Foreign Policy in a New Context
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
THINKING ALOUD Foreign Policy in a New Context By Reinhold Niebuhr The mills of historical experience grind small and usually chew up the ideological pretensions and preconceptions of power...
...and the ferocious Vietcong represent the Communist portion of the electorate...
...consequently, nations such as Russia, having nationalized industry, are by definition free of this taint...
...The day of Diem's overthrow is now annually remembered in a special South Vietnamese holiday...
...Our imperial prestige was more heavily invested during the Kennedy Administration, when our democratic presuppositions and illusions about Indochina prompted us to create the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and proclaim to the world that we were supporting a "democratic nation...
...This was a new version of "making the world safe for democracy...
...The most obvious motivating forces must have been the unconscious concern of the people for the pride and prestige of their imperial nation, and the unconfessed identical concern of our political leaders...
...Frequently they recast them into ironic shapes...
...nor will it transform the motives of a world power concerned about its prestige into Don Quixote's desire to help the helpless...
...3. The third motive was "missionary," that is, the desire to confer some high value on the colonial nations, whether that high value was conceived as religious zeal, technical competence or political democracy...
...Incidentally, that treaty was probably the greatest achievement of President Kennedy's all too brief Administration...
...As is now all too well remembered, the regime was overthrown in a bloody Army revolt...
...soldiers, the mounting American casualties that equal or exceed local casualties in a bloody civil war, and the ever-mounting costs running into billions create the suspicion that our loyalty to Wilsonian international ideals (or in the President's phrase, "Our determination not to desert our principles or our friends") was not powerful enough to motivate this tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure...
...And they have no popular war hero to win an election by promising to end the war in Vietnam, as Eisenhower did in Korea...
...The dogmas of the past always have an ironic effect on the sober realities of the present...
...To these one has to add some vague residual fear of Communism which ignores the recent developments that have disintegrated the Communist monolith, the so-called "international Communist conspiracy...
...The British Foreign Minister, George Brown, on a peace mission to Moscow, was told pointedly that he would do better to address his appeal to Washington...
...The President even insisted that if we did not make our stand in Vietnam we would have to defend ourselves in either Honolulu or Seattle...
...According to their respective political doctrines, they are actually anti-imperialist...
...1. The most obvious motive of 19th century European empires was economic exploitation of subject nations for the sake of furnishing the imperial master with raw materials and markets...
...Prime Minister Harold Wilson, despite strenuous efforts during Premier Kosy-gin's visit to London earlier this month, in the end could not do much better either...
...They foolishly suggest greater cuts in our welfare and anti-poverty programs...
...Meanwhile, the phenomenal expansion of the Vietnam venture from a few "military advisors" to a still growing army of over 400,000 U.S...
...In the case of the Soviets, this has been true since the second stage of their development when they ceased to use the satellite European nations as sources of raw material for industry...
...Some unconscious and unconfessed motives must have been behind this vast undertaking...
...Yet these difficulties did not prevent Washington from defending its venture to preserve our imperial prestige in strictly Wilsonian terms...
...and have made China and Russia political adversaries...
...The Republicans may of course reduce the Democratic majority for the President and in Congress, sparking Congressional rebellions which Johnson's immense prestige and ingenuity have so far succeeded in suppressing...
...We adopted the southern sliver of divided Vietnam and proceeded under President Eisenhower to support it economically and through the presence of "advisors...
...In short, the U.S...
...The USSR is an anti-imperialistic empire because Marxist dogma demies "Imperialism" as the unique sin of capitalism...
...It also implied that the Chinese would not hesitate to cross the Pacific and challenge us on our own soil...
...Jefferson could therefore assume that our foreign relations were conducted "by reason, rather than force...
...Both positions reflected the hypocrisy which characterizes all collective attitudes...
...In our ventures in a little nation so close to China, we must be wary of disturbing the nascent nuclear partnership with Russia on which peace in a nuclear age depends...
...We were obviously a republic and so could not be guilty of royalism...
...In part, too, our anti-imperialism is due to our natural wealth making overseas expansion unnecessary...
...We might have made Thailand our base...
...The Russian embarrassment has been heightened by the war in Vietnam...
...There have been many indications, in other words, that the South is not ready to organize an integral nation, no less a democratic government...
...But ultimately our great democracy must find ways of extricating its peace and the security of civilization from the hazards of guiding a mature world power by ideas inherited from our Wilsonian adolescent engagement with world problems...
...Since it is dangerous for modern imperial nations to base their foreign policies on dogmas and illusions disproved by historical experience, it becomes important for us, as an imperial nation, to re-examine the virtues and vices of imperial power...
...We were "resisting aggression...
...We were subject to political confusions derived from the attempt to hide our concern for imperial prestige behind the idealistic terms of Wilsonian lib-ertarianism...
...China and America's prestige were at stake...
...But both Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung were so confident of the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare that neither bombing nor a pause in bombing could bring them to the negotiating table...
...If a less ingenious and shrewd statesman than Lyndon Johnson were President, this foreign undertaking would have been abandoned...
...We might have made this choice without blood, despite Thailand's rule by a hereditary monarchy and a military junta...
...The Communists usually obscured the second and third motive in their indictment of the first motive...
...and the USSR possess not merely massive economic and military strength, but a capacity to determine human destiny beyond their own national boundaries dwarfing that of the ancient and the 19th century European empires...
...But the Soviet embarrassment is minute compared with American ideological confusions in Indochina...
...What peace we enjoy rests upon a "balance of terror," upon their equal ability to destroy each other and the world...
...Both Diem and his brother Nhu were murdered...
