THE FATAL OBSESSION IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

...After all, this outburst of resentment and fury was directed at something besides Nixon as a person...

...The Soviet Union was behind it...

...I cannot believe that the Russians are any more capable than any other people...

...That is a hope which we all share, but it is only a hope...

...For this particular policy, the Congress must bear a large part of the responsibility...

...Once again, the same apathetic inertia spread from the government to the people...

...in this area regarded as safe, above all others, a symbolic explosion occurred no less startling in its impact on the nation than the first Sputnik...

...Before this equipment rusts, belore these supplies are exhausted, I am afraid that we are in for many other unpleasant shocks on the model of Iraq, from one end of the globe to the other...

...Now, I am not averse to these studious pursuits...

...I am told that even now leaders of the Administration go to bed with tracts from the Marxist litany in order better to understand their adversaries...

...in effect, that we did not become sufficiently involved with the Nationalist government to sustain it...

...Military aid has been on the most lavish scale...

...Can we live with Arab unity, or can we not...

...We can decry the Soviet Union's great influence in China, or we can look to ourselves for cutting off all our contacts with the Chinese people by emulating the habits of the ostrich...

...Look at the image of this country through the eyes of the rest of the world...

...There was a realization that others had labored while we had loafed...

...Nor is this sudden unexpected use of military aid in Iraq the first time that has happened...

...But the effect could largely be overcome by strong, astute, political leadership from the White House, which is in a position—if it has the will and the know-how—to create a more informed public opinion, to help its political friends, and to hurt its political enemies...

...I am afraid that the opposite may be the case—that in an urge to maintain the status quo in China we gave too much and became too deeply involved with a government which had failed to meet the demands of its people for change...

...We were looked upon from one end of the earth to the other as the great hope of mankind...

...I ask that we put it aside long enough to examine what it is we ourselves are doing to destroy the position this nation has occupied in the world since the end of the second great conflict...

...For years now we have taken the easy way...

...There is a popular concept in this country that the chief trouble with our policies with respect to China was that we failed to give sufficient military and other aid in sufficient time...

...That is why I urge that we put aside now this blinder, this comforting belief that the Soviet Union is the sole source of our troubles...

...We are now looking squarely into the abyss of war, a war which we do not seek and which can only have the most catastrophic consequences for all humanity...

...It is based in part on a false conception of our real, long-term national interests and in part on an erroneous appraisal of the state of the world in which we live...

...Worse, it reflects a dangerous apathy and a quite incomprehensible unwillingness to look facts in the face...

...We no longer have that margin...

...The Iraqi Army, which was the recipient of our arms, has thrown out the government which we regarded as the most friendly and most reliable of the Arab States in its adherence to the West...

...Recently events occurred in Latin America to remind us of the pre-cariousness of our position in the world...

...But the issue of peace or war is only one of our problems...

...If we go on as we are, soon—in the fashion of the cat on the hot tin roof—we shall be skipping from one crisis to another all over the globe unable to get our footing anywhere...

...It upset the basic asumption upon which our defense had rested since World War II—the assumption of our ability to maintain a substantial scientific and technical supremacy in this country...

...We can denounce the Soviet Union for seeking a foothold in the Middle East, or we can examine our own failure to develop policies which win the acceptance of the peoples of that region...

...It is a natural result of the fact that one branch of Congress must answer every two years to local con-stitutencies far removed from foreign contacts...

...And, as a corollary of this, would it not be wise to embargo the shipment of arms into the area...

...I can accept the obvious fact that they have worked harder at world domination by communism than we have for the spread of freedom...

...Where are we going in the Far East...

...It is time to ask ourselves some searching questions...

...Everything that goes wrong is laid at the door of communism...

...Should we not give careful and thorough consideration to a policy of neutralization of the area, with guaranties from all interested parties...

...We must abandon the cliches and reconsider all our assumptions...

...We may well be, as we already are in China and in the Soviet sphere, persona non grata in vast areas of Asia and Africa and Latin America, and even perhaps in Europe...

...Look at what has now happened in Iraq...

...It shows aid extended indiscriminately to governments which serve the needs of their peoples and alike to those which do not...

...How many more Americans must be killed by our own foolish gifts of weapons to shaky governments before we learn...

...I suspect the roots of this fearful clinging to the status quo go back at least to the time of the collapse of Nationalist China...

...If we are going to solve these problems we must stop thinking about them in terms of a stereotyped view of the world...

