Mythraking

...Steel has raised once again the issue of "disengagement," for which George Kennan argued so eloquently a decade ago...

...How odd it is to remember the indignation he then provoked...

...Merely to raise that question is to suggest how archaic and simplistic the whole "tripwire" analogy has become...

...The really dangerous myths are not to be found among the unenlightened populace...

...Our prime difficulty is not one of persuading the people of what the policy-makers already know...

...but it is only when he summarizes his views in a paper for the chairman of some obscure Senate subcommittee that the New York Times will consider it newsworthy...

...The mythraker and the mythmaker are not always to be easily distinguished...

...And so on, for almost a full column of solemn reportage that is positively eerie in its ghostly disconnection from reality...

...In the American system of government, a Senator is not only a legislator...

...Or will we...

...In that sense, one must be grateful to Senator Fulbright for having engaged in a forthright bit of mythraking...

...Today it has its own nostalgic appeal...

...THINKING ALOUD Mythraking By Irving Kristol ON April 11, the New York Times carried the following dispatch from Manila: "The Military Aid Advisers of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization reaffirmed today the need for constant readiness to take combined action against any aggression in the area...

...If Mao Tse-tung is too unstable and bellicose a colleague for Khrushchev, it is exceedingly strange to think that he is a suitable candidate for a neighborly barbecue with Lyndon Johnson...

...It is our good luck, too, that Soviet foreign policy has been just as mythically obsessed as ours...

...In any case, now that the discussion has been opened, one hopes it will take a more serious course than that outlined by Senator Fulbright...

...In that case, we would be drawn into nuclear suicide for no reason of either national interest or international morality...

...d'Escadre J. R. Evenou...

...Yet it is this analogy that is the base plan of NATO...

...This idea was savagely ridiculed at the time as a form of appeasement...

...but rather than waste it in an editorial, they will report it as "news" when a Senator conveniently gives it expression...

...The advent of Polaris has made NATO'S atomic artillerv...

...And if Castro refuses to coexist with Betancourt, there would appear to be no good reason why anyone should insist that we coexist with him...

...All we can promise Europe is that, if it should be threatened by Soviet aggression, we shall see to it that both Russia and ourselves are destroyed...

...SEATO is only one of the myths that envelops and infiltrates American foreign policy like a remorseless fog, and anyone who helps to sweep away this fog merits our thanks...

...there is no real possibility of its continuing in this role...

...He has helped spread the idea that American foreign policy is not only deficient in specific respects but might be problematic in its entire construction...

...In short, the upshot of the past 12 years of NATO'S history is the equivalent of our having originally concluded a singularly unfavorable treaty with the Soviet Union—except that a treaty would have cost us pennies, whereas NATO has cost us billions...

...they are lodged in the uppermost echelons of the government...

...It is a "reality" that West Berlin is a potentially dangerous bone in the Soviet throat, just as Castro's Cuba is in ours...

...Perhaps the most strikingly original of Steel's points is his analysis of how ambiguous the NATO "tripwire" has become...

...Having conceded all this, however, it remains true that the official perspective on American foreign policy, formed in the light of yesterday's (and yesteryear's) events, is least likely to be relevant to the actual urgencies and opportunities...

...But our policy-makers in the State Department and the White House already know this well enough...

...Well, it now looks as if that withdrawal will take place—either on our own initiative, or that of our European allies, or both—in exchange for nothing at all...

...Though the relation of popular opinion to foreign policy is certainly one of the more troublesome and least tractable questions for any democracy...

...Europe, so far from being a ruined and dependent ally, has become a prosperous and self-determining power in world affairs, with its own specific interests, its own historical perspective, its own military potential...

...he is also a one-man mass medium...

...No other explanation seems possible for his—at this moment—eccentric recommendation that the United States attempt to woo China into the comity of nations, or his opinion that it is somehow up to us to design a program for peaceful coexistence with Castro's Cuba...

...I do not myself see that it is the major problem today...

...It is our good luck that, because of the crisis within the Communist world, our mythomanie diplomacy has been less effectual than might have been the case...

...In a way...

...if not obsolete, at least dispensable...

...It is certainly a "reality" that, as Senator Fulbright says, the world Communist movement has lost its monolithic structure...

...quite simply, time...

...This is, of course, easier said than done...

