Which Way U.S. Foreign Policy? - An Exchange The Case for Retrenchment

...Nixon is a confirmed internationalist, or, as the critics would have it, an interventionist...

...But the usefulness of the alliance to the United States is diminishing, and the fact that the Atlantic Treaty is now 20 years old offers the new Administration an opportunity to conduct a long-overdue reassessment...

...find a quality (though not a policy) of leadership similar to that exercised by de Gaulle when he assumed power in a country shaken by revolt...

...We coexist very well with totalitarian governments of the Right...

...It takes over a sense of mission about the uses of American power, the idea that the world would be a better place if it conformed to an American conception of virtue...

...a convert to detente, though insisting on "negotiation from strength...

...The Case for Retrenchment By Ronald Steel Richard Nixon conies to the Presidency with a good deal of experience in foreign affairs and an avowed commitment to hammer out a new diplomacy geared to the demands of today's world...

...Where the Americans took it as regrettable but hardly disastrous—the ultimate in nonchalance being Dean Rusk's remark that no pity should be lost on the Czechs and Slovaks since they were the fourth largest supplier of arms to North Vietnam—the West Europeans were made brutally aware of how fragile their defense forces really are...

...There is, at least on the surface, little here to give heart to the apostles of retrenchment and withdrawal...

...In some instances violent or undemocratic change is the only way that the modernization we incessantly advocate is likely to take place...

...Nonetheless, these alternatives lurked in the background and everyone was aware of them...

...Many nations succumb to a similar temptation...

...The hardest, but perhaps the most important, task of the new Administration will be to create a climate that will permit a retrenchment from the self-deluding fantasies of global intervention, while making it possible to attack the fundamental causes of disorder and disaffection at home...

...If it addresses itself to the root causes of the domestic crisis, it could even pave the way for a government, for a concept of community responsibility, that might blunt the edge of domestic guerrilla warfare, and perhaps make it unnecessary...

...And in this case skepticism may be the first step toward restraint...

...of narrowing the dangerous gap between the privileged minority in the Northern Hemisphere and the exploited majority in the underdeveloped nations...

...Intelligence because it must be discriminating, dispatch because it would be exceedingly dangerous to drift along with reflex commitments that are no longer intellectually supportable...

...they also fear that it may be sustained at the price of the indefinite partition of Europe...

...Further, Nixon must not only end the war, but, as a corollary, he must conduct his foreign policy in such a way as to insure that there will be no more Vietnams...

...Ronald Steel, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, is the author of End of Alliance and Pax Americana...

...Certainly Nixon would not want to...

...the effort, halfhearted though it may be, to aid the underdeveloped world...

...The foreign policy it carries out, like the policies of its predecessors, will almost certainly be imperialistic...

...Yet Eisenhower's foreign policy proved to be not much different than Harry S. Truman's...

...It is questionable whether the Nixon Administration is up to the task...

...and of liberating ourselves from the deep-rooted social and political anxieties that are expressed in an emotional hatred of Communism and an instinctual fear of revolution...

...The war had become an albatross...

...He will be Johnson with a little less arrogance and, hopefully, a little less adventurism...

...One of Johnson's great mistakes was that he did not get rid of Kennedy's foreign policy advisers...

...the limitation on nuclear proliferation...

...Nixon inherits, first of all, nearly three-quarters of a million soldiers stationed in 30 countries, four regional defense alliances, mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, membership in 53 international organizations, and military or economic aid programs to nearly 100 nations...

...But Truman had already begun the negotiations, even though it might have been politically difficult for him to carry them through without incurring the wrath of Republican fundamentalists...

...The basic outlines were drawn more than 20 years ago and are not going to be erased overnight...

...of controlling nuclear weapons...

...There are, in fact, two questions at issue: First, is Richard Nixon's approach to foreign affairs substantively different from that of Lyndon B. Johnson or John F. Kennedy...

...The truth, for once, may lie somewhere in between...

