Cruising American Style
GOODMAN, WALTER
Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Cruising American Styb Since I was not having much luck settling the Iranian crisis last month, I took a cruise to the Caribbean. The weather was good, and so was the food,...
...If only the tourists would stay at home, if only multinational corporations were barred, if only the natives of these lovely lands could be left on their own to enjoy the unpolluted beauty of sun and surf and sky and starvation in their inimitable ways, both nationalists and ecologists would be gratified...
...Such are the rules of the game post-Vietnam, post-Mossadegh, post-Allende...
...Yet can the West's notions of political freedom thrive or survive even on home soil as the world's economic power and political influence shift to the most benighted regimes extant...
...But history teaches that the powerful do not readily relinquish power or permit it to be stripped from them...
...the blood to support the comforts of the rich have generally come from the sons of the poor...
...Given the job of picking and choosing among tyrants, crooks and bumb-lers, this country finds itself in an awkward position...
...A minitakeover of the regime in one of the islands in the St...
...And what effects will that have on other shaky regimes...
...The record is familiar and appalling...
...With what consequences...
...For there I was, sailing in a middle class version of luxury into a nook of the Third World, with its own painful history of colonialism, its own humiliating remnants of Western rule, its own discontents...
...One of the lessons of Vietnam, not so often cited, is that a country where public opinion counts is at a disadvantage in geopolitical hanky panky...
...Lacking the resources or the skills to make their economies work, their rulers or bosses rent themselves out to new patrons for military or economic assistance or bribes in exchange for who knows what unwritten favors...
...We were glad to note that the lifeboats were ready and accommodating...
...Having paid off despots who suited our purposes, we must now contend with despots who do not suit them at all...
...History, which is kind to no country, turns out to be most particularly unkind to the powerful countries who wrote it...
...The islands have much in common— all are beautifully situated, all are poor...
...Will the United States, in acknowledgement of yesterday's wrongs, in deference to today's proprieties, continue to watch its economic interests and its political values being buffeted through much of the world and make no effective response...
...How much abuse and disappointment will the citizenry endure before it demands that we resort to the force of which we are so famously capable...
...The weather was good, and so was the food, but Iran would not go away even during those 10 days...
...The consequences of a principle that permits Washington to undermine a repressive ruler who throws in his lot with this country, but bars it from injuring repressive rulers who hate us are ordained...
...As we were about to dock in Puerto Rico, American servicemen were killed...
...Musclebound Americans Such are the unoriginal reflections that passed through my drowsy head as I lay toward the stern of the ship accumulating a tan and watching enough garbage being dumped daily to feed several score Antiguan families...
...Let's create a Rapid Deployment Force...
...When we got to Antigua, the papers were reporting on the results of an election in which all the parties seemed to have been named People's or Labor or Progressive...
...Why then, demand that our leaders use their vaunted power to punish someone somewhere if only to vent our frustrations...
...As our cruise ship sailed from port to port, we passengers could make believe that we were welcome guests on the islands that received our dollars and bodies...
...The sorriest bequest of the West to its former colonies has been the failure to advance the principles of self-government that are the pride of Western society...
...we can undermine them...
...We have also discovered that efforts to convey some variation of Western democracy to deprived nations are not always rhapsodically received...
...As things now stand, America's position as premier defender of the West is not comfortable...
...And having acknowledged that common truth, what then for us repentant North Americans...
...Whatever pretensions may have existed in this country to economic hegemony over the globe have been stifled —and that assuredly is to the good...
...Would it mean making special deals with the Khomeinis and Quad-dafis of the world...
...Are prices getting higher...
...We may be sure that given their heavy-handed approach toward clients like Afghanistan, they will in time bring morale among their allies in the Third World to the level that prevails in Eastern Europe...
...we can withdraw assistance...
...Are the Iranians acting up...