...Some of us recognized that for years this nation had wallowed in a kind of fool's paradise in jolly and supercilious comJ. W. FULBRIGHT, U.S...

...Those tragic events in China seem to have set a rigid pattern which has been followed almost unbrokenly even since...

...At best, we shall be up against the disaster of an isolation of this country from reasonable and essential intercourse with great areas of the world...

...It is time for the Administration and the Senate to embark on a complete reconsideration of American foreign policy...

...This, too, gave us cause to think...

...This was the wave of the future—not communism—and no power of Soviet propaganda was able to shake that almost universal conviction...

...We are face to face with new rulers of Iraq, who despite the hundreds of millions we have spent on intelligence groups, are unknown factors to us...

...Would it not be wise to revive the proposal, which has been tentatively advanced on several occasions, to create a regional development authority under the direction of Arab leaders primarily and drawing at least some of its funds from regional sources, that is, production or transportation of oil...

...And, in answering that question, we must hardheadedly distinguish between what are really vital national interests and what would be nice if we could have it...

...I am impelled, further, to consider the likelihood that they have been aided by the inadequacies of our own policies and even more specifically by the conduct of these policies...

...Its King, whom we had been given to understand was a good and progressive chap, is no more...

...This country emerged from World War II at an unprecedented pinnacle of world power and influence...

...We shall not even have time for another spell of apathy before we are face to face with unspeakable disaster, At worst, it will be the disaster of war, which presumably everything we have done in the past ten years has been designed to prevent...

...They ought not to be used, like a hot pad, as a comforting device to provide surcease from the more chilly business of examining our policies with a view to removing the weaknesses and inadequacies which the Communists are only too happy to exploit...

...How much of the equipment furnished to the Nationalist government of China was subsequently used by the Communists to kill Americans in Korea...

...Too often when peoples elsewhere have sought to assert their God-given rights against an intolerable status quo, we have appeared to be on the side of those who opposed the assertion of these rights...

...It is no answer to say we want to live at peace in a free, peaceful, and secure world...

...This article is adapted from Senator Fulbright's recent notable address in the Senate on U.S...

...Perhaps if we do this, we shall have a better understanding of why even now the trap is fast closing on us, and why we find ourselves being slowly snared between the prospect of a catastrophic war and a forced isolation from the rest of the world...

...Senator from Arkansas, is the second ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee...

...We awaken one morning and find strange hands in control of what we believed to be the most reliable of the Middle Eastern nations, so reliable that we had encouraged it to join in a friendly military pact...

...This, too, was a measure of how far we had fallen...

...The reformation was momentary...

...A fresh, new, uncommitted look should be taken at the mistaken policies we have been following, and which have led us into our present impasse...

...They are essential for stability and the growth of friendly relations with the nations of Asia and Africa and to a solution of the complex problems of the Far East...

...There was a realization that we had seriously neglected education...

...Here is this nation appearing before the world as an obstacle to change at the very time when the world is in a ferment of cataclysmic change...

...I suggest, however, that they ought not to be followed to the point of obsession...

...What a perfect formula for the evasion of reality and, I may add, what a futile formula...

...How many similar plots are being hatched in other armies which we are aiding...

...A man may fail many times, this saying goes, but he is not really a failure until he starts blaming others...

...Here we are, a nation that for decades prided itself on its revolutionary tradition, on its willingness to experiment, to abandon the outworn traditions of a bygone age and move on to new horizons...

...The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace—not so much because of what it has done but because of the excuses it has provided us for our own failures...

...We can bewail the fact that the Russians did their homework and launched the Sputnik, but we had better look to our own failure to place greater emphasis on scientific progress and intellectual achievement...

...A principal factor involved in this process is that in the fear of the deviltry of communism, we have cast ourselves indiscriminately in the role of the defender of the status quo throughout the world...

...Once again, for a brief time, we turned our attention to the serious business of what had gone wrong...

...There is an irony in this...

...I know that this Administration is not solely responsible for the corner into which we are being inexorably driven in our own relations with other nations...

...We can complain of Soviet efforts to undermine NATO, or we can ask ourselves why we have failed to give affirmative leadership to the free nations of the West...

...We have abandoned that course, only to find that now, increasingly, the rest of the world seeks isolation from us...

...Once again, Latin America receded from the front pages of the press to the last pages...

...We have found ourselves aligned with landlords who have exploited tillers of the soil and with militarists who have kept the people in line...

...I do not think much can be done about the first factor...

...We can berate the Soviet Union for attempting to enlarge its relations with Latin America, or we can look to ourselves for losing the benef icial intimacy which we once enjoyed with that part of the world...

