I do not say that we ought to prefer the happiness of one particular society to the happiness of mankind; but I say that, by exerting ourselves to promote the happiness of the society with which we are most nearly connected, and with which we are best acquainted, we shall do more to promote the happiness of mankind than by busying ourselves about matters which we do not understand and cannot efficiently control.
—Thomas Macaulay, speaking in the House of Commons in 1845
Introduction
The passing of the Cold War, in presenting us a world which appears to be devoid of anything that could be seen as a major great-power enemy of this country, also obviously presents us with a problem for which few of us are prepared. One has to go back to the 1920s to find anything that could be even remotely regarded as a precedent for it; and even then, conditions have changed so greatly since that time that the precedent would be of very little relevance.
What presents itself, in this situation, is a demand for nothing less than a redesigning of the entire great pattern of America’s interaction with the rest of the world. To treat this whole subject in a graceful and coherent form within the limits of a single chapter in a book of this nature would surpass the capacity of this writer. He can only attempt, as a starter, to sketch out what he feels should be the main thrust and balance of American policy in the remaining years of the century, and then to give at least a partial elucidation of this concept by commenting on several significant aspects of the problem, without attempting to bring all of these individual comments into one, comprehensive statement.
The Parochial Interests
Anyone who sets out to design or to conduct the foreign policy of a great country has to be clear as to the interests that policy is supposed to serve. Only if the image of these interests is clear in his mind can the policy he evolves have coherence and usefulness.
Those who conduct American foreign policy have two sets of interests to bear in mind. First, there are the parochial interests of the country itself, in the most narrow and traditional sense of that term. Second, there are the interests that engage this country as a participant in the affairs of the international community as a whole. Both of these sets of interests deserve our respect and attention. But it is those of our own country, in the narrower sense, that lie closest to our hearts; and they demand our first consideration.
There is nothing wrong about this allotment of priorities. It is not the dictate of a national selfishness or disregard for others. This particular territory and these particular people, ourselves, are all that we, as a national state, have control over. The management of our society, and this in a creditable way, is for us an unavoidable responsibility as well as a privilege. Unless we meet this responsibility, no one else will; for there is none who could. And unless we meet it creditably, there will be very little that we can do for others—very little that we can do even to serve global interests. The first requirement for a successful participation by the United States in the confrontation with international environmental problems, for instance, will be success in coping even halfway creditably with the similar problems within its own territory.
But there is another reason, too, why the service to our own national interest is more than just selfishness. Our society serves, for better or for worse, as an example for much of the rest of the world. The life of no other people is so widely and closely observed, scrutinized, and sometimes imitated. So true is this that it is not too much to say that the American people have it in their power, given the requisite will and imagination, to set for the rest of the world a unique example of the way a modern, advanced society could be shaped in order to meet successfully the emerging tests of the modern and the future age.
The example, in any case, is going to be there, whether favorable or otherwise, and whether we like it or not. Our handling of our own problems is going to be carefully watched by others, no matter what we do. But if the example is only one of failure—of the evasion of challenge, of the inability to cope with our own major problems—this will be for others, aside from the loss of respect for us, a source of discouragement, a state of mind which can have far-reaching consequences, and for which we will bear a measure of responsibility. It is because no country can hope to be, over the long run, much more to others than it is to itself that we have a moral duty to put our own house in order, if we are to take our proper part in the affairs of the rest of the world.
But beyond the above, and as background for all that follows in this chapter, I should make it clear that I am wholly and emphatically rejecting any and all messianic concepts of America’s role in the world: rejecting, that is, the image of ourselves as teachers and redeemers to the rest of humanity, rejecting the illusions of unique and superior virtue on our part, the prattle about Manifest Destiny or the “American Century”—all those visions that have so richly commended themselves to Americans of all generations since, and even before, the foundation of our country. We are, for the love of God, only human beings, the descendants of human beings, the bearers, like our ancestors, of all the usual human frailties. Divine hands, as I suggested in chapter 2, may occasionally reach down to support us in our struggles, as individuals, with our divided nature; but no divine hand has ever reached down to make us, as a national community, anything more than what we are, or to elevate us in that capacity over the remainder of mankind. We have great military power—yes; but there is, as Reinhold Niebuhr so brilliantly and persuasively argued, no power, individual or collective, without some associated guilt. And if there were any qualities that lie within our ability to cultivate that might set us off from the rest of the world, these would be the virtues of modesty and humility; and of these we have never exhibited any exceptional abundance. The discussion that follows is predicated on the rejection of such illusions.
