A Decade of Disasters in Foreign Policy
Galbraith, John Kenneth
A Decade of Disasters in Foreign Policy by JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH John Kenneth Galhraith is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard, currently on leave in England at Cambridge...
...This was not an irresponsible choice: to ignore the domestic opposition was to risk losing initiative or office to men who wanted an even more dangerous policy...
...The only missing ingredients were capital and people with the special blessings of Providence...
...But their audience dwindles...
...the need of the CIA for the interest, personal drama, excitement, and outlet for money that go with its Laotian adventures...
...The survival of that bureaucracy depends on making policy on the wrong assumptions...
...Yet enough has changed in the last ten years so that Nixon's expressions as President on the Communist menace are both fewer and more pacific than were those of Kennedy...
...But there has also been change in the substance of world affairs...
...The Communist world is as relentlessly plural as the non-Communist world...
...The proper policy toward the Third World requires not only new doctrine but also elimination of the need for a large part of the military, intelligence, and civilian bureaucracy that conducts the present policy...
...It is hard to see now why so much tension developed in the 1950s and early 1960s over whether such countries would follow the Communist or non-Communist pattern of develop-merit...
...The difference to a population already dead is not decisive...
...Acting, where action is both impossible of effect and unnecessary, it has produced disaster...
...Relations with the Soviet Union, including the indirect encounters in the Middle East and Germany, include a terrible component of latent risk...
...There, economic organization or the capacity for such organization, industrial skills, technical competence, highly developed public administration and services already existed...
...True believers are still to be found in the more airless recesses of the Pentagon...
...It added to their confidence and resulting acquiescence that the bureaucratic case was always couched in the resonant Cold War platitudes which as experienced men they associated with sound policy...
...But this does not affect the need of an army for the occupation, prestige, promotions that go with active military operations...
...It follows that, although the broad rule of nonintervention and non-presence applies to all of the Third World, differing history will dictate a differing time schedule...
...Yet the war continues...
...That the difference is one thing in Europe or the United States and something quite different in the Congo, Vietnam, even Cuba, was well beyond their reach...
...The tendency of bureaucracy to find purpose in whatever it is doing is superbly revealed by the experience of the past decade in Vietnam...
...They rejoice in anything that seems to suggest a revival of the conflict...
...The SEATO Treaty need not be denounced—it is sufficient that the Asian members know that it is being allowed to wither on the vine...
...In poor rural societies they have only a rhetorical relevance...
...What remains to be recognized is that a shift in assumptions, from wrong to right, would produce better results...
...The area where our course most needs correction is not Western Europe or Japan...
...They do supply raw materials...
...Once it was asserted that vital American strategic interests were involved—that, quite literally, if we did not fight in the jungles of Vietnam we would soon be assaulted in the Philippines or even on the beaches of Hawaii...
...The Third World has been their and our foreign policy trap...
...No one much cared about who was to run the Treasury...
...Now, ten years later, one looks back on—seemingly—an uninterrupted series of disasters...
...Since Korea we have been learning and relearning the lesson that strategic air power is ineffective against primitive agriculture or men moving at night along jungle roads...
...It means that we no longer distinguish between governments that we like and those of which we disapprove...
...At the end of the decade, each was capable of destroying the other from five to fifteen times over...
...His books include The New Industrial State, The Affluent Society, and American Capitalism...
...Had it not been for the policy in these parts of the world, Lyndon Johnson would still be President of the United States, the wishes of his wife notwithstanding...
...Elsewhere, we have now learned in the hardest of schools, things are different...
...Now it is sound doctrine that the war caused the inflation of the latter 1960s that still frustrates good economic management...
...Still, the larger fact remains...
...An election was cited in support of the pretense...
...to friend and foe alike," President Kennedy said in his inaugural address, and no one doubted the power and not many the wisdom of the word...
...It means even more specifically that over the generality of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, military missions are withdrawn and military aid comes to an end...
...It mattered greatly who was to be the Secretary or Under Secretary or even an Assistant Secretary of State, although there were enough of the latter to form a small union...
...Control by Washington is exiguous...
...Two—The next lesson that we need to learn, or more precisely are relearh-ing, is that Communism and capitalism are concepts of practical significance only at an advanced stage in industrial development...
...This is much to be welcomed...
...Meanwhile, tension between the two superpowers has diminished in other respects...
