The World in Disarray
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers &Wfriting THE WORLD IN DIARRAY by barry gewen books were pharmaceuticals, both Oscar Handlin's The Distortion of America (Atlantic-Little Brown, 165 pp., $10.95) and Jean-Jacques Servan...
...It may not be sufficient when the stage is less familiar and the regimes to be defended lack legitimacy or popular support...
...Let us, by all means, move in the direction he points to, but let us, by no means, expect the miracles he promises...
...Handlin is at his best in presenting the dismal effects of the decline...
...Yet Servan-Schreiber is no pessimist...
...His is a glowing picture with more than an ounceof truth to it...
...They would reduce dependence on oil...
...In a series of essays previously published in such magazines as the Atlantic, Commentary, American Scholar and The New Leader, which are now linked into ageneral argument, Oscar Handlin traces the 30-year decline in American power and will...
...No sections of The Distortion of America, however, should be read more fastidiously than the parts on Vietnam, for nowhere is Handlin's polemicizing more open to question...
...Herbert Marcuse meant far less to the war protestors than Bob Dylan or, for that matter, Bonnie and Clyde...
...So long as we remain alert to the occasional half-truths in their books, their warnings merit our attention...
...each is trying to sound an alarm, to prod people into action...
...Computers are undeniably a wave—if not the wave—of the future, and there is no gainsaying the wisdom of Servan-Schreiber' s approach to current problems, both his effort to find solutions on a global scale and his recognition that increased prosperity alone provides the basis for a lasting answer...
...Handlin even mishandles the origins of U.S...
...But in an odd flip-flop, Handlin declares collective security a dead doctrine, a conclusion that leaves him with nothing to offer as a future course...
...Today U.S...
...others who share his perspective have certainly done so...
...And when power becomes truth, even nuclear warfare, the unthinkable, becomes thinkable...
...Neither Handlin nor Servan-Schreiber is especially interested in providing a well-rounded analysis...
...Affairs are allowed to drift...
...Tunisiaand Libya...
...Uganda and Tanzania...
...Quite the opposite...
...Given the thrust of his arguments, one might have expected him to finish with a call for renewed faith in our traditional policies in order to face the present danger...
...l^.n a sense, Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber's The World Challenge picks up where Handlin leaves off...
...Can information so readily replace industry...
...Just about the only border in the region that has become easier to cross is the one between Egypt and Israel...
...Of the New Left Handlin states that it "easily transferred its loyalty from Stalin to his successors and from them to Mao or the Albanians," although, as an American historian, he should know that the '60s radicals took their name to distinguish themselves from the totalitarian sympathizers of the past, and that their sources lay more in the various strains of American populism than in any Marxist ideas imported from Europe...
...SerVan-Schrei-ber is too much the cheerleader, too quick to reassure where difficulties loom...
...it did not account for, but was symptomatic of, the general abandonment of hope in an international order—an abandonment that events in the 1960s and 1970s would amplify...
...A beggar-thy-neighbor policy of export subsidies and nontariff barriers can lead only to economic civil war...
...his concern is with the problems of the present, in particular America's relations with the Third World...
...But the glow on the picture soon disappears...
...Where Handlin falters isin hisexplanationof thisdisarray...
...His case was not critical...
...Handlin criticizes the Eichmann kidnapping as a violation of the right of asylum, stating: "The regrets are not for Eichmann but for the faded concept of governing law...
...The contents are useful only when absorbed with grains of salt...
...The implementation of the Taif Report," says Servan-Schreiber, "will launch the greatest challenge to the Western way of life since the Moslems hammered on the gates of Europe a thousand years ago...
...Yet such complaints miss the point...
...Walter Lippmann, with his disdain for liberal democracy, is singled out as a progenitor of this attitude, which grew stronger in the '60s and came to a head with the Vietnam War...
...Taking his cue from some Japanese business and government leaders—and with a nod toward Daniel Bell and Peter Drucker—he insists that the West can meet this challenge by transforming itself from an industrial society to an "information society" based on computerization...
...What began vaguely with FDR and became under Truman and Eisenhower a coherent policy based on collective security against aggression has degenerated in recent years, first into the Nixon-Kissinger pursuit of detente and then into mere helplessness and confusion...
...Notions of justice and common concern give way to brute force as a means of settling disputes...
...policymakers that Handlin sidesteps, including the ultimate question raised by the Kennans and Morgenthaus of whether the conflict was worth the candle...