...a believer in foreign aid and mutual defense treaties...

...But the Republicans may not delude themselves into believing that their imperialism is necessarily good for everyone it affects...

...It had been assumed for years in Western Europe that the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking and, in certain circles, the alliance with America was considered a tiresome insurance policy that could eventually be allowed to lapse...

...What I call for is not a new isolationism," he said during the campaign...

...of learning to live with revolution in the Third World...

...Yet even these worthy objectives are becoming outmoded, or are in a bad state of disrepair...

...Otherwise he would find himself in Johnson's predicament: neglecting the nation's domestic crisis, incapable of governing effectively, and no doubt unable to run for reelection...

...Washington's allies have a vested interest in the detente...

...What is important is not the label a regime chooses to pin on itself, but the policies it follows...

...The new Administration inherits an attitude toward American responsibility and American power that was a necessary corrective to the old excessive isolationism, but now has become encumbering and dangerous itself...

...Rarely has it been felt at so many layers of society: not simply among intellectuals and the tiny minority that concerns itself with foreign affairs, but even among those who normally have been content to leave such matters to professionals...

...The problems of the next decade will be those of seeking withdrawal from dangerously overextended positions without succumbing to the mentality of isolationism...

...The "taste for intervention," in Charles de Gaulle's uncharitable phrase, has become so elemental a part of America's attitude to the outside world during the past quarter-century that it is unlikely any President would—or could —completely reverse it...

...and where Communists were very much involved, as in Central Europe, we did not intervene because we feared the danger of igniting a third world war...

...While isolationism is not rife in the land, the number of Americans questioning the wisdom, if not the sincerity, of "what America is doing now around the world" has grown to serious proportions...

...But it could be thought of as a necessary or practical one under certain conditions...

...He offers no new foreign policy, but rather an improved performance of the old one, resting on increased cooperation with allies...

...Nixon, of course, did not defend the war, but neither could he attack it, since it was fought on premises he largely agrees with...

...In fact, without this conviction it would have been extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible, for the last four Presidents to have carried out their interventionist policies...

...Continued Cooperation with the USSR While seeking to maintain the old ties with Western Europe, the new Administration is eager to expand the detente with the Soviet Union...

...The willingness to tolerate progressive-minded revolutionary regimes—however unsympathetic we may find their methods or their political rhetoric—means coming to terms with the whole problem of development in the Third World...

...From the looseness of the Truman Doctrine there emerged a variety of carelessly conceived, dubiously valid pacts and pledges, glossing over the difference between Communism as an ideology and Communism as an instrument of Soviet power...

...Everything, according to some...

...But unless the Russians extend their bellicosity westward, rather than confine it to their own restive empire, this new-found unity will be hard to maintain...

...During his campaign for election, however, he could hardly have failed to catch the popular mood of disenchantment, doubt and impatience engendered by the Vietnam war—a mood that has spread to much of our foreign policy...

...Within certain limits, intervention is, of course, perfectly proper and necessary...

...Just as there is a danger that the Russians may upset the present balance—whether from an exuberant belligerence or from an alarmed defensiveness—there is as great a danger that the United States may do the same...

...Reassessing NATO Some elements are worth salvaging: the alliance with Western Europe...

...In addition, of course, the new Administration has to cope with a war which the mightiest military machine in the world has been unable to win and which so far has eluded an acceptable political solution...

...This might seem like the happy harbinger of the rejuvenation of nato...

...The latter alternative is not nearly so attractive to the Europeans as the present situation, in which the United States provides both the nuclear deterrent and a powerful land army in West Germany...

...This means that it must be turned into a more equitable partnership, with the Europeans assuming a continually greater share of the burden of their own defense, or else it must give way to a simple mutual guarantee pact, with the United States pledging itself to defend Western Europe against Soviet attack by whatever methods seem most appropriate...

...But this intervention for the military containment of a hostile great power was expanded, in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the policies that flowed from it, to a commitment to defend governments everywhere against direct or indirect aggression...