...Soviet Muscb For the Soviet Union the situation holds promise, since during the great centuries of colonialism the Russians were in no position to do as much colonizing as the British or French or Spanish or Portuguese or Dutch...
...What blacks and Indians suffered in our own land is little different from what non-whites suffered in many other lands at the mercy of other representatives of civilization...
...Editorial pages and aspiring candidates are getting shrill...
...Americans still tour the world in comfort, even while the sense of power is being drained from us...
...Would it mean dumping Israel...
...To speak of democratic government in the Third World is hilarious...
...Alas, they know us and our cousins the West Europeans only too well...
...There may be some indignity from some mob somewhere in the world to which America will respond with something more forceful than expressions of indignation at the United Nations...
...The general rule is tyranny, ineptitude, lethargy, corruption, perennials that can flourish in any ideological clime...
...In the Caribbean, the sun shone splendidly, the sea was placid...
...Under what circumstances...
...we can abet their overthrow...
...How much has the sum of liberty been increased by the change of regimes in Vietnam and Iran...
...Much of the Third World is in truth a welfare state...
...How much has the price of oil been decreased by our deference to the cartel...
...If the waters become too rough, the crew must respond...
...But for now they are in a position to enjoy the West's discomfiture and play the geopolitics of oil with, ahem, clean hands...
...So now they are in a position to garner the fruits of discontent on the cheap...
...We keep telling each other that we are pitiable giants...
...Even the seemingly placid waters of the Caribbean can give a ship's crew trouble as it maneuvers close to shore...
...But many of us could not avoid reflecting that smiles may be dollar-deep and that even the smoothest waters have their currents...
...No democracy is without its repressive forces, the would-be jailers, book burners, skull-bashers...
...There may be a limit to what the West will endure from the oil barons before it responds with something less mild than calls for conservation...
...The repercussions may be felt even in our own relatively secure land...
...To Deploy Force Rapidly where...
...And at least our captain knew where his ship was supposed to be heading...
...although there have been occasional outbursts of the fever, they have been quelled fairly easily, and the allegations of fascism rampant have been largely the products of rote rhetoric on the manic Left...
...But how much strain can a country like France or Italy endure before its anti-democratic elements, already prominent, make their move...
...What, after all, do the peoples of the Middle East or Africa or Latin America know of the Russians...
...For sea and surf, they meet the highest standards of the Sierra Club, marred only by the tourists who disturb the beaches with their bodies and throng the shops in search of bargains...
...Is oil getting scarcer...
...The reluctance among many of our putative allies to utter harsh words about the Iranians during the holding of the hostages may be taken as a measure and portent of their stamina should harder times come upon them...
...There is much to be said for the separation of churchmen and state...
...Why then, crack down on Iranian students...
...But once regimes are installed that are, for understandable reasons, not attached to Washington, we may not lift a finger to annoy them...
...Vincent's group required a dispatch of troops to keep the peace...
...The only multinationals that offend no regime's ideology are the munitions makers...
...There may be a point at which a threat to our interests or our values will compel us to act—yes, even beyond a cutback on grain exports...
...Would that mean taking Communists into a cabinet...
...Politicians of all stripes, feeling the chill of defeat, turn their faces toward the sun of power, seeking warmth where they can...
...And the present is scarcely more appealing than the past...
...These have been happily contained in this country and in Britain for a remarkable length of time...
...Dangerous shoals these...
...We can be fastidious and effective about unwholesome rulers who are attached to us...
...The Russians, suffering no such inhibitions, can prop up whatever brutes serve their purposes, even in such infelicitous terrain as Afghanistan, and attempt to knock over those who do not, with the assistance of surrogates like the Cubans...
...such plants need accommodating soil and patient nurturing...
...But then, he had been there before...
...The developing nations are lucky if they do not develop cancers like Idi Amin and the Emperor Bokassa...
...For what purposes...
...It is easier to deal with Brezhnev, who is calculating, than Khomeini, who is fervent...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 2
