OUR FOREIGN POLICY
Neumann, William L.
Our Foreign Policy IN DEFENSE OF THE NATIONAL INTEREST, by Hans J. Morgenthau. Alfred A. Knopf. 283 pp. $3.50. AMERICAN DIPLOMACY. 1900-1950, by George F. Kennan. University of Chicago Press. 146...
...He sees to date only one major failure of the "Master Plan," the loss of China, but even that loss he does not believe is permanent...
...Reexamining the past 50 years, they reach strikingly similar conclusions...
...146 pp...
...American diplomacy in Europe is judged with equal severity...
...Fischer is an honest optimist...
...II . Kennan describes the American error as the "legalistic-moralistic" approach while Morgenthau, an adept labeler, calls it "utopianism" and equates it with "Wilsonianism...
...Beginning with 1898, Kennan finds a long series of major errors in American policy...
...Paul H. Douglas as "an antidote to the subtle Machiavellianism" of the Kennan and Morgenthau books...
...The way was open, as the late Charles Beard said, to wage perpetual war in the interests of perpetual peace...
...It bears the imprimatur of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and has been acclaimed by Sen...
...Instead of trying to stop Hitler in the thirties, Kennan places greater emphasis on the failure of the victorious powers to create a Germany in which the Hitlers would have had no public support...
...As for World War II, Kennan believes that it was in good part lost before it was begun...
...Fischer's optimism extends also to the Far East...
...He relates in detail all the obstacles to the creation of a strong Atlantic Pact army, yet he believes that the Russians can be militarily stopped at the Rhine if not at the Elbe...
...Since it is in these articles that he laid down his "containment thesis," it is unfortunate that their author did not take additional time to subject this policy to the same critical analysis he gave its predecessors...
...MASTER PLAN U. S. A., by John Fischer...
...The volume by Prof...
...He points out that there is no alternative to war with the Soviet Union other than realistic negotiation, and he quotes with approval Churchill's statement in 1946 that it is "better to have a world divided than a world destroyed...
...Even more surprising is a belated acknowledgement of past mistakes by George Kennan, former director of the State Department's Planning Staff...
...Faced with the dilemma of guns or butter for the straining western European economy, he finds an answer in guns and butter...
...For the first century of this nation's existence American statesmen shaped diplomatic policy towards clearly understood ends with a high degree of success...
...he suggests it is only perverse justice that today we are carrying the burden of Japan's former responsibilities in that area...
...Kennan did not continue his lectures into the postwar period but offers his two Foreign Affairs articles of 1947 and 1951 as examples of "the application of the same intellectual approach to problems of the present day...
...Morgenthau finds in America's present policy much of the confusion of the pre-war decades...
...This tragic state of affairs is beginning to be grasped in academic circles whence have come the most skillful intellectual justifications for the policies which brought America to this plight...
...Fischer sets out to convince the common man that American foreign policy is "not as fouled up as it sometimes looks," but instead is the product of what he bravely calls America's "Master Plan" for victory in the world arena...
...Even the gap between Japan's growing population and limited resources can be breached by an answer for which a few of the State Department's "heavy-duty thinkers are searching hard...
...Douglas advises, does need to be read in conjunction with the Kennan and Morgenthau volumes, for it illustrates many of the fallacies against which they preach...
...Men like John Hay, Woodrow Wilson, and Cordell Hull were entranced by abstractions, by glittering generalities, based neither on experience nor on a grasp of the interests of other nations...
...2.75...
...Even the primary goal of all foreign policies, the strengthening of national security, has not been achieved...
...After taking part in two world wars and while fighting a costly "interim war," Americans are warned by their government to begin burrowing into the ground in order to survive a third world conflict which may be just around the corner...
...The participation of the Soviet Union on the side of Britain, although essential to military victory, meant paying a heavy price in the strengthening of Soviet power...
...Briefly stated their analysis is this: Successful foreign policies are not built upon abstractions...
...This plan is, of course, the Kennan-Acheson "containment" of the Russians behind a line "somewhere near the present borders of the Soviet Union...
...When there is a gap between national interest and national power, compromise is the only alternative to failure...
...The Fischer book, as Sen...
...American diplomats are advised to forget the notion that foreign policy is a struggle between virtue and vice with virtue bound to win, and Morgenthau offers the reminder that no nation's power is without limits within which all policies must be made...
...But for the past half century the ends of American policy have been confused and obscure while successes have been few and far between...
...He agrees that the present order in France, Italy, or Western Germany offers "little except misery to the average wage earner," but he believes that the Marshall Plan has succeeded...
...The war with Spain was launched without adequate reason and the spoils of that war, the acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, only burdened this country with additional problems...
...The results suggest that a similar retreat might be essential, periodically, for all policy-makers...
...is the question which the first two of these books try to answer...
...Hans J. Morgenthau of the University of Chicago is a welcome sign of growing enlightenment...
...They are the result of practical conceptions of national interest and involve realistic appraisals of the limits of national power...
...Harper and Brothers...
...When Wilson projected American moral standards into the realm of international relations, it was but a short step to an effort to convert with fire and sword all those who denied or deviated from these standards...
...Unlike some of the scholarship bred of the animosities of World War II, Kennan's reading of history does not give Germany the major blame for World War I, nor does he believe that Wilson's decision to take the United States into that conflict was a wise one...
...It was not the decisions of Teheran, Yalta, or Potsdam which betrayed American interests, but the nature of the war itself...
...Since 1900, at least, American policy makers have ignored these principles...
...Ill Kennan's book consists of a series of lectures growing out of a year of retirement from Washington's daily press of business and represents his effort to re-evaluate policy in the light of American history...
...The result has been a will-o'-the-wisp pursuit which has cost the lives of thousands of Americans to little avail...
...253 pp...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann W'HAT went wrong with American foreign policy...
...Abstract principles have had value, Morgenthau believes, in marshalling public opinion behind wars and warlike policies, but in turn they have resulted in the loss of the peace...
...John Hay's Open Door notes represented an antiquated British policy which had no practical effect but to commit the United States to a moralistic policy in the Far East which led to the war with Japan...
...For this he blames a small group of expansionists led by Theodore Roosevelt who "simply liked the smell of empire...
...Kennan recognizes the failure of American diplomacy in not acknowledging the vital interests of Japan on the continent of Asia...
...John Fischer's book is of a different character...
...Such optimism may be reassuring, particularly when it skims past the prospect of atomic warfare and of America's limited resources...
...Tallying up the results of the two_ world wars, Kennan says, "in terms of their ostensible objective, you find that if there has been any gain at all, it is pretty hard to discern...
Vol. 15 • December 1951 • No. 12