We saw, in the preceding chapters, some examples of the failures and unsolved problems of our society. There are others that could have been mentioned. Until these inadequacies have been overcome, the task of overcoming them will have to have first claim on our resources. Comprehensive programs of reform in several areas of our life will have to be devised, put in motion, and carried through. Until this is done, we will not know what resources we can spare for foreign policy; and those we find it imperative to continue to devote to that purpose will have to be cut to the bone. What we should want, in these circumstances, is the minimum, not the maximum, of external involvement.
All of this seems to me to call for a very modest and restrained foreign policy, directed to the curtailment of external undertakings and involvements wherever this is in any way possible, and to the avoidance of any assumption of new ones. This means a policy far less pretentious in word and deed than the ones we have been following in recent years. It means, in particular, a rejection of the tempting but fatuous assumption that we can find, in our relations with other countries or other parts of the world, relief from the painful domestic confrontation with ourselves.
There will no doubt be those who will be quick to label what has just been suggested as a policy of isolationism. The term is not very meaningful; but if it means what I think it does, I could only wish that something of that sort were possible; for most foreign involvements are burdens we should be happy to be without. But unfortunately, as will be seen shortly, whatever possibilities may exist for the curtailment of our external commitments and obligations, there will always be a goodly number that cannot be eliminated—not, at least, in any short space of time—and of which we must acquit ourselves as best we can.
The reason given above—namely, the priority of our domestic concerns—is not the only reason for the modest and restrained policy suggested above. There are others that will, I hope, become apparent from some of the detailed comments that are to follow.
The Global Interests
I have said that in addition to these parochial American interests which we have no choice but to respect, there are interests of the entire world community that also require our consideration.
First, there are the multilateral bodies to which we belong and in the activities in which we participate. Outstanding among these, of course, is the United Nations. The disappearance of the Cold War, with the extreme bipolarity and other distortions that accompanied it, should bring an enhancement rather than a reduction of the importance of the UN as a factor, generally, in world affairs. But beyond that, to the extent that we can resign some of our responsibilities, particularly in peacekeeping matters, to the UN (which is probably where some of them belong anyway), it can ease the shift toward a less ambitious and more self-effacing American policy. This will not mean divesting ourselves of all responsibility for the treatment of the problems in question; it will mean only that our efforts, instead of being unilateral, will be exercised through the UN, in multilateral bodies.
And there is one other aspect of UN affairs in the pursuit of which the U.S. government will have every reason to take an active part. The receding into the distant past of World War II, coupled with the disappearance of the Russian empire and the breakup of Yugoslavia, has already raised basic questions for the United Nations, particularly with regard to the future composition of the Security Council. In whatever direction one looks for the solution to these questions, one will find oneself coming up against a problem to which reference was made in chapter 4: the problem, that is, of finding a place for the smaller ethnic entity that is too restless to remain comfortably within the sovereign framework of a larger state but is not fully qualified or prepared to assume all the responsibilities of a total independence and equality of sovereign status as a member of the United Nations. In any efforts it may make to redesign the composition of the Security Council and to revise the structure of the international community, the United Nations should be able to call upon the most enthusiastic and creative collaboration that the U.S. government is capable of giving to it.
There will be other multilateral forums, either beyond those under the UN or only tenuously connected with a UN patronage, which can also serve as channels for American diplomacy in this coming period. Where they are available, they should be used. This writer was never partial to the use of multilateral channels for Cold War diplomacy; but for a country anxious to remove itself from the limelight and to give priority to its domestic challenges, the use of multilateral rather than unilateral approaches to world problems has much to commend it.
Beyond this, there are of course the serious formal and long-term commitments this country has already assumed. These, particularly its military alliances, may be subject to eventual modification or termination; but for the short term they are there and must be respected. There are numerous other contractual arrangements, particularly foreign and military assistance programs, most of which, as will be seen below, ought probably to be terminated as soon as possible; but that does not mean that the termination need be rude or abrupt. It should merely not be unduly delayed—and particularly not in the many instances where our interest in the programs in question is primarily of internal motivation, either by domestic-political pressures or by the parochial interests of individual governmental offices or private bodies.