...Without recognition there can be no change, and without enlightened leadership there is unlikely to be adequate recognition...

...It is a new internationalism in which America enlists its allies and its friends around the world in those struggles in which their interest is as great as is ours...

...The United States is determined that Western Europe be kept out of Soviet hands...

...Foreign policy needs an element of continuity, and the new scaffolding has to stand, unavoidably, on the old foundation...

...The great problems of foreign policy for the 1970s will not be those of the 1960s—the restructuring of nato, the containment of Communism, the effort to achieve nuclear superiority...

...The most pacific doves favor some kind of intervention when it involves the survival of Israel or the tragedy of Biafra...

...He did, as promised, end the Korean War...

...The verbiage may be sticky, but it describes a true sentiment, and let no one who seeks to alter American foreign policy underestimate it...

...Rarely has the need for change been more obvious or more urgent...

...The mood, to be sure, is changing...

...The situation is reminiscent of 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was swept into office on a vague promise to end the Korean War and bring the, nation back to some semblance of "normalcy...

...By one of the ironies of history, Eisenhower's Vice President finds himself, perhaps somewhat to his own surprise, now head of state...

...launch a determined assault on racism that will uproot traditional attitudes and even the structure of our society...

...The nation is ready, indeed eager, for a new look at America's involvements—at Vietnam, at nato and the Alliance for Progress, at the quarantine of China and the old arguments for foreign aid, at the assumptions of nuclear deterrence and the policies of detente, at the relics of cold war and the unexamined premises of America's global role...

...An enlightened foreign policy would require an attitude of tolerance, rather than hostility, toward violent revolutions—even where Communists are actively involved or in the vanguard...

...That ideology is not merely the defense of the nation, but something far more sweeping: the establishment of a world order on the American model...

...Regimes which have lost the support of their own population, which cannot wrench them free from the bondage of feudalism, which find their raison d'etre in the protection of the privileged minority, cannot be saved even by the world's mightiest military power...

...By the same token, his approach to the great issues of foreign policy is as similar to that of Johnson as Eisenhower's was to that of Truman...

...This could not have occurred without the Vietnam war, and particularly if the war had not turned into such a costly stalemate...

...Small Communist nations are no threat to the United States nor, as we should have learned from experience, are they likely to remain satellites of Moscow or Peking for very long...

...His was an Administration of consolidation and, in some senses, of retrenchment—precisely what the country needed and wanted in 1952...

...Rather it indicated that the war had become as politically undefinable as it has been militarily unwinnable...

...Yet the alternatives were so ambiguous and threatening to established positions that none of the major candidates could articulate, let alone propose, any...

...And the problems he faces are not unlike those of his former chief...

...This is particularly true among the Europeans, many of whom were deeply shocked and alarmed by the August 1968 invasion...

...Nixon does not believe in it, and relatively few Americans consider it desirable or necessary...

...In that election, too, there was the feeling that the Democrats had been in power too long, that they had involved the nation in commitments that could not be honored at a price the people were willing to pay, that deep fissures within the society had grown unmanageable and dangerous...

...They are concerned about the "American challenge" in business and industry, the attempt to achieve economic and political integration, the eventual reunification of the Continent, and Europe's place between two great but unstable empires...

...Foreign Policy—A Symposium," which also includes contributions by Paul Seabury and Richard A. Falk...

...These are the people who, be they liberal Republicans or liberal Democrats, McGeorge Bundy or Walt Rostow, have held positions of high responsibility under both parties—the people who launched the Bay of Pigs, the occupation of the Dominican Republic, and the Vietnam war...

...By force of circumstances, Nixon will have to evolve a diplomacy based upon the supposition that the American people will simply not tolerate another Vietnam...

...Narrow Margin for Maneuver Thus Nixon is not going to revolutionize the nation's foreign policy because, given his view of the world, he does not think any revolution is necessary...