...President Johnson's assurances that our objectives there are limited do not impress the Russians: They are bound by their ideology to support the Communist cause, especially when political adversaries within their own camp seek to rob them of ideological prestige because they have become, in effect, the allies of the hated "Capitalist Imperialists...
...technically backward, nations...
...This astounding justification surely implied that we were resisting aggression not from North Vietnam but from China...
...It is certainly significant that the two modern empires, the USSR and the U.S., are comparatively free of the economic motive...
...This nostalgic myth was possible because our liberal democratic idealism attributed imperialism to either monarchism or militarism...
...Not long ago, at the time of the initial Bandung Conference, there were some among us who believed that the new nations collected there would surely recognize their affinity with us...
...But these moral claims were generally as extravagant as the Communists' charges of economic exploitation as the sole motive of empire...
...So we find ourselves championing anti-Communist nations even though their politics are bereft of democratic substance, or trying to create democracies in peasant cultures lacking all the technical and cultural prerequisities of self-government...
...with its attending perils of weakening the Great Society program, inflation, tight money and probably higher taxes, could erode this prestige...
...The attempts to meet the responsibilities and hazards of our world embracing power by following the concepts Woodrow Wilson used in his futile effort to beguile an isolated nation into world responsibilities after World War I are bound to distort present power realities...
...An analysis of the complexities of imperialism will yield the conclusion that traditionally there have been three motives for the exercise of imperial power, and that they were present in varying proportions in ancient as well as 19th century empires...
...France regarded itself as the bearer of "civilization," and Britain saw itself as the midwife of democracy among peoples of backward cultures...
...Our democratic ideals properly prevent us from transmuting our hegemony into an imperial structure of power...
...Our popular press hailed poor Diem as "The Churchill of Asia...
...The motives of today's two great imperial nations are, in fact, a unique compound of lust for power and prestige, and missionary devotion to their overarching value systems...
...Both preside over a continental economy, and both possess an arsenal of dread nuclear weapons with terribly destructive power...
...Johnson's immense prestige was won by his rigorous domestic policies, by his extending the welfare slate and offering the Negro minority our belated justice in equal civil rights...
...This places our foreign policy in a new context...
...In fact, he was an oppressive Catholic Mandarin ruler, whom the non-political Buddhist peasants feared probably more than they feared Ho Chi Minh...
...Yet both of these imperial nations govern their international relations by the light of dogmatic presuppositions which their own power, and sense of power, has clearly refuted...
...while the imperial nations emphasized the missionary motive...
...Our own anti-imperialistic pretension has more diverse sources...
...There were reports that President Kennedy, appalled by their suppression of the Buddhists, indirectly brought on the revolt by ordering the cia to cease furnishing Nhu's Special Forces with secret funds...
...If the Republicans were shrewder they would mount a viable alternative...
...2. The second motive was political: the impulse to enhance the power, prestige or "glory" of the imperial nation...
...Thus, as I have previously noted in these pages, historical vicissitudes have made the Soviet Union and the United States the arbiters of the world's fate...
...The Soviet Union is the holy land of the Communist scheme of social redemption: Thus many of its current policies can be understood only in terms of the conflict of interest caused, on the one hand, by its being a pillar of order as the partner of the U.S...
...All of them have not only had trouble with the Buddhist monks and peasants, but have found it difficult to preserve harmony among the civilian and military factions representing different regions, conflicting religions, Northern emigres and the indigenous Southerners...
...The Communist indictment of imperialism made this economic motive the dominant or even the sole purpose of empire building...
...And in part it has been drawn from an idealistic innocence, expressed from the days of Thomas Jefferson to those of Woodrow Wilson...
...We chose instead a more dubious alternative, or were inadvertently drawn into it...
...We reiterated our desire for a peace conference...
...Our military presence was considered necessary to protect the non-Chinese nations, chiefly Malaysian, against China...
...But they are more "patriotic" than the President in supporting the war...
...The magic of even the most ingenious politician will never transform the southern portion of Vietnam into an integral democratic nation...
...Since signing the Limited Test-Ban Treaty, they even have a nascent partnership for avoiding a nuclear catastrophe...
...We were defending "the right of self-determination...
...We did have a military establishment, but until recently military leaders were not distinguished in class terms...
...Since Diem's downfall, the South has been governed by a series of military juntas...
...only a face-saving device for both imperial powers would suffice...
...When the French Empire in Indochina collapsed, the Geneva Conference neutralized the two small countries of Laos and Cambodia and partitioned Vietnam...
...The President's assurances of our "limited objectives" have not relieved the Russians of their embarrassment vis-a-vis China...
...That is why cynical journalists in Washington speak of a "credibility gap...
...The cost of the war...
...in the effort to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, and on the other hand, by the need to guard its ideological prestige??particularly in Asia, where China sneers at Russia's pretensions of orthodoxy and accuses this now technically competent nation of "Bourgeois Revisionism...
...The United States foreign aid program, of course, has run into the billions...
...True, it would be cynical not to appreciate the genuine character of the missionary motive, manifested in the universalization of moral, technical and cultural values from their original homes to the benefit of more primitive, i.e...
...We are the hegemonic nation in the presumably democratic non-Communist bloc...
...Increasing casualties and costs may yet prompt the nation and the President to sober second thoughts...
...It springs partly from the fact that we were the first nation to gain freedom from an imperial power in our war of independence...
...THINKING ALOUD Foreign Policy in a New Context By Reinhold Niebuhr The mills of historical experience grind small and usually chew up the ideological pretensions and preconceptions of power politics...
Vol. 50 • February 1967 • No. 5