...Too often, then, the demand for a "facing up to reality" comes down to little more than the glib advocacy of some favorite panacea...

...The postwar circumstances that made NATO a necessity have by now changed sufficiently to make it an absurdity...

...We are only just beginning to realize, however, that it may be our European allies who will one day— accidentally or willfully—set off the alarm...

...It is informed public opinion, creating the climate in which official policy operates, that has the responsibility for improvement and reformation...

...But luck has a tendency to run out...

...In retrospect, the Kennan plan looks more advantageous every day— so advantageous, in fact, as to be unrealistic in the current circumstances...

...Moreover, it was part of the Kennan plan that Europe—or at least the major portion of the continent—be a prohibited zone for nuclear weapons...

...Kennan proposed that the United States withdraw its troops from continental Europe in exchange for a Soviet quid pro...

...Doubtless there are people in this country (or even in Congress) who need to be told that the Communist bloc is no longer a monolith, and that Poland and Yugoslavia pose no threat to the free world...

...it is, however, no less a "reality" that the various Communist factions, in different parts of the world, are capable of causing a great deal of dangerous mischief for us...

...For one thing, the conduct of our foreign affairs is now involved with the functioning of such a huge bureaucracy that even a minor change of position means moving mountains of "position papers" through numberless bureaus...

...Thus revisions of prevailing policy are most easily made under conditions of crisis, when events impose upon the President a sudden freedom of action...

...Not only is there no need for the United States to act as the benign protector of Western Europe...

...He believes that the American commitment to NATO is a form of political necrophilia: the alliance is quite dead, and our insistent passion for it is both indecent and unhealthy...

...The advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile removes all meaning from the atomic "umbrella" we used to hold over Europe: we no longer have such an umbrella, even for ourselves...

...But any coming to terms with "realities" also implies a consensus as to what these realities are...

...It is hardly surprising that the Europeans don't believe us...

...A joint communique issued at the end of a twoday planning conference of the eight member nations was subscribed by the French adviser...

...What killed the alliance is...

...True, in giving substance to his criticism, the Senator seems to have automatically fallen back on yesterday's liberal clichés...

...And probably the best point of departure for any discussion of NATO in the '60s is the new book by Ronald Steel—The End of Alliance: America and the Future of Europe (Viking...

...As for those very military bases which the Soviet Union demanded we remove and which we insisted were crucial to the security of the West, we are now quietly dismantling them without even asking anything of the Russians in return...

...The fundamental notion has always been that, if the Russians activated that wire, the United States would rush to the rescue—like a bigger and better Pinkerton Agency answering a burglar alarm...

...I would wager that no Assistant Secretary of State could offhand name the other seven...

...but it is also a "reality" that no political operation has yet been devised for the removal of either of these painful and exacerbating obstructions...

...I would not at all be surprised if the Times' decision to reprint the full text of Senator Fulbright's speech—a decision that is always premeditated carefully, and "on the highest level," as they say—was made some time before he got around to uttering it, and perhaps even before he got around to composing it...

...Vice Adm...

...And this idea certainly needs the widest possible circulation...

...and it would seem to be time for us to peer through the myths and try to come to terms with the realities...

...Steel, a young former Foreign Service officer (and a frequent contributor to The New Leader), minces no words...

...3.75...

...Our policy-makers are tying themselves into knots to dissuade Europe (with no significant chance of success) from developing its own force de frappe—a contingency which might have been foreseen by statesmen with a minimum sense of history...

...Steel's book is a notable contribution to the formation of such an opinion...

...Such a myth is NATO—less spectral, to be sure, than SEATO, but maybe the more deceiving for that...

...it would be even less surprising if it did not dawn upon us that we were not in a position to believe ourselves...

...148 pp...

...I cannot have been the only reader to have been astonished to discover that SEATO —the initials are vaguely familiar—actually still exists, and that France is—for reasons one cannot even begin to recall—a member...

...A scholar may write a brilliant and original economic treatise on unemployment, or inflation or monopoly...

...Nevertheless, what Senator Fulbright said is in the long run less significant than the fact that he said it_and that the press seized upon it...

...he would, at least, be bound to forget New Zealand...

...Similarly, the editors of the Times may themselves have an occasional bold thought about American foreign policy...

...Rather, it is to persuade the policy-makers to contemplate the possibility that much of what they know isn't so...