old starting point may not actually be what we thought it was...

...The question is whether it will resolve itself into (3) polycentrism (which is to be discussed later), or (4) multi-isolationism, the utopia that each country can withdraw into its shell and leave the others in peace...

...At the same time, in order to survive, these smaller units must surrender much of their sovereignty to regional planning boards...

...Of its former alliances (NATO, SEATO, CENTO) it may have retained the empty shells and some isolated clients (Israel...

...For historical reasons a nation may seek its identity in rivaling, surpassing, getting even with certain others...

...The standoff that in Europe clearly had been accepted by both sides was not greeted with relief but vilified as "cold war," while Soviet invasions and proxy wars came under the heading of "coexistence...

...Not only noblesse, bigness too, obligates, as George Washington had foreseen...

...But what appeared as the foundation of a bright future now seems difficult to accept as the result of 25 years' contestation...

...perhaps even allow some satel lites to escape...

...Having supported the crusading policy in the honest belief that its aim was a transcendent ideal, they felt utterly let down when they suddenly saw that no such aim was reached or even intended and that their dream could not be realized with the means employed...

...People who saw no point in pressing on Europe our own conception of the millennium had to profess a deep disappointment over our inability to fire others with our own messianism...

...Not only has 25 years' experience made us wiser...

...Any have-not alliance includes junior members whose ramshackle governments must show successes in foreign policy, or at least stir up hate campaigns the major powers may be unable to control...

...Neither he nor other "neoisolationists" like Kennan or Lippmann or Morgenthau say that...

...But after a brief spurt of internationalism, we relapsed into our natural stance—isolationism...

...practical isolationists of the Right have therefore concluded that retrenchment must be accompanied by even heavier armament and by constant preparedness to reenter the contested areas...

...Nixon would like to extricate us with as little damage as possible to these clients...

...For the risk of not playing is usually greater than that of playing...

...We may retreat from positions we never planned to be permanent, which we had occupied precipitously to meet a special emergency, or which proved to be untenable...

...we even offered to finance Castro's agrarian reform...

...but it will not come to rest before it has put the old ruling powers in their place...

...they cannot help getting involved in other nations' affairs and they are not prepared to give up, nay they wish to increase, their national sovereignties and identities...

...Their superweapons are of little use in small wars and they cannot even overcome colonial rebellions...

...Such expectations have been disappointed...

...As for the latter, there is no such thing...

...but for a time now they have vied with each other in pressing the most sophisticated arms into the hands of wreckers of the peace...

...Failure in Vietnam discloses not any "limits of U.S...

...The recent My Lai case, however, has returned the fundamental idea of this law to the people...

...To be a have-not country is not something that can be defined by statistics...

...7 This failure is often misunderstood...

...The critics would like to extricate U.S...

...The other proviso was that America must secure for herself freedom of action in its own hemisphere...

...They can think of hardly any provocation, short of an actual attack on the United States itself, against which the use of U.S...

...Moreover, it merely continued a trend that had been apparent in our policies for over 50 years...

...The model for this procedure is found in the Locarno Treaty of 1925 when England guaranteed the Rhine frontier...

...We may assume that this new unit will exercise a stabilizing influence after the lapse of NATO...

...But where there is need for change, there also are forces that resist and others that are impatient...

...Smaller powers were not strong enough or not united enough to fill such vacuums...

...Yet this picture is not quite correct...

...they warned us not to get involved in any land war in Asia...

...that most American assets abroad have been nationalized or repatriated, and the United States has discontinued most of its foreign aid operations...

...The rudimentary form of all these services does not allow any hope that during the seventies they will generate authorities to which the nations might bow...

...but the list of new conflicts that might arise during a decade must be much longer—and at least one of the contestants is likely to seek support from a big power...

...recognized that the U.A.R...

...anti-Europeanism...

...shoulder its responsibilities...

...A speech of 1951, often quoted to thecontrary, was not a policy paper but a pure propaganda harangue...

...Japan may once more become the hegemon of the area it tried to make into its political empire in the thirties...

...It no longer matters whether Americans do or do not agree to intervene on behalf of their clients in other parts of the globe...

