A Taste For Intervention

...and in any nation which may be taken over by Communists, whether from the inside or the outside...

...Seeking universal peace and condemning war as a means for settling political grievances, America has, nonetheless, been an active belligerent in two major land wars since 1950 and the sponsor of a series of military interventions?a record unmatched by any other power...

...Infused with the belief that nothing is unattainable so long as the cause is just, and fortified by reliance on America's awesome military power, they often seem to confuse the desirable with the attainable...

...If someone had said in 1946 that 20 years later there would be 225,000 American soldiers in Germany...

...Yet the way in which this aspiration is pursued often makes our motives seem to others self-righteous and tinged with hypocrisy...

...However deep the wellsprings of moral duty to which President Johnson refers, the means chosen to transfer these values to a recalcitrant and often un-admiring world has troubled many thoughtful Americans...

...We are so rich that we can retain an army in Europe, fight a war in Asia, dispense billions in foreign aid, and increase our national wealth by $30 billion a year...

...Never again, we said...

...We are still playing the same role of guardian that we played 20 years ago when America and Russia were the only important powers in the world...

...The result has been a dangerous gap in our foreign policy between our commitments and our means, between what we would like to accomplish and what we can reasonably hope to accomplish...

...Yet so accustomed are we to our global commitments that we take this remarkable situation for granted...

...This article is the first of two adapted from his new book...

...America quickly accepted—and even came to cherish —its new sense of involvement in the fate of the world...

...Like many military entanglements, this happened more by accident than design...

...Intervention is neither a sin, nor a panacea...

...In the decision to rebuild and defend Western Europe, the United States acted with wisdom, humanity and an enlightened conception of its own interests...

...The result was the twin Crusades: one in Europe, one in Asia—one to restore freedom to the West, one to bring it to the East...

...In a way it could be said that our foreign policy has been a victim of its own success...

...But expanded indiscriminately and without measure, it has involved us in struggles we do not understand, in areas where we are unwanted, and in ambitions that are doomed to frustration...

...We did not come as an army of occupation or as foreign mercenaries, but as friends joined in a common cause...

...The moral purity of American isolationism gave way to the moral self-justification of American interventionism...

...But it is a principle to which we are deeply committed: in nato and its sister pacts, cento and seato...

...The Word was given Flesh by the mating of American military power to a native idealism...

...war of 1914-18 entangled us more against our will than by design...

...The United States has become an interventionist power, indeed the world's major interventionist power, without most Americans quite realizing how it happened or its full implications...

...America is an idealistic nation—a nation based upon the belief that the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence should be extended to unfortunate peoples wherever they may be...

...American idealism was the foundation...

...These commitments are to be found in a tangle of regional alliances, military pacts, verbal agreements and even unilateral decisions...

...American military power, consecrated by the victory of the Second World War and re-corifirmed by the development of the atomic bomb, joined forces with the power of American idealism to inaugurate a policy of global interventionism...

...But the Cold War has not been simply a struggle of giants for supremacy...

...it has also been an ideological contest for the allegiance of mankind...

...Nor, despite the fact that we have dispensed nearly $120 billion abroad during the past 20 years, have we been able seriously to alleviate the poverty and hopelessness in which most of the world's population lives...

...Collective security, as applied to our postwar military pacts, has never been much more than a polite word for a unilateral guarantee by the United States to protect its clients...

...But it has posed a terrible dilemma for American diplomacy: one which is rarely acknowledged openly, and often not even clearly recognized...

...The commitment to interventionism as a guiding principle has made it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between necessary and spurious motives for intervention—to determine which actions have a direct relation to the nation's security, and which merely represent wish-fulfillment on an international scale...

...It transformed a philosophical commitment to the principles of freedom and democracy into a political commitment to bring them about...

...We entered it under the banner of idealism when neutrality became difficult, and we left Europe in disillusionment when power politics reared its ugly head at Versailles...

...America did not enter these wars from a sense of adventure, or a quest for territorial gain, or an effort to retain distant colonies, but rather from a desire to contain Communism and protect the values and the boundaries of the "free world...

...We are in very deep in Europe, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, and in the entire nexus of underdeveloped countries now struggling under the burdens of authoritarianism and instability...

...As we face the obligations of our global commitments, we are becoming aware of our inability to impose our will upon events or to structure the world into the form we believe it should take...

...We turned our back on the isolationism of the 1930s, put the American frontier right up to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, pledged our atomic weapons to the defense of our allies, added our own soldiers as guarantors of this pledge, and accepted the risk of nuclear devastation...

