More Than a Race to the Moon
Bowles, Chester
More Than a Race to the Moon by Chester Bowles This article is adapted from Mr. Bowles' absorbing new book, Ideas, People and Peace, to be published soon by Harpers. Formerly our ambassador to...
...America needs more than a sense of urgency, however...
...It was geared to the economic, political, and ideological realities of this dynamic era...
...It must be said that such a "peace," melancholy though we know it to be, is better than the specter of unilateral destruction or nuclear blackmail that faced us in the fall of 1957...
...Since 1953 the Soviet Union has even provided more capital than we have to assist the economic development of Asia and Africa, not including Soviet aid to China...
...What precisely is required of us...
...Our prodigious wartime efforts there were followed, not simply by defense measures against the possibility of a Soviet invasion, but by the Marshall Plan that laid the political and economic foundations for a new Europe, and by a NATO charter which looked beyond weapons, air bases, and ground forces to the human factors that alone can create an Atlantic Community based on something more lasting than a common fear...
...and invited thousands of young people from these awakening continents to come to America for study and training...
...We will only have restored the situation which Winston Churchill described as "peace by terror," a peace baldly based on the capacity of two nuclear giants, each to destroy the other, and on the hope that no reckless act in Moscow or Washington will inadvertently trigger a chain of events which could bring catastrophe to mankind...
...Today, they profess, however cynically, to champion anti-colonial revolutions, national independence, and even to offer such old-fashioned democratic promises as liberty, fraternity, and equality...
...reaffirmed the Good Neighbor Policy south of the Rio Grande...
...How is it, then, that we have allowed the prestige and influence which it gave us to be largely frittered away...
...A truly adequate defense program will deny any similar advantage to the Kremlin...
...Across the seas the effect of this dazzling Soviet achievement was even more profound...
...In the wake of the Sputniks and the frightening evidence of Soviet superiority in guided missiles, this in inevitable...
...In the last few years American foreign policy has failed, I believe on three counts: 1. It has failed to earn for us the respect and understanding of the people of the world...
...Yet in spite of our gigantic expenditure many observers were convinced that the balance of military power in the winter of 1958 was tilting toward Moscow...
...Were they witnessing at last the Decline of the West...
...Today we hold their loyalty not because they share with us a comGoal Beyond the Missile Race mon purpose or even a common fear, but because they know that their own privileged positions can be maintained only through American subsidies...
...upheld China's right to sit in the United Nations Security Council...
...The reason, I believe, is clear: In situation after situation we sacrificed economics, politics, and ideas to military expediency...
...Those who best understand America, however, saw the dramatic events in the autumn of 1957 not as an end but as a beginning...
...Our objective is a sound and lasting peace...
...But has civilization no greater destiny than to exist poised indefinitely on the brink of nuclear oblivion...
...When the war ended in 1945, America stood at the peak of her influence and power...
...Armed with nuclear warhead, the rocket which launched Sputnik could destroy New York or Chicago 18 minutes after the button was pushed in Moscow...
...Sputnik's impact on much of the world was magnified because it followed closely on the heels of the Little Rock conflict...
...But to assume that an adequate military defense is our end objective, is almost equally dangerous...
...Since the end of the Korean War Congress has appropriated the fabulous sum of $211 billion to create effective defense barriers against the expansive forces of world communism...
...it also reflects a shrewd and tactful understanding of how to deal most effectively with them...
...If life is to retain its meaning we must look far beyond the restoration of the military balance...
...In this broader perspective the challenge of the next decade takes shape...
...It was deeply rooted in the American tradition...
...The struggle between the forces of totalitarianism and those who support the dignity of man will not be determined by a rocket race to the moon...
...Although his successor, Joseph Stalin, blundered in his efforts to carry out Lenin's ideas, the more flexible Kremlin leadership that succeeded Stalin is unlikely to repeat these mistakes...
...The irony is that we have been unsuccessful on both counts...
...Someday they must find the way to bring fears and ambitions into balance...
...2. It has failed to develop the impregnable military defense to which we have largely devoted our resources and our energies...
...In Sputnik and Little Rock they saw the shock that was needed to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers, to replace our complacency with a new sense of proportion, of humility, of determination to be up and doing again...
...His other books include Tomorrow without Fear, Ambassador's Report, The New Dimensions of Peace, Africa's Challenge to America, and American Politics in a Revolutionary World.—The Editors October 5, 1957, will be remembered in history...
...What are the full dimensions of the challenge...
...If America becomes incapable of defending itself and those nations which associate themselves with her, we shall find ourselves living in a Soviet-dominated world sooner or later, and probably sooner...
...We found several, to be sure, but many of the agreements that we made there have placed us in a position of uneasy partnership with the upholders of a doomed and hated status quo...
...When we looked to these underdeveloped continents at all it was primarily to seek military allies...
...Ultimately, this accommodation must include step by step disarmament, world atomic control, military disengagement in Europe and elsewhere, rapidly expanding world development, and, finally, the strengthening of the United Nations into an organ of peace stronger than any vetoing power...
...The Soviet program which has been taking shape in Asia, Africa, and Latin America not only recognizes the decisive importance of these continents in tomorrow's world...
...For several years, with the support of a bipartisan foreign policy coalition in Congress, with bipartisan administration in the executive branch, and with the bipartisan backing of a substantial majority of the American people, that leadership was forthcoming...
...Bowles recently completed another journey through Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and Europe...
...One of several essential means to the securing of that end is an effective military balance...
...Millions so wondered, some of them bitter and exulting, but many more with a sense of hurt and tragedy...
...As late as April, 1955, my own report from India that the Soviet Union had offered to finance and build a large, modern steel mill there was ridiculed because such assistance was said to be "far beyond Russia's economic capicity...