...No arrangements, pacts, organizations, or political conceptions can change these foundations unless the change has first occurred in the minds of people, in their attitude to their own nation, in their ability to understand our current problems as world problems...

...I also assume that most U.S...

...This is at the bottom of our difficulties in NATO: our allies don't wish to fight our wars on their soil...

...Radicals, therefore, will have to think of methods to break the vicious cycle...

...they no longer enjoy absolute hegemony in their spheres of influence...

...But since "Vietnamization" of that war has become our official policy, it is doubtful whether in the future we shall find many who wish to be protected by our guarantee...

...Senator Taft felt at the time that we were in the wrong war, and later he attacked Truman for "losing China" and for concluding an armistice in Korea...

...Meanwhile, Japan is likely to emerge as a strong power center in East Asia...

...While liberals hailed and conservatives deplored this turn toward the "One World" concept, both sides agreed that our fall from the paradise of innocent isolation had occurred at some time in the forties...

...Once such ideologies have been used and set in motion, they induce a dynamism in the behavior of their believers...

...Since there is little hope that states will be abolished within the next decade, the question is how to make this system, immoral as it may be, habitable for human beings—a task perhaps self-contradictory because the system that is built on nationalism in turn creates more nationalism...

...When we specify "the system," we must conclude, therefore, that it is the power game itself, the rivalry of nations or what Lenin called "the system of states...

...nor was it consistently anti-Communist, as Acheson's HENRY PACHTER because people changed their minds about the merits of its underlying principles but when the policy associated with it in Vietnam proved unsuccessful...

...On the other hand, our interests are "vital" in Berlin and in Israel, though these places also are thousands of miles away...

...considers their best interest is cited as justification for our indifference to what they consider their business...

...We have imposed reforms on Japan andFormosa...

...THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY diers whom the Germans hold there as hostages for the safety of their former capital...

...In short, the present big and small states are utterly unsuitable for such an experiment...

...Having failed to obtain a fair peace for Israel, we need not wonder why so few small nations find it necessary to vote our way in the United Nations Assembly...

...There are now five atomic powers, and a dozen more nations could become atomic powers at short notice...

...that the NATO command is in the process of being dismantled, SEATO and CENTO have been shelved...

...I agree that, had we gone farther in that direction, we would have lost the support of the parasiticclasses in Latin America...

...were to sustain and contain each other...

...for of all countries the United States is least dependent on foreign markets and suppliers...

...Translated: there is no middle thing betweendeterrence and annihilation...

...Where we have adopted the latter course (as in China), we have done so with so little gracefulness that a hidden impatience to intervene seemed to shine through the apparent abstentionism...

...They should more properly be called anti-interventionists...

...De Gaulle saw that he did not need to pay for the umbrella by assuming reciprocal obligations...

...But strangely, instead of blaming the realism of the actual policy, they blamed the idealism in which they had believed, and thereupon turned their back on all principles of foreign policy, especially that of collective security...

...Is there really more safety in a fluid state of diplomacy than in a more structured order...

...he has argued that we must take a business-as-usual attitude to Ian Smith and Vorster...

...We cannot "return" to isolationism, because we never were isolationist in the sense of being "detached from world affairs...

...Nor can Pakistan forget Kashmir, etc...

...As other nations had their crusades, we have fought the uncivilized Indians and the overcivilized English, the absolutist Queen of Spain and the Bolshevist Russians, the wild Asiatics and the sophisticated Europeans...

...Any circus clown knows that juggling is easier with two balls than with five...

...Constitution has given the federal government powers transcending the states, so perhaps the nations can be transcended by regional development authorities and international agencies...

...interventions in World Wars I and II, the Korean war and the Cold War...

...The President's new China policy obviously does not call for any changes here...

...SUCH A WORLD ORDER can be conceived in several forms: (1) as "concert of powers": In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the "concert" of England, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia-Germany guaranteed to each nation that none of them should gain preponderance...

...We do not know what regime will govern in the Soviet Union, but we must assume, as it is technologically superior to China, that it will be the world's greatest power...

...Fairly recently Woodrow Wilson aroused its sense of global responsibility...

...We have seen that presidents get themselves elected on a no-war pledge only to find themselves forced to override their own promises and even their political interests...

