AMERICA IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION

...There is a growing feeling in some parts of the world of a new direction in American foreign policy...

...Thus, contrary to our own will and intentions, we sometimes find ourselves arrayed against the forces of political and social reform and on the side of reactionaries whose ideas and actions are an affront to our own democratic values...

...We delude ourselves when we suppose that our own Revolution has any real relevance to the profound social upheavals that are taking place today in Latin America and Asia and Africa...

...I am apprehensive that we are now at such a turning point in international relations...

...Our policies have been distorted again and again since the end of World War II by a tendency to confuse Communist ideology with Communist imperialism...

...ago people concerned with foreign policy were talking of Atlantic community and bridges to the east, of India's five-year plan and of land reform in Latin America...

...But they are no longer the principal focus of public and official interest...

...Thereafter the American people acquired wealth and power by the relatively peaceful habitation of an almost empty continent...

...We must recognize, as many Americans are not now recognizing, that Communist totalitarianism as practiced within Communist countries, though profoundly distasteful to us, is no more a threat to our security than the right-wing authoritarianism of Spain or South Africa...

...In fact, what Americans fear is not social reform but Communist aggression...

...A new emphasis in American foreign policy is apparent in our relations with Latin America as well as in our relations with the Communist countries...

...Because Russia was expansionist under Stalin and China is expansionist under Mao, we have inferred that all Communist regimes by their very nature are expansionist and that, therefore, they must be regarded as threats to our security regardless of how they actually behave...

...A recent expression of this altered emphasis was the so-called "Project Camelot," a study conducted by a research organization at the American University with funds provided by the Department of the Army...

...Difficult as it will be, we must apply the test of policy rather than ideology, and bear in mind that the Communist countries of Eastern Europe have had little to do with the war in Vietnam and that the Soviet Union itself has been restrained in support of its North Vietnamese ally...

...they are still being pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm and energy...

...A year or two J. W. FULBRIGHT is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...We are much closer to being the most truly unrevolutionary nation in the world...

...instead we are preoccupied with matters of military escalation and counter-insurgency in southeast Asia, with the unforeseen consequences of a military intervention in Latin America, with warnings and threats among the great powers...

...This is not and cannot be easy for us...

...Our own Revolution was a conservative one in the sense that it represented a successful effort by relatively free and prosperous people to recover traditional rights that had recently been infringed...

...In the coming months it will take a high order of statesmanship in Moscow and in Washington to save the two great powers from being drawn toward catastrophe...

...This ill-advised project purported to study the likelihood of insurgent movements developing in Chile and means of combating them...

...It would be a tragedy of enormous proportions if the United States, in fear of Communism, were to allow the Communists to make themselves the champions of nationalism and social reform throughout the world...

...We delude ourselves further if we suppose that the forces of change in the emerging nations are likely to be consummated everywhere without violence and profound social dislocation...

...There are only great numbers of people with limited resources and unlimited needs...

...there is no promised land in Pakistan or Egypt...

...On the other hand the campuses are inhabited by proliferating institutes and centers with awe-inspiring names which use vast government contract funds to produce ponderous studies of "insurgency" and "counter-insurgency"—studies which, behind their opaque language, look very much like efforts to develop "scientific" techniques for the anticipation and prevention of revolutions, without regard for the possibility that some revolutions may be justified or even desirable...

...We are rich and satisfied in a world of desperate poverty and human degradation...

...It would be a signal service to the countries involved and to the national interests of the United States if the intellectual resources devoted to these dubious "studies" of insurgency and counter-insurgency were diverted to the more constructive projects of the Alliance for Progress—projects of social and economic reform which offer the only real hope of avoiding violent revolution...

...Looking beyond the war in southeast Asia, it would seem to be time for us to re-evaluate the policy toward China which has proved so unsatisfactory over the past decade...

...It is the latter which threatens us, just as German and Japanese imperialism threatened us twenty-five years ago...

...In their concern with matters of security, some of our officials seem to have forgotten that virtually all reform movements attract some Communist support, that there is an important difference between Communist support and Communist control of a political movement, that it is quite possible to compete with the Communists for influence in a reform movement rather than abandon it to them, and, most important of all, that in the long run economic development and social justice are the only reliable security against Communist subversion...

...This is not a theory but an inference from experience...

...These are total revolutions, like the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and not like the American Revolution of 1776...

...On the one hand students and professors conduct marches and teach-ins to protest the war in Vietnam...

...They have come awake in the Twentieth Century and they are making revolutions...

...We are required by our interests and our ideals to understand things of which we have little experience and to accept and support profound social change, sometimes by means that are contrary to our traditions and our strong preferences...

...The point that we must grasp about our own experience is its uniqueness...