There is also the interest our government has traditionally taken in the foreign economic activities of American business, and the extent to which it is at this time involved, multilaterally and unilaterally, in efforts to liberalize world trade and especially to encourage and support American exports. These involvements will surely continue; and it is not the purpose of this writer to urge any diminution of them within the framework of a more modest and restrained foreign policy. But the involvement of private interests in this entire field of activity is so overwhelming, and so seldom has the part our government has taken in these matters had anything to do with calculations of the national interest, as compared with private ones, that there is little place for the mention of it in a discussion such as this one. Suffice it to note here that our government’s involvements with international bodies such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, not to mention its unilateral exchanges and involvements with individual governments in matters of international trade policy, must be expected, however they may relate to the national interest, to continue essentially unabated in the years that lie ahead, and thus to make a mockery of any charges or suspicions of a total “isolationism.”
Finally, there is the entire area of the global environmental problem. Here, too, of course, the form of American involvement will have to be primarily multilateral—through participation, that is, in the work of the United Nations Environmental Program, and of other multilateral undertakings concerned with environmental matters. More will be said about this in the ensuing comments. But it should be noted here, and emphasized, that this is one aspect of foreign policy where the American interest is no smaller, and no less urgent, than in the need for domestic reform. And the priorities should be adjusted correspondingly.
The Governmental Machinery
The value of any policy purporting to reflect the national interests of the United States cannot be greater than the ability of the U.S. government to carry it out. And that will depend, in turn, on the extent to which the policymaker is free to address himself to that particular problem—the extent, that is, to which his field of vision and his energies are not preempted by competing undertakings in which the national interest is not a factor at all.
First of all, let us note the manner in which our government is at present set up for the conduct of foreign policy. In recent decades, the power to make foreign policy decisions has been scattered all over the vast panorama of Washingtonian bureaucracy. The process is theoretically under the ultimate control of the president, in the sense that anytime he decides to put in his word, that word is the controlling one. But the president is a very busy man. The time he has to devote to this sort of thing is limited. It was pointed out in an earlier chapter of this disquisition that under the American system of government, but not under many others, the president has to be both chief of state and prime minister, not to mention his responsibilities in party leadership. This puts great strain on him. The number of decisions, great and small, that enter daily into the conduct of American foreign policy are multitudinous. The State Department alone, we are told, receives, and is obliged to respond to, more than seven hundred telegrams a day. The president cannot possibly occupy himself personally with more than the tiniest fraction of such demands. The vast majority have to be delegated.
In recent years, this process of delegation has occurred in such a way that the power to take the necessary decisions has been fragmented, and is, as I say, farmed out all over the governmental pasture. In addition to the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Treasury, the Department of Commerce, and no end of legislators, legislative committees, and staffs all have their fingers in this pie. Parochial bureaucratic outlooks, interests, and competitive aspirations clash at every point. The result is, for obvious reasons, a very messy business. In this confusion, such a thing as a clear, firm, and prompt decision—and particularly one where all the relevant aspects of national interest are brought together, calmly weighed, and collectively taken into account—is rare indeed. It would do little good to have, here or there, at one place or another in the Washington scene, clear concepts of long-term national interest, so long as the power to make decisions remains thus fragmentized. As things now stand, many of the decisions taken are the results of long, labored, and tortuous compromises among endless numbers of individuals and committees, each of whom or of which has a different idea of the interests to be served. The result, not surprisingly, is everything else than a coherent, concise, thoughtfully formed, or clearly articulated foreign policy.
This writer has long had a vision of the most desirable means of correction of this deplorable situation—a vision that conforms, as he sees it, to the intentions of the founding fathers, but is most unlikely to be widely shared in the nation’s capital today. He considers that the president needs to have at his side, for the immediate conduct of all aspects of the country’s external relations, a deputy, whose powers in this field would be comparable to those of the normal European prime minister, and that this should be none other than the secretary of state himself. Subordinate to the authority only of the president himself in this broad field of activity (and by “this field of activity” I mean, literally, all aspects of official external American policy, political, military, commercial, or other), the secretary of state should be empowered to exercise not merely the direction over the operations of his own department but a general supervision over those of any and all other offices of the executive branch in the country’s external relationships.
