The Global Crunch

For all their immense physical power, the two dominant nations in the world--the United States and the Soviet Union--suffer from a neurotic sense of insecurity, although neither regards itself as being in imminent danger of attack by the other. At tremendous cost, their nuclear armories keep them at bay and, even if each were foolishly to add a new inventory of ABM missiles to the awesome stockpile, the delicate equilibrium will hold, leaving the two rivals in a state of chronic but only low-grade anxiety over the danger of attack by the other. It is a costly and desperately dangerous way of keeping the peace, but it is all we have shown ourselves capable of thus far.

The immediate threat that each superpower perceives from the other is its ideological impact on third countries, most particularly those that it regards as its protective buffers. It is one of the supposed realities of international politics--a kind of higher law transcending such legal documents as the United Nations Charter--that great powers are allowed to have spheres of influence made up of "friendly" neighbors. In the case of maritime powers such as the United States, the neighborhood may extend to the fringes of distant continents; but, whether or not the buffer is contiguous, the principle is the same: In order to guard itself against even the most remote or hypothetical threat to its security, a great power is held entitled to intervene in the affairs of its small neighbors, even to the extent of making the basic decisions as to how they will organize and run their own societies. This is where ideology comes in. Neither the Soviet (continued on page 86) Global Crunch (continued from page 81) Union nor the United States seems to regard itself as being in danger of direct ideological subversion by the other, although there have been times--the period of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and of McCarthyism in the United States--when they did. In more recent years, the focus of great-power apprehension has been on their small-power buffers. Over these, each great power displays frenzied determination to exert ideological control. Within its sphere, the Soviet Union insists on the maintenance of Communist governments, inaccurately described, for the most part, as socialist; the United States, on the other hand, insists on the maintenance of non-Communist governments that we, for the most part, incorrectly call free.

Starting with the assumption that ideology is an instrument of foreign policy through which the rival great power will establish its political domination over others, whenever and wherever the opportunity arises, each great power seems to look upon its own buffer states as peculiarly susceptible to ideological subversion by the other great power. It is further assumed that the ultimate aim of this subversion is to isolate and undermine the great power itself; that ideology, being contagious, is singularly suited to this purpose; and that, like a disease, it must therefore be isolated and destroyed before it can spread. These assumptions lead to the conclusion that it is no more than an act of self-defense for a great power to take such measures as it judges necessary to preserve the ideological purity of its sphere of influence.

Seen in this way, the various interventions of the United States and the Soviet Union are explained not only as legitimate defensive measures but as positive services. Thus, in the case of the intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, American policy makers were untroubled by the fact that the U.S. actions violated both the Rio Treaty and the Charter of the Organization of American States and that the revolution the U.S. suppressed was on behalf of a freely elected government that had been expelled by a coup. These were judged only superficial considerations when weighed against the need to defend America from the specter of a "second Cuba" while rescuing the Dominicans from their foolhardy flirtation with communism. Similarly, in the case of Vietnam, far from wishing to impose anything on anybody, the United States, in former Secretary of State Dean Rusk's view during a 1967 press conference, seeks only to save the world from being "cut in two by Asian communism."

It remained for the Russians to devise a doctrine of ideological justification for the policy of interventionism. In a document that has come to be known as the Brezhnev doctrine, published in Pravda, the Soviet government pointed out that, in invading Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and its protégés were doing no more than "discharging their internationalist duty toward the fraternal peoples of Czechoslovakia" and defending their own "socialist gains" against "anti-socialist forces" supported by "world imperialism" seeking to "export counterrevolution." Turn this phraseology around, substitute "anti-democratic" for "anti-socialist," "world communism" for "world imperialism," "revolution" for "counterrevolution," and the resultant rationale differs little from the official explanation of our own interventions in recent years.

Whether or not the Russians actually believed their excuse I would not venture to guess. At any rate, I don't believe it; I believe that the Russians--even if they persuaded themselves otherwise--suppressed the liberal government of Czechoslovakia because they feared the contagion of freedom for the rest of their empire and ultimately for the Soviet Union itself. Nor do I believe that, in suppressing revolutions in Latin America and in trying to suppress revolution in Vietnam, the United States is acting legitimately in its own self-defense. There are, God knows, profound differences between the internal orders of the United States and the Soviet Union--ours is a free society and theirs is a totalitarian society whose leaders have shown themselves to be terrified of freedom--but, in their foreign policies, the two superpowers have taken on a remarkable resemblance. Concerned primarily with the preservation of their own vast hegemonies, they have become, in their respective spheres, defenders of the status quo against the pressures of revolutionary upheaval in which each perceives little but the secret hand of the other.