...Even the liquidation of the Indochina disaster will take time—although, in principle, no more than is needed to negotiate an amnesty for those that have served us and to move the men to the ports and airports...
...But elsewhere as well, in Asia and Latin America and in lesser degree in Africa, the 1960s saw the deployment of a huge American military, counterinsurgency, intelligence, diplomatic, public information and aid establishment designed to influence potentially erring governments and people away from Communism...
...To global strategists, a relentlessly amateur calling which the United States nurtured in alarming numbers after World War II, it seemed important, accordingly, that ideological affiliation be not with Moscow but with Washington and lower Manhattan...
...It is incapable, on its own, of a drastic change of course...
...we do not need to do so...
...When the decade began, the United States and the U.S.S.R...
...It is greatly and promptly to contract our policy in Latin America, Africa, and Asia...
...Control by the Congress is for practical purposes nonexistent...
...Once it was held that we were saving the fledgling democracy of General Thieu and Marshal Ky...
...Indeed, one of the constraints on foreign policy in the future is that it must be of a nature that it is subject to political as distinct from bureaucratic control...
...The needed policy disestablishes this bureaucracy...
...Not wickedness but the dynamics of big organization is involved...
...Where, as in Vietnam and Laos, the frustration has been nearly total, the bureaucratic input has been all but infinite...
...The present policy sustains and empowers a large bureaucracy which reacts to its own needs...
...The lessons of the 1960s, as regards foreign policy, are, then, both specific and self-reinforcing...
...None of this, given the underlying circumstances, is altogether surprising...
...In our case, at least, self-doubt is a valuable antidote to evangelism—with its capacity both to offend and endanger...
...Bureaucratic momentum being the only reason for continuing the war, there is no case for a more gradual procedure...
...The Cold War panic led to a large delegation of power over the fearsome technology and clandestine maneuvering which seemed the only answer to the Communist menace...
...In consequence, men such as Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Allen Dulles and John McCone as heads of CIA, John J. McCloy and Dean Ach-eson as advisers-at-large, were strongly and even uniquely compliant with the bureaucratic view...
...Among the custodians of the current foreign policy cliche gathering for the ritual discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations, a suggestion along such lines induced a raised eyebrow...
...One—We need to learn, first of all, the limits on our power in the Third World...
...And over the 1960s, relations with the Communist countries improved both in the vision and in the reality...
...Although the impression was to the contrary, these statesmen had given little independent thought to foreign policy—it was their natural assumption that given their experience and high position in the community they already knew...
...But that vision has now dissolved...
...This World has no monopoly on peaceful behavior, occasional doctrine to the contrary notwithstanding...
...If from the Soviet Foreign Office anyone has recently been assigned to Ulan Bator, it has not been for his handling of relations with France, Germany, Britain, or the United States...
...It accepts only the lesson of the last decade, which is that our intervention does us no good and, for the people involved, can make everything much worse...
...Colonial power was exercised rather simply through a line of command which, in general, gave orders...
...Governments can be influenced, but where governments are weak and their power negligible, the power implicit in so influencing them is also predictably negligible...
...Yet not everything in these years went wrong...
...But it would be a mistake to picture bureaucratic need in terms of a too specific bureaucratic self-interest...
...This has had little effect on Air Force doctrine for it happens not to be what the Air Force needs to believe...
...In this World we cannot intervene, need not intervene, and we have intervened...
...Circumstances and politics have given us different and relentlessly hostile friends and clients in the Middle East—a problem area which I am deliberately passing over in this article...
...Richard Nixon in the 1950s spoke the lines of a militant Cold Warrior...
...It calls for special attention...
...None now say, though it was doctrine in the early 1960s, that our action in Vietnam is in response to a probe deliberately directed from Moscow against a weak point on the perimeter and to be resisted, accordingly, as a matter of global strategy...
...I do not, of course, suggest that a military and foreign policy bureaucracy, once launched on course, can never be diverted...
...Once there were the dominoes...
...and Dean Rusk would still be Secretary of State or, at a minimum, in honorable retirement as president of a college well on the Establishment side of the Mason-Dixon Line...
...Difficult problems remain between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...During his long tenure as Secretary of State, Dean Rusk was criticized for his conviction that foreign policy was subordinate to military convenience...
...Far better, one knows, to continue in error than to lower the prestige of a great nation (or its servants) by changing course and thus confessing the mistake...
...Now that contention is offered only as an exercise in irony...
