Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR INTERVENTIONISM On the 20th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, it comes as a surprise to read in your columns ("A Taste for Intervention" NL, June 5) Ronald Steels contention that "we...
...He should have censured most of the nation and not just the 30,000 Jews who somehow survived the Nazi occupation...
...He may write: "It is precisely the school of political analysis that sees policymaking as 'state-craft' with the elected captain free to turn the state-ship, that causes confusion on this issue...
...One of the jokes circulating in Warsaw tells of an Israeli sentry suspiciously scrutinizing his Syrian counterpart across the border...
...The rest of Pachter's intemperate letter...
...While the concept goes a long way toward justifying a sociologist's paycheck, it is given the lie by a glance at the week's headlines?any week, really, but particularly this past one...
...It would also be possible to point to deeds, such as our support of Tito when he was a more radical Communist than Stalin, or to Eisenhower's offer to finance Castro's land reform????but Steel would probably reply that in doing so, Truman and Eisenhower were only "pracContinued on next page DEAR EDITOR ticing interventionism...
...guarantee for its clients" in it...
...Haven't you ever seen an Arab soldier before...
...His stare finally provokes the latter to snap back —¦ but in Russian?What's the matter...
...Not since the heady days of political ferment in 1956 have I encountered such a clear-cut devision between a unified public opinion on the one hand, and the policies of the Polish government on the other...
...that they must stand up for collective peace or else they will have war...
...For he is always ready to suspect that we practice interventionism "as a principle of foreign policy" and because it has been "imposed upon us by abstract theory...
...Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier New York City Research Associate European Institute Columbia University SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH Two articles in the June 19 issue of The New Leader provide a telling contrast in political methodology...
...And yet in the very teeth of Etzioni's sociological monster, bound by every conceivable cultural and historical tie, de Gaulle managed????houdini-like????to charge "the opening of hostilities by Israel...
...Politics, he reasons, is determined by "sociological forces" over which politicians????beleaguered by "nationalism, religious and cultural diversities, economic interests, conflicting conceptions of regional security"????have little or no control...
...Certainly one of the most curious sidelights of the Mideast war has been the discrepancy between popular sentiment and official pronouncement...
...If Steel were to familiarize himself with the methods of historical research, he might learn that leaders sometimes voice high moral purposes but pursue policies that are dictated by necessity rather than desire...
...If the Marshall Plan was designed to bring about "change** anywhere, it has remained a secret except to Ronald Steel...
...Here* again, a current joke illustrates the situation...
...Shocking as this attitude is to an American, it is nevertheless explicable given the deep-seated unpopularity of the regime...
...Thus, American involvement in Vietnam is "interventionism," while American involvement in the Near East is fulfillment of sacred obligations...
...Following Kurt Kiesinger's recent assumption of power Bonn-Paris relations warmed somewhat...
...All the social gatherings I attended were regularly interrupted to listen to Radio Free Europe broadcasts...
...Similarly, because the Polish government supports the Arabs, popular sentiments are with Israel...
...New York City Henry M. Pachter Department of History New School for Social Research Ronald Steel replies: If Henry Pachter was., as he says, an active promoter of the Marshall Plan and did not desire to bring about changes in the recipient countries, then he was far more naive than those who conceived and directed the program...
...People were glued to the sets and held long excited discussions after the news reports...
...When Poland threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Israel, Tel Aviv sent back an ultimatum: Unless the threat is withdrawn by midnight, Israel will recall the Polish government back home...
...unless mis-investment consists of results that do not advance our interests...
...The two leaders got along well...
...Since he does not understand the subject, he moralizes about it...
...The Truman Doctrine and nato, if it pleases Steel to look up any history book, were responses to very specific attempts, by Communist powers, to upset the Yalta and Potsdam settlements for postwar Europe...
...There would be no need to correct them if he did not use his ignorance to spread misconceptions about the nature of U.S...
...They were far more eager to tell me the latest news of Israeli victories (heard on foreign broadcasts) than to listen to my comments about the drabness of Moscow...
...Considering that the Rio Pact preceded nato by two years, historians look upon the former as the "seed" of the latter, rather than the other way round...
...As one who actively promoted the Marshall Plan, I am not aware of having propagated any "change in other countries" or any particular "American ideals and interests" except those that this country has in common with the nations concerned: the ideal and interest of economic stability and peace...
...This lack of theoretical understanding is responsible also for Steel's invention of that mystical quality of "interventionism...
...Presidents found necessary to render to other nations...