...V11 T T HE SYSTEM DESCRIBED in the preceding section resembles the old model of the "concert...

...It was for this reason that FDR was so anxious to secure Stalin's adherence to the United Nations...

...While theoretically it is not necessary that one side must win what the other side has abandoned, in practice the Soviet Union has pressed hard on the heels of the Western powers wherever their retreat left a vacuum...

...No matter what im portance one may attribute to Communist and national-revolutionary ideologies as policy-inspiring factors, it is clear that a dynamic faith with a promise of world domination is a much stronger cement for any alliance than the merely defensive ideologies of the Western powers, which do not claim to be doing more than preserving an unsatisfactory status quo...

...But now hidebound nationalism is no longer confined to the backwoods constituencies...

...In his memoirs Khrushchev boasts that he himself ordered the missiles put into Cuba, not his generals...

...Recently, the development of multinational corporations has come under scholarly scrutiny, and it is clear that for international relations even more than in domestic affairs Reinhold Niebuhr's dictum (rephrased after Marx) is true: when private enterprise ceases to be private, it should become public...

...The superpowers seem to have lost stature...

...One hestitates to enumerate the problems fear of total war becomes once more a strongargument for heavy modern arms...

...An unstable equilibrium is exposed to adjustments which may become necessary for any number of reasons—demographic, economic, ideological...

...Here it describes critics of the conventional views on U.S...

...At first sight one should think that this need of defensive superiority diminishes as the United States disengages itself from overseas obligations...

...the conservatives found themselves in the company of radicals who claimed to be guarding the tabernacle of traditional neutrality in foreign affairs...

...Likewise, disarmament will not eliminate the causes of the arms race, but may help to limit its course and its cost...

...is "setting itself the aim of constructing its society along socialist lines...

...But even should, by good luck, some of the existing A-weapons be destroyed in the process, the remaining overkill would still be the multiple of anything that was thought tolerable in 1941...

...since two powers, allied by ideology and treaty, threatened to dominate both Europe and Asia in the thirties, the United States had to provide the balance...

...The growth of such functional associations, it seems to me, would be the most meaningful development that can realistically be expected in the seventies...

...V1 T T HE PICTURE MAY NOT BE QUITE as chaotic as the notion of multi-isolationism suggests...

...But we see that the Soviet Union and China, neither of which is, whatever they may be, capitalistic by any classical definition, also engage in warlike policies against each other, and that in both countries it is not the military but the civilian leadership that fans the flames of their conflict...

...Americans who formerly thought that "the most powerful nation" could do everything now find that the price of doing anything is too high...

...After V–Day, we might once more have retreated from world politics, had not Stalin's shadow, hovering ominously over Europe, stirred our conscience: this time for good, we recognized our duty to shoulder our share of the burden to preserve international peace...

...Some naive neutralists may have hoped that American retrenchment would result in everybody's retrenchment, as though good examples were as contagious in foreign affairs as they are supposedly in the nursery...

...Technologically, politically, and economically, perhaps even morally and artistically, we felt superior to the Russians...

...The so-called Nuremberg Law was faulty only because it was imposed by conquering governments, some of which did not have clean hands...

...The big will grow more efficient, and at least some small ones will merge into larger units...

...It is said, for instance, that we were "overextended" and had no "vital interest" in a country "5,000 miles away...

...The ideological swings of the pendulum tend, therefore, to be wider than the swings in our actual foreign policy...

...In both cases the ideology of collective security was debased to provide legal cover for the protection of big-power interests...

...Perry "opened Nippon," Beveridge and Josiah Strong hailed the Anglo-Saxons' "destiny"— a term beloved by Hitler, too...

...Let us also assume that all countries that have not yet done so will have established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the Chinese People's Republic, and even the German Democratic Republic, recognizing thereby the Communists' conquests of 1939-49...

...The proposal would oblige governments to disseminate each other's releases through the news media on a periodic and reciprocal basis, i.e., to publish, in the periodicals, the press, through radio and TV, maybe in the movies, the other side's point of view especially during negotiations, in litigation, or in case of conflict...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that our failure in Vietnam should be accompanied by a resurgence of "isolationism" or "neoisolationism," whose representative speakers claim to be both more realistic and more idealistic than the proponents of the previous policy...