...This is because the bureaucracy, the military and intelligence bureaucracy in particular, operates not in response to national need but in response to its own need, and carries a too passive Commander-in-Chief along with it...
...This is partly because of the nature of its task...
...And its conflict with sensible priority in resources use has become a cliche...
...China and the Soviet Union are much farther from coordinated action than France and the United States...
...This is a matter of the highest importance, one that explains the most basic tendencies of our foreign policy...
...The remedial action is also clear...
...Indeed, next only to the cities, foreign policy will be considered the prime disaster area of the American policy and it will be accorded much of the blame for the misuse of energies and resources that caused the trouble in urban ghettos and the alienation and eruption in the universities...
...The 1960s were particularly favorable to its exercise of in-ertial power...
...On the record too, the Communist powers are cautious—rather more cautious perhaps than the Government of the United States— about risking disaster in pursuit of an idea...
...For capital is not the missing ingredient...
...it was on this theme and its domestic repercussions that he founded his political career...
...Some have now become ludicrous...
...Diplomacy, like truth, is an early casualty of war...
...The Communist world is as relentlessly plural as the non-Communist world . . ." This autonomy is combined, in turn, with the tendency for any bureaucracy, military or civilian, in the absence of the strongest of leadership, to continue to do whatever it is doing...
...Bureaucracy can always continue to do what it is doing...
...But it was not here in the last decade that we stumbled...
...Remaining bases related to the defense of these areas are given up...
...In the late sum- mer of 1970 much energy was expended on keeping Marshal Ky from coming to Washington for a political rally lest he remind Americans of the repressive, obscene, and incompetent dictatorship with which they are aligned...
...Indonesia, North Korea, and above all China were where Soviet policy went off the rails...
...Following World War II in Western Europe we developed a Marshall Plan syndrome...
...The Third World consists, by definition, of poor rural societies—that is what undeveloped or underdeveloped countries are...
...and we cannot in any case have a policy that requires that much delegation to the CIA...
...The result was in dim contrast with the promise...
...broken windows, burned libraries, and more or less virulent anti-Americanism elsewhere in the world...
...the invasion of the Dominican Republic to abort a Communist revolution that had to be invented after the fact...
...It was not our relations with the Soviet Union that made our foreign policy in the 1960s the mess that we have come, not incorrectly, to consider it...
...Withdrawal from the Philippines and Korea will have to be negotiated...
...The possibility of struggle within and between nations and peoples remains...
...We were in luck, but success in a lottery is no argument for lotteries...
...It follows that whether such countries call themselves free, free enterprise, capitalist, socialist, or Communist has, at the lowest levels of development, only terminological significance...
...It is not easy to associate the prospect with the passive tendencies of President Nixon...
...That capitalism is only an issue if there is capitalism is a proposition not, in its essentials, difficult to grasp...
...over everything else, the brooding, frustrating, endlessly bloody, infinitely expensive, and now widely rejected involvement in Indochina...
...Foreign policy vis-a-vis the "Sino-Soviet bloc," as it was still called, was accordingly a facilitating instrument for a larger conflict...
...Few men in the executive branch remain in office long enough to have knowledge of the affairs of which, nominally, they are in charge...
...And this was the age of the Establishment in foreign policy —of the New York and Washington statesmen who had come to prominence in World War II, under the Marshall Plan, in the German occupation, and under John Foster Dulles...
...It would be optimistic to suggest that this control has yet been broken...
...So it has come /about that after all national purpose in Vietnam has dissolved, and this is extensively conceded, bureaucratic purpose and momentum still serve...
...That this is so will even be conceded...
...Legislators who must rely on such men for knowledge have even less...
...It is something for which one could hardly have hoped at the beginning of the decade...
...This is partly because such influence is disappointing in effect and the normal bureaucratic answer to frustration and noneffect is to get more money and more men and build a bigger organization...
...Dozens of other activities—military support to Latin American countries, staff services to SEATO and CENTO, bases in Spain, the radar watch in the Arctic, ABM, nuclear carriers, any number of Cold War intelligence and countersubversive activities—owe much or all of their existence to the same momentum...
...When these were supplied by the United States, the miracles predictably followed...
...And at least one of the successes of these years seems a good deal less compelling when one looks back on it...
...Again, the Third World...
...American withdrawal will not ensure good international behavior...
...Four lessons seem clear: Bureaucracy "is incapable, on its own, of a drastic change of course...
...and amusement replaces even nostalgia in what remains...