...That great area is temporarily quiescent, but by no means peaceful...

...We can berate the Soviet Union for posing before the world as the defender of the ordinary man's vital interest in peace, or we can look to ourselves for our failure to give an intelligent leadership to mankind's hope for peace...

...But when it has been a question of exchanging students, of interchanging the best of cultural achievements between nations, there has been much rending of hair over economy and a parsimonious doling out of the shekels...

...It has taken this shock to bring our errant attention once again to the highly dangerous conditions extant in the world in which we live...

...We should put off no longer a complete reconsideration and reorientation of our foreign policy...

...Only the blindest of optimism would interpret our international position as a secure one...

...An aphorism I heard the other day has some pertinence in this connection...

...placency while elsewhere others of more serious bent of mind had worked...

...If there is a single factor which more than any other explains the predicament in which we now find ourselves, it is our readiness to use the specter of Soviet communism as a cloak for the failure of our own leadership...

...It shows aid eagerly and lavishly given to governments which profess their anti-com-munsim even though their peoples with valid reason might have been disenchanted with those governments which refuse to parrot anti-Communist lines but which, nevertheless, have deep roots in their own peoples...

...And I may add that I believe their job has become easier and easier as the conduct of these policies has become worse and worse...

...But, if we are their equals as men, and if the ideologies for which we bear witness are superior to theirs, then in heaven's name when are we going to stop taking refuge in this excuse that they are responsible for our difficulties...

...I need hardly recall that a decade later this conviction had disappeared in large areas of the world, and in many others it was gravely shaken...

...In this connection, we should determine to our own satisfaction the real relationship between pan-Arabism and communism...

...Does the fault lie in the diabolical genius of the Russians for spreading lies and having them believed, or does it lie in ourselves...

...It told us that there had grown up elsewhere in the world a capacity for scientific, intellectual, and technical achievements, which, if it had not already done so, would soon surpass our own...

...There we dangle, waiting and wondering what will come next...

...Let something go wrong— whether it be in China or Nigeria— and we have had a ready answer...

...the world from the specter of revolution...

...Time and again we have drifted until circumstances reached an intolerable state, and then we have rushed to the brink...

...yet they are essential to a peaceful solution of the Middle East situation...

...Look through the sorry record of the past ten years...

...This time we have even put one foot over the brink...

...For example, what, really, is our policy in the Middle East...

...Most of the world was with us...

...The Administration might well review the validity of the concept of the Bagdad Pact and of the Eisenhower Doctrine...

...The smug and apathetic tendencies of our leadership soon spread to the rest of the nation...

...Ever since the end of the Marshall Plan, when it has been a question of meeting the desperate needs of people elsewhere for economic and social progress, we have been pinch-penny in our approach...

...Perhaps it would be well to ask ourselves, Where will the shock come next...

...There,.in an area with which we had once enjoyed a most cordial, friendly, and intimate association...

...What does it show...

...We have, I think, been too generous with regard to military assistance and too niggardly with regard to economic and cultural matters...

...We had a margin of power and good will throughout the world which enabled us to put off the day of reckoning...

...The first question which we must ask ourselves is, why have we slipped...

...Even our erstwhile enemies were ostensibly not unfriendly...

...While we are asking questions about how the, United States got into the world predicament in which it now finds itself, it behooves us in Congress to take a look at our own part in the process...

...The launching of the first Sputnik shocked us into a momentary confrontation with reality...

...They are essential to a restoration of the sound neighborly relations which we once enjoyed with Latin America...

...When it has been a question of spending on anti-Communist propaganda through a blatant information program, tens of millions of dollars have been poured out, willingly and without much critical judgment...

...I do not see these characteristics...

...It is not at all impossible that the weapon with which the unfortunate young king was assassinated was provided with the best intentions, but with the utmost shortsightedness, under the military aid program...

...How long will our fleeting awareness last this time before it disappears...

...and second, of the lack of strong political leadership in the Administration...

...The present Vice President was spat upon and stoned...

...A few years back, a former Vice President had been greeted with almost hysterical approval in Latin America...

...Even more important, it is time to ask ourselves how we have gotten into this predicament...

...Think about it for a moment...

...Will we never learn...

...One thing is certain, if we go on as we are, more shocks await us in the not too distant future and in many parts of the world...

...We have on a grandiose scale provided peoples of the underdeveloped nations with the weapons of destructive warfare, and have been miserly in providing them weapons to wage war on their own poverty, economic ills, and internal weaknesses...

