Moralism and Foreign Policy

...The only possible conclusion is that these men-lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy-were intoxicated by power...

...Yet it seems important to note that for the last 25 years the moralists have made the foreign policy decisions, and only with Vietnam and the ensuing desertion of liberal intellectuals did this begin to change...

...Kennan's central argument is profoundly pessimistic...

...How can we spend money to defend Southeast Asia when there is still poverty and discrimination at home...

...Today 'spy-in-the-sky' satellites orbit over Soviet central Asia and Communist China...

...Here is a seminal statement of the central theme: "The destiny of Europe and Asia has not been committed, under God, to the keeping of the United States...

...The liberal argument further suggests that our arrogance will destroy our democratic values: "If we go in, decency, tolerance, kindliness, truth, democracy and freedom will be the first victims," wrote Norman Thomas and Bertram D. Wolfe in Keep America Out of War (1939...

...This gave us, in the hardnosed view, a vital interest in the security of those states...

...The high priest of this view of national interest is the distinguished historian and diplomat George F. Kennan...

...In other words, our primary mission is to bring the democratic ideal to fruition in the United States...

...It has a familiar ring, and could be Senator Eugene McCarthy or Professor Henry Steele Commager discussing Vietnam at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...You stand up for freedom, whatever the price...

...in Africa it will buttress the "territorial integrity" of existing states, in Latin America it will welcome dictatorships and democracies with equal warmth, in Asia it will (as an antiwar military officer put it to me in Saigon) "let the gooks fight it out...

...In the hands of a cool President and a positively remote Secretary of State, the United States is abandoning its moralistic thrust of the last 30 years for the solid ground of "vital national interests...

...rushed to give a liberal imprimatur to this strategy of national selfishness...

...In practical terms this amounts to abandoning our concern with the behavior of other nations unless their actions pose something called a "direct threat" to our interests...

...Once upon a time, we needed bases to contain Communist power...

...A certain amount of humility is no doubt healthy, but the argument supports the conservative position best formulated as "Who needs them...

...I would be the last person to deny that moralism can get us into trouble, or-on the other hand-to defend indiscriminate and nonpruden-tial efforts to liberate the world...

...Events in the developing world outside of Latin America we would view with friendly disinterest...

...What concern of ours is it whether black or white prevails in Rhodesia...

...When we disregarded "power realities in the Orient," we bought unnecessary trouble...

...The liberal rationale, while it results in roughly the same policy, is quite different, resting on a curious amalgam of pacifism, anti-imperialism, and anticapi-talism...

...With regard to Japan, for example, Kennan's tightly argued thesis was that an intelligent approach to our relations with the Orient might have avoided Pearl Harbor...

...It is, in fact, an excerpt from Charles A. Beard's Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels (1939...

...and only conceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust of power, or a desire to escape from our domestic perils and obligations could possibly make us suppose that Providence has appointed us his chosen people for the pacification of the earth...

...Most of our interventions, he suggested, have created problems greater than those they were designed to meet-an inevitable result, perhaps, since they were founded on crusading fervor rather than rational calculation of real interests...

...argues for a cutback in American commitments, he and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee colleagues claim to be doing penance for our "arrogance...

...You do what is right...

...The only power in the world that can directly threaten the United States is the USSR, so why should we become exercised over who controls Saigon, Bengal, Djakarta, Ouagadougou, or Jerusalem...

...If the New Left historians are correct in asserting that the Cold War arose from American provocations, this division should bring detente in short order...

...There is nothing wicked about this rejection of moralism ("the tired cliches of the Cold War," etc...

...On the contrary, this country will also get along nicely no matter what happens in the Middle East or Southeast Asia...

...Arabs or Jews in Israel...

...But failing to appreciate the forces that drove the Japanese to expand, and carried away by sentimental attachment for China, we "hacked away, year after year, decade after decade" at the Japanese encroachment on the Asian mainland...

...Now a news item about the closing of Bada Beir, the communications base in Pakistan, describes the situation tersely: "Technological progress in electronic surveillance made the base in Pakistan no longer necessary...

...would agree to a spheres-of-influence division of the world...

...Like the rain, which falls equally on the just and the unjust, American policy in the Middle East will be "evenhanded...

...What, for instance, can a rational analyst of national interest make of a President who would say: "What do you do when little Israel calls on you for assistance and help...

...The moralists took command of containing Communist power, much to Ken-nan's dismay...