This suggestion should not be taken too dramatically. What is intended is not to create a line of authority for the secretary of state over the heads of other departments. What is envisaged is only that he should be, for the range of problems indicated above, primus inter pares among his cabinet colleagues, that actions in this field should not be undertaken by other departments and agencies of the government without his knowledge and consent, and that he should have adequate opportunity, in case of disagreement, to lay his position and that of his department before the president.1
I mentioned, above, the National Security Council. Should it be retained at all? Not, I would hope, in its present form. It has been developed, in recent years, into something like a duplicate State Department. Presidents, for some reason, seem to have found this politically convenient. No other reason for it is visible. It adds, of course, importantly, to the cumbersomeness and the confusion of the entire foreign affairs bureaucracy.
The original concept of the National Security Council was, as I understood it at the time of its founding, a sound one. It envisaged the occasional coming together of a small group of the president’s senior foreign affairs advisers, to help him in his confrontation with questions of particular urgency and gravity. For this, there was required a secretary, with a small secretariat, to keep record of the meetings and to assure the follow-up of decisions. A council so conceived and so charged with competence need not have been an operative body; least of all need it have been a duplicate Department of State. But it could, if chaired (as it ought normally to be in the president’s absence) by the secretary of state, have been a suitable locus for treatment of the more important problems of coordination of foreign policy within the government.
Plainly, of course, there would always likewise be Congress to be taken into account. It, too, has its constitutional place in the designing of foreign policy. Decisions taken in the executive branch will always have to be compromised with the views and wishes of individual legislators and congressional committees. But here is where politics comes in. Here, the president and the secretary of state, both political figures, are the ones whose responsibility it is to make the unavoidable decisions as to the extent to which congressional views and wishes, very often the reflection of lobbyist pressures, should be deferred to, compromised with, or defied in the designing of foreign policy.
In the days of my directorship at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, I was sometimes urged to take into account, in our recommendations to the secretary of state, the domestic-political aspects of the recommendation in question. “Should you not warn the secretary,” it would be asked of me, “of the domestic-political problems this recommendation would present, and make suggestions as to how they might be met?” I resisted firmly all such pressures. Our duty, I insisted, was to tell the president and the secretary what, in our view, was in the national interest. It was their duty, if they accepted the force of our recommendations, to see how far these could be reconciled with domestic-political realities. This was a duty that they were far better fitted to perform than were we. And if we did not give them, as a starter, a view of the national interest in its pure form, as we saw it, no one else would, and they would not be able to judge its importance relative to the domestic-political pressures by which they were confronted.
Somewhere along the line there ought today to be, as there was then, someone charged with defining and holding before the eyes of both president and secretary of state the interests of the country as a whole, as distinct from those of individual groups or bodies of its citizenry. That being the case, there ought also to be, in regular and close contact with the secretary of state, a subordinate whose position would not be affected by changes of presidential administration and whose experience and memories could serve to remind both secretary ?nd president of the lessons learned, and the precedents established, by previous administrations. For these purposes, I would suggest, the secretary of state ought to have, to assist him in his tasks, a permanent under secretary of distinctly nonpolitical coloration, either a highly experienced diplomatic official or someone from private life long versed in the ways of international life. And this official, in turn, should have under his authority two deputy under secretaries: one for such international travel (of the sort now too often performed by the secretary of state himself) as could not be avoided, another for the administrative concerns of the Department of State and the Foreign Service (both of which organizations, one might hope, would gradually be greatly reduced in size). Flanked by these senior assistants, the secretary of state, himself avoiding like the plague, let us hope, all forms of official foreign travel, would normally be found sitting in dignity in his office on the seventh floor of the State Department, receiving as few visitors as possible, leaving to the permanent under secretary and his other subordinates the daily burden of contacts with members of the Washington diplomatic corps and with the various international bodies, and giving his attention to all the major problems of America’s external relations across the globe—not, as is at present the case, only to a single one of them, and for long periods on end. There would, under such an arrangement, be none of the hectic shuttle diplomacy, conducted in person by the secretary of state, that has marked American practice for the past two or three decades.
As for the real Department of State (and not this imagined one): this, and the Foreign Service it controls, is in a dreadful state: vastly overstaffed, poorly organized internally, so overelaborate and cumbersome that it becomes practically useless as an alert and responsive channel for presidential decisions. Its chief officer, the secretary of state, is sloughed off, suffocated by a cloud of competitors from other quarters of the government, and given only partial and limited peripheral tasks in a field of activity where he was supposed to be the president’s first assistant and alter ego.
