LIBERALS AND FOREIGN POLICY
Galbraith, John Kenneth
LIBERALS and FOREIGN POLICY by JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH This article is adapted from Mr. Galbraith's keynote address before the nineteenth annual convention of Americans for Democratic Action in...
...Far too many of our officials have been so persuaded because, much in the manner of a man shouting down a well, they have heard their own voices...
...These considerations have caused quite a few thoughtful right wingers to suggest that socialists be made honorary Communists...
...The reason is not the power of our arms, the subtlety of our propaganda, or the acuity of our intelligence organizations...
...We must, first of all, escape from the entrapment of our own propaganda...
...The reason is the aid program...
...It is none of these things...
...Liberals should, I think, stand equally opposed to the divine right of wealth and the divine right in the field of foreign policy of Sullivan and Cromwell...
...It is an odd concept of democracy that leads us to work hard to elect liberal governments in order to put our foreign policy under those who couldn't care less...
...Unlike, say, the Department of Agriculture, there was no community with a strong pecuniary interest to scrutinize action...
...Our policy now must be to remain on the defensive in whatever area we can hold with the present force...
...But it is unscarred by the memories of Joseph Stalin and Joseph McCarthy...
...Let us resolve to save their reputations and reward them most handsomely, but in some other way...
...Thus: % We launched the great drive to expel the Soviets from the United Nations under Article 19 of the Charter...
...They had believed that our association with him would endure...
...The right gleefully pounced on the error—and the erring...
...We should make it wholly clear that when China is willing to recognize the separate existence of Formosa and accept the charter of the United Nations we will support her admission to the United Nations and will accord her recognition...
...The ultimate bargain will not be brilliant...
...The foregoing means that we cannot have a good foreign policy that is run by conservatives—however venerable their service or however estimable their motives...
...But that is about all Indo-Chinese governments have ever been...
...Liberals do not believe that difficult or controversial questions can best be resolved by putting them in deep freeze or pretending they do not exist...
...Occasionally, and I think increasingly, the State Department responds to suggestions for keeping peace with cautious approval...
...And they are justified in pointing out that this tradition, however excellent in its time, can now get a President and the country into a lot of trouble...
...But he cannot be held responsible for his inheritance...
...The purpose of this, like the demand for manpower to pacify the whole country, is now, however subjectively, to bail out the reputations of those who for so long have been committed to this ill-starred enterprise...
...H It was assumed that we faced a unified conspiracy directed according to changing preference by Hanoi, Peking, or international Communism in general...
...It will not last...
...None, I believe, suggests that this is a disciplined warrior race that we must have on our side...
...It is also denied by all recent experience...
...Liberals have been rightly skeptical of this arming of the indigent...
...The United States has a reliable association with nations only if it has a clear identification with the needs and aspirations of their people...
...Since the break-up of the wartime alliance, the goal to a singular degree has been to fight international Communism...
...They have no personal stake in the insurrection and can be ignored as a factor in any settlement...
...This is a contradiction in terms...
...We differed on method...
...Some have long doubted that individual liberty is compatible with democratic centralism...
...Liberals are also committed, in international affairs, to the rule of law...
...We must always start from where we are...
...Reflecting the great expansion of the educated and educational community, it is also a client group on foreign policy of no small size...
...I see no reason, finally, why liberals should regret their past commitment to the aid program and to the principle of helping the poor to help themselves...
...Let us also note, moreover, that liberalism, in this land, is not exactly a minority position...
...Let me now say a word about the most annoying, though not, I venture, the most important of our problems —that of Vietnam...
...It will respond, I think, to good and liberal leadership...
...In the third world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, aid and reform have bulked large in the liberal program...
...We have become interested not in how to promote conflict but how to reconcile diverse interests without conflict...
...It is not even the eloquence of our past ambassadors...
...Its policies can no longer be afforded...
...Such has been our policy on China...
...that Communist ambition is unremitting...