...Again, isolationists who fought America's entry into the European War in 1914 were imperialists for the Pacific area—with few honorable exceptions, such as Norman Thomas...

...We might then return to our previous as sumption: if and when the Soviet leadership will be satisfied that they hold a slight su periority in arms and can consider their empire safe, then internal changes inside the Soviet society might permit the rise of a new leadership with a new perception of its place in the world...

...Unre quited love and sour grapes provide the emotional underpinning for the return to a policy of cumulative disengagement: our retrenchment diminishes our partners' zeal, which in turn decreases our feeling of concern, etc...

...At the end of the seventies, the United States will clearly not be "the most powerful nation in the world" but find itself as one of four more or less equal powers, with the prospect that two to five other such THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY powers might emerge in the eighties...

...It merely assures the Asian nations of our continued support and assigns to the U.S...

...Soviet power will almost certainly continue its drive toward the Moslem areas south of its borders, into the oil-rich Arab countries and toward the Indian Ocean...

...There may be greater disposition to intervene on the part of some policy-makers than of others...

...the former hold that other nations' independence is our business...

...Incidentally, this danger might be even greater for other nations...

...THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY ad hoc precipitous actions, often decided in the nick of time to prevent great disaster...

...it is a state of mind...

...While the means and the intensity of our involvement have changed from time to time, the Republic has followed, from its earliest days to the present, a balance-of-power policy, never allowing any one nation to dominate either Europe or Asia...

...power from undesirable involvements regardless of the consequences for our local proteges...

...Atomic weapons are just threatening enough to provide an umbrella under which the small powers are able to conduct their own independent policies...

...a Chamberlain might fumble the ball...

...The average American probably saw his government's interventions in world affairs in the light of Gary Cooper's role in High Noon...

...In the next section, I shall briefly indicate how this system broke down...

...The Vietnamese, united under the banner of Ho Chi Minh, might try to reassemble the Indochinese empire once owned by the French...

...but we still have to seek influence and mutual relationships in this universe, and the greatest error would be to envisage a new isolationism as a return to America's "natural" attitude after a spree of misconceived "globalism...

...Likewise, the advice of U.S...

...In reality, they were internationalists because internationalism was a practical idea...

...The clients no longer wish to be rescued by us if rescue means all the things we are doing in Vietnam...

...I am not advocating world government or world economic planning, but the erosion of national governments and the supersession of national economic interests by inter 11 Nor is it Mr...

...out of the region...

...All these were attempts to cope with the main but unforeseen postwar problem: the militancy of revisionism...

...This idea, made popular by the various youth movements in recent years, represents a decisive departure from previous efforts on the Left...

...then two unforeseen events precipitated us into "globalism...

...At the time of the Baghdad Pact, Mr...

...The critics of such various police operations, by contrast, all too soon came to question America's right or duty to engage in any peace-keeping venture outside its proper defense perimeter...

...More appropriately, they might be called collectivists or equilibrists, since in the late forties they committed the United States to the defense of a certain status quo which seemed to them to keep world affairs in a state of perfect balance .4 4 This may imply the obligation to keep promises one did not make...

...divisions can be brought home from Europe, so that NATO can be transformed into a purely political alliance...

...Likewise, when Senator Fulbright untiringly assures us that "the most powerful nation in the world" need not use its power to see it respected, he actually is concerned with appearances and methods rather than with the essence of the problem of power...

...World politics is visibly moving away from the polarized, binomial model of the fifties and sixties, toward a more "polycentric"—an unfortunate coinage which seems to mean multicornered—or even chaotic model...

...The military debacle of Vietnam and the moral debacle of Santo Domingo have in this country tipped the balance of articulate opinion toward revisionism in its extreme form...

...Germany divided will fill the air with laments over its frustrations, or united will be a danger to its neighbors...

...He is getting undeserved laurels for seeming to say that power need not be wielded...

...Its rules may be realized, as Marx said, like the law of gravitation when the house collapses on us...

...We are returning to the insight of liberal internationalists, at the end of World War II, that the organization of peace requires the involvement of all the big powers...

...it finds eloquent advocates among the educated and wordly-wise who can show how little the U.S...