And down that same slippery slope has gone the Foreign Service, to the brave beginnings of which, in the 1920s, this writer was once an immediate witness and of which he was a beneficiary. Victim for over sixty years to ignorance, indifference, domestic politics, and envy in many quarters, what was once supposed to be a well-selected, well-educated, well-trained, well-disciplined, and devoted corps of career civil servants, men and women, schooled to the service of the nation in a particular field and all held to the same competitive standards in selection and promotion, the Foreign Service has been steadily kicked around by official Washington until what remains of it today, to be sure, is a considerable band of faithful individuals, serving with intelligence and devotion at foreign posts not because of the way the government has treated them but in spite of it. These, however, are buried among masses of other individuals, who have undergone no such process of selection and who share little of this sense of commitment. The American diplomatic missions abroad, the premises of which were originally supposed to have been the offices of the various agents of the Department of State, diplomatic and consular, are now packed with outsiders, the children of other and more influential departments of the government, to a point where the members of the Foreign Service find themselves, like once the unhappy wife and son of Homer’s Ulysses, barely tolerated guests in their own home, and in some instances almost squeezed out of it. It speaks for a portion of American youth that it produces people able and willing to carry on under such conditions.
This, I suppose, is all that could be expected of a government that knows and cares as little as does our own about the traditional institutions of diplomacy and the needs they imply. The way that governments interact at the diplomatic level is a rather esoteric subject, fully to be mastered only by a certain amount of firsthand experience. But in the long run, the instrumentalities for the projection of our diplomacy are bound to be the reflection of the level of enlightenment brought to the shaping of them by masses of people, not only short-term political appointees, legislators, and civil servants but journalists and media personalities as well, few of whom have had such experience or attach any great value to it. In these circumstances, the spectacle our Foreign Service now presents—of a considerable number of able and devoted people working, side by side with thousands of less able ones, in rather overblown and absurd organizational complexes, most of them nominally American embassies—will long remain the object of wonderment and amusement on the part of the foreign statesmen who come in contact with it, but of despair on the part of the few Americans who once learned, and can still remember, the original purposes the institutions of diplomacy were supposed to serve, and the reasons why they were so designed.
The Domestic Lobbies
The limitations of our governmental institutions for policy-making are not restricted, however, to the habits and organizational confusions of the executive branch. There is also the effect on policy-making of domestic political considerations and pressures. It is to the power of these pressures that we owe the fact that what American policy has too often reflected has not been the national interest but something quite different: the parochial interests of minorities—lobbies, factions, or special pressure groups of one kind or another—to the influence of which both branches of the government, legislative and executive, have shown themselves to be extensively responsive. Anyone who has ever served in a policy-making position in the State Department or at one of its missions abroad knows how frequently this source of pressure has been the determinant of governmental action, and how unfortunate have often been the consequences of this abuse of the policy-making function. So numerous and conspicuous have been the instances of this sort of thing that illustrations would seem superfluous. The China lobby, the Israel lobby, the sugar lobby, and dozens of others that could be mentioned: they have all been there to twist the arms of American politicians whenever the interests of their particular clientele appear to be at stake. And who can blame them? If blame is to be assigned for such efforts and for the effects they have had on American policy, it is not the lobbyists themselves who deserve it; their motivations are understandable enough. It is rather the statesmen who have yielded to them even when they knew that the national interests would have warranted a firmer resistance.
The temptations to yield to this sort of abuse are, of course, for both branches of the government, great; and it would be too much to expect that this yielding could ever be completely avoided. Such is the nature of our political system. But it is important to recognize that to the extent that this tendency cannot be controlled and reversed, American foreign policy will never be fully under control. In every instance where special interest is allowed to prevail in a given aspect of American foreign policy, it is the national interest that comes out that much shorter, if only because the area in which the national interest could find reflection in the final product of policy is thereby curtailed. And anyone who undertakes to comment on the real and major long-term interests of the country as a whole, as I am about to do, has to ask his listeners to remember that whatever merit his comments may have will be restricted to that narrow area in which policymakers might still feel free to think in terms of the national interest rather than the interests of particular pressure groups or lobbies.
The Real Alliances