...One man's freedom, all too often, is another man's exploitation...

...To some exent," in the words of a Senate committee dealing with problems of national security, "every postwar administration has indulged our national taste for the grand and even the grandiose...

...The change from the old isolationism to the new interventionism flowed almost inevitably from the involvement in the Second World War...

...In this respect it reflects a traditional weakness in American policy, which has been given to grandiose principles at the expense of a cool assessment of national interests, and which has led the nation into painful involvements as a result of bold gestures carelessly made...

...With the exception of the Philippines and a few brief adventures in the Caribbean, our national idealism did not go abroad in search of new fields to conquer...

...Put all this together and it leaves us, in James Reston's words, "with commitments the like of which no sovereign nation ever took on in the history of the world...

...Freedom, we have learned, is not only divisible between nations, it is subject to a hundred different interpretations...

...But the passing of one tyranny in Europe saw the rise of another, the defeat of Japan gave way to the resurgence of China...

...From 1945 on we were no longer simply the "well-wisher" to the world...

...Well, that's the way I know I am an American...

...The goal we sought in Western Europe in the early postwar period had three qualities essential to military intervention: It was vital to our interests, it was within our means to achieve, and it had the support of those we were trying to protect...

...Roused to a new sense of mission by the threat of Soviet Communism, eager to bring its cherished values to the masses, a bit infatuated with the enormous power it possessed through the unleashing of the atom...

...Our diplomacy has not kept pace with the changes in the world power structure, and we are committed far beyond our ability to control events...

...The Second World War threw the United States into the world arena, and fear of Communism prevented it from retreating again...

...No task of global omniscience is imposed upon us that we do not choose for ourselves...

...Today we have 700,000 soldiers stationed in 30 countries, are a member of four regional defense alliances and an active participant in a fifth, have mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, are a member of 53 international organizations, and are furnishing military or economic aid to nearly 100 nations across the face of the globe...

...is the only idealistic Nation in the world...

...As a nation we have what General de Gaulle has so uncharitably labelled "a taste for intervention...

...The crusade that was the war against Fascism gave way to the new crusade that was the Cold War against Communism...

...This ambition inspired the postwar policy of "containment" and provided the rationale for a series of military involvements...

...Otherwise, it is likely to become an end in itself, dragging the nation down a path it never intended to follow, toward a goal it may find repugnant...

...It is imposed by ourselves and subject to whatever limitations we choose to put upon it...

...It is a method, and like all methods it must be directly related to the end in view...

...In Asia the disintegration of the Japanese empire brought Russia into Manchuria and the United States into Japan, Okinawa, South Korea and Taiwan...

...The alignment of national goals with national interests—of desires with needs—is the most pressing task facing American diplomacy...

...The United States became involved in the defense of Western Europe because the defeat of Nazi Germany brought Stalin's armies into Central Europe...

...America was, in John Quincy Adams' phrase, "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all," but "the champion and vindicator only of her own...

...We have intervened in the politics of other nations as well, trying to push some into new alignments, trying to remake the social structure of others, and helping to overthrow the governments of not a few...

...But because the Cold War, like the Second World War, was conceived as a moral crusade, it inflated an involvement that was essentially pragmatic into a moral mission...

...in foreign aid...

...The world of the early postwar era may not have been the One World of Wendell Willkie's dream, but America felt a unique sense of responsibility about its welfare...

...Too often our interventions have seemed to be imposed upon us by abstract theory rather than by a cold assessment of political realities...

...This led, through the back door of the European Recovery Program, to nato, under which the United States is pledged to the defense of most of Europe and even parts of the Near East—from Spitz-bergen to the Berlin Wall and beyond to the Asiatic borders of Turkey...

...They have done this not because they are knaves intent on foreign adventurism, but because they have been swept away by the force of their own rhetoric...

...America today faces a dilemma of power: a dilemma over how to use power—whether economic power in the form of surplus grain and dollars, or military power in the form of jet fighters and foot soldiers—for the achievement of ends which American leaders declare to be morally desirable...

...We have the power to destroy most human life on the planet within a matter of minutes, yet we cannot win a guerrilla war against peasants in black pajamas...

...For the first 170 years of our national existence, however, we were content to make this a principle rather than a program of action...

...Too often we have found ourselves involved in areas—the Congo the day before yesterday, Santo Domingo yesterday, Vietnam today, perhaps Thailand tomorrow—where our presence has often acerbated rather than alleviated the problem, and where a solution was not within our power to achieve...

...Even this is now being shattered by the breakup of the Cold War alliances...