...Nor is it a testing place of democracy...
...The elements are all there: ? The reaction was automatic...
...The first factor making for change has been the arrival of a new generation...
...Silence then ensued...
...With some dissent from the extreme right, it was also agreed during these years that foreign policy should be entrusted to the permanent diplomatic and military establishment and to the New York foreign policy syndicate...
...I am among those who regard the President as a force for restraint—and for change in the old policy...
...The right wing of the Republican Party sets these well above human rights, and a moderate Republican is a man who believes them identical...
...The President is rightly held responsible for his Administration...
...It has, I would judge, an adequately sophisticated view of Communism...
...I do confess to believing that he could do with more and better help...
...Foreign policy, until very recent times, had no strong clientele group in the United States...
...Then came the great disillusionment which was hardly lessened when the Soviets themselves erased Stalin's name from their sacred tablets...
...ADA was born of these attitudes...
...That is our defense of that bastion of freedom, as an anarchist would define it, in Vietnam...
...Galbraith, the celebrated Harvard economist, was formerly ambassador to India and is the author of a number of notable books, among them The Affluent Society...
...It requires a policy as between Communist powers...
...Let us resolve to stop talking this nonsense...
...During the war years they had accepted the current picture of Stalin as an amiable and avuncular figure...
...There being no serious social foundation for the insurgency, it was thought, those who do the fighting are the servants of the external authority...
...But fortunately the cost in money has so far been larger than that in lives...
...And he inherited, in the old policy, the attitudes which have led to our present misfortunes...
...None of these propositions has survived the experience...
...Liberals have turned up, on occasion, in the aid program and at the United Nations...
...But it has been common ground that our own military power must be great...
...Under these circumstances the purpose of the holding action is to allow of the best possible bargain between the non-Communist groups in Vietnam and the Vietcong...
...The old coalescence on the old and simple goal of anti-Communism is past...
...I hope we have now learned that despots, even though not offensive to well-mannered Americans, rarely go down well with their own people...
...The assumption that it did—that foreigners would make do with despots, incompetent generals, and social indignity—was the worst single error of the old syndicate...
...There can be no real doubt as to the military feasibility of this policy...
...We can only hope that the alliance will survive its salvation...
...The temptation to extend these attacks is especially strong when things go wrong politically in the South as they so often do...
...We must abandon the notion—as I am sure most sensible people have in Washington—that we are going to roll the Vietcong back from vast areas that they have controlled now for up to ten years...
...We need only compare the promises of the last year with the performance...
...It accepts, only, the developing evidence of these last months and years...
...Now this chapter has also come to an end...
...We should, and this is a vital step beyond present policy, now permanently suspend air attacks on the North...
...President Johnson inherited a good part of the Vietnam involvement...
...As occasion and good judgment require, this will mean that we will oppose what the Communist nations seek...
...As one moves to the right, one again encounters the old objection to helping the poor...
...fNo social issue being involved, military measures, it was long felt, would suffice for solution...
...It is not surprising that more intransigent members of the old guard still speak rather doggedly of a Sino-Soviet bloc...
...Some draw on their experience with the Communists in the unions...
...Truth tended to be what it proclaimed...
...that it is always probing for weak points and will be dangerously encouraged by any success...
...It is worth hoping that the policy is all that gets buried...
...All must remember that the phrase "calculated risk" is a military euphemism for total ignorance as to the outcome of a particular action...
...But not for years has it been imagined that a Secretary of State could be the source of any such suggestion...
...We remained as long as we were wanted...
...This will also sufficiently establish the one valid way in which resistance serves our policy, which is to show that whatever our error in getting in we cannot easily be shoved out...
...We must affirm, what we long ago learned, that the only good foreign policy is a liberal policy...
...For a long while the country went along...
...We have paid rather heavily for the myth of the older policy in Vietnam...
...Conceivably this might then prevent some future probe...