...The difference may be significant but it is one of judgment (specifically as to the value of those clients and of promises made to them) rather than of basic attitudes...

...This development is consistent with two trends that have become evident over the past 10 years: increasing nationalism of the de Gaullist type among our allies, and decreasing efficacy of the big deterrent in most current types of conflicts...

...It is true, however, that new policies always have to be "sold" to the American people by invoking ideologies...

...more recent writers who were tarnished with the "neoisolationist" epithet have rightly repudiated any connection with the earlier breed...

...Senator Mansfield thinks that now or soon the six U.S...

...hence we may once again safely relegate power politics to second place, confident that people abroad know now that we would again rush into any breach in case of emergency...

...The temptation to enlarge such deliveries is great since the big powers are equipping their armies with more and more futuristic hardware and would not know how to dispose of the dated equipment if they could not hand it to beggars and bandits.io Space doesnot permit here a discussion of HENRY PACHTER civil wars that might degenerate into confrontations between national powers...

...Opportunistic as we are, we did not react to the shock by inquiring into the specific causes of the disaster but by jumping to the conclusion: internationalism has failed, interventionism has failed...

...Their rivalry was seen as either "cold war" or as "coexistence...

...a French Revolution might suspend the rules altogether...

...Created by conflict, it creates more conflict...

...Finally, there is no reason to doubt that sooner or later its systematic research efforts will lead to technological breakthroughs that will relegate the United States to second place...

...For according to Kant's categorical imperative, each of us must act in accordance with a maxim that could be the maxim for the conduct of all others...

...in the West among the U.S., U.S.Eu., and the U.S.S.R...

...Thinkers who just wanted us to mark time had to propagate retrenchment...

...It strengthens the people's ability to withhold cooperation or even enjoins them to resist a government that has violated international law...

...The revolutionary nationalism that developed after the post-World War II liberation may be unhealthy, immature and easy to belittle as mere "resentment...

...Like any other country, we have had periods of more intensive activism and periods of relative inactivity or retrenchment...

...There would have to be rapid retreat not only from national policies but from national ideologies...

...The new idea is not incompatible with this approach but supplements it: it aims to weaken the national governments' ability to violate international law...

...III T T HE TARGETS OF ISOLATIONIST—or revisionist 3—criticism are both the means and the philosophy of America's political behavior in these last 30 years, as well as its two kinds of agents, the liberal internationalists and the military nationalists...

...But I deny that it waslogical for us to support Nasser, Papadopoulos, Somoza, Thieu, etc...

...When national enterprises cease to concern only one nation, they ought to become international, at the same time that they become public, i.e., democratically controlled...

...The United States, let us hope, may overcome its present dissensions and once more be a stabilizing factor in world politics...

...Historical revisionism—a legitimate reconsideration of past policies in the light of new information—degenerated into a self-lacerating ritual of purging America of its "arrogance of power...

...The liberal internationalists, whose original concern had been with organizing world peace, now modified their homegrown faith in legalized collective action to maintain that the United States had an implicit mandate to police the status quo...

...Even if it wanted to, the Soviet Union now could not settle the Near-East conflict by offering the United States a reasonable proposal—not with China in the wings to shout betrayal in the halls of the Bandung countries...

...Of all revisionists, GeorgeKennan alone had the courage to carry isolationismto its logically mad conclusion...

...Nixon with his senatorial and professorial critics on the other side...

...Even so cursory a survey reveals that we did not pass from a state of introverted innocence to an eruption of exuberant expansionism in this century, and there is little substance to the prediction that, after the shattering experience of Vietnam, we might "return" to the earlier mood of humility...

...A Frederick II might not play by the rules...

...part of Pakistan might have joined Afghanistan...

...the Soviet Union—at least potentially, though it may be less ruthless in exploiting its capacity for political purposes...

...Both the Soviet Union and China must watch this new rival, and as a result we shall have three triangles of power: in the East among Japan, China, and the U.S.S.R...

...The case for retrenchment, therefore, no longer rests on purely ideological grounds and does not even have to rely on the argument that interventions do not serve our best interests...

...HENRY PACHTER Many innocents had indeed experienced this disappointment...

