Kennedy's Foreign Policy:

...It is also another instance of that trap of imitating the Russians and playing the game according to their rules...

...Since the Communists are gaining control through guerrilla warfare, we must reply in kind...

...The positions on Berlin appear irreconcilable...

...Quite a number of Hamlets must have walked the battlements of the White House in recent nights, debating with themselves the relation between thought and action...

...need only use its strength to get what it wants...

...It must try to break out of the sterile patterns of past policies and put forward proposals which equal in boldness the novelty of our tasks and the urgency of the dangers that face us...

...They are not likely to have been selected for their political sophistication and manipulative skills...

...When it staged the invasion of Cuba, it thought the Cuban people would rise up against Fidel Castro...

...Otherwise, however, the modern totalitarian regimes have come to power and maintained their rule with the support of populations willing to sacrifice individual freedom and self-government, actual or potential, for order and what they consider to be social justice...

...Our positions in Asia are deteriorating...

...It is the easiest policy to pursue, it is bound to be popular, but it cannot fail to lead to disaster...

...But where guerrilla warfare is to some extent the spearhead of popular revolution, as it was in Cuba and is today in South Vietnam, counterguerrilla warfare, operating in hostile territory without a popular base, must fail...

...Professor Hans J. Morgenthau is Director of the Center for the Study of American, Foreign and Military Policy at the University of Chicago...

...It assumed that the Castro revolution was not a genuine popular revolution or, if it once was, it is no longer...

...Both the Cuban invasion and the official sanction of the prisonertractor deal point up another real weakness of the Administration's foreign policy: the process of policy formation...

...The intellectual does not need to have, and is frequently devoid of, that quality which is indispensable in the statesman—practical wisdom...

...What is worthy of blame here is the people's judgment, not the Government's actions...

...Such regimes cannot be overthrown by counterrevolutionary invasions, but only by the vision of a realizable social order superior to the status quo...

...The Republican opposition is naturally, and one might say professionally, disenchanted and advocates "strong action" after the model of what President Eisenhower did in Lebanon and Guatemala...

...The Kennedy Administration, for example, has embarked upon a new policy of foreign aid, derived from what appears to be a sound philosophy of the conditions and purposes of foreign aid...

...An even more important consideration is the policies of other nations that limit a new administration's freedom of action...

...However, the Administration is also being blamed deservedly for failures of commission and omission...

...But the American people are utterly unprepared for these retreats...

...The Administration has found to its dismay that it has even less freedom of action than it thought it had when it assumed office...

...which is another way of saying that one can be very intelligent and very foolish at the same time...

...Where guerrilla warfare is an instrument of foreign invasion, as it was in Greece and Malaya, it can indeed be countered in kind...

...Perhaps it is not by accident that an administration whose style is to an exceptional degree determined by intellectuals speaks a great deal about purpose but appears to lack a sense of direction, and calls upon the people for sacrifices without being able to tell them what to do...

...In the political world, ideas meet with facts which make mincemeat of the wrong ideas and throw the pieces in the ashcan of history...

...History will judge the Kennedy Administration on how well it meets the challenge of bringing its thought and action up to the level of that truth...

...Kennedy's Foreign Policy Failure and Challenge By Hans J. Morgenthau After five months in office, the Kennedy Administration cannot boast of anything that can be called a success in foreign policy...

...Its outstanding failure of commission is, of course, the invasion of Cuba...

...It is the misfortune of the Kennedy Administration that it has assumed office at a moment when the veil which had hidden an obstreperous and dangerous world from the eyes of America has worn thin enough to show at least some of the contours of a disturbing reality...

...Consequently, the chances for disarmament are virtually nil...

...The reassuring slogans which for eight long years we had taken to describe reality have now started to clash openly with the facts of life...

...As long as President de Gaulle seeks an independent position for France within Europe and an independent position for Europe, under French leadership, within the Atlantic Alliance, it will remain impossible for the Kennedy Administration to do what it wants to do, e.g., to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance...

...Our awareness of the Administration's failure to perform this task is perhaps the deepest source of our disenchantment: We have been told and we know that there is something fundamentally wrong with our national life and our foreign policy...

...foreign policy has not been set right since January 20, as they thought it would be...