...It is not so...
...Thus it has come about that the superpower which seeks to intervene in the Third World remains the victim of the organizational, administrative, and technical vacuum which, after all, is what tends most to distinguish this World...
...Given this public framework, industrial, railroad, and modern agricultural development could be induced in reasonably predictable fashion if policy so prescribed...
...That guns could be had with butter was the not excessively novel formulation...
...But even here the typical observation concerns not their power as sources of such supply but rather their weakness as competitive hewers of wood in the markets of the industrially advanced countries...
...Our capital, our energy, our economic system, our idealism, our business statesmen, our special standing with a benign God, all combined to produce such capacity...
...This they obtained by creating a structure for colonial administration and having done so, they did not influence, they governed...
...It would be naive to imagine that these organizations will acquiesce easily in the change, however effectively they are proven in error and however ghastly the resulting experience...
...The strength of the nations of the Third World, in relation to the superpowers, lies in the absence of levers by which they can be controlled and the absence of power at the end of the levers...
...In the colonial era, European powers had a substantial influence on the inner life and development of the Third World countries...
...The comic opera affair at the Bay of Pigs...
...Decency has its claims...
...We now know, a few special cases such as Formosa and Israel apart, that the process of development is infinitely slow, that the ultimate organization of these societies is far too academic a question to influence the policy-making even of the most passionate ideologue...
...severe alienation throughout Latin America...
...Purpose is among the least of bureaucratic needs...
...Much of the work of our intelligence and military missions abroad is possible only because no one is aware of how little is obtained for the outlay involved...
...Now to cite the domino doctrine is to remind people that it was the war itself that tumbled the first domino (or most of it) in Cambodia...
...The course here urged does not mean that all will be well in the Third World...
...This accords immunity equally to effective intervention by the Communist powers and by the United States...
...But it is a mistake to look for complex reasons for the error when simpler ones avail...
...In recent months considerable movement along these lines has been implicit—though with an inconsistent commitment to earlier Cold War rhetoric—in the so-called Nixon Doctrine...
...Accordingly, introspection, and even thought, are held in low esteem in the diplomatic estate...
...Foreign policy, especially of the more belligerent sort, is regularly formulated with a view to rejoicing its author and audience with its therapeutic simplicity...
...We stumbled in the Third World...
...It seemed so in Europe after World War II...
...In the early months of the new Administration, numerous quite marvelous ideas were spawned for strengthening or improving or revising our overseas affairs...
...But the in-ertial dynamic of the bureaucracy is the major explanation of the disasters of the decade...
...I set great and particular store by the continuing importance of foreign aid...
...Our commercial relations, it is worth noting, will thus be freed from the incubus of suspicion that they reflect some larger imperial ambition...
...Now the suggestion that the Pentagon is pursuing the chimera of military victory in Vietnam provokes an indignant denial...
...Latin American, African, and Asian countries would soon be industrialized...
...Therewith they would become military powers...
...The national need can dissolve and become ludicrous as in the case of Vietnam...
...But if conflict with the Communist world was the great and inevitable fact, the Rusk view was at least consistent...
...One can only be certain that Soviet and Chinese efforts to dominate these countries will encounter the same obdurate circumstances as have we...
...And the process by which it ensures its continuity—in the case of the Pentagon, by which it prepares budgets, persuades the Bureau of the Budget, instructs its Congressional sycophants — is itself highly organized/ Thus the momentum...
...It was here—in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, in minor degree in the Congo, and most of all in Indochina—that the mistakes were made or the disasters occurred...
...So also a foreign politician...
...They will end accordingly in frustration not different from that of the United States in Vietnam or their own experience in Indonesia...
...That the great industrial societies have common requirements in planning, industrial discipline, and organization, and common disasters in environmental effects is at least being discussed...
...We cannot guide affairs in Laos...
...not even the defenders of the conflict affirm the original reasons for the venture...
...It means that henceforth the raison d'etre of aid and information programs is to assist economic development and inform countries as regards the United States, not to fight Communism...
...So also in all three continents do counterinsurgency, countersubversive, and intelligence operations...
...A government that is being seduced by a superpower wishes, at a minimum, to have the deed done in private...
...Where organizational, administrative, and technical capacity and skills are lacking—where, in short, there is no industrial base or experience—the economy does not respond to an infusion of capital...
...The assumptions being wrong, the results caused deep trouble...
...Retired Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs...