...The time is gone when UN resolutions were respected at least in those areas where we had power...

...The first president did not warn against "entangling alliances" but against "permanent alliances," and for that he had good reason: in concluding the alliance with France he had neglected to set a term for renewal, and he was anxious to correct this violation of an elementary rule of diplomacy...

...At that time, long before we invested $100 billion abroad and acquired garrison rights in overseas countries, many thought we were entering "an American century...

...5) Another way of overcoming sovereignty would be the gradual enlargement of certain essential services the UN is now offering on an almost eleemosynary basis: regional planning, investment aid, health care, ecological surveys, energy supply, transportation policies and, above all, the establishment of a body of international law governing the various encounters between nations, formation of an international civil service, etc...

...Nevertheless, no one expects that the superpowers will renounce these weapons voluntarily...

...So are the other partners of this or that diplomatic and strategic triangle...

...Likewise, it has now been recognized that peace in the Middle East will require the guarantees of all the big powers concerned...

...In politics as in personal life, "you can't go home again" is a truism painful to admit...

...And some see our interventions abroad as dictated by sinister business interests, others as the work of doctrinaire fanatics and the outflow of liberal idealism...

...But whenever such laws were established, they left the national governments in as strong a position as before and free to break the agreements whenever they saw fit...

...Italy never agreed that Nice and Savoy are French departments...

...However, as the U.S...

...Whenever such a crusading ideology lost its usefulness, the people and its policy-makers found it difficult to switch signals at the right moment...

...Any discussion of America's future policy must start with a repudiation of this isolationist myth...

...It is sheer accident that these critics also identify themselves with Third World revisionism...

...The system failed, not because the powers were divided THE NEW SHAPE OF FOREIGN POLICY but because the three first-named powers were not strong enough to bargain...

...The first presidents started the bad habit of their successors: to justify opportunistic policies by invoking principles manufactured for the occasion...

...property and assets abroad may be nationalized, after which friendly relations can prevail between the United States and the revolutionary juntas...

...Dean Rusk said on August 25, 1966: "No would-be aggressor should suppose that HENRY PACHTER If an association of independent states was to counterbalance Soviet power and its ideologicalpolitical dynamism, they had to develop a spirit of group solidarity...

...it sustains itself through the mechanism of a mutual containment, but that same mechanism may destroy it...

...So far, our ideas on foreign policy were addressed to national governments, and most efforts to curb the power of nationalism and militarism were based on the assumption that international agreements or international councils are able to impose transnational law upon reluctant national establishments...

...Not even the benevolent leadership that many conceived as America's role in this world of rising expectations is to be tolerated...

...On the other hand, the preconception that the United States must not treatment of Yugoslavia and Dulles's treatment ofthe Hungarian revolution showed...

...but on reflection it is consistent with expectations most of us thought realistic back in 1945— with the exception that few expected Mao to win all of China...

...It is very clear that there must be a point beyond which the United States cannot retreat without unsettling the equilibrium and endangering its safety...

...The danger of overshooting the mark had to be countered by a counterideology of "isolationism...

...It is silly to blame "lack of unity" for the failure of a body that was created as a bargaining table, a place not to dispense justice but to distribute power...

...5 This, after all, was the lesson these men had learned in the thirties: failure to repel the first aggression eventually resulted in world war...

...in the near future it will be based on the fact that we have not been invited to intervene and that other nations will place their trust in their own diplomatic agility rather than in our promise to help them...

...Having rejected NATO, they felt obliged to disapprove of America's entry into World War I and World War II...

...The easiest and most common suggestion of a remedy is to abolish foreign policy and to substitute public relations programs for the use and show of power...

...The limitations ofWestern powers in the Third World are not logistical but political, inasmuch as guerrillas are alwaysable to resume any fight they appear to have givenup: as long as they don't lose totally, they win...

...Germany is on the verge of emulating his example, which also opens Eastern markets to German industry...

...now, after the Kremlin has shown that no peace is possible there without its specific consent, we are interested in making the U.S.S.R...

...The CIA has consistently warned Johnson against committing American troops in Vietnam, and I for one would not be surprised if one day we were to learn that some of the violent kinds of opposition to the war had secretly been fomented by the CIA...