...To lump them together with questionable military aid and bribes and to condemn the whole as "intervention" betrays an ignorance which should disqualify Steel from writing about international affairs...
...The policymaker thinks of a particular intervention not as an opportunity to display his interventionism but as a dire necessity which he has vainly striven to avoid...
...For Hans Morgen-thau ("The U.S...
...When Ludwig Erhard became Premier in 1963, all this was reversed and the Common Market's growth was markedly slowed...
...These, by the way, were truly excellent????factual and detailed...
...But to Steel, collective security is nothing but "rhetoric of our Cold War diplomacy," and he almost rejoices in telling us that "it is now being shattered...
...On the drive from the Warsaw airport into the city it was clear that both the taxi driver and my friend, a university professor (neither of them Jewish), were enthusiastic supporters of Israel...
...It has become fashionable to attribute to American policy makers such a strange desire or attitude, which has variously been called "interventionism" or "arrogance of power...
...Steel, was "collective security," and it will be difficult to find even a trace of "Cold War" or "U.S...
...Part of these services and payments were motivated by purely humanitarian considerations...
...Pachter is not nearly such a humanitarian as he would have us, and perhaps himself, believe...
...The parallels with Polish history are only too obvious...
...But the mystical "interventionism" from which any particular intervention is said to flow never existed...
...The Truman Doctrine, too, which Steel mentions, is collective security...
...Nevertheless, when he gets around to analyzing the issue of Britain's entry into the Common Market, he charts the ups and downs of this organization entirely in terms of the personal relations of the politicians concerned: "Thus the eec flourished as long as de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer were both in power...
...and the Mideast") politics is determined "not by moral principles and legal commitments but by considerations of interest and power...
...Memories of their own country's dismemberment (the fourth and most recent partition having taken place in 1939) are deeply ingrained in the national consciousness...
...This, Mr...
...The ruling elite has little or no popular support in Poland...
...Many people expected another world war resulting from a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...But now attention was directed elsewhere...
...Whether Polish anti-Semitism is in fact dead may be open to question, but the wholehearted support for Israel expressed by the majority of Poles in June 1967 is undeniable...
...Nasser was contemptously referred to by my Polish hosts as a small Arab Hitlerite...
...Anyone familiar with the touchiness of people who have to accept foreign aid will confirm that no price of gratitude was exacted for these services, which a succession of U.S...
...The fact that many persons of Jewish descent hold positions of authority in the economic and cultural apparatus (while some high Party officials, including Grom-ulka, have Jewish wives) exacerbates the resentment against an alien regime...
...It was even rumored that the Bishop of Cracow had offered a mass for the Israelis...
...First of all, the sympathy and imagination of the Poles were engaged by the gallant struggle of a small nation whose very existence was threatened by larger and hostile neighbors...
...to promulgate American values...
...interventions in the postwar period have been...
...New York City Bruce Boynton...
...Scratch a sociologist and you get a hard-headed political realist...
...to natc," much as Charles C. Tansill has said of Pearl Harbor that Roosevelt used it as a "backdoor to war...
...and since he moralizes, he cannot discover any motive in American foreign policy except "the ambition...
...It was Coolidge who said: "If people lose their jobs, unemployment results...
...After what I observed in Warsaw during the days of the actual fighting, Wladyslaw Gomulka's warning to Polish Jews not to support Israel sounded rather strange...
...If nations intervene, interventionism results...
...Ordinarily, my remarks would have been sweet music to Polish ears...
...while touching in its uncritical acceptance of virtually every action undertaken and every publicity handout released by the State Department, reflects a rather naive view of international relations????a view which I would not have thought appropriate to one who lectures others, both within the confines of the New School and without, on the meaning of history...
...Anyone familiar with the foreign aid program, and particularly as it has been pursued outside Europe since the Marshall Plan, recognizes that its purpose is not merely to help alleviate poverty (at which it has been spectacularly unsuccessful), but to advance the foreign policy goals of the United States...
...Is Pachter arguing that such a program did not "reflect our ideals or advance our interest...
...others might be considered as "enlightened self-interest...
...The latter derive from the U.N...
...Bitter experience has taught the statesmen that the price of avoiding commitment too long may be too high...
...For example, I have never heard anyone in Warsaw refer to the well-known poet, Antoni Slonimski, as a Jew, although he was head of the Polish Writers' Union for a time after 1956...
...Finally, Polish enthusiasm for Israel is a commentary on the nature of the anti-Semitism that still prevails in Poland...
...It would be possible to quote the words of every President (including Eisenhower and Johnson) to the effect that "we are not fighting Communism but aggression...