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The Impotence of Power: Suppressing revolution in its own immediate vicinity is an easy if embarrassing task for a superpower. Suppressing it on a distant continent is more difficult; and, as we have learned in Vietnam, beating down a strongly motivated, capably led and well-organized indigenous force is a virtual impossibility. Confronted with rising nationalistic movements, the superpowers, to their own astonishment, sometimes find themselves muscle-bound. Their nuclear power, though colossal, is so colossal as to be unusable except for keeping each other terrified. But in dealing with the unruly third world, as Presidential advisor Henry Kissinger pointed out in a Brookings Institution symposium called Agenda for the Nation, "Power no longer translates automatically into influence."

Nor, one might add, does influence translate readily into desirable or usable power. In Europe before World War One, there was a significant relationship between influence and power and between territory and power--though perhaps even then, the correlation was less than it seemed. Yet, by conquering territory or forming alliances, a nation could hope to gain material resources and political predominance. Accordingly, the balance of power was maintained--more or less--by isolating and denying opportunities for territorial expansion to the most powerful or ambitious nation. In our own time, the balance of power is determined far more by economic and technological developments within countries than by alliances and territorial acquisition. China, for example, has gained far greater power through the acquisition of nuclear weapons than if it had conquered all of Southeast Asia.

Nonetheless, the great powers struggle to establish their influence in neutral countries. Guided by a ritualized, anachronistic, 19th Century concept of the balance of power, they seek influence for its own sake, as if it were a concrete, negotiable asset. I am thinking not only of Vietnam but of India, where we worry about Soviet economic aid, and to whom the President once even cut off food supplies because the Indian prime minister had sent birthday greetings to Ho Chi Minh. I am thinking of Laos, where we are not only fighting a proxy war against the Communist Pathet Lao but are engaged in an agitated rivalry with the French for the control of secondary education. And I am thinking of the global propaganda effort of the United States Information Agency, with its festivals and exhibits and libraries carefully pruned of books that seriously criticize America, all aimed at manufacturing a favorable image of the United States.

All this, we are told, is influence, and influence is power. But is it really power? Does it secure something valuable for either the other country or ourselves? If so, I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of what it is; and that, I strongly suspect, is because there is none. The real stake, I apprehend, is not power at all, but a shadow that calls itself power, nourishing an egotism that calls itself self-interest.

Vietnam, in this context, is a showcase of bankruptcy, a hopeless war fought for insubstantial stakes. As a war for high principle, Vietnam simply does not measure up: The Saigon government is neither a democracy warranting our support on ideological grounds nor a victim of (continued on page 200) Global Crunch (continued from page 86) international aggression warranting our support under the United Nations Charter. As an effort to contain Chinese power, the war in Vietnam is irrelevant as well as unsuccessful; even if a Communist Vietnam were to fall under Chinese control, as I do not think it would, the gains to China would be trivial compared with those accruing from her industrialization and acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The case on which Vietnam must stand or fall--if it has not already fallen--is the theory of an exemplary war, a war fought not so much on its own intrinsic merits as to demonstrate something to the world, such as that America will always live up to its alleged commitments or that "wars of national liberation" cannot succeed. The stake, then, is ultimately a psychological one--influence conceived as power.

Knocking down the case for an exemplary war is at this point very nearly belaboring the obvious. How we can demonstrate faithfulness to our commitments by honoring dubious promises to the Saigon generals while blatantly violating our treaty commitments in the Western Hemisphere--as we did in the covert intervention against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965--is beyond my understanding. As to proving that wars of national liberation cannot succeed, all that we have proved in four years of bitter, inconclusive warfare is that, even with an Army of over 500,000 Americans, we cannot win a victory for an unpopular and incompetent regime against a disciplined, nationalist insurrectionary force. In the harsh but accurate summation of Peregrine Worsthorne, a British conservative who was once a supporter of the war, writing in the New Republic:

Instead of the Americans impressing the world with their strength and virtue, they are making themselves hated by some for what they are doing, and despised by the remainder for not doing it more efficaciously.

At least two prominent members of the Nixon Administration have explicitly recognized the bankruptcy of our Vietnam strategy. Henry Kissinger wrote in Agenda for the Nation:

Whatever the outcome of the war in Vietnam, it is clear that it has greatly diminished American willingness to become involved in this form of warfare elsewhere. Its utility as a precedent has therefore been importantly undermined.