...Military missions, military advisers, active military formations in the more tragic instances, counterinsurgency teams, pacification teams, technical assistance teams, advisers on aid utilization, auditors and inspectors and other instruments against indigenous larceny, information officers, intelligence officers, spooks—the list extends indefinitely...
...Not distinguishing between good and bad governments, we recognize all...
...This is what must be done...
...This means specifically that we no longer stand guard against what is called Communism in these parts of the world...
...No one will argue, where Mr...
...In the case of Korea, withdrawal could be very slow...
...they try to warn a generation that does not share their wisdom...
...But first let me list what we must learn from our dealings with the Third World in the last decade...
...A Decade of Disasters in Foreign Policy by JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH John Kenneth Galhraith is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard, currently on leave in England at Cambridge University...
...There was to be an expanded and reorganized aid program, a Grand Design for Europe (subject to some uncertainty as to what that design might be), the Alliance for Progress, the "Kennedy Round," a Multilateral Force, the Peace Corps, counterinsur-gency, an expanded recognition of the role of the new Africa, and a dozen other enterprises which did not achieve the dignity of a decently notorious rejection...
...Doubtless there are improvements to be made in both places but the past has not been intolerable...
...We also trade with all...
...However, even brief reflection on the recent history of our relations with the Third World suggests that we have made policy on the basis of a startling succession of wrong assumptions...
...American foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s was made by men to whom a difference between capitalism and Communism was the only social truth to which they had access...
...Working indirectly by way of the hearts and mind* of a people requires a much more massive table of organization...
...This vision too has become comic...
...This view held that the United States could always work wonders in other countries...
...The prestige of the military and foreign policy establishment, following the successes of World War II and the Marshall Plan, was high— far higher than now...
...That alternatives to capitalism only become interesting after there is capitalism (and associated industrialization) was eloquently affirmed by Marx more than a century ago...
...But that is not my present intention...
...Without exception every reason originally offered for our intervention there has dissolved...
...Often there was even a measure of pride —tough-mindedness it was called—in rejecting such complications...
...On the visible evidence, this has been also true of the Soviet Union...
...The Editors The decade of the 1960s, in the absence of a massively successful revisionist exercise, will be counted a dismal period in American foreign policy...
...Foreign policy is a gentlemanly profession which sets much store by tradition and continuity, even in error...
...The terrible fact obtrudes...
...there is no industrial society to be controlled...
...The promise was bright—"Let the word go forth...
...No bilateral relationship that depends on or is associated with capacity for reciprocal destruction can be regarded with equanimity or considered stable...
...There is something more than a little wrong with a system that poses a choice between survival and domestic political compulsion...
...Three—Next, we must learn that although the inner life and development of the Third World is beyond the reach of the power of a superpower, and equally beyond its visible self-concern, the effort to influence that development brings into being a large civilian and military bureaucracy...
...If there were divisions within the Communist world, they were presumably on how best to pursue the revolution...
...Without public administration there can be no control...
...It means that in these countries we return to orthodox diplomatic relations and give the assistance in capital, technique, or volunteer manpower that an economically and technically advanced country finds morally rewarding or economically advantageous to render to its less equipped neighbors...
...Perhaps Khrushchev was coming through a bit too well...
...A bureaucracy defends, even with righteousness, the wrong assumptions if they are the ones on which it is operating...
...John F. Kennedy was at least moderately in the opposition camp...
...Diplomacy, like truth, is an early casualty of war...
...Even by the crudest power calculus, military or economic, such nations have no vital relation to the economic or strategic position of the developed countries...
...Where the pre-existing European ingredients of success are missing, the power to work miracles is, not surprisingly, nonexistent...
...He was Ambassador to India for two years under President Kennedy and has served as economic adviser to the National Defense Advisory Commission...
...Is this the real Uncle Sam...
...Galbraith originally prepared this article at the request of the editors of a new quarterly publication, Foreign Policy, but because in the author's view and ours his presentation advances a major analysis of foreign policy of great concern to progressive Americans, we are publishing it too...
...But secrecy is not the only protection from public scrutiny...
...That the NFL carries the banners of Vietnamese nationalism is now generally (if not quite universally) accepted...
...The missile crisis did not show the strength of our policy...
...Nixon is concerned, that he is responding to anything so simple as a change in conviction...
...Cold War diplomats solemnly contemplating the world over their martinis at the Metropolitan Club, still evoke the Communist conspiracy on which their fame and fortune were founded...
