ON POLITICAL BOOKS

...Moynihan writes about the technical aspects of the nuclear issue with authority and remarkable clarity...

...What is behind these inconsistencies...

...who denounce America and Israel—denounce us, he believes, as symbols of democracy...

...We live in an age of nuclear parity and monstrous budget deficits...

...It could all be a fussy way to justify the same old gunboat diplomacy...

...The procedure he recommends is somewhat cumbersome: We should take issues like the seizure of the Falklands and the Teheran embassy to an international court, and then, if we must, follow up its decision with economic measures or legally sanctioned force, ideally in concert with other nations...

...Moynihan defers to no one in his hatred of the Soviet Union, yet he believes we should be making diplomatic overtures to Cuba...

...This may or may not be true at the U.N., but out in the real world surely there is more at stake...

...He sees a "catatonic quality" in the decision to deploy the MX, a triumph of politics as usual and entrenched bureaucratic interests...

...Some of Moynihan's answers are less probing than others—less willing to doubt the doctrines of the Commentary crowd...

...The nuclear essay is the most convincing in the book, for it is here that Moynihan is best served by those two staples of neoconservative writing, his sense of urgency and his concern for democratic values...

...If asked directly, Moynihan would give it a leading role—and would defend that role to the last polemical phrase...

...He argues firmly against the notion that the Soviet nuclear force is superior to ours...

...Why should the American people be any smarter or less reckless than congressmen, generals, and arms control experts...

...In this respect Moynihan's third essay is a useful antidote to the second...

...He is also thoroughly alarmed by the quality of debate about nuclear issues, and he dwells at length on the difficulty of deciding such questions in a democracy...

...Does ideology matter...

...But he turns that neoconservative notion on its head by suggesting that the "test of nerves" should take place at the negotiating table...

...policy in Central America...

...Like much of his writing, the three essays in this slim volume are elegant and elliptical, an often uneasy combination of anti-totalitarian rhetoric and more considered ideas...

...To what extent should it figure in calculations of American foreign policy...

...He does not mention the neoconservatives, but these are all questions left in the wake of their arguments, questions that must be answered by anyone who wants to respond to their attack...

...The essay focuses on Carter, but it is also meant to convey a picture of today's liberal Democrats...

...We should be known to favor restraint and the peaceful resolution of conflicts...

...It is also a tacit criticism of the neoconservative thinking that he gradually seems Tamar Jacoby is deputy editor of The New York Times Op-Ed page...

...Or had NCPAC exaggerated...

...He is, by turns, idealistic and self-promoting, an earnest patriot and a flippant joker...

...as a "means of diplomatic aggression" and seems largely indifferent to efforts to address them as practical problems...

...Yet, he emphasizes that in the pursuit of law, the United States must not appear vindictive...

...Moynihan should know, for he himself has questioned much of what we are doing in Central America...

...For Moynihan, by contrast, ideology no longer comes first, in this case at least...

...How can we be both anti-totalitarian and anti-nuclear...

...The problem is that both sides have come to depend primarily on big, vulnerable land-based missiles aimed at the other's missiles...

...Moynihan's answer to Israel's real diplomatic isolation and security problems is to carry the ideological struggle back to those at the U.N...

...But he saves his most scathing phrases for those—including, in effect, his old allies—who do not see that nuclear questions are too important to be "discussed at the level of rhetoric...

...He is, as ever, extremely wary of the THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY/MAY 1984 men in the Kremlin and, in true neoconservative fashion, convinced that our relations with them must remain a kind of vigilant contest...

...Yet by 1982 NCPAC radio and television spots were attacking him as "the most liberal United States senator in 1980"—anti-American, pro-communist, more liberal than even Teddy Kennedy...

...He does not quite say but he implies it is because they are not blinded by a need to win votes or by what he calls bureaucratic "routine, " and they see the threat more starkly...

...The thread that runs through the three essays is loyalty to country and, more importantly, to what he loosely calls "principles...

...What are the lawful instruments available to an American president...

...Clearly something strange was happening to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...What makes his book interesting is the way he is beginning, quite in spite of himself, to struggle with the neoconservative notion that ideology—the contest between communism and democratic values—is the most important aspect of our dealings abroad...

...To what extent does America have a responsibility to stand for something in the world...

...Nowhere in his lengthy discussion of the U.N!s ostracism of Israel does he mention events on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza...

...The tone of the essay is incredulous and dismayed: What after all are we fighting for, if indeed we are no better than the Soviets—if we don't stand for some kind of decency and liberal values...