...We scarcely knew whether to take them to our bosom or send them to the same mental oblivion to which we have consigned the Chinese Communists in the naive belief that if we failed to acknowledge their existence, they would somehow go away...

...If that is the case, we had better will the world to them without further ado—and ourselves along with it...

...The assumption made by the Administration that Nasser is merely a tool of the Kremlin should be tested as to its validity...

...That event told us what many already knew, but what this government chose to ignore...

...If anybody in the Administration is giving serious, imaginative, uninhibited thought on a full-time basis -to these and many other similar questions which I could cite, I have so far been unable to discover it...

...For decades, we sought to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world...

...I doubt that the leadership itself knows...

...Before our remaining toeholds go, it is time that we stop to look at where we are...

...What had we done...

...But when it has been a question of aid for the military establishments of other countries, the hand has gone deep and unhesitatingly into the pockets of the American people...

...They are essential to the maintenance of the close alliance among the Western nations...

...If these policies are as worthless as I believe them to be, it is high time they be reconsidered and abandoned...

...My fear is that if we continue as we have been and are, we will lose so much ground diplomatically, politically, and economically that the question of a shooting war will really become irrelevant...

...Now, we will either look at ourselves, our policies, and our practices abroad with the closest scrutiny, or we will face the gravest of consequences...

...Equally troublesome—and a good deal more complicated—are the questions of what our long-term position in the world is going to be and of what specific kind of world we think would best serve our long-term interests...

...Nor is that all...

...I do not know where we are heading under the present leadership of this country which, when it is not weak and desultory, tends to be impetuous and arbitrary...

...While foreign policy in this country is basically a function of the executive branch of the government, Congress also has a share of the responsibility...

...This is a reflection, first, of the parochial attitude Congress frequently takes in regard to money matters...

...In deed as well as in word, we stood for peace, progress, and the international leadership of freedom...

...Are we to admit that we are, as men, less capable, less astute, less able than the Russians...

...I do not ascribe this particular weakness in our position to the present Administration...

...I suggest this is true of nations, too, and it is painfully deceptive of the U. S. government at this point in history...

...Once again, the soul-searching began and once again it did not last long...

...The exposed position we now occupy in that area is only one reflection of that trouble...

...It is putting it mildly to say that Congress has not always been wise in its foreign policy actions...

...Time and again we have put things off...

...We Americans conceived of our civilization as a movement not as a condition, as a voyage not as a harbor, as one noted historian put it...

...One of the key questions we must ask ourselves is: What do we want the world to look like five, ten, twenty-five years from now...

...We found an easy reassurance in the smug belief that only a relative handful of Latin Americans participated in the riots and that they were either Communists or Communist sympathizers...

...Yet there are competent people in private life throughout the country who are thinking about these questions, and who, I hope, are beginning to formulate some answers...

...For those who would still take comfort in the belief that all our difficulties arise from what they apparently regard as the super-human capabilities of the Russians, I can only say, what nonsense is this...

...This had happened in a country and under a system which was hostile to our own and to the freedom which we cherish...

...What is our policy...

...There are billions of dollars worth of arms and military supplies loose in the world as a result of this aid...

...We have already waited far too long...

...A year ago we had another reflection of it, when the Soviet Union launched the first of the Sputniks...

...it is not a policy...

...Too often, we have found ourselves aligned against those who would strike at tyranny or corruption...

...I suggest that some of the blame belongs closer to home...

...I do know that, unless there is a drastic, sweepHerblock in The Washington Post "Your Office Seems To Be On Fire" ing revision of our foreign policy and the execution of that policy, we are heading for far greater troubles than these in which we now find ourselves...

...Next morning, we find that our Marines have landed in Lebanon...

...Now it has happened again...

...The fact is that we are in trouble, very deep trouble, regardless of what happens next in the Middle East...

...This is particularly true in regard to appropriations...

...Further delay may prove disastrous...

...Frankly, I do not see anywhere on the horizon the will, the understanding, the initiative, or the imagination to bring about the revision which is so desperately needed in order to stop the drift to disaster...

...We cannot forever ignore 600 million people on the mainland of China, but what are we doing to make it possible to deal with them on the best terms possible...

...But today, this dynamic nation is shrinking in the eyes of...

...Is it Soviet propaganda which has been responsible for the change...

...There was a time, perhaps, when we could afford the use of the Communist crutch to excuse us from the disagreeable task of facing up to our own inadequacies...