...The resolution of that dilemma may determine not only the role America can hope to play in an unstable world, but perhaps the very future of American democracy...

...If the struggle with Russia were simply over geographical spheres of influence, if the Cold War were nothing more than old-fashioned power politics on a global scale, our commitments could have been cut and our involvements drastically limited...

...and, most recently, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, a blank check given by Congress in a fit of absent-mindedness to allow President Johnson to intervene as he sees fit in Southeast Asia...

...From the seeds of the Truman Doctrine and the precedent of nato came the Middle East Resolution, under which Congress gave President Eisenhower permission to protect the Arabs against Communism...

...Convinced in the righteousness of our cause, we became intoxicated with our newly-discovered responsibilities and conceived of them as a mandate to bring about the better world we so ardently desired...

...But this role of watchman is not, for all President Kennedy's noble rhetoric, imposed by destiny...

...For the past quarter century the United States has —at great financial, human, and even emotional cost?been pursuing a foreign policy designed to promulgate American values...

...In the belief that we were containing or repelling Communism, we have involved ourselves in situations that have been morally compromising, militarily frustrating and politically indecisive...

...Since we were accustomed to victory in battle and were stronger than any nation had ever been in history, we believed that the world's problems could be resolved if only we willed it hard enough and applied enough power...

...Wilson, whose career is a tragic example of what happens when idealism is divorced from political realism, never spoke a truer word...

...Statesmen, unable to adjust our limited means to our unlimited ends, have committed us to goals beyond the capacity of the nation to carry out...

...America, whether most of us realize it or not, has become the interventionist power par excellence...

...Yet we cannot adequately deal with the decay of our cities, the pollution of our atmosphere, the disintegration of public services, the growing hostility between Whites and Blacks, and the inadequacy of our educational system...

...We have assumed the responsibility for creating Great Societies at home and abroad, but we have not been able to bring this goal into line with our interests or capacities...

...We took this terrible risk because we had to: because neither strategically nor culturally could we accept the loss of Western Europe to our adversaries...

...The unavoidable war against Fascism revealed the bankruptcy of isolationism, and destroyed the illusion that America could barricade itself from the immoralities of a corrupt world...

...Interventionism, as a principle of foreign policy, has not served us noticeably well in recent years...

...the cento and seato treaties that John Foster Dulles constructed to fill in the alliance gap from Iran to the Philippines...

...in the Rio Pact and the oas...

...an unwritten obligation to protect India...

...America, my fellow citizens...

...This policy of interventionism is not only military, although we have intervened massively throughout the world with our military power...

...The difficulty, however, arose when the principles underlying nato and the Marshall Plan were applied indiscriminately throughout the world, when it was assumed that the success of the Atlantic alliance could be duplicated in countries which shared neither our traditions, nor our interests, nor even our assessment of the dangers facing them...

...The President and his advisers speak in the most noble rhetoric of the need to defend freedom wherever it may be threatened and of the indivisibility of our responsibility to protect other nations from external (and even internal) aggression...

...The rhetoric of our Cold War diplomacy rests upon the indivisibility of freedom, the necessity for collective security, and the sanctity of peaceful reform as opposed to violent change...

...With every expansion of our commitments, there has been a corresponding expansion of our official rhetoric...

...For the first time in its history the nation had the ability to seek its idealistic goals by active intervention rather than by mere pious proclamation...

...Our intervention has also been economic and political...

...The moral inspiration of America's involvement in foreign wars is unmistakable...

...Although the postwar vacuums are now disappearing —with the recovery of China, Japan and Europe?our commitment remains unchanged...

...Whether we are in too deep for our own good, and perhaps even for the good of those we are trying to help, is the great problem today facing American diplomacy...

...And whether we consider this to be commendable or deplorable, it is certainly undeniable...

...It is a staggering program of involvement, and it could easily lead us, as it already has in Vietnam, into dangerous conflicts whose limitations we cannot possibly foresee...

...Later we advanced into Indochina when the French, despite our financial and military support, were unable to retain their Asian territories...

...the anzus treaty with Australia and New Zealand...

...We are there because we feel ourselves pledged to a world-wide struggle against Communism, because we see ourselves as the defenders of freedom and democracy in the contest against tyranny, because we are, in President Kennedy's words, "by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom...

...Its fleets roamed all the seas, its military bases extended around the earth's periphery, its soldiers stood guard from Berlin to Okinawa, and its alliances spanned the earth...

...The military alliance with Western Europe worked so successfully because there was a clear community of interests between America and its allies...