...Nor does the Third World have a very good record: the seizure of our embassy in Teheran is particularly offensive to Moynihan...

...But more frightening than this crisis scenario is his sense of what the new doctrine would do to accelerate the arms race...

...That is what is pushing both sides to rely on the threatening new strategy often called "launch on warning" or "launch under attack ." Moynihan imagines how it would go: the blip on the radar screen, the unanswerable question—is it a Russian missile or merely a flock of geese?—and the eight to 12 minutes in which we would have to decide whether or not to launch our missiles first...

...Even Moynihan, in his more considered moments, seems to recognize that the United States is facing new limits to its power abroad...

...Of the three, this essay bears the least trace of Moynihan's years in the Senate...

...But more important, more troubling to him as an American, is Washington's increasing disregard for these crucial peace-keeping standards...

...In the first essay, on nuclear weapons, the principle is the importance in a democracy of careful and responsible debate...

...to be shedding...

...For example, that tired epithet, "obscene:' figures twice in a few pages...

...Then there are the exaggerated charges...

...How, then, should we make decisions about our nuclear policy...

...The principle at stake is the rule of law—the standards of decency and accountability that, in theory at least, have guided international conduct since the days of Moynihan's great hero, Woodrow Wilson...

...This may not sound like much—and it would not be on an ordinary Democrat's platform—but it is a sharp departure from the conventional hard-line wisdom of people like Norman Podhoretz, who now suggests that faith in arms control may be "a pacifist illusion" that weakens Western will and increases the chances of a nuclear war...

...But that is only a polemical prelude to his real theme—an attack on how the Carter administration handled itself at the U.N...

...We must not get down into the gutter with the Soviets but should stand above the fray, bearing the standard of objectivity and law...

...Moynihan looks to the electorate...

...No Democrats—even those who oppose the new missiles we are installing in Western Europe—believe that Soviet communism is either more just or more humane than liberal democracy...

...These questions lie, unspoken, just beneath the surface of Moynihan's book...

...The principles at stake in the second essay are, precisely, democratic values, and here, unfortunately, ideology tends to get the better of reality...

...Thus he opposes the MX missile and the doctrine behind it, the shift toward a "first-strike" strategy...

...Even more unsettling, however, is Moynihan's failure to look beyond the halls of the United Nations...

...it is a way for Americans to protect themselves from the idea that might is right...

...The first troubling thing about this essay is its tone...

...Moynihan's new book* does not conclusively answer these questions...

...The liberals and Jews in his constituency pull in two different directions, and both seem to take their tithe...

...Moynihan's answer is not entirely persuasive, but it is a strong testimony to his idealism...

...He simply believes that the rule of law can triumph—and points out that it is in our "interest" to make sure that it does...

...For him, this is enough to temper even his antiSovietism...

...It has to do with misguided feelings of "guilt ." Americans like Jimmy Carter have come to believe that we are "the principal source of instability and injustice in the world ." This leads them, according to Moynihan, to attack the "very existence" of American military power...

...Of course it does...

...Yet he goes on fighting just that kind of straw man—an anti-American bogeyman created, in good neoconservative fashion, from his memories of the 1960s...

...Will it work in a world of ruthless men like Idi Amin and Josef Stalin and kamikaze Moslem terrorists...

...Moynihan is not unaware of the real sources of tension between the United States and the Third World—economic disputes and the other inevitable tensions that divide a great power with a stake in the status quo from small, new countries intent upon change...

...Loyalties, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $9.95...

...Here at last, the alarm is justified while the faith in democracy is brought back down to earth, down from the dangerous heights of polemicism, where it so easily becomes an excuse to threaten the Russians or impose our control on the countries of the Third World...

...A code of decency and fairness is not a foolproof weapon, but it may well be our most effective one...

...This may be Moynihan the politician talking, but he makes a strong, even eloquent, case...

...He is looking for a "proportionate response,' a safe instrument—something "between doing nothing, or next to nothing, and blowing up the world ." This is his sharp-est criticism of the neoconservatives—of their dire warnings that America has lost the will to assert itself with the use of force—and it is characteristically funny as well as telling: "Freud is said to have remarked that the first man who cursed an enemy rather than striking him was the founder of civilization ." As for cursing the enemy, Moynihan has hardly abandoned the righteous confrontational style he practiced at the U.N...

...We would be taking leave of our senses',' he notes caustically, opening a Pandora's box of unthinkable new weapons, including ever larger and more vulnerable missiles and a probably unworkable nuclear defense—a "space armada" of laseremitting satellites...