...These came to be treated as though they were virtually identical, thereby confounding the attempt to make a rational assessment of American security interests...

...But this meant neither indifference, nor wide-scale public acceptance of the war...

...In other words, what was a limited responsibility expanded into a global policy that could neither be defined nor restricted in terms of American interests...

...This can be fairly basic—the McCarthy campaign indicated how willing perfectly average, unradical Americans are to contemplate rather "heretical" ideas about our foreign policy...

...Since the Republicans cannot win the war either, they have no alternative but to end it on whatever decent terms they can get, and turn to other pressing, neglected matters...

...He inherits a war whose purpose and methods he has never disavowed...

...It was right for the United States to intervene in World War II to save Europe from Nazi domination, just as it was right to intervene after the War to protect and help rebuild the demoralized nations of Western Europe...

...So long as we are mesmerized by Communism as an ideology, it will be extremely difficult for us both to accept the fact that even violent changes in the status quo need not be hostile to our interests, and to restrain our urge to suppress violent or even undemocratic movements of social transformation...

...and give conscious recognition of the degree to which much of our foreign policy is rooted in economic and military imperialism...

...The nation must right the social imbalance that still concentrates power in the hands of the very rich at the expense of the poor, some of whom do not even realize the degree of their exploitation...

...The major outlines of Eisenhower's foreign policy—nato, the Truman Doctrine, foreign aid—were laid down by his predecessor...

...It means recognizing that the development process will be nasty, brutish and long, that democracy may be a political luxury for many such countries, and that the rich nations are going to have to return, in the form of development assistance, some of the booty they have extracted from the nonindustrialized ones...

...This does not mean, as the Vietnam hawks would have it, that the nation would then be driven into isolationism...

...Since neither the United States nor its allies have shown any serious desire to transform nato into an "Atlantic federation," it has to relinquish some of its more pretentious ambitions and come to terms with the realities of a fragmented, increasingly nationalistic Europe...

...Without questioning the new President's sincerity or ability, it is reasonable to ask whether it is likely to be fulfilled...

...The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia has, for the time being, infused a bit of oxygen into nato...

...What is remarkable is that this has been generally accepted—not because it is desirable, but because it is unavoidable...

...Any of these would imperil, if not destroy, the detente and the whole policy responsible for it...

...For he is an interventionist by conviction, a member of the generation that grew up in World War II, when isolationism became a dirty word, and which in the early years of the cold war discovered how exhilarating and morally satisfying the exercise of international power could be...

...The United States has intervened deeply in the affairs of countries where our national interest was only remotely involved...

...If the new Administration proves incapable of keeping in check what an inspired Eisenhower speech writer referred to as the "military-industrial complex," if it tries to press for the kind of absolute military superiority that Nixon sometimes referred to in his campaign speeches, if it falls victim to the same bloated rhetoric and liberal self-delusion that haunted the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, if it fails to understand that the cold war with Russia is over and that from here on in even the most advanced industrial societies will be preoccupied with the effort to hold themselves together, then we are in for serious trouble...

...What is viable in the foreign policy the new Administration has inherited...

...Vietnam was not a major debating issue in the campaign...

...nothing, according to others...

...In some cases we did not intervene because Communists were not involved...

...Perhaps the Republicans cannot heal this wound, perhaps no one can...

...Faith has been shaken, but not destroyed...

...These ideas simply must not be, or seem to be, revolutionary...

...We can learn to coexist with totalitarian governments of the Left as well, and let the Russians and the Chinese worry about the purity of their ideology...

...The Europeans, however, have more than their defense to worry about...

...The crusade in Asia has now come to be viewed, even by such ardent former crusaders as McGeorge Bundy and Robert S. Mc-Namara, as a disastrous misadventure which ought to be concluded as quickly and unobtrusively as possible...

...What is ultimately at stake is not simply a change in policy, but a change in direction...

...Although it has not been our stated intention to preserve the status quo, this has been the impact of our policy...