...or if they thought they did, they have not been able to defend vital interests against Soviet encroachments...

...power might be justified.8 They are not sure that we either should or can protect Israel, and they are anxious to extricate from Berlin the 10,000 American sol 8 The issue was joined in May 1967, when theshipping rights of a democratic country and of allother countries, including the United States, werebeing attacked by a willful dictator who also waswaging war in Yemen...

...Dulles tried to keep the U.S.S.R...

...If there was any doubt about the meaning of the Guam Doctrine, Nixon resolved it in Cambodia...

...those who imagine that we need only go back to the illusions of 1945 for everything to be all right have not understood what has happened in these 25 years...

...Many conflicts will have no other reason than some megalomaniac's desire to assert the sovereignty of his country...

...They will always try, as they have done before, to prompt international organ izations, such as the OAS and the UN, into necessary actions or, like a good judo fighter, if they are clever enough they will incite two of our enemies to fight each other rather than do it themselves...

...Weakness suggested a defensive attitude during the Civil War...

...It is true, the Soviet Union's satellites have less freedom to stray from the fold...

...The Brezhnev doctrine gives satellite leaders a hold on Soviet policies: by declaring himself a Leninist, Castro could force Khrushchev to stand by him...

...Therefore, it did not seem very realistic for pacifists to exhort and implore them to disarm...

...America's plan had been to fulfill and even to raise the economic expectations, while containing the political dynamics, of revolutionary nationalism...

...revisionists of the Left, one remembers with a smile that in their own day they were denounced by the Right as Communists or protectors of Communists...

...The Europeans are indeed eager to conclude special security treaties with the Soviet Union, provided that security is guaranteed by the United States...

...11 F F OR THE LAST 25 YEARS Americans have viewed their foreign policy in the light of a myth...

...They follow certain rules that keep the game of equilibrium going...

...though for some time the Soviet Union can forbid Austria to join, ultimately the United States of Europe may attract even Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia too...

...There may emerge, during the seventies or eighties, a common market for South America and a political confederation of black Africa, perhaps also an Arab-Moslem community encompassing the former Ottoman Empire...

...The universe in which we live is different from the one we imagined in 1945...

...Neither the Chinese nor the Russians are likely to abandon their respective claims to preeminence in the Communist world...

...Unless he holdsthat total unilateral disarmament is realistic, an advocate of retrenchment cannot readily oppose ABM, ULMS, FOB, and MIRV: the deterrent must be strong enough to make war impossible...

...Laird as saying: "Our policy isbased on preventing war, not planning to fightwars...

...but they are unlikely to discard and foreswear this instrument of foreign policy...

...Even Dean Rusk, the former secretary of state who is the neoisolationists' bete noire, would agree that one must not make promises one cannot keep...

...Just as French opponents of collective security at the end of the thirties did not want to "die for Danzig," it is equally true that Americans do not want to die for Berlin or Jerusalem...

...in the Pacific among the U.S., China, and Japan...

...The opportunistic policy of shoring up friendly governments of whatever description was denounced as the bastard child of an ideological preconception and defended as a service to "democracy...

...Therefore they have been called, not quite accurately, internationalists or even, derisively, globalists...

...This is neither true nor necessary...

...We never conveived of our role as that of "the world's policeman," 2 but perhaps as its fire brigade...

...Until that time, ideological vectors and the dynamic factors in the structure of na tional-revolutionary states are likely to carry the Soviet Union and its allies toward ex pansionist policies...

...The debate also led to new and strange kinds of polarization...

...Thus our collective security will be neither very secure nor very collective...

...As a legacy from its past, moreover, it still feels strong incentives to take the former colonial powers' place...

...A diplomacy that merely aims at preventing the outbreak of war may find itself busily engaged in the affairs of seven continents, and in the absence of any rational system of collective security the job might be desperately difficult...

...The real question is whether the United States should be committed to the defense of other nations or should wait and withhold intervention until it perceives a clear and present danger to its own interests...

...Arabs may fight among each other, or once again with Israel, with other powers backing either side...

...To put it bluntly, there is no system of collective security in sight, and there never was one either in the old League of Nations or in the present United Nations...

