REFLECTIONS
Landau, Saul
REFLECTIONS Saul Landau Toward a New Foreign Policy We have wasted our substance for thirty years and more fighting some phantom Russian," observed the late I.I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner in...
...The encirclement of the Soviet Union with military bases did not force the communists to back down, but to build up...
...It is time for a change—a fundamental one...
...Government spent some $ 10 trillion for national-security purposes...
...economy and the policy of global interventionism have been marriage partners, but the conditions that allowed for that union have changed...
...nor would there be popular support should a President attempt such folly...
...Let us return to historically rooted notions of policy that not only increase trade and protect our people and territory but also conform to the laws and treaties that our Government has sworn to uphold...
...For forty years, the arms race and national-security crises have absorbed a huge portion of the Federal budget...
...Rabi, Nobel Prize winner in physics and a key figure in making the first atomic bomb...
...George Kennan, at that time head of policy planning in the State Department and an architect of containment, knew that the facts of postwar Soviet life actually did not support the premise that the Soviet Union was intent on conquering Western Europe and eventually the United States...
...The U.S...
...Western propagandists not only charged that the Soviets posed an immediate military threat to "free" Europe, but also attributed to them fantastic powers to fashion revolutions throughout the Third Saul Landau, a senior fellow at the Institutefor Policy Studies, is the author of "The Dangerous Doctrine: National Security and U.S...
...The national-security response calls for instant hostility at the ringing of the revolutionary bell anywhere...
...foreign policy...
...In the course of twenty years, the Soviets did become strong enough to aid some Third World revolutions, though not at the level these movements had anticipated...
...troops in Korea and Vietnam...
...Anticommunism as it became Cold War policy and ideology .has had a monumental impact on American history and society...
...To replace the anticommunist engine of postwar policy, we need to define U.S...
...At home, the FBI became a national political police, hunting down "communists," "subversives," and those who dared to challenge U.S...
...A common-sense guideline is that foreign policy should promote domestic peace, prosperity, and stability—and not be aimed primarily at hurting a foreign government...
...The mighty U.S...
...support or diversified their economic and military dependency...
...hegemony over much of the Third World has passed into history...
...Let's come to our senses...
...To thine own self be true...
...To apply these principles will require renouncing intervention as a way of life...
...The United States built more than 3,000 military bases—at home and in forty foreign countries...
...These syllogisms led to the devastating engagements of U.S...
...Similarly, the entire relationship with the Soviet Union needs to be rethought...
...It has transformed a republic into a national-security state and has led the United States into costly global entanglements...
...The ideologists of the Cold War posited that the Soviet Union exercised control over a whole variety of anticolon-ialist and nationalist movements that had been brewing and stewing for decades...
...In several areas of the world, the United States will be challenged by ongoing or new liberation movements...
...As a first proposition, foreign policy should serve domestic interests, not try to realize grandiose visions of keeping or making the world free from this or that abstraction...
...It has raised a standing army of some three million soldiers...
...And it readied more than 25,000 nuclear weapons to be launched from bombers, submarines, and land bases to stop the communists...
...The anticommunist obsession has produced enough suffering...
...leaders created an apparatus that became a kind of state above a state to combat the Soviet threat...
...Anticommunism provided the impulse for atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and for fashioning a CIA that conducted assassinations, plotted coups, and performed drug-testing and mind-altering experiments on the American public...
...The foundations for current policies were established in the late 1940s on the premise that the Soviet Union and international communism threatened freedom everywhere...
...World...
...Foreign Policy," published by West-view Press...
...Egypt, Ghana, Somalia, and Indonesia either replaced Soviet aid and advisers with U.S...
...But the very policy designed to combat a Soviet threat played a part in producing one...
...The Soviet Union was utterly exhausted by the exertions and sacrifices of the recent war...
...interests more clearly...
...But the age of U.S...
...Still, the crude ideologists of the national-security state insisted that all Third World revolutions were Soviet productions and that combating the Soviet threat was equivalent to defending freedom...
...I say, get our own house in order...
...New Soviet leadership, major nuclear-weapons agreements, and a world peace movement have further isolated the die-hard Cold Warriors...
...Nonetheless, beginning with the National Security Act of 1947, U.S...
...Intervention is no longer practical, and the $300 billion military budget no longer affordable...
...No amount of bluster, jingoism, or right-wing nationalism is going to bring Latin America back under Uncle Sam's thumb...
...Two obvious principles emerge as guidelines for future policy: human rights and international law...
...We have tried that and failed...
...In no way did the Soviet Union appear, at that moment, as a military threat to this country," Kennan reflected in 1985...
...deficit and the debt, the current disparity between military and domestic spending, the massive investment in the so-called 'defense industry—all of these stem from anticommunism as the official state religion, the pillar of Cold War policy...
...And the Soviet Union certainly did not gain control of them as American ideologists had posited...
...From the end of World War II through 1987, the U.S...
...Already there are signs that the Cold War curtain is being lifted...
...This article is adapted from a chapter in "Winning America: Ideas and Leadership for the Nineties," an upcoming book co-edited by Marcus Raskin and Chester Hartman and co-published by IPS and South End Press...
Vol. 52 • April 1988 • No. 4