President Nixon's ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Charles Yost, made the point in Foreign Affairs as forcefully as possible:

The most decisive lesson of Vietnam would seem to be that no matter how much force it may expend, the United States cannot ensure the security of a country whose government is unable to mobilize and maintain sufficient popular support to control domestic insurgency.... If indigenous dissidents, whether or not Communist, whether or not supported from outside, are able to mobilize and maintain more effective popular support than the government, they will eventually prevail.

Vietnam is only one--albeit the most striking and costly--instance of a general, if not quite invariable, American policy of opposing revolution in the developing world. In some instances, this policy has been successful, at least for the short term. With our support, repressive governments in Brazil and Greece and a conservative government in the Dominican Republic, to cite but a few examples, have successfully held down popular aspirations for social and economic change. Through our support of reactionary governments in Latin America and elsewhere, we are preserving order in our sphere of influence and momentarily, at least, excluding revolution. But it is order purchased at the price of aligning ourselves with corruption and reaction against aggrieved and indignant indigenous forces that by and large are more responsive to popular aspirations than those that we support.

This policy of preserving the status quo is an exceedingly shortsighted one. Sooner or later, there can be little doubt, the rising forces of popular discontent will break through the brittle lid of repression. So, at least, historical experience suggests. We did it ourselves in 1776 and much of the history of 19th Century Europe consists of the successful rebellion of nationalist movements--German, Italian, Belgian, Greek and Slavic--against the powerful European order forged by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In the 20th Century, we have seen the great European empires--British, French and Dutch--break up in the face of nationalist rebellion in hardly more than a decade after World War Two.

Since then, the revolutionary wide has continued to swell across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and it seems unlikely that even the immense resources of the United States will prove sufficient to contain the tide much longer. We have all but acknowledged our failure in Vietnam. What would we do if Souvanna Phouma's government in Laos should collapse, as it probably would if we terminated our counterinsurgency efforts and as it may, anyway? Or if a popular rebellion should break out against the military dictatorship in Brazil? Or if a Communist-Socialist government should come to power in Chile through a free election, as it could in 1970? Would we send armies to these large countries, as we did to South Vietnam and the small Dominican Republic? With aid and arms, we have helped delay the collapse of regimes whose very existence is an obstacle to social and political justice. Eventually, there seems little doubt, they will collapse, the more violently and with greater upheaval for having been perpetuated beyond their natural life span.

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Thus far, I have been writing of the fragility and shortsightedness of our policy of repressing revolution. Something should be said about its morals as well. "Order" and "stability" are antiseptic words; they do not tell us anything about the way human beings live or the way they die. The diplomatic historians who invoke the model of Metternich's European order in the 19th Century usually neglect to mention that it was an order purchased at the cost of condemning millions of people to live under the tyranny of the Russian czar, the Turkish sultan and other ignorant and reactionary monarchs. The absolute primacy of order over justice was neatly expressed by Metternich in his assertion that, "Barbarous as it is, Turkey is a necessary evil." In a similar vein--if not, let us hope, with equal callousness--when we speak of "stability" and "order" in the developing countries, we neglect to note that in more than a few instances, the order purchased by our aid and by our arms is one that binds millions of people to live under a feudalism that fosters ignorance, hunger and disease. It means blighted lives, children with bellies bloated and brains stunted by malnutrition, their parents scavenging food in garbage heaps--a daily occurrence in the omnipresent slums of Asia and Latin America. Only the abstractions of diplomacy take form in high policy councils; to see its flesh and blood, one must go to a Brazilian slum or to a devastated village in Vietnam.

Besides being shortsighted and immoral, our policy of perpetuating the status quo has a third fatal defect--a defect that represents our best hope for formulating a new foreign policy: It goes against the American grain. That is the meaning of the dissent against Vietnam and of the deep alienation of so many of our youth. It is their belief in the values they were brought up to believe in--in the idea of their country as a model of decency and democracy--that has confounded the policy makers who only a few years ago were contending that we could fight a limited war for a decade or two without seriously disrupting the internal life of the United States. What they overlooked in their preoccupation with war games and escalation scenarios was the concern of millions of Americans not just with the cost but with the character of wars they fight and their consequent outrage against a war that--even at what the strategists would consider tolerable cost--has made a charnel house of a small and poor Asian country. In this moral sense, there is hope--hope that we will recognize at last that a foreign policy that goes against our national character is untenable.