...If it is true, as Etzioni claims, that "there is relatively little the State Department, Harold Wilson or even de Gaulle can do about these [sociological] forces," they should all be told as soon as possible...
...Nor is it true that the Truman Doctrine and nato were "the seeds" of other commitments including the Rio Pact and the U.S...
...DEAR EDITOR INTERVENTIONISM On the 20th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, it comes as a surprise to read in your columns ("A Taste for Intervention" NL, June 5) Ronald Steels contention that "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...
...American popular sentiment was not "neutral in word, deed and thought...
...He denies that the U.S...
...If nations fail to intervene, non-intervention results, as we experienced during the Spanish Civil War, at Munich and, more recently, in the Near East crisis...
...But this overwhelming popular support for Israel in a nation long known for its anti-Semitism is not as surprising as it might seem at first glance...
...This is arrant nonsense and cannot be supported by any statement ascribed to a responsible policymaker...
...He argues curiously that it was "a backdoor...
...The success of the Marshall Plan is measured by the fact that economic and political changes did occur????that Western Europe was restored to prosperity, and kept out of Communist hands...
...Anti-Semitism among the intelligentsia and the middle classes is a curious inversion directed not so much at Jews per se as against Jews in high Party and government positions...
...In the 20-odd years of Israel's existence France has been its closest ally and the French its warmest supporters...
...Usually the charge has been levelled by speakers who happen to disagree with a particular policy...
...it is an abstraction in the observer's mind...
...But Etzioni himself knows that politicians can do just about what they wish in making policy...
...They were not the fruits of any American desire to "change" that balance in our favor...
...It is considered alien and superimposed...
...My friends informed me with almost possessive pride that this or that Israeli commander has already distinguished himself either in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or in the Polish underground army during the last War...
...he never compromised himself by any pro-government or pro-Soviet statements...
...Each Israeli success was greeted with warm enthusiasm, and everything else seemed of little significance...
...Nor am I aware of any "change" that was brought about or desired by our half-billion-dollar mis-investment in Nasser or by the $5 billion which we poured into the bottomless poverty of India...
...Only Robert McCloskey and his friends at the State Department were...
...Another element in Polish support for Israel is undoubtedly the fact that the rout of the Arabs meant a setback for the Soviet Union...
...While this may well be justified, wc ought not to deceive ourselves about the purpose of our largesse- Nor can we afford to ignore that the use of foreign aid to support pro-Western governments can lead????as it already has in Vietnam????to unilateral American military intervention to prevent the collapse of such governments...
...If anything certain can be said about American foreign policy, it is precisely that it has been characterized by an utter lack of theory and purpose, that it has always been opportunistic, that its decisions were made ad hoc, that it has always hesitated to commit itself and to throw its power into the balance, that it has never understood its role in world politics and never analyzed the meaning of its "interventions...
...Moreover, courageous fighting against odds always stirs a quick response from the Poles...
...Most Poles see the USSR as having directly precipitated the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...Any losses suffered by the USSR are automatically applauded in Poland...
...contributions to United Nations peacekeeping operations...
...Charter, which preceded the Truman Doctrine, and the Rio Pact, concluded in 1947, was derived from the Monroe Doctrine, the Good Neighbor Policy and the many Pan-American conferences of the '30s and early '40s...
...More unfortunate????because he has no superior to rescind a statement????is the case of de Gaulle and the French...
...POLAND Having recently returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, I thought your readers might be interested in the reaction of the Polish people to the Arab-Israeli war...
...For Amitai Etzioni ("Why Britain is Different") power is a deluding self-image in the "post-imperial world," a word to be used gingerly and only in quotes...
...Yet, people high on the administrative ladder, and who are just as much assimilated Poles as Slonimski, are invariably branded as Jews...
...Does he forget????as Colonel Nasser has ????that the United States abandoned its allies in the 1956 crisis to condemn the aggressors...
...I wish it were so...
...policies...
...Similarly, why was a half-billion dollars "mis-invested" in Nar-ser...
...When the first news of open conflict in the Mideast reached Warsaw, there was a general run on all the food stores...
...But enough of Steel's historical and logical errors...
...Incidentally, he makes the sophomoric mistake of confusing "collective security" with "alliances," and thus misses the whole point he proposes to discuss: what the motives of U.S...
...has assumed certain commitments to safeguard its legitimate interests or those of its allies, and he asserts that "we are there [in Asia] because we feel ourselves pledged to a worldwide struggle against Communism...
Vol. 50 • July 1967 • No. 14