...The test of policy henceforth must be not the negative one of what fights Communism but the affirmative one of what serves the interests of the United States—and the survival and well-being of all people...
...The meaning of all this is that we have long had a policy of getting along with the Soviets...
...We launched the multilateral nuclear force (MLF) and then reversed this because the reality was that our Allies feared the proposal more than they feared the Soviets...
...Not surprisingly the man who handled this was sent to Portugal...
...We should stop because these attacks, and the temptation to extend them, involve the one major and intolerable risk, which is war with China or conceivably Russia...
...The archons of the old coalition are now busy, in person, saving NATO...
...It will be, henceforth, a powerful force influencing foreign policy...
...How do we escape from this entrapment...
...Galbraith's keynote address before the nineteenth annual convention of Americans for Democratic Action in Washington April 15...
...And Communism, as John Foster Dulles saw it, was a problem not in social deprivation but moral degradation...
...So it is not subject to the searing fears which caused an older generation to be equally fearful of Communism and of seeming to be soft on Communism...
...Let me stress again the present importance of restraint—and of supporting the President in restraint...
...Nor is it a, bastion of freedom...
...Millbank, Tweed, Hope, Hadley, and McCloy...
...We support the United Nations as an instrument of law and not as a forum for cold war polemics or as a last resort in error...
...Always, as ever, there is Munich...
...And as circumstances and good judgment require, it means that we pursue policies that reflect a common interest in improved well-being and survival...
...That policy has served us well...
...This is not a defeatist assessment...
...And, I venture to think that the old syndicate is not far short of honorable retirement...
...Vietnam will be the graveyard of the old policy...
...And, I would judge, only Representative Gerald Ford and Senator John Towers really yearn to repeat this experience...
...This manifested itself in all-powerful, all-embracing conspiracies...
...U Americans could be counted on to believe what they were told, particularly about the power and integrity of the people on our side and the menace with which we deal...
...f Until the moment of their collapse, governments on our side are bastions of liberty and their leaders are pillars of freedom...
...The growing pluralism of the Communist world has also done great damage to the old coalescence...
...It will be no comfort, if we find ourselves involved with the Chinese on the Asian mainland, that it resulted from a miscalculation...
...And we reversed course because the reality was that we wanted them to stay...
...But by any reasonable calculation that is not our fault...
...But it will provide a refuge for those who have joined our enterprise...
...We must not invest lives, even those of other people, in an enterprise of such dubious and temporary value to the Vietnamese who might survive...
...Communists are casual about property rights...
...Our Vietnam involvement was a textbook manifestation of the old policy...
...Inevitably I must conclude with some references to the crowning accomplishment of the old policy...
...U We launched a crusade on behalf of Generals Wessin ? Wessin and Imbert in the Dominican Republic...
...And it does not accept the official truth on foreign policy with the acquiescence that so many would like to associate with sound Americanism...
...It has credited itself with a uniquely perceptive and aroused view of, as it has always called it, the international Communist conspiracy...
...And fortunately, also, the lessons—the dangers of automatic and unselective reaction to Communism in accordance with formula, the dangers of unlimited commitment, the dangers in supporting governments that are unsupported by their people, the shortcomings of military solutions—are all brilliantly clear...
...Peaceful co-existence was a snare and a delusion...
...Having lived on the same planet with the Russians without coming to blows for fifty years, there is a growing disposition to keep on trying...
...Elsewhere, when they have happened into high office in past years they have considered it their principal function to bless with their liberal reputation whatever the State Department wished to do...
...And we reversed it because the reality was that right-wing dictatorships promised to be more damaging than the risk of Communism...
...They have doubted that Communism would be effectively suppressed by either Nineteenth Century diplomacy or Twentieth Century weapons...
...What we should welcome, and in the end will have to welcome, is a regional settlement, as in Laos...
...This is a principle and not a tactic...
...No longer can it proclaim a holy war against all...
