Foreign Policy and the Next President
MORGENTHAU, HANS J.
FIVE CRITICAL PROBLEMS Foreign Policy and the Next President BY HANS J. MORGENTHAU Foreign policy is supposed to be an important concern in the current Presidential primary campaign. Assuming...
...On the other hand, our appreciation of the difficulties facing the Third World has been impaired by certain misconceptions deriving from our own anticolonial and liberal past that we have uncritically applied to the Third World...
...It has been injurious on two levels...
...The decline of the national morale that everyone complains about today cannot be attributed exclusively to Vietnam and Watergate...
...For better or, for worse, the American system of government stands or falls with the quality of the Chief Executive...
...Next, there is the matter of relations with our allies...
...The next White House occupant has to somehow extricate the United States from the blind alley it is now stuck in...
...This has called into question the viability of the Atlantic Alliance...
...In the abstract, almost everybody agrees that the destruction of our civilization is a virtual certainty if the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union is not brought under control...
...But what if they are included nevertheless...
...They were greeted by the candidates and most of public opinion not with rational rebuttals or expressions of support, but with attacks upon the Secretary's presumption to intervene in the nominating process...
...it has been rendered obsolete by the availability of atomic weapons...
...His opponent for the top spot on the Republican ticket has declared, "The truth is that this nation must trust less in the preemptive concessions we're granting the Soviet Union and more in the re-establishment of American superiority...
...It has been a stumbling block to our fully normalizing relations with China and to our reaping the maximum political benefits from the new three-cornered configuration involving Washington, Moscow and Peking...
...Close behind comes our relations with the Communist superpowers, the Soviet Union and China, and with the other nations controlled or threatened by Communism...
...While all the Democratic candidates have paid their respects to the plight of the Soviet Jews, only one of them has devoted a whole speech to dealing with other countries...
...This is a dilemma the next President is almost sure to face and should be thinking about...
...occasionally it has made matters worse...
...This brings us to the vital role of the President...
...Heading the list, of course, is the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in particular, and nuclear proliferation in general...
...It is futile, and can be pernicious, to hamstring the President with legal restraints in his conduct of foreign affairs...
...and presumably believe, about events beyond our shores, and the magnitude and complexity of the actual issues the victor will have to deal with, is truly stupendous...
...Through the authoritative words of Secretary Kissinger and State Department Counselor Helmut Son-nenfeldt, delivered at a meeting of American ambassadors held last December in London, the United States has expressed its opposition to having Communists share the seats of power in allied nations...
...Acquiescence to their entering the ruling circles would raise the specter of the Finlandization of Western Europe and the disintegration of NATO...
...In either case the Atlantic Alliance would be in jeopardy...
...The Alliance problem...
...The new President must be prepared to cope with the risks inherent in that contest and its effects on proliferation...
...Military containment, no matter how successful, would have become irrelevant, since Soviet power could establish itself firmly on the Western side of the 1945 line of military demarcation...
...in most cases it has been a waste of human and national resources...
...But Ronald Reagan's theme that America cannot be allowed to remain Number Two is obviously an appeal to jingoism rather than a program for a new foreign policy...
...The U.S...
...Nobody can speak with the same authority that he does, and nobody else can follow up what he has to say with the appropriate actions...
...More likely than not, these will be foreign governments acting directly or through native surrogates...
...They can only be settled either through a cooperative arrangement among several nations, or through a supranational effort subordinating individual interests to the authority of a supranational agency...
...The Chinese have given us a subtle yet clear signal of their feelings by inviting Nixon to Peking and thereby insulting the American government (imagine we had invited Liu Shao-ch'i or Nikita Khrushchev to Washington after their downfalls...
...The adjustment problem...
...It would be wiser and more useful to nominate and elect a President whose intellect and character at least carry the promise that he will understand and act upon the critical foreign policy issues facing the nation...
...Moreover, the uncontrolled spread of these weapons, Whose initial phase we are at present witnessing, is the organic byproduct of the uncontrolled nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...The contrast between the utter irrelevance of what they have to say, Hans J. Morgenthau, a frequent NL contributor, is University Professor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research...
...American opposition to second-level Communism has taken on special immediacy in Western Europe, where the Communist parties of most nations, and notably of Italy and France, are knocking at the doors of governments which for decades have pursued anti-Communist and pro-American policies...
...Even after one has made due allowance for the corrupting requirements of an election campaign, one is aghast at the political irresponsibility and timidity of our Presidential aspirants...
...They have intimated to us that if we treat the Taiwan government as though it were the government of China, they shall treat Richard Nixon as though he were still the President of the United States...
...Then, relations with the so-called Third World...
...That is to say, he has fumed the policy of containment, originally and successfully applied to Europe, into a universal principle of American foreign policy...
...Such thinking was applicable to conventional warfare...