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An Act of Faith: The question to which we come is whether order, in the sense in which we now conceive it, is, indeed, a vital interest of the United States, or whether, in this revolutionary age, we can accommodate ourselves to a great deal of disorder in the world. My answer, as I am sure will be clear by now, is that we must and can learn to live with widespread revolutionary turmoil. We must because it is not within our means to stem the tide; we can because social revolution is not nearly so menacing to us as we have supposed--or at least it need not be. If we can but liberate ourselves from ideological obsession--from the automatic association of social revolution with communism and of communism with Soviet or Chinese power--we may find it possible to discriminate among disorders in the world and to evaluate them with greater objectivity, which is to say, more on the basis of their own content and less on the basis of our own fears. We should find, I think, that some revolutionary movements--including even Communist ones--will affect us little, if at all: that others may affect us adversely but not grievously; and that some may even benefit us.

All of which is to say nothing about the right of other peoples to settle their own affairs without interference by the great powers. There is, after all, no moral or legal right of a great power to impose its will on a small country, even if the latter does things that affect it adversely. Americans were justly outraged by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, not primarily because we thought the Russians could have endured Czech democratization without loss to themselves but because we thought the Czechs had a right to reform their system, whether it suited the Russians or not. Ought not the same principle apply in our relations with Latin America and, indeed, with small countries all over the world?

I believe that it should. I would go even further and suggest that we rededicate ourselves to the Good Neighbor Policy enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt 30 years ago. There is, of course, nothing new about the principle of nonintervention: We have been preaching it for years. What I suggest as an innovation is that we now undertake to practice it--not only when we find it perfectly consistent with what we judge to be our interests but even when it does not suit our own national preferences. I suggest, therefore, as a guiding principle of American foreign policy, that we abstain hereafter from military intervention in the internal affairs of other countries under any circumstances short of a clear and certain danger to our national security--such as that posed by Castro's decision to make Cuba a Soviet missile base--and that we adhere to this principle whether others, including the Russians and the Chinese, do so or not.

Surely, it will be argued, we cannot be expected to refrain from interference while the Russians hold eastern Europe in thrall and the Chinese foster wars of national liberation in Asia and both seek opportunities to subvert non-Communist governments all over the world. Would this not throw open the floodgates to a torrent of revolutions leading to communism?

Setting aside for the moment the question of whether Communist rule elsewhere is invariably detrimental to the United States, experience suggests a policy of nonintervention would not throw open the floodgates to communism. Communist bids for power have failed more often than they have succeeded in countries beyond the direct reach of Soviet military power--Indonesia and Guinea, for example. Of all the scores of countries, old and new, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, only four are Communist. There is, of course, no assurance that an American policy of nonintervention would guarantee against new Communist takeovers--obviously, our abstention from Cuba in 1959 was a factor in the success of Castro's revolution. But neither is there a guarantee that military intervention will defeat every Communist revolution--witness Vietnam. Neither abstention nor military intervention can be counted on to immunize against communism, for the simple reason that neither is of ultimate relevance to the conditions that militate for or against revolution within a country in the first place.

We have, in fact, had positive benefits from pursuing a policy of nonintervention. There is no country in Latin America more friendly to the United States than Mexico, which expelled American oil interests 40 years ago, while seemingly enthralled with Marxist doctrines, and which even now pursues an independent foreign policy, including the maintenance of cordial relations with Cuba. The thought presents itself that a policy of nonintervention could now serve as well to liberate us from the embrace of incompetent and reactionary regimes, which ignore popular aspirations at home out of confidence that, if trouble develops, they can summon the American Marines, while holding us in line by the threat of their own collapse.

The critical factor is nationalism, which, far more than any ideology, has shown itself to be the engine of change in modern history. When an ideology is as strongly identified with nationalism as communism is in Cuba and Vietnam and as democracy is in Czechoslovakia, foreign military intervention must either fail outright or, as the Russians have learned in Czechoslovakia, succeed at such cost in world-wide moral opprobrium as to be self-defeating. My own personal feeling is that, in a free market of ideas, communism has no record of achievement to commend itself as a means toward rapid modernization in developing countries. But, be that as it may, it will ultimately succeed or fail for reasons having little to do with the preferences of the superpowers.