...This rather shallow treatment of Vietnam casts doubt on Handlin's explanation for America's decline, permitting a much different reading of recent events: We lost our way following Vietnam not because of disgruntled intellectuals but because of a policy that was inappropriate to new realities...
...Libya and Egypt...
...Both authors leave themselves open to the criticisms of superficiality and one-sidedness...
...The UN becomes a propaganda palace...
...the Sudan and Ethiopia...
...They would benefit both the rich and poor nations...
...Those who have traveled into the bush before him could tell Servan-Schreiber of the frustrations, the mistakes, the corruptions, the thousand-and-one glitches that get in the way of good intentions in areas where flush toilets exist only in dreams...
...What Harold Hill was to boys' bands and George Gilder is to tax cuts, Servan-Schreiber is to computers...
...Many—perhaps the majority of—reputable commentators on the subject maintain that the Geneva accords assumed a unified Vietnam, and even those who challenge this assessment are obliged to acknowledge that the agreements, at the very least, were ambiguous on this point...
...The transition that he tells us is so historic can scarcely be as smoothly achieved or as cost-free as he would have us believe...
...Liberal democracies like Israel and Iceland have also been guilty of breaking the system's rules...
...The heart of his book is his message that computers could change the world...
...In this headlong rush toward anarchy, Handlin observes, the fault lies not only with the world's tyrannies, whose minions bomb, kidnap and assassinate regardless of national boundaries or international treaties...
...In the intervening time it has become unsafe or impossible to crossthe borders between Moroccoand Algeria...
...involvement in Southeast Asia when he declares that the 1954 Geneva settlement drew "across Vietnam a line separating two distinct, internationally recognized governments...
...Though an opec-Third World alliance is hardly the threat he imagines, assistance to the underdeveloped countries, especially the agricultural aid he recommends, is a matter of urgency, and the industrial nations would do well to heed his advice to avoid the zero-sum game of neomercantil-ism...
...The idea of collective security was adequate when the setting was Europe and the threat was overt aggression or covert subversion...
...Either way, the 1954 documents opened up a whole set of difficult issues for U.S...
...Anarchy rages...
...Surprisingly, Handlin appears in part to agree...
...Each country abjures a belief in international law to attend solely to its own interests...
...A more complex response seems called for...
...intellectuals (a distinctly odd choice of villain for a Harvard Professor and the author of over 25 books...
...The Distortion of America ends on a peculiarly empty, in fact, mournful note, with not a clue on where we should go from here...
...A personal substantiating note: Some 15 years ago I traveled across North Africa and then south into East Africa...
...The opec countries, he warns, may some day soon use their oil weapon to force a massive transfer of technology from the developed to the underdeveloped nations...
...He points his finger at a flabby liberalism that has been too successful for its own good, and at U.S...
...Is unemployment so easily manageable...
...These two volumes have a common topic, the decline of American influence in international affairs, and a common polemical style, one that sometimes sacrifices the complexities of reality to the simplicities of partisanship...
...As the idea of collective security under a red-white-and-blue umbrella wanes, disorder grows...
...They write as agitators, pamphleteers aware that American foreign policy is at a crossroads and that critical decisions await to be made...
...Such a trip could not be made today...
...Writers &Wfriting THE WORLD IN DIARRAY by barry gewen books were pharmaceuticals, both Oscar Handlin's The Distortion of America (Atlantic-Little Brown, 165 pp., $10.95) and Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber's The World Challenge'(Simon and Schuster, 307 pp., $ 14.95) would carry a label of caution for prospective consumers: "Take with care...
...The truth is not that simple...
...Kenya and Uganda...
...Moving through a world without standards or laws, Americans, like others, act like figures in a nightmare...
...Ethiopia and Kenya...
...Indeed, last year they drew up a blueprint for their demands at Taif, Saudi Arabia...
...And just how appropriate are computers to those primitive villages he wishes to revitalize, anyway...
...policymakers are despairingly uncertain and unclear about America's role, with the result that problems are papered over instead of faced...
...They would permit rapid development of the underdeveloped...
...Such thoughtful men as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau and Stanley Hoffmann are dismissed as having "linked policy to cost/benefits" and "assessed the results as they would the score of agame...
...The educated, according to Hand-lin, have succumbed to anti-Americanism and a fear of the masses rooted in misanthropy...
...Servan-Schrei-ber shows little interest in the past...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 16