...This inherently schizophrenic coalition limped along through the '50s, but disintegrated under the impact of Vietnam...

...Similarly, when Senator Mike Mansfield (D.-Mont...

...But I am convinced that a United States dedicated to isolation and national affluence, while most of the world degenerated into squalor and totalitarianism, would be a moral monstrosity...

...On that level of analysis the conservatives are, of course, right...

...however, it puts the conservative isolationist position beyond reproach...

...A few solid commitments would remain: the Monroe Doctrine, and our alliances with insular powers such as Japan, Britain and Australia...

...Ironically, they unwittingly returned to the positions that those of us who opposed World War II had abandoned in December 1941...

...While the conservatives, who have for years opposed pouring resources into "rat-holes," winked at each other knowingly, Senator Frank Church (D.-Id...

...With a surgeon's scalpel, he opened up American 20th-century diplomacy and found it to be suffering from a pervasive malignancy: moralism-or, in his precise formulation, "the legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems...

...No longer are we to be "the watchmen on the walls of world freedom," as John F. Kennedy viewed our role, or the advocates of a universal "Great Society," which Lyndon B. Johnson saw as a legitimate American aspiration...

...The young generation, never having seen at first hand the enormities of totalitarianism, simply defected...

...Church does not want to give funds to undemocratic regimes, the conservatives do not want to give money to anybody, but pragmatically there is full agreement: no money...

...The conservative case for an essentially isolationist foreign policy rests on the proposition that remarkably few things could happen in this world which would vitally affect our national interests...

...our military effectiveness depended on airfields in Britain, Western Europe, Libya, etc...

...thus, he went on, "the great misfortune of the West, I suspect, was not Hitler but the weakness of German society which made possible his triumph...

...The icbm and Polaris submarine have rendered the rest of the world militarily expendable...

...As the chief theoretician of containment, he believed that dealing with the Soviets was a task for foreign service officers and other gentlemen, not for impassioned crusaders...

...This policy of disengagement can, of course, be wrapped in high rhetoric...

...I'll tell you what you do...

...It could be a resolution by Americans for Democratic Action or an editorial in the Christian Century...

...If one extracts moralism as a basic component of foreign policy, the conservative position is impregnable...

...This world view necessitates a spectator role-except where vital interests are at stake, say, in Latin America...

...The conservative justification for isolationism-that the United States can manage very nicely no matter what happens at most places in the world-is coldly realistic...

...The conservatives are further correct in their assessment that advances in military technology have made isolationism (or disengagement, for those who choke on a word) functional for the United States...

...Whether Communists or non-Communists in Vietnam...

...Joseph Kraft put this sentiment in its classic form in his May 29, 1967, syndicated column when he pointed out that in Vietnam and the Middle East no "American vital interests are at stake...

...Back in 1951, he presented the essence of his position in a small tour de force, American Diplomacy...

...Or of a President who announces that we are the "watchmen on the walls of world freedom...

...Had we been over a long period of time more circumspect in our attitudes toward the Japanese, more considerate of the requirements of their position," Kennan wrote, "there was a possibility that the course of events might have been altered...

...Our continental fortress is only vulnerable to the Soviet Union, but for 25 years the USSR has been hoping the U.S...

...It is an argument with great intrinsic appeal to the American people-who, after all, did not go to war with Nazi Germany until Adolf Hitler declared war on the U.S...

...This is obviously a powerful argument, but are its premises valid...

...We don't need "them"-the Thais, the Vietnamese, the Germans, the Indians, the Israelis...

...Therefore we should disengage behind, in Walter Lipp-mann's phrase, "blue water...

...here, as elsewhere, the New Left provides conservative advance men...

...The appalling reality of modern totalitarianism muffled this liberal isolationist theme in the decade following World War II...

...What emerged from the practice of containment was an alliance between those who thought that checking Communist power was a vital American interest (conservatives), and others who believed that the United States was morally obligated to oppose totalitarianism (liberals...

...In reality, he observed, we cannot shape the world to our ideals, we cannot alter history...

...President Nixon, for example, did a masterful job of justifying to Congress the demolition of the Alliance for Progress, explaining that only innate modesty has led us to halt our attempts to shape the Latin American future...

...If we settled for the Western Hemisphere, Britain and Western Europe, Japan and Australia, and abandoned moralism (that is, the Cold War), the sources of conflict with Russia would presumably vanish: The two superpowers would go about their business in their own bailiwicks...