We could profitably take a leaf from the Chinese notebook in this respect. The Lin Piao doctrine of "wars of national liberation," often mistaken as a blueprint for world conquest, is, in fact, an explicit acknowledgment of the inability of a foreign power to sustain a revolution without indigenous support. This is what Lin Piao said in the Peking Review:

In order to make a revolution and to fight a people's war and be victorious, it is imperative to adhere to the policy of self-reliance, rely on the strength of the masses in one's own country and prepare to carry on the fight independently even when all material aid from outside is cut off. If one does not operate by one's own efforts, does not independently ponder and solve the problems of the revolution in one's own country and does not rely on the strength of the masses, but leans wholly on foreign aid--even though this be aid from socialist countries which persist in revolution (i.e., China)--no victory can be won, or be consolidated even if it is won.

One hears in this the echo of President Kennedy, speaking of South Vietnam in 1963: "In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it." Or, as Theodore Draper summed it up in Commentary, "The crisis in 1965 in South Vietnam was far more intimately related to South Vietnamese disintegration than to North Vietnamese infiltration."

Nationalism is not only the barrier to communism in countries that reject it; it is a modifier and neutralizer of communism in those few small countries that do possess it. As Tito has demonstrated in Europe and as Ho Chi Minh has demonstrated in Asia, a strongly nationalist regime will defend its independence regardless of common ideology: and it will do so with far greater effectiveness than a weak and unpopular regime, also regardless of ideology. It is beyond question that the Tito government has been a vastly more effective barrier to Soviet power in the Balkans than the old pre-War monarchy ever could have been; and, as Edwin O. Reischauer wrote in Look:

It seems highly probable that Ho's Communist-dominated regime, if it had been allowed by us to take over all Vietnam at the end of the war, would have moved to a position with relation to China not unlike that of Tito's Yugoslavia toward the Soviet Union.

If freedom is the basic human drive we believe it to be, an act of faith seems warranted--not in its universal triumph, which experience gives us no particular reason to expect, but in its survival and continuing appeal. The root fact of ideology to which we come--perhaps the only tenet that can be called a fact--is that, at some basic level of being, every man and woman alive aspires to freedom and abhors compulsion. It does not follow from this--as, in the rhetorical excess of the Cold War, it is so often said to follow--that communism is doomed to perish from the earth as a distortion of nature, or that democracy, as we know it in America, is predestined to triumph everywhere. Political forms that seem to offend human nature have existed throughout history, and others that have seemed attuned to human needs have been known to perish. All that can be said with confidence is that, whatever is done to suppress them, man's basic aspirations have a way of reasserting themselves and, insofar as our American political forms are attuned to these basic aspirations, they are a long leg ahead in the struggle for survival.

Faith in the viability of freedom will not, in itself, guarantee our national security. But it can and should help allay our extravagant fear of communism. It should enable us to compete with confidence in the market of ideas. It should free us from the fatal temptation to fight fire with fire by imitating the tactics of a rival who cannot be as sure of the viability of his ideas in an open contest. The Russians, when you come right down to it, have better reason to fear freedom in Czechoslovakia than we have to fear communism in Vietnam. Appealing as it does to basic human aspirations, the contagion of Czech liberty very likely is a threat, at least in the long run, to the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union; by no stretch of the imagination can Ho Chi Minh's rule in Vietnam be said to pose a comparable threat to democracy in the United States.

The greatest danger to our democracy, I dare say, is not that the Communists will destroy it, but that we will betray it by the very means chosen to defend it. Foreign policy is not and cannot be permitted to become an end in itself. It is, rather, a means toward an end, which in our case is not only the safety of the United States but the preservation of her democratic values. A foreign policy of intervention must ultimately he subversive of that purpose. Requiring as it does the maintenance of a huge and costly military establishment, it must also entail the neglect of domestic needs, a burgeoning military-industrial-academic complex, chronic crises and marathon wars--all anathema to a democratic society. Every time we suppress a popular revolution abroad, we subvert our own democratic principles at home. In no single instance is the self-inflicted injury likely to be fatal; but with each successive occurrence, the contradiction and hypocrisy become more apparent and more of our people become disillusioned, more become alienated or angry, while a few are simply corrupted.

Being gradual and cumulative, the malady went largely undetected for too long a time. Now, however, a hue and cry has been raised, and for that we may be grateful, because the great debate in which we are engaged can, if we wish, be corrective as well as cathartic, by laying the foundations for a new approach in our foreign relations.

The shape and content of a new foreign policy are still beyond our view. For the moment, all that comes clearly into focus are the contradictions of our present approach and a few basic inferences that can be drawn from recent experience, notably: that we need not rely on military intervention to give freedom a chance of surviving in the world; that, indeed, we cannot do so without compromising our own freedom; and that only by being true to our traditional values and our own best concept of ourselves can we hope to play a decent and constructive role in a revolutionary world.