...The Cold War vision of Communism always owed much to men whose place in the American pantheon and whose self-confidence of outlook substantially exceeded their information...
...At the beginning of the decade, to accept coexistence with world Communism suggested a slightly defective moral stance...
...One must sympathize with those whose lives were predicated on the theory of a more unified and heroic Communism...
...One senses similar doubts in the Soviet Union...
...At the Bay of Pigs, in the Dominican Republic, in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand (as again in Cambodia), the bureaucracy showed its power to sweep the leadership into disaster and against all the counsels of common sense...
...Surveillance of Communists, or more active military operations to put down subversion, also requires public reticence...
...Secrecy is also occasioned by the intrinsically high failure rate in these operations...
...Such recognition does not come easily, as I shall presently argue...
...In the Cuban missile crisis President Kennedy had to balance the danger of blowing up the planet against the risk of political attack at home for appeasing the Communists...
...In the Johnson years it helped also to have a President who, though not lacking in either intelligence or will, was least experienced in the field of foreign policy and (from his Congressional experience) had also a habit of acquiescence on military matters...
...They are poor and rural however they describe themselves...
...Such a solution is no longer allowed...
...it showed the catastrophic visions and the resulting pressures to which it was subject...
...Once it was a defense of the war that it was a marginal exercise which the American economy could take in stride...
...Nor will it ensure greater reliance on collective reaction to attacks by one country on another, although that might be hoped...
...A more important factor is pure organizational momentum...
...The effort has required a large bureaucracy, military and civilian...
...By the time India, sub-Sahara Africa, and most of Central or South America are industrialized to anything approaching present Western European levels, even greater changes will have occurred in the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Innocents imagine that when they have shown that purpose has evaporated, function will end...
...When the decade began, the official vision of the Communist world was still that of a political monolith (the word was still much used) relentlessly bent on the destruction of what few were embarrassed to call the Free World...
...Although one guesses that the Soviets have seen the impracticality of socialism without previous preparation, one cannot guarantee that intervention will not be attempted...
...or the need of the Air Force for bombing as a raison d'etre...
...Once it was held in its defense that, purpose aside, the war could readily be resolved by military means...
...Given the nature of bureaucracy, there is great persistence in disaster...
...But it will now be clear that what is here proposed is no mere matter of announcing a change in policy...
...The prestige of foreign policy in 1961 was enormous...
...were each equipped with weapons capable, even at the lowest levels of military expectation (then more sanguine than now), of destroying each other and most of the world between...
...Four—We need to learn that an overseas bureaucracy, once in existence, develops a life and purpose of its own...
...these had been the theaters of ultimate misfortune in the Twentieth Century, always assuming war to be such...
...Meantime—and here one can speak with certainty only of the United States—there has been a considerable accretion of knowledge both about the insecurity inherent in the weapons race and the unwisdom of leaving the contest under the control of the armed services and the affiliated weapons industries...
...The disaster area of our foreign policy has been in what the knowing unite in calling the Third World...
...That existence and coexistence are identical, few now doubt...
...It is a far greater factor in our foreign policy than we have even begun to realize...
...They are the walking wounded of the Cold War...
...It is axiomatic that in such matters one does not show his hand to the enemy...
...The change in direction that is involved in stopping military operations, bureaucracy cannot accomplish...
...The sheer number and variety of such overseas operations in all their different national settings, coupled with the revolving door nature of higher Washington officialdom, also foster anonymity...
...Joseph Alsop, Kenneth Crawford, one or two other aging sages...
...What remains, as noted, is to act on them...
...But the emergence of the Pentagon and its power as a political issue is one of the major developments of the late Sixties...
...Our relations with Western Europe and Japan caused no particular pain...
...Capitalism is not an issue in a country that has yet to experience capitalism, and neither is Communism as an alternative...
...So it seems in retrospect...
...For the appreciable future, they will so remain...
...It is impossible to think of a case more intellectually inert than that for the Vietnam war...
...In part, no doubt, our error was the result of a fantastic overestimate (as it now seems) of the speed of economic development in the Third World...
...In the United States there is not quite the same conviction of total economic and social success that there was in 1960—at the crest of the Key-nesian revolution...
...This is not the parochial view of an opponent of the war...
...This by its nature cannot be controlled...
...None will doubt the extent of the exercise of Presidential and other political authority that will be needed...
Vol. 35 • February 1971 • No. 2