...What has happened to Moynihan in the Senate...

...From this, Moynihan concludes that our problems abroad are due above all to a failure of will here at home—a mistaken notion that we are on "the wrong side of history...

...Moynihan himself has raised questions about our waning ability to influence what happens in revolutionary Central America...

...Above all, he seeks to alert readers to the danger of abandoning deterrence...

...What is wise and intriguing about this book is the way that reality is creeping into his thinking...

...How can we do so without using force— or using it only in dire circumstances, as a last resort...

...This is also a shrewd answer...

...And, of course, as he notes, all of this argues in a crisis for taking no chance and striking first—"use 'em or lose 'em:' as the strategists say...

...In fact, virtually no one in mainstream American politics questions the need for an efficient military...

...He feels that America needs to find a safer, shrewder way to assert itself, but it does not seem to occur to him that we might better defend our values if we did so quietly and confidently and did not always lord our virtue over the countries we seek to influence...

...But Moynihan sees it as more than a legal process...

...That sits somewhat uneasily with his own rhetoric and combativeness—evidence of his incomplete divorce from the neoconservatives...

...Personal pique of the kind Jimmy Carter showed after the invasion of Afghanistan, belligerent rhetoric, hasty military strikes—all are unacceptable to Moynihan...

...But he is more interested in the way these issues are used at the U.N...

...The essay is set, in effect, at the United Nations, and a good chunk of it is a review of Moynihan's own most controversial moment there—his denunciation of the vote equating Zionism and racism...

...This is not, the essay points out, a good time for lawfulness...

...Specifically, Moynihan strongly opposes the intervention in Grenada and the implication that we have a "right" to destabilize Nicaragua...

...But that is not to say, as he suggests some Democrats do, that we are always wrong or the Soviets are right—or that our ideals are now invalid...

...Not long ago, after all, in the mid-1970s, he was known as one of the most flamboyant and clever spokesmen for the neoconservative movement—a frequent contributor to Commentary and a close friend of its editor, Norman Podhoretz, a man who used his job at the United Nations to denounce the "infamy" of totalitarianism as loudly and frequently as possible...

...Nothing seems more pressing to him now than the danger of these weapons, and he is firmly committed to negotiating not merely ceilings but real cuts in both sides' nuclear arsenals...

...Why has he spoken out against the invasion of Grenada and raised questions about U.S...

...Nor do you have to like what Sandinistas are doing in Nicaragua to question the policy that has turned Honduras into a base for continuous military maneuvers and an illegal exile army...

...and, more broadly, on what others have called "the Vietnam syndrome...

...Moynihan's charge is fairly straightforward...

...Political calculations play a part, although it is hard to say how big...

...Yet, paradoxically, as one reads through Loyalties, sorting the grandstanding from the reasoned ideas, it also seems clear that Moynihan owes the better part of his wisdom, on foreign policy at least, to his years in the Senate—to the tempering effect that practical experience has had on his neoconservative views...

...The principle changes with each piece...

...Why indeed has he voted since 1982 against the MX and for a nuclear freeze...

...He writes as if our problems with Third World countries were entirely psychological—a matter of our self-doubt and their resentment...

...Had Podhoretz been wrong...

...No one can forget Vietnam or Watergate or the hostage crisis...

...What about the argument that we are on the wrong side of history...

...Rather than invade Grenada, we should have been talking to Havana, doing what we could to separate Fidel from his Soviet sponsors...

...But Moynihan's evolution is more than just a personal story...

...What's happening there does not justify the U.NN hostility to Israel, and it may not be Moynihan's central concern, but it cannot be irrelevant to Carter's position on a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the territories...

...The challenge is to find a way to live within those limits without necessarily giving up the idea that America should stand for something in the world...

...He might as well still be at the U.N.—living in that thin atmosphere of symbolic drama and hyperbole...

...Here, then, Moynihan turns his ideology to account, using it not as a blunt, predictable weapon but rather as a challenging standard, both for us and for the rest of the world...

...The theme—the warning—at the heart of the third essay concerns "the Sovietization of American foreign and military policies ." Jimmy Carter comes in for a fair share of criticism, but Moynihan reserves a special sense of outrage for the way the Reagan administration has borrowed Soviet tactics for its assault on communism...

...They feel that America is always wrong and assume, therefore, that the other side—the totalitarians and their allies—is right...

...The Soviet Union is of course a great offender—intervening in Afghanistan, shooting down the Korean airliner, flouting the standards of the United Nations with Orwellian abandon...