...But the modern totalitarian regimes, fascist and Communist, have not been imposed by a tyrannical minority upon an unwilling population...

...The President must set an example to the American people by offering popular illusions on the altar of the truth...

...If the Administration were to embark upon these and other tasks with sufficient boldness, it could not doubt the kind of sacrifices it must ask of the American people...

...One of these tasks is the liquidation of overextended commitments...

...However unwise and unsuccessful the preceding Administration may have been, and however wise the new one may be, the very vices and failures of its predecessor put strict limits upon its freedom of action...

...This being so, the Administration is naturally tempted to reconcile itself to the inevitable and to put its stakes upon the unabated continuation of the nuclear armaments race, hoping for the best but knowing in the back of its collective mind the inevitability of the worst...

...The negotiations on the cessation of atomic tests are at dead end...

...It will take some time for this new policy to filter down through the ranks of the officials in the field, if it ever does...

...The Atlantic Alliance remains in disarray...

...In the world of the intellectual, ideas meet with ideas, and anything goes that is presented cleverly and with assurance...

...Thus the President, when he had to make a decision on Laos, was compelled by the objective requirements of government to restore the National Security Council to its original function as the President's principal adviser on issues of national security...

...This concept of Presidential government has considerable merit compared to the committee system which it is intended to replace, but it is not likely to work in practice...

...Most of these officials have operated on certain primitive assumptions, deeply ingrained in the folklore of American politics, about the relations between foreign aid and economic development, economic development and social stability, social stability and democracy, democracy and a peaceful foreign policy...

...These advisers, operating as equals, are supposed to present the President with a variety of individual views and recommendations from which he can choose...

...Here the Administration is offered a great opportunity to put its brain power to work on a task of constructive statesmanship...

...Most significant, the Administration is disenchanted with itself...

...True, the Franco regime came to power on the bayonets of Nazi Germany, and the satellite regimes of Eastern Europe came to power on the bayonets of the Red Army...

...Woodrow Wilson was a brilliant intellectual without, at the very least, the full measure of wisdom...

...Yet even after they have learned how to translate the new philosophy into effective action, it may take years for the results of the new policy to show...

...Harry Truman had practical wisdom without being an intellectual...

...Our disenchantment is also nourished by the nature of the tasks which it has fallen to the Kennedy Administration to perform...

...The people are disenchanted with the Kennedy Administration for its failure to do what it was expected to do, but was incapable of doing in view of the objective circumstances...

...Two qualities are essential in the statesman which are not necessarily present in the intellectual: a sense of limits—limits of knowledge, of judgment, of successful action—and a commitment to a grand design born of a sense of purpose which neutralizes the doubts engendered by the awareness of limits...

...These weaknesses are conceptual, organizational and intellectual...

...Thus the overthrow of the Communist governments of Russia and China has been predicted and expected time and again...

...President Kennedy has made a conscious effort to avoid his predecessor's isolation from both relevant information and effective control...

...Since nobody in authority has yet told the American people what the facts of life are, the Kennedy Administration is widely suspected of weakness in the face of Communist aggression because it is not living up to the slogans it has not dared repudiate...

...And it is first of all the President's failure...

...And those who are supposed to have a monopoly of at least some of the arcana imperii, such as officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, are likely to have an advantage over those who can boast of nothing more than intelligence with a small i. This system also tends to separate the men of ideas from the men of facts and gives an inevitable advantage to brilliant presentation unchecked by practical experience...

...Two strands can be distinguished in this negative attitude toward the Administration's foreign policy: One is rooted in the psychology of the public, the other stems from actual deficiencies of Kennedy's policy...

...They are sacrifices not primarily of money or of toil but of long-held, cherished convictions which have turned out to be illusions...

...When the President finally spoke in positive terms about the national purpose, he and his advisers could think of nothing better than being first in sending a man to the moon, a patent publicity device which an unexcited public took in its stride...

...That is to say, the United States, if it does not want to risk war in the defense of indefensible and at best non-essential positions, must retreat from these positions...

...As concerns American power vis-àvis the power of other nations, they are living in a dream world which antedates the atomic age, especially in its bipolar quality...

...All that is needed, then, is military intervention to free an unwilling people from Communist domination...