...3. Consequently it has failed to further the prospects for a "just and lasting" peace...
...In the meantime the door should never be slammed on any proposal that promises to ease present tensions, however slightly, or to provide agreement on whatever isolated or peripheral issues it may be in our common interest to settle...
...In many key underdeveloped nations the Soviet Union has borrowed the very techniques which we originated, adapted them to their purposes, supported them with budgets far more generous than ours, and turned them against us...
...Knowing our capacity for creative action, they were confident that the result of this national awakening could be nothing but healthy...
...Were they watching the passing of the land of Jefferson and Lincoln from the position of power and respect which it had held for so long...
...The Soviet economic assistance program to Syria, negotiated in 1957, was larger than the current American aid program for the whole Middle East put together...
...Soviet loans on generous terms have been flowing into Afghanistan, India, Egypt, Syria, Burma, Indonesia, and elsewhere, and trade is being rapidly expanded with these and many other countries...
...From its exciting promise of an Atlantic Community NATO has shrunk to become an uncertain military alliance based precariously on the prevailing interpretation of the present danger...
...Simultaneously with our urgent defense efforts we must seek to create a new atmosphere in which we can begin to make the first tentative moves toward peace...
...His forthcoming book is based in part on those travels...
...Someday, therefore, the two nuclear giants must come to accept each other's right to live and to let live...
...As this is written our energies are largely focused on the scientific and military requirements...
...supported the independence of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Indonesia...
...Before October 5 almost no one had questioned America's industrial, military, and scientific superiority...
...In newsreels and photographs the colored two-thirds of the world who live in Asia and Africa had seen nine dignified young Negro Americans walking toward a public school through lines of jeering whites whose faces were distorted with racial hate...
...In view of the Soviet Union's scientific, industrial, and manpower capacity, America cannot possibly put herself in a position to demand diplomatic unconditional surrender at the negotiating table...
...In July, 1957, they invited some one hundred thousand students from over eighty countries to the mammoth World Youth Festival in Moscow...
...Forty years ago Lenin realized that the world society which for centuries had centered in Europe was doomed and that the new world which would ultimately take its place would largely be shaped by movements which had been generated elsewhere...
...In the meantime, the Communists have been busily at work in the villages, bazaars, and factories encouraging the discontent of the people against their right-wing governments, and associating us in the public mind with the money-lenders and absentee landowners who exploit them...
...Then suddenly there was Sputnik, ringing the earth, and millions began to ask whether Communism was not the winning side after all...
...From a secure military base we could now confidently proceed to rebuild our political fences throughout the world...
...This many-sided response to a many-sided challenge provided a fresh and imaginative start toward a new American relationship with a new kind of world...
...Formerly our ambassador to India, where he served with great distinction, Mr...
...If we are to achieve this new vision the time has come to examine our relations with the world with blunt new honesty and perspective...
...Above all, how can we achieve the urgently needed balance between military security and positive political and economic action for peace...
...In our proper pursuit of military security we needlessly allowed ourselves to drift out of touch with the people whose convictions, fears, and hopes, for better or for worse, will shape tomorrow's world...
...Is there no way of breaking out from this nuclear strait-jacket and striking out boldly along more creative and promising roads...
...Yet many American policy makers assumed that the Soviet Union was under such a heavy drain from its military program and its aid to China that it had little to offer the struggling economies of non-Communist Asia, Africa, and Latin America beyond rosy promises and an occasional one-shot program for publicity purposes...
...Instead of being an occasion for rejoicing at a brilliant scientific success, it was an occasion for fear...
...If our focus on military defense had enabled us to build an impregnable military position, we could at least be thankful for that...
...Where have we fallen down...
...How can America and her Atlantic Community associates meet this broader challenge...
...In its present cocky post-Sputnik mood, it is wishful thinking to expect the Soviet Union to negotiate broad-scale, enforcible agreements on our many differences...
...launched the Point Four economic development program...
...Ninety-eight per cent of our entire national security budget has gone directly or indirectly into this effort to meet our military objectives...
...We broke with our tradition of isolationism to lay the basis for a full-blown military, political, and economic partnership with Western Europe...
...Most of mankind looked to us for leadership, not simply in science and industry, but in their struggle for an increased measure of individual dignity and opportunity...
...On that day the Soviet Union, a nation which most Westerners had dismissed as industrially and scientifically backward, shot an earth satellite the weight of a good-sized man into outer space...
...In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where most of mankind lives and where the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism may ultimately be decided, our approach has been equally narrow...
...The military and scientific advantage which we had taken for granted had slipped away and a sense of uncertainty spread across America...
...Must the two camps glare everlastingly at each other across uneasy boundaries, breathing hate and destruction, waiting for an opportune time to strike...
...They have developed student exchanges to a point where thousands of Asians and Africans now study in Soviet universities...
...The long-term objective of American foreign policy is to remove the basis for this hope and to create the global conditions in which the essential accommodation may become possible...
...He saw that military and industrial power had their own strict limitations and that the decisive advantage would be held by those who understood the political, economic, and ideological forces which increasingly would shape the minds of men...
...As long as the Kremlin has reason to hope that the world will ultimately fall into its lap through European divisions, American mistakes, and its own alleged omnipotence, its leaders will be in no mood for the give and take on which a permanent peace must be based...
...Once we succeed in restoring the balance of military power, we will only be back where we were in 1956...
...it needs a new vision...
...The ultimate victory of Communism, he believed, would come through a revolutionary alliance between the Soviet Union and the "exploited peoples of Asia and Africa...
...In Asia, Africa, and Latin America we gave freedom to the Philippines...
...Borrowing further from our early initiative, the Communists have set up libraries in dozens of foreign cities and spent some twenty times as much as we to print millions of low-priced books in many languages...
...How can we regain the initiative...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
