Dangerous Course

...More specifically it arose from the conflict between Russia's demand for security on her western border, partially satisfied after 1945 by her control of the East European nations, and America's traditional Open Door policy, which envisioned a world of no spheres of influence, no discriminatory tariffs or regional trading blocs— a world in which American capital and commerce could move freely...

...This policy was underlain by the assumption that American actions abroad responded not primarily to what other nations did, but to America's own domestic needs, especially its economic needs...

...Our safest guide to what we do abroad is always what we do at home...

...in short, it must create a world economic community that would permit peace and stability without undue reliance on military might...

...Unfortunately, the Open Door policy failed to break down Russia's Iron Curtain, and after two years of trying to do so by peaceful economic pressures, the Truman Administration switched to military force...

...Several recent books have sharply challenged generally accepted interpretations, and 45 more such books can be expected as "New Left" historians and political scientists leave the graduate schools in greater numbers and as the Vietnam war continues to alienate a sizable portion of the intellectual community...

...The Cold War, LaFeber argues, in somewhat the same manner as Williams, developed out of many decades of Russian-American distrust and fear...

...It was also assumed by American policymakers in 1945 that to prevent a recurrence of the economic nationalism of the 1920's, which helped cause the depression of the 1930's, which in turn led to World War II, the United States must use its vast economic power to insure the free flow of exports and imports...

...The overriding rule which I want to affirm is that our foreign policy must always be an extension of our domestic policy," he announced...

...With few exceptions, "realists," liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans accepted the globalism of American policy...

...The impact made by these critics, however, seemed negligible...

...LaFeber clearly makes a contribution to Cold War historiography...

...Nevertheless, his judgments about the past performance of American diplomacy, particularly the misuse of power, deserves a sympathetic hearing...

...The research has been extensive in both secondary and hitherto unavailable primary sources (the Dulles papers at Princeton yielded an especially rich harvest...

...As late as August, 1966, President Johnson was expressing the same assumptions that had governed decisions since 1945...

...They quarreled only over whether the means to implement the policy should be limited or massive...

...Moreover, he does not always substantiate his thesis that domestic events heavily influenced foreign policy...

...The inevitable result, as LaFeber effectively demonstrates, was a drastic loss of flexibility...

...Reviewed by Ralph Stone Ideas about the Cold War are changing more rapidly today than at any time in the past fifteen years...

...Two principal criticisms leveled by the revisionists are reflected in this new volume by Walter LaFeber: First, the United States must bear much of the blame for causing and prolonging the Cold War...

...What made this rigid posture so disastrous was that it coincided with a relaxation of the Soviet stand in Europe...

...One wishes, however, that LaFeber had not been limited to 85,000 words by the format (it is one of nine books in the diplomatic series, "America in Crisis...

...SEATO and the Eisenhower Doctrine, added to NATO, represented the scrapping of the Open Door in favor of a global Monroe Doctrine...

...LaFeber is most distressed by the paucity of fundamental questioning within the United States after 1950 of the nation's overall objectives...

...It is this attitude, LaFeber maintains, which must be challenged...

...LaFeber is a young Cornell historian who studied at Wisconsin under one of the early and still active revisionists, William Appleman Williams...

...Not until the mid-1960's, when the "New Left" on the one hand and moderates such as J. W. Fulbright on the other voiced doubts, did a genuine debate emerge over the uses to which American power should be put...

...second, and a corollary to the first, the United States has badly misused the enormous power at its disposal...

...Any hope for a detente rested on the formulation of imaginative new policies, not the tired repetition of cliches about Russian behavior that grew out of the immediate postwar period...

...By trying to analyze the domestic and foreign policies of both Russia and the United States, he sometimes is overly sketchy and cryptic...

...At the same time Washington officials began to accentuate the ideological character of the struggle—freedom versus Communism—and to accept almost unilateral responsibility for defense of the "free world...

...The early 1950's saw a widening as well as a hardening of the American response...

...The Korean War and charges by McCarthyites that the State Department was "soft" on Communism led to additional commitments in Asia and the Middle East...

...Until the United States recognizes that the world cannot be molded in its own image, until it realizes that military power is no solution for political and economic failures (in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, to cite the three most recent examples), it will continue on its present dangerous course...