...as a mediator between the "two hegemonies" was based on precisely this view...

...It would be more than unfortunate if Nixon made the same mistake, for if ever a policy was bankrupt, it is the one he is now inheriting...

...The Communist world has been dramatically split, first by the Russo-Chinese rivalry, and then by the mounting assertions of nationalism in Eastern Europe and in the Communist nations of Cuba, North Korea and North Vietnam...

...When that day comes—and it has already been postponed too long—the Europeans will either have to pool their resources in some meaningful way to provide for their own defense, or rely on an American nuclear guarantee that is not supported by American hostages on the Continent...

...During that time the vast majority of Americans became convinced not only that it was necessary for the United States to intervene throughout the world politically, economically, and when need be, militarily, but also that there was a moral imperative for doing so...

...The power of this nation, to a degree not fully realized even by those in whose name it is employed, has been turned into an instrument for the pursuit of an American ideology...

...On the success of this task hangs not only the fate of the Nixon Administration but of the nation itself...

...Assuming Global Responsibilities The new Administration inherits, in short, a commitment to intervention as an operative concept of American foreign policy...

...Now that the lesson has presumably been learned, it is up to the new Administration to apply it with intelligence and dispatch...

...In practice what this comes down to is not intervention against injustice, but intervention against Communism—where Russian power and national interests are not directly threatened...

...Eisenhower simply pursued them with a somewhat different style...

...De Gaulle's vision of France (perhaps Western Europe...

...The war, it goes without saying, is not viable—that is precisely why Johnson was put in a position where he dared not run for reelection, and why Nixon is President of the United States today...

...The "American Empire," to use a somewhat abused descriptive phrase, rests upon the conviction of most Americans that the world role of the United States is a beneficent one...

...The superpowers, though, are motivated by the internal mechanics of their own imperial positions, and are learning that cooperation is the price of survival...

...Indeed, in 1954 (which, admittedly, was a long time ago when many people felt very differently) he argued in favor of United States military intervention on the side of the French to "save" Indochina...

...It was assumed by the electorate, and by the candidates themselves, that the war had to be wound up early in the term of the next President...

...The nation is ready for a new assessment of its purpose, a new definition of its responsibilities...

...Still, he did make possible a political truce that finished off Senator Joseph McCarthy, and, for all the sanctimony of Dulles' inflated rhetoric, managed to keep the nation at peace for eight years...

...But we have not intervened in a number of countries where freedom is a mockery, such as Saudi Arabia and Haiti...

...Once that is assured, it is possible to reach various economic, political and even military agreements that are not necessarily identical with the common interests of the European allies...

...He is a firm supporter of nato and of "Atlantic interdependence...

...Unfortunately, those conditions assume that the Communist bloc is a unified conspiracy directed from the Kremlin and intent upon world domination by, if need be, military means...

...It was shattered by the invasion, and even France has been notably cooperative in the councils of nato in recent months...

...But unless it is healed, or at least some effort in that direction is made soon, prospects for the American Dream—what is left of it—are bleak indeed...

...Moreover, his margin for maneuver is not nearly so great as critics of our present diplomacy like to believe...

...Hubert H. Humphrey could not attack a war he had spent most of his term as Vice President defending, nor did he make any serious attempt to justify it on grounds of national interest...

...Without the American deterrent, and the willingness of Washington at least to threaten its use, they would be unable to hold back any determined Russian attack...

...That is the lesson of Vietnam, and we have had to learn it the hard way...

...The attempt to suppress revolution, as we should have learned from the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, involves a threat to the survival of American democracy...

...or where it is confined to a privileged few, as in Rhodesia and South Africa...

...The hands-off policy toward one another's aggressions (Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic), the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the attempt, albeit feeble, to keep the arms race from getting totally out of control—all these are essential if the two relatively satiated superpowers are not to destroy one another...

...What America has done, and what America is doing now around the world," Johnson declared in all sincerity shortly before 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 wellsprings of American purpose...