...In Cuba, as elsewhere, the Administration has operated with an outdated concept of revolution...

...The successive presentation of views and recommendations by isolated individuals is no substitute for the dialectic confrontation of such views and recommendations in a group which can put differing opinions to the test of empirical verification and logical analysis...

...We all smile in memory of what was once a maxim of our government: that a man who knows how to run General Motors knows by definition how to run the Department of Defense, and that a man who has met a payroll must also be capable of meeting the requirements of government...

...it has come to recognize that intelligence and initiative are not enough to vouchsafe success in foreign policy...

...Consequently, there is a general disenchantment with the Administration...

...It is possible to be very intelligent without being very wise, or, for that matter, being wise at all...

...It is, however, not selfevident that a man who knows how to run a university is thereby qualified to run the foreign policy of the United States, and that an intellectual who knows how to lecture and write books knows by definition also how to make foreign policy...

...This task is politically risky in the short run, but in the long run it is the precondition both for the restoration of the vigor of our national life and the renewal of our foreign policy...

...It may soon be faced with a similar choice in South Vietnam...

...Also, in a contest among equals for the President's ear those with offices in the White House are likely to be more equal than those with offices, say, in Foggy Bottom...

...And whenever the President called for sacrifices, he said hardly anything of substance, but he said it in beautiful prose...

...The Democrats are disenchanted because all that was wrong with U.S...

...But it has registered two glaring defeats: the Cuban disaster and the Communist conquest of Laos...

...Here indeed is the Administration's failure of omission...

...These expectations are bound to be disappointed...

...The Administration, by seeming to look to counter-guerrilla warfare as its main answer to Communist revolution, falls into the trap of assuming that what works well for the Communists must work equally well for us, if we only make the effort to imitate it...

...To stand one's ground in this battle of ideas which will determine the course of history is a different matter, requiring different qualities of mind and character, from that innocuous and frequently irrelevant pastime which we call pretentiously the academic dialogue...

...To that purpose, he has done away with the committee system of governing, at least on the top level, and has surrounded himself with a number of individual advisers, in different degrees brilliant, knowledgeable and experienced...

...It has already retreated from Laos and has been trying, at this writing unsuccessfully, to obtain the cooperation of the Communist powers in covering up that retreat...

...The quandry of the Administration in knowing that it must give American foreign policy a new direction and instill it with a new purpose without knowing how to go about it stems from the contrast between the nature of the tasks before it and the quality of its thinking about them...

...We all share to some degree the ineradicable tendency to expect immediately from a new administration all the achievements which we hoped for in vain from its predecessor...

...The people, it was reasoned, are antiCommunist by nature and if they live under a pro-Communist government, it must be under duress...

...THIS EQUALITAMAN diffusion of the advisory function raises another issue: the role of the intellectual in the process of policy formation...

...What gives us pause is the discrepancy between the actual foreign policies pursued and the kind of thinking which apparently goes into them, on the one hand, and what we have been led to believe about our condition and what we know to be true...

...We expect dramatic and spectacular reversals of fortune...

...As long as Khrushchev insists upon a Soviet veto on the political decisions of international organizations, the disarmament policies of the Kennedy Administration must remain a deadletter...

...The intellectual is rather sure of himself, satisfied with himself, and out for the next little triumph in his little world...

...we were shocked by the manner in which it failed...

...Yet the Administration seems to think and certainly acts on the assumption that traditional remedies will cure our ills...

...The Administration is therefore emphasizing what it calls "paramilitary operations...

...In that dream world the U.S...

...Furthermore, insofar as a new administration has the freedom to start new policies and makes use of it, the results of those new policies are not likely to be visible at once...

...What has shocked our sensibilities was not so much that the Administration tried to intervene in Cuba by force of arms or that the intervention failed...

...It is that manner, the incredible folly of the whole thing, that points to actual weaknesses in the Administration's conduct of foreign policy...

...And when countries such as Laos and Cuba go Communist, or are in danger of doing so, as is South Vietnam, it can only be through foreign intervention and not through popular consent...

...The tasks of greatest urgency are Berlin, the supranational control of nuclear power and, intertwined with, the latter, the revitalization of the Atlantic Alliance...