...We had no intention of virtually annexing Okinawa, of occupying South Korea, of preventing the return of Taiwan to China, of fighting in Indochina, or remaining in Western Europe...

...The warning of John Quincy Adams has lately been forgotten in the intoxication of heady moral obligations —obligations which no one asked us to assume, and whose purpose we do not often understand...

...Were our policies to be judged by a cold calculation of national interest, a good many of them might have been scrapped long ago...

...America became not only a great world power, it became the world power...

...the pledge for the defense of the entire Western Hemisphere under the Rio pact...

...They can all, to one degree or another, be traced back to the Truman Doctrine of March 1947 when the United States made the ambiguous offer to defend threatened nations from aggression, whether direct or indirect...

...It is a task that has become increasingly urgent with each expansion of our commitments...

...This is not a bad ambition, but nowhere does this noble rhetoric seem to be in touch with the crass reality of the world as it is...

...The war also provided the means for the dramatic growth of American military power which made the new policy of global interventionism possible...

...But to estimate them highly is not necessarily to understand them, or to find them always wise...

...We have funnelled more than $120 billion of American money into foreign aid since the war—all of it for the purpose of bringing about changes in other countries that would reflect our ideals or advance our interests...

...various peace-keeping functions under the United Nations...

...50,000 in Korea, and nearly half a million Americans fighting in Vietnam, he would have been considered mad...

...The commitment to peaceful social change by constitutional processes has now collided with the reality of revolution and disorder throughout much of the world...

...A reaction to the old isolationism, the new globalism forced Americans to realize that they could no longer escape involvement in an imperfect world...

...Too often American diplomacy has been engaged in the effort to create miniature natos and Marshall Plans with countries that have only recently shaken off the yoke of Western rule, that are at a greatly inferior stage of economic and political development, that are as suspicious of us as they are of our adversaries, that are endemically poor and unstable, and where we are usually greeted as unwanted manipulators rather than welcome friends...

...When we built our bases in Europe and sent our own soldiers to man the front lines, it was in the knowledge that we agreed with our allies on the dangers they faced and the means by which they should be met...

...American power was the instrument to achieve the ideals...

...From there the commitments become more vague, the situations more ambiguous, the countries themselves less crucial to American security...

...From that time on American idealism was transformed into a plan...

...It is the dilemma of how to reconcile American ideals with American military actions—and perhaps even more gravely, how to make American values relevant to a world that seems not to want or even to respect them...

...in the Alliance for Progress...

...This is the fault of the statesmen rather than that of the public, for they are often tempted to use slogans to justify their actions, and are then apt to become prisoners of their own slogans...

...Intervention has been the dominant motif of American postwar foreign policy, but the purpose, and even the methods, of this intervention have been concealed in a miasma of rhetoric and confusion...

...And we never again did, until the Japanese dragged us into a global war by the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...special defense arrangements with Japan and Korea...

...Who, indeed, would underestimate them...

...The triumph of the Second World War did not mark the end of our labors, but only the beginning...

...It is a problem we cannot ignore, or even postpone, for it is being pressed upon us by the cruel realities of the war in Vietnam—the symbol of America's effort to maintain a global authority, even in areas which have traditionally been outside the legitimate range of national interests...

...What America has done, and what America is doing now around the world," President Johnson declared at Catholic University a few months after he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, "draws from deep and flowing springs of moral duty, and let none underestimate the depth of flow of those well-springs of American purpose...

...In doing so, they commit the nation to ends that cannot be achieved, and thereby breed a national frustration that nags at the roots of American democracy...

...we were its "champion and vindicator" as well...

...It is because we feel ourselves to be embroiled in a much greater struggle that we are involved in the sustenance and security of some 100 countries, that we have replaced the old isolationism with a sweeping policy of interventionism, and that we are today fighting yet another land war in Asia...

...THINKING ALOUD A Taste for Intervention By Ronald Steele We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.—John F. Kennedy The United States, delighting in her resources, feeling that she no longer had within herself sufficient scope for her energies, wishing to help those who were in misery or bondage the world over, yielded in her turn to that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself.—Charles de Gaulle ometimes people call me an idealist," Wood-row Wilson said as he stumped the country trying to drum up support for the League of Nations...

...in Southeast Asia...

...Or so it has seemed to its leading participants...

...Applied intelligently and with restraint, as in Western Europe after the war, it has done credit to our nation and served its interests...

...It can provide the excuse for our playing the role of global gendarme, or serve as a guideline for a measured calculation of the national interest...

...The great European Ronald Steele, our roving European correspondent, is in New York for the publication of Pax Americana, to be issued later this month by the Viking Press...