Dissent from the Monolith

...On the contrary, whether they look toward Europe or Asia, the noteworthy examples of rapid advancement are found among the non-Communist countries...

...The emerging nations are aware that Communism holds out no solution for their wants, no instant skills for primitive African lands, no remedy for the population pressures on India or Egypt, no workable formula for dynamic economic growth...

...This reversal of Communist fortunes-fragmentation within, rising resistance without-stems not from the American takeover of the war in Vietnam, or any other localized encounter...

...Isolationism was an attempt to withdraw from this complexity, and globalism is "a wish to end complexity by reforming the world through the accomplishment of an indefinable process of orderly 'revolution.' " This, the authors assert, is a futile endeavor, "an unattainable vision.' Clearly, the United States can live in the world, as it is, but we cannot make it over in our own image...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, in a discerning editorial, sums up our case: "What concerns so many Americans so deeply is not merely the Vietnam war as such, but the basic policy of which it is the cutting edge...

...a policy based on the postulate that the United States has a mission to project itself into the social revolutions of Asia and indeed of the whole world...

...The authors plead for the application of the same realism to our diplomacy that we have always shown in our domestic politics, where we have implicitly recognized the "inevitable limit on action...

...It is nationalism instead, the authors conclude, which is the most potent force in the world today...

...Africa, left to itself, keeps rejecting Communist penetration, while the Red tide begins to recede in Asia...

...He, too, objects to the present dichotomy between foreign and domestic affairs...

...For example, they stress that "The assumptions of globalism-the present American foreign policy-are at bottom identical to isolationism...

...Small wonder that some of us in the Senate should dissent from a foreign policy so antiquated that it still treats with Communism as a mighty monolith...

...The St...

...We possess more than enough military might to deter aggression against us, with plenty to spare for intervention elsewhere, should our vital interests genuinely call for it...

...a policy that commits us to define aggression unilaterally, without respect to international opinion, and to wage war wherever we alone choose to say aggression has taken place...

...it will "brand us as the exponents of a new imperialism for which there is no moral justification and no economic or military necessity...

...It is rooted, rather, to reasons much more fundamentalto the weaknesses inherent in Communism itself...

...Communists should always do their own thinking and act independently, maintaining their own identity," the editorial declared...

...And the world knows it, even if we Americans do not...

...They should not dance to the tune of others...

...The American foreign policy establishment has rendered an adverse judgment on Power and Impotence...

...But nothing requires us to interject ourselves into the revolutionary struggles of other societies, far removed from our own country, out of an obsessive fear of Communism...

...An editorial in the official party organ, Rodong Shinmoon, under the heading, "Let Us Defend Independency," is quoted as attacking the "flunkies" of big foreign powers within the Party's ranks...

...a policy that makes us the ideological guardian of Asia, and the self-appointed policeman of the world...

...The opening of this new fissure is but the latest episode in the crack-up of the once-vaunted Red Bloc...

...The two titans of the Communist camp stalk each other in bitter rivalry, while the satellites drift steadily away from the confinement of their former subjugation...

...Their book, Power and Impotence, is must reading for everyone who has come to question the wisdom of unlimited American intervention abroad...

...Power and Impotence, while it does not undertake a detailed definition of an alternative foreign policy for the United States, does set forth some common-sense guidelines...

...Basically, they argue, American policy through history has persistently recoiled from the complexity of foreign affairs...

...As I begin this review, the morning paper discloses that North Korea's Communist party has just declared independence from both the Soviet Union and China...

...Becoming the global sentinel of decadent governments will not only prove futile in the end...

...Resurgent nationalism, increasingly evident in Eastern Europe, spreads now to North Korea, challenging the thesis that Asian Communism is somehow different than the European variety, in that it condemns the small Communist countries neighboring China to forever remain its puppets...

...Against this reality, when Communist governments, struggling with their cumbersome economic systems, are faced with growing dissension even at home, it is strange indeed that the United States should still behave as though the "Free World" were about to sink under "the rising tide of Communism...

...Since we cannot stop violent upheaval in the world at large, our efforts should be directed toward "confining the international effects of these conditions...

...But the heresy of today is often vindicated tomorrow...

...They correctly sense that what we mean to the rest of the world depends less on what we say than what we do, and less on what we do than what we are...

...Here, the parallel with George Kennan's thesis is significant...

...The European comparison speaks for itself, but the same holds true for Asia...

...He also urges us to place our faith in the inherent strength of our free society to survive in this age of ferment, if only we avoid the brutalization of incessant, ideological war...

...Communist China "an exaggerated threat to America: inimical but for a long time to come materially weak...

...Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Today, Communist solidarity is little more than a slogan on the limp banners of a spent revolution...

...Stillman and Pfaff have written a profound and prophetic book...

...As loseph C. Harsch, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, recently observed, "China is in the process of being ringed with countries which are surging upwards...

...and the Third World "largely immune to any single internationalist political doctrine...

...The enmity which separates Peking from Moscow diminishes the external influence of both capitals...

...The conventional wisdom can hardly be expected to applaud so devastating an indictment of its most cherished doctrines...

...In a more positive vein, the authors recommend that the United States "attend more sensibly to itself...

...Indonesia is a case of a country which has tasted the Communist approach to a better life, rejected it, and is turning hungrily toward the system which has been so successful in the other places...

...Outside the splintered Red Bloc, the Communist world revolution bogs down...

...Casting current orthodoxy aside, Stillman and Pfaff find Russia "an insecure and troubled nation...

...In this appraisal of our present conduct, Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, co-authors of a refreshingly original new treatise on American foreign policy, would, I think, wholeheartedly concur...

...The truth is that Communism is much too sluggish a system to engulf the world...

...Primary examples of the new breed of states around the fringes of Asia are Japan, South Korea, and Formosa...