Master of the 'If'

...McCarthy's quick brush-strokes over the global canvas of American policy are filled with insights that are highly pertinent to the current debate about America's role in the world Unfortunately, however, McCarthy's pictures have a tendency to dissolve at the edges just when the reader is hoping for greatest clarity...

...Up only to Australia and New Zealand, as Walter Lippmann recently suggested...

...Master of the 'If' THE LIMITS OF POWER By Eugene J. McCarthy Holt, Rinehart and Winston 246 pp $5 95 Reviewed by PETER BARNES Staff member, "Newsweek" Washington Bureau There is something that closely resembles paranoia in America's over-response to every distant or imagined threat India does not go into convulsions when, say, Nicaragua attacks Costa Rica, but Washington rushes m halt a million men when a guerrilla force aided by North Vietnam attacks the government of South Vietnam Japan is not supposed to build offensive nuclear weapons to counter China's atomic arsenal, but the United States, which already possesses more overkill than the rest of the world put together, must supplement its deterrent with a $5-billion anti-ballistic missile system The participation of 55 identifiable Communists in a Leftist rebellion m the Dominican Republic is sufficient justification for intervening with 20,000 American troops...

...Senator Eugene McCarthy, (D-Minn) is not afflicted by tears of this sort His underlying theme in The Limits of Power is that the United States is actually justifying some of its own worst fears by making the rest of the world more hostile to us than it need be In Latin America we are buttressing the status quo through our Military Assistance Program and such over-responses as the Dominican intervention, thereby earning the understandable enmity of those who seek change In Asia we are obsessed by a Chinese militancy which is more verbal than real and have headed ourselves on a course that, for no sensible reason, looks destined to produce a collision with Peking In Europe, until recently, we were bent on perpetuating the Cold War and our own hegemony over nato rather than on easing tensions and permitting the development of an independent, more unified continent The adventures of the ubiquitous Central Intelligence Agency and the fervor of the Pentagon's irrepressible arms salesmen have likewise sown seeds of trouble that are already coming back to haunt us...

...If we are not to thrust our gun-sights and footsoldiers up to the remotest rice paddy on China's back door, how far, in 1969 or 1970, do we extend ourselves...

...The Pentagon's prime justification for the arms assistance program (now running at about $3 billion a year) is that the weapons are needed to bolster friendly forces around--in Defense Secretary McNamara's words...

...These over-reactions reflect a worrisome psychological strain m America's attitude toward the rest of the world We are the first nation m history whose far-flung military might is not, at bottom, offensive and motivated by a sense of mission, but defensive and fear-inspired Ours is the first imperialism that is not designed to augment our wealth or spread our enlightenment, but rather is based upon a gnawing fear that the rest of the world is essentially inimical to us and that the only way to save ourselves is to arm to the teeth and start fighting as far from our shores as possible...

...McCarthy is also inconclusive on personalities Toward Dean Rusk, the executor of the policies he questions and the man whose "quiet resignation" he now calls for, McCarthy is unbelievably sweet, the harshest criticism he can muster is that Rusk "has yet to make his mark," even on Vietnam Apparently Rusk's sins are not of commission but omission As for President Johnson, whose foreign policy failures have now impelled McCarthy to launch a challenge for the 1968 Democratic Presidential nomination the Senator has nary an unkind word...

...He displays great mastery, for example, at using the conditional "if" without saying whether the condition is to be met Thus, he tells us that "we must begin now the adjustments of attitude which will be necessary if we are to reduce or liquidate our commitments in Asia," but does not specify whether, or how, or when, we should reduce or liquidate those commitments Similarly, he observes that "if the balance of power is 10 be the stabilizing way for Asia, it will be achieved only when the great powers of Asia--Japan, India and Indonesia--are able to play major roles " The reader may thereupon deduce that McCarthy would like to see the U S role in the Orient supplanted, in 10 or 20 years, by the leading Asian powers But he never comes right out and says this, nor does he fill in the obvious chronological gap...

...Up to the de-fendable population centers of South Vietnam, as General Gavin has argued...

...the great arc of forward positions to the west, south and east of the USSR and Red China " Corollary to this is the rationale put forward by the Pentagon's chief arms salesman, Henry Kuss "Receipts from military sales account for about one-half of the deployment costs of our forces, measured in balance-of-payments terms," Kuss testified in 1966 'The ability of this country to follow a forward strategy is heavily influenced by the balance-ot-pay-ments costs attributable to such a strategy ". McCarthy s distaste for squeezing the poor nations of the world to help support our advance lines of resistance is clear enough Indeed, his disenchantment with the entire program is evident Yet his remedies and recommendations are disappointing m the light of his critique 'It this forward strategy is to remain a necessary feature of our policy, it might be wise to seek other means of offsetting its effect on the balance of payments than by pressing arms on either eager or reluctant allies The Congress, particularly the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, must give increasing attention to the desirability--and the very morality--of our arms distribution program '. In the end, McCarthy raises, and then largely evades, what has become the central foreign policy question of our time Should America maintain its all-out forward strategy, its open-ended defensive imperialism'' He implies--but only implies--that we should not, that we should instead establish "standards for selection of response, both as to place and degree," that we should return to the "classical" pre-Dulles precepts of American foreign policy in which our obligations were "clear, direct and limited ". This is not a call for neo-isolation-ism, it is a call for proportion and definitions McCarthy makes clear that the United States has sensible and definable roles to play in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East It is m Asia, though, that the need for proportion and definition is most acute, and it is here that McCarthy is least precise...

...Admittedly, these are questions of the most difficult order But they are questions that demand analysis, especially by those who are distressed by out present course Senator McCarthy is right to call for new definitions of the limits of American power, the pity is that he does not attempt to develop them himself for Asia...

...The best of the book's somewhat disjointed chapters deals with the Defense Department's free-wheeling Military Assistance Program This was embarrassingly uncloaked by a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff study last January, and has been mildly curbed by Congress m actions since then McCarthy points out a facet of the arms sales program that has been little appreciated its integral relationship to Washington's "forward strategy" of fighting Communism as far away from home as possible...