...There is now no longer doubt as to whether negotiations are desirable or not^although they may not be conducted by us...
...This gave great power to the syndicate and the permanent establishment...
...The central government will, at best, be only a loose federalism of areas under different control...
...This is not for humane reasons although I am not opposed to humanity...
...Its younger members especially are politically sophisticated, liberal, and anxious for such leadership...
...Let me also be clear that most of what I say is not meant to be in criticism of the President...
...Had it been lost in 1954 no one would now be thinking of it...
...Soul searching has also been caused by the number of initiatives that, under the old auspices, have been launched against the Communists in these last years and which then—when the realities were faced—have had to be reversed...
...What counts is local control of the countryside...
...Communists are clearly opposed to that...
...And I think it well that we should reflect on this experience, for those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it...
...More were wounded by Stalin...
...In this part of the world the writ of a central government often runs only to the airport...
...This is not to say that the permanent foreign policy establishment is irrevocably conservative...
...We did not consider whether we defended viable institutions or fought on favorable terrain...
...With the permanent establishment it has now guided our foreign policy for so long that many Americans unquestionably imagine it to have tenure...
...Next we must face seriously the likelihood that there will not again be a government in Saigon which is seriously capable of prosecuting the war along with us...
...A government that reflects the interest of the people will reflect their suspicion of foreigners, their struggle for a national identity, and their terrible war-weariness...
...But liberalism is a practical faith...
...We are paying heavily for the myth of airpower...
...Dulles's followers still make nostalgic pilgrimages to meetings of the treaty organizations he established...
...The latter—the Dulles, McCloy, Lov-ett communion with which, I am sure, Secretary of State Rusk would wish to be associated and of which Dean Acheson is a latter-day associate —has now provided the grace notes for American foreign policy for twenty years...
...This, to the old establishment, was heresy...
...The Editors...
...Nor, at this stage, are we to be impressed with infinitesimal gestures that could have been made ten years ago...
...There is, perhaps, some need to discover that the only menace to its peace of mind is not from the extreme right...
...If we can clear and hold all of South Vietnam with a large force, one can hold a very limited area with a smaller force...
...It will not fight...
...But liberals long accepted anti-Communism as a goal of our foreign policy...
...Once burned, American liberals were determined never to let it happen again...
...Freedom, in one current of our political thought, means freedom to make money...
...If there seemed to be dissent it was sufficient to warn of the risks of inviting another Munich...
...However, we may remind ourselves that the world did not lose respect for the Russians because they retreated in Cuba...
...This may well be rather small...
...It is a good instrument, and would welcome better employment...
...Military men always describe as unfeasible what they do not wish to do...
...Liberalism does not stop at the water's edge...
...These attitudes are still influential...
...A government that works with us and fights the war will not have the support of the people...
...Perhaps, as a happy concluding thought, these inhospitable jungles were well designed to stimulate a more liberal, more rational, more discriminating, more collectively motivated and somewhat less paranoic view of our mission in the world...
...Conservatives have strongly applauded this goal...
...and that any non-Communist leader, however repugnant, would, as a matter of expediency, have to be supported against the Communist conspiracy...
...Nor is it because airpower is both indiscriminate and ineffective, although this is also true...
...We are, despite all misfortune, well regarded in the poor lands...
...Let me look at some affirmative steps for escaping from this outworn legacy...
...iberals have had a twenty-year agreement on foreign policy goals...
...Let us note well that the reputation of what would have been counted the most successful liberal administration since Roosevelt is in danger of being ruined by a foreign policy of men who have never raised their hands on behalf of any liberal cause in their life...
...Vietnam is not important to us...
...Some will certainly suggest covering their disappointments in the South with more muscular action elsewhere...
...Lucius Clay, Henry Stimson, Nicholas Murray Butler, and the more impeccably traditional members of the permanent foreign policy establishment...
...Henceforth, quite a few decided, they would be second to none in their war with Communism—only more intelligent...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