...As a result, three issues in this area still have to be met...
...For the clash between a consistent U.S...
...The addresses delivered recently in San Francisco and Boston by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger constitute the only coherent, reasoned and politically responsible statements of United States policy thus far presented...
...In some cases our aid has improved the lot of the recipients...
...What the Third World seems headed for is not self-sufficient, sovereign governments, but a new colonialism, however disguised...
...Yet this awareness has stubbornly defied translation into political action, and the competition for more, bigger and better nuclear weapons is sure to have two major consequences: irresistible domestic political, military and economic pressures for the continuation of the arms race, and unbridled proliferation...
...Taiwan is one of them...
...The nuclear problem...
...For although the Soviet military expansion would still be contained by the nuclear power of the United States, the political pendulum could not fail to swing strongly in favor of the Soviet Union...
...inclination for the status quo and governments intent on maintaining it has had a particularly deleterious effect on our relations with the so-called Third World?the many former European colonies that are today, at least technically, sovereign nations...
...But we have continued to confront the minor Communist movements and governments—except for Yugoslavia—with uncompromising hostility...
...On the basis of what the candidates have said on the subject to date, though, this may well be a Utopian expectation...
...The next President could greatly damage the interests of the United States by remaining a captive of past prejudices and slogans and standing idly by or intervening ineffectively while the Third World exchanges the old colonialism for a new one...
...What we have not understood is that the main roots of the Third World's misery and degradation lie within its own societies, its own cultures and its own politics...
...The new Chief Executive will have to reflect upon the philosophic foundations, as well as the political and military implications of this position...
...Assuming this is so, the debate on the subject, if it can be called that, must be seen as a frightening symptom of the intellectual and moral decline of American democracy...
...This process must be stopped at its psychological roots...
...It is one of the earmarks of this age that some of the most important international issues can no longer be handled by the traditional nation-state acting in isolation...
...It will be incumbent upon a new President to make clear, at the minimum through the formulation of general guidelines, what the United States intends to do under certain circumstances and where it intends to stop...
...The Third-World problem...
...They proclaim not a new approach to diplomacy but, if I understand what I read correctly, popular participation in the conduct of foreign affairs...
...Constitutional and political tradition have made him the leader and teacher of the American people...
...The man moving into the White House in January 1977 will also be confronted by a number of issues none of his predecessors had to deal with, at any rate not so intensely...
...Consequently, in the name of stability we have supported status-quo groups and authoritarian regimes throughout the world...
...Third, the Secretary of State has stipulated that the United States will not countenance the extension of Communist rule through outside military intervention, especially on the part of the Soviet Union and Cuba...
...Continued opposition would risk encouraging a rapprochement between the Western European Communists and a Soviet Union eager to bring them back into the fold...
...Issues such as the use of the oceans and seabed, pollution, energy, the weather, and others will not respect national boundaries...
...These roots are impervious to foreign aid and can only be remedied by governments able and willing to put the Third World's house in order...
...We can no longer think in terms of superiority and inferiority, attack and defense, strategy and tactics, victory and defeat...
...The Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy has drastically altered our relations with the Communist superpowers, but it has not affected our position toward minor Communist governments and movements, or toward anti-Communist forces...
...policy of containment and a consistent Soviet policy of expansion carries within itself the seeds of a third world war...
...Second, it was a great achievement of the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy to have ideologically decontaminated our relations with the two leading Communist powers and put them on a businesslike basis...
...The man elected in November will have to come to grips with five interconnected foreign policy problems, each possessing its own cluster of subproblems...
...The President's personal contribution to the debate has been limited to banishing the word "detente" from his vocabulary and substituting for it "negotiations from strength...
...In many instances, the preservation or restoration of order depends on the ability and willingness of military regimes to intervene on behalf of order, and the United States has generally taken the side of these regimes...
...Finally, there are the adjustments we ourselves have to make in a rapidly changing world...
...We have come to believe, for example, that much of the misery and degradation so typical of life in the Third World is a result of what we have done or failed to do...
...it stems as well, indeed more, from the absence of Presidential explanation and assurance...
...On the one hand, the American commitment to stability is up a-gainst the fact that most of the Third World is in a prerevolution-ary or revolutionary, if not near-chaotic, stage...
...They shy away not only from a stand on, but from facing at all, the formidable issues that will determine the future, nay, the very existence of this nation...
...We have frequently accepted at face value, and sometimes even eagerly, the Third World's accusations of callousness and exploitation, and tried to atone for our alleged sins with foreign aid...
...The new President will have to persuade the country of the necessity and urgency of these supranational tasks, despite their running counter to the emotional and moral preferences and political practices of centuries...
...The Communist problem...
...No major newspaper appears to have published more than a few excerpts from that speeoh, and they are so vague as to be virtually incoherent...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
