The Two Faces of American Diplomacy

...Writers & Writing THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY BY BARRY GEWEN READING THE newspapers each day, one can easily conclude that American foreign policy is a sickly creature of circumstance, limping weakly from crisis to crisis with neither continuity nor direction John Lewis Gaddis' excellent and suggestive Strategies of Containment A Critical Appiaisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford, 432 pp , $25 00) is a useful corrective to this view Tracing the course of strategic thinking through six administrations, Gaddis reveals a remarkable consistency from Harry Truman to Gerald Ford Conceptually speaking, not much has happened in U S foreign policy since its outlines were established during the five years following World War II Dean Acheson was right in saying that he was "present at the creation " In his highly praised The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, Gaddis demonstrated outstanding powers of synthesis and exposition Those same talents are on display in this sequel to his 1972 work As an intellectual historian he is less a chronicler of events than an explicator of ideas, so anyone expecting a blow-by-blow narrative will be disappointed But Strategies of Containment presents the lineaments of American foreign policy lucidly and concisely, alternating chapters that set forth the policymakers' ideas with chapters that critically examine their implementation Altogether, Gaddis finds what he calls five "geopolitical codes of the postwar era"—containment, the formulations of "NSC-68", the Eisenhower-Dulles "New Look", Kennedy-Johnson's "flexible response", and detente Yet looming behind these apparent shifts are two founding and rival ar-chitects of the American edifice George F Kennan and Paul H Nitze defined the arena of discussion throughout the entire period, says Gaddis, and even now "debates over the future of containment tend to be little more than reruns of those between George Kennan and Paul Nitze three decades ago " As you read this, Nitze is heading the U S delegation negotiating with the Soviets on tactical nuclear weapons for the Reagan Administration, while Kennan has been speaking out as one of the most vocal critics of the White House's conduct of foreign affairs Plus ca change The men who inherited responsibility for guiding the nation in the postwar world after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death had to create whole, for FDR's legacy was a muddle He did not have a direction, only a priority—winning the War at the least cost in American lives—and as a result, the U S drifted uncertainly in its dealings with the Soviet Union until 1946 The signal for a change was Kennan's well-known "long telegram" of February 22, 1946, later popularized in his even more famous Mr X article published in the Summer 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs Kennan's was the strongest voice within the Truman government calling for a firm American stance against the Russians, and the doctrine of containment became the intellectual foundation for Washington's policies In Henry Kissinger's words, "George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history " Although Kennan's fundamental point about the impossibility of permanently resolving differences with the repressive Soviet regime is common knowledge, Gaddis goes beyond the two major documents to flesh out the full Kennan perspective with statements gleaned from his other writings of the period Most important among Kennan's views was his rejection of "universalism," his belief that the U S must concentrate on protecting only those areas vital to American interests "Kennan objected vigorously," Gaddis writes, "to the notion that the United States had to resist communism wherever it appeared ' Indeed, depending on the circumstances, Kennan was even willing to tolerate the expansion of communism Titoism, he believed, was a harbinger of things to come in the Communist world, and the U S would bewell advised to encourage what he considered to be an irreversible trend, the fragmentation of the Soviet empire through the development of independent Communist centers But a different reading of America's world role received articulation in 1950 when Truman, confronted with the explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb and the fall of China to the forces of Mao Zedong, called upon a special committee of State and Defense Department experts to draft acomprehen-sive statement on U S foreign policy That document was known as "NSC-68", the chairman of the committee was PaulH Nitze Whereas Kennan had argued for a "particulanst" approach focusing on specific interests, Nitze's committee declared "The assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere This "universalist" view required a dramatic expansion of America's military might if it was to be credible, a step, "NSC-68" advised, that could be accomplished with relatively little pain by the implementation of Keynesian economics "One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a higher standard of living " Kennan had been eager to draw limits to U S foreign policy goals, "NSC-68," with the help of John Maynard Keynes, seemed to offer policymakers near-limitless opportunities As Gaddis indicates, history would show that neither position was wholly adequate to the challenges America faced Kennan's notion of limits was put to the test and found wanting by the Korean War South Korea was not a vital American interest by anyone's standards, including Kennan's, yet not even he was ready to acquiesce to the North Korean invasion "If these developments," he wrote, "proceed in a way favorable to Soviet purposes and prestige, and unfavorable to our own, there will scarcely be any theater of the East-West conflict which will not be adversely affected thereby " The more open-ended ideas of "NSC-68" had to await the Kennedy-Johnson era for their test, Eisenhower was too much of a fiscal conservative to practice pump-priming No one except a Keynesian, it seemed, would engage in the kind of unbounded rhetoric Lyndon Johnson employed when he stated "We are the richest nation in the history ot the world Wecan al lord to spend whatever is needed to keep tins country safe and to keep our freedom secure Johnson's expansiveness led, of course, straight into Vietnam, where the President bumped up against the limits he had previously given little thought to Vietnam exhausted the country economically, militarily and politically It paved the wav, too, for the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente, which allowing lor some ambiguities, once again sought to plot a course based on "particulanst" national interests A year after Kissinger became Secretary of State, Kennan announced "Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has " Gaddis concludes Strategies of Containment with a brief description of the Carter policy—essentially a more confused version of Kissinger's detente in his view—and an attempt to draw some sort of lesson from his researches What he suggests, a blending that draws from the best of the Kennan and Nitze schools of containment, is easier said than done In fact, the dilemmas he so ably details may be inherent in any formulation of foreign policy Gaddis would have been wiser to end his fine study on an unresolved note, leaving others to search for solutions that simply may not exist THEY ARE, in any case, not to be found in Defending the West (Arlington House, 256 pp $14 95) by Winston Churchill II, the grandson of his namesake and a Conservative member ot Parliament This is a book of the "Wake up, America...

...The trouble with writing a book that tries to wake up America is that you usuallv sound about as thoughtful as an alarm clock...

...How much should be spent on defense...

...Where should the money come from...

...A less partisan conservative would have addressed these matters concisely, perhaps warning the President about the long-term danger of forcing the poor to pay lor the nation's rising military expenditures...

...and Britain) sort, carrying the message that the Soviet Union, armed with a master plan for global conquest, is actively preparing for war Limits are not very much on Churchill's mind Having written before the Israeli attack on the Osirak installation, Churchill is to be credited with considerable prescience in his remarks on the dangers of Iraq's nuclear program He is also quite blunt about the need tor the friends of the U S to bolster their own defense spending "For too long America's NATO allies, including the Europeans and the Canadians, have taken a free ride off the United States ' Churchill, however, is a partisan first, a thinker second He makes no bones about his likes ("Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party have a vision of Britain that is strong, tree and democratic", "The election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency of the United States offers the hope of a new beginning in international relations"), or his dislikes ("The election of Michael Foot is ample evidence of how far the rot has gone within the ranks of even the Parliamentary Labor Party") Nor is his predilection for rhetorical overkill calculated to persuade the unpersuaded "The seventies—the' Decade of Detente'—prov ed in reality to be the' Decade ol Appeasement '" Clearly, Churchill has little sympathy for the Kennan side of the argument, preferring political rodomontade to careful analysis But for this reason, Defending the West has almost no practical value even to its friends It has nothing to say, for instance, about the difficult questions now facing the White House...