...Second, is it possible, with the best intentions in the world, substantially to change the basic outlines of American diplomacy...

...That is the great lesson of a foreign policy that has been exhausted and must now be entirely rethought...

...The Atlantic alliance is based upon an identity of interests basically limited to the military field...

...A good deal of sanctimony went down the drain in Vietnam, and even those who accept the premises of the war are touched by the stigma of its failure...

...While the mandate for change is clear enough, that is a big promise...

...Primary among these, obviously, is the deteriorating condition of the nation's cities and the nation's psyche: the mounting insecurity and disaffection that expresses itself in racial fears, in anxiety over property, in suspicion and hatred of young people who refuse to play the game...

...Since the war cannot be won militarily, even by destroying North Vietnam, a political settlement, whatever its disguise, will in the long run be little more than a face-saving compromise...

...nato is clearly on its last legs and needs to be succeeded by some less antiquated conception of America's relations with Western Europe...

...Yet, until such an eventuality, the wiser course, the only viable one, is to proceed on the assumption that cooperation with the Soviet Union is possible and desirable...

...It would be virtually impossible for the United States, with its present economic, political and social structure, to carry out any other kind of foreign policy...

...of achieving new methods of international cooperation going beyond the war-inducing confines of the nation-state...

...Robert Strausz-Hupe, another veteran contributor here, is director of the University of Pennsylvania's Foreign Policy Research Institute and served as a Nixon adviser during the campaign...

...A few American corporations will suffer, vestigial attitudes about Communism will be shaken, but the national interest of the United States is unlikely to be harmed even if revolutionary governments come to power in much of Latin America—as happened in Mexico more than 50 years ago...

...There is always the danger, naturally, that the Kremlin leadership, which has lately shown certain signs of instability (as, for that matter, has the entire American political system), will try to upset the present political balance by some sudden act of force majeure, that it will provoke reckless moves by its wards in the Middle East or elsewhere, that it will invade Yugoslavia (an act of provocation, as distinguished from a family settling of accounts, as in Czechoslovakia, or even Rumania), or that there will be a rapprochement with China...

...This must be so fundamental that it is difficult to see how it can be accomplished without a drastic reform of the nation's social structure and charismatic leadership of the kind few societies ever enjoy or long tolerate...

...The smaller European countries are not ready to pull out of nato, for they prefer American leadership to French or German dominance...

...Put it all 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...

...or even where there was open Communist aggression, as in Tibet, Hungary and Czechoslovakia...

...the detente with the Soviet Union...

...of accepting a relationship with the Soviet Union and other major powers based on limited cooperation and continued antagonism over a wide range of issues...

...But the extraordinary power of America has transformed its sense of mission from a vision into a program, although an ill-defined and only half-recognized one...

...But American patience is likely to give out even before the balance of payments requires a massive reduction of troop forces in Europe...

...We can expect the new Administration to be driven by circumstances into continued cooperation with the Soviet Union...

...Whether such assumptions were ever valid (and some, such as George Kennan, have argued that they were not valid even in the critical area of Central Europe), they are little more than a historical anachronism today...

...We have defined stability as anti-Communism, and thus we have been drawn into the suppression of progressive forces simply because Communists have been involved...

...The President's scope for initiative is as sweeping as it is ill denned...

...If the new Administration can provide a breathing space between the wars of intervention against Communism abroad and the coming guerrilla wars against racism and exploitation within America itself, it will have served a useful function...

...Revolution in backward countries is no threat to the United States...

...Its instruments are defense pacts and military bases, foreign aid and defense support, the economic power of the government and American business, and where other measures fail, American combat troops and American bombers...

...That is not a particularly noble policy, especially when one considers the rhetoric in which it is usually framed...

...This has been done in the name of freedom and the struggle against Communism...

...That would raise fundamental questions about international responsibility and the morality of the nation-state that few citizens or politicians are willing to contemplate...