...Now France was only 500 miles away from Algeriaand certainly had "vital" interests to defend there...

...forces a standby role of last resort instead of the front-line role they have played in Korea and Vietnam...

...The latter feel that this nation should stick to its own business...

...TheAlianza para el Progreso was especially designedto force beneficiary countries to institute reforms...

...V S S EEN IN THIS LIGHT, America's newly resurgent isolationism seems merely a reflection of the nationalism that is becoming the practical guide for every country's foreign policy...

...This was the essence of Herbert Hoover's conception of "Fortress America," and it is no less topical today: paradoxically, the more seriously President Nixon takes his Guam Doctrine, the less conciliatory can he allow his negotiators to be in the SALT negotiaions...

...the five powers which sustain and contain each other do not really act in "concert...

...Originally founded to provide a haven from the quarrels of Old Europe, so we were told, this country had little foreign involvements for 100 years and more...

...the term suggests some degree of harmony, but conceals their rivalry with each other...

...Here Rusk, with Kennedy, Roosevelt, Acheson, and Stevenson, stands on one side...

...It was not until after the victory over fascism—that most virulent kind of chauvinism—that the idea of a "world order" or of "collective security" took hold...

...Their apparent idealism rested on a solid foundation of enlightened interest...

...Even without China present, the United Nations General Assembly has become quite unruly—to the point of adopting resolutions it knows it cannot carry out...

...America's interventions abroad have indeed given the impression of being 1 Incidentally, the Farewell Address is consistently misquoted...

...The new state of the world requires our help to keep its joints together...

...PS — This essay was written some time ago...

...The full speech is the most extreme statement of the philosophical rationaleof unilateral intervention: even in the absence of an explicit mandate, this argument runs, theUnited States must act as though it had receivedone...

...has received in return for worrying over the fate of the world...

...The obvious conclusion from this outline of history is: with Stalin gone, the dangers of the Cold War situation have receded...

...When there were only two superpowers, Khrushchev could confidently tell us: you watch your Germans, I'll watch mine...

...conflicts may multiply as smaller countries find support in defying the presumptions of the big...

...The antifascist origins of the insight seemed to make it a slogan of the Left, and internationalism part of the liberal ideology...

...Isolationisim was merely the other side of continental imperialism and, right down to the beginning of World War 1, it was consistent with interventions in this hemisphere, in Africa, Asia, and Polynesia, and even with the acquisition of colonies...

...power" in state-to-state relations but the differentabilities to take punishment, on the one hand, of a professional army and, on the other hand, offanatical kamikaze fighters...

...In negotiating such agreements, governments so far have considered primarily the relationship of their respective forces and capabilities to hurt each other...

...The isolationism of the forties and fifties was actually nothing but 2 I have not been able to find this claim in any Administration source, but only as a charge in the mouth of opponents...

...At the same time, socialists should encourage the growth and strengthening of subnational authorities and centers of power...

...5 In his popular book, A New Foreign Policy for the United States (New York: Praeger, 1969), Hans Morgenthau charges that we defend the status quo not only with respect to the international distribution of power, but in the social constitutionsof overseas countries, too...

...There are countertrends, too...

...HENRY PACHTER Peace-keeping will be more difficult in such a universe of nations than under the Soviet-American "condominium," which kept the world divided but also kept its conflicts manageable for 25 years...

...But in practice we may find that retrenchment in foreign policy increases difficulties in domestic affairs, and just the opposite of the desired effect may result: more economic and financial controls, more burdensome defense expenditures, restriction of liberties or even a military dictatorship to meet the more stringent conditions of international political rivalry...

...generals has often been sober...

...The ensuing debate has had all the earmarks of a conversation in an insane asylum, with each participant answering to a fourth person the question that a second had asked of a third, while addressing a fifth...

...Those who blame all our woes on the mistake of ever having left that position certainly have no sense of history...

...commit itself to collective arrangements of mutual security was given out as "Realpolitik...

...But precisely those whopreviously had complained that "we always support dictators" now came to Nasser's aid by denouncing any action we might have taken to prevent the outbreak of a war for which he professedto lust...

...A textbook widely used only 10 years ago, and aptly entitled The Revolution in American Foreign Policy, told of our late conversion to "collective security...