...The spirit of crusading anti-Communism, which poisoned our politics in the early Fifties, is once again on the rise, threatening to undermine the hard-won gains of the past decade toward better East-West relations...

...Whether our own domestic values are to be conserved in the world or are to be swept away in a tide of violent upheaval is likely to be determined by America's own ability and willingness to support social revolution...

...Louis Bicentennial...

...It is felt that after a period of sympathy and support for political and social reform in the emerging nations the United States has set itself against these forces and has made itself the champion of the militarists, reactionaries, and privileged minorities...

...Our interests and our ideals require us not to abandon the field in exaggerated fear of Communism and its power, but to compete with the Communists as vigorously as we can in the advancement of the worldwide aspiration to national dignity and social justice...

...At the same time, in addition to repeating our willingness to negotiate an end to the Vietnamese war, we might also begin to indicate what we would consider honorable terms for ending the war...

...We must bear these facts in mind and we must act on them...

...We are not hearing much about the Alliance for Progress these days, although it was reported prior to the Dominican crisis to be doing quite well...

...We are not, as we proclaim in Fourth of July speeches, the "most truly revolutionary nation in the world...

...We are threatened with a situation somewhat like that of 1914, when the great powers of Europe, largely to prove their loyalty to weak and irresponsible dependent states, allowed themselves to be drawn into a conflict that none of them really desired...

...The social revolutions of Twentieth Century Latin America and Asia and Africa are not sober efforts to recover traditional rights but angry movements by people who have always been poor to acquire the national dignity and social justice that they have never known...

...We, an unrevolutionary nation, are required to make ourselves the friends and supporters of fundamental change, with or without revolution...

...Our government remains concerned with both social reform and security, but in recent months, partly because of the influence on our thinking of the war in Vietnam, there has been a marked shift in emphasis...

...It is not an easy thing for a nation like the United States to associate itself with revolutionary change, but neither is it impossible, and a great deal depends upon our doing so...

...We can alleviate the strains on East-West relations by negotiating at Geneva for an underground nuclear test ban and a nuclear non-proliferation agreement and by expanding our commercial and cultural relations with those Communist countries such as Rumania that demonstrate a desire to pursue independent foreign policies...

...There are no empty and fertile plains waiting for cultivation in India...

...None of these ideas has been abandoned...

...The aspiration to national dignity and social justice is the most powerful force in the world today...

...This view of American policy is substantially inaccurate, but people act not on objective truth but on what they believe to be true...

...Our prospects for avoiding a third world war depend largely on our willingness to distinguish between ideology and policy, and to act toward Communist countries according to how they act toward us...

...I fear that we may be moving from a time of adjustment and accommodation to a time of tension and conflict, from a time of international community building to one of chauvinism and militant nationalism, from a time of peaceful civilian programs for the advancement of human welfare to a time of armed might for the suppression of aggression, subversion, or revolutions...

...Nowhere is the new atmosphere more in evidence than in the nation's universities...

...Happily, "Project Camelot" was promptly canceled but there are indications that similar projects are planned for other countries...

...Instead United States officials seem to be preoccupied with the danger of Communist infiltration of reform movements in Latin America and accordingly are showing more interest in counter-insurgency techniques than in housing and road building and land and tax reform...

...Unless both sides are able to resist mounting pressures for expanding the Vietnamese war, the Soviet Union and the United States may be drawn into the direct confrontation that both want most fervently to avoid...

...Somehow the term "counter-insurgency," of which we hear so much, sounds very much like "counter-revolution...

...The critical question for the months ahead is whether it will be possible to limit the effects of the war in Vietnam or whether it is going to undermine past achievements in East-West relations and draw the great powers into a new round of conflict...

...Unless we act on this inference and make the clearest possible distinction between the ideology and the actual behavior of Communist states, war is virtually certain to result...

...This article originally appeared in "Challenge and Choices," a special supplement of the St...

...The aims and ideals of these movements may be similar to those of the American Revolution but their nature and intensity are profoundly different...

...Since President Kennedy took office in 1961, the United States has been concerned both with economic development and social reform in Latin America, and with the need for security against Communist subversion...

...It is our misfortune that we have confused Communist imperialism with Communist ideology and Communist ideology with any reformist doctrine or movement that attracts Communist support...

...As any sensible observer might have anticipated, the Chilean government—and the United States ambassador in Santiago—took offense at this project, with its implicit connotations of counter-revolution and possible intervention...

...Change is in the air...

...Experience of the last twenty years shows that some Communist regimes are aggressive and others are not and that all, including the Soviet Union, are subject to change...

...Louis Post-Dispatch that commemorated the St...

...Our policy makers face the task of resisting pressures that are certain to mount while the war continues for an undiscriminating "tough" policy toward all Communist countries...

...For a time we were moving toward doing so, but in recent months we appear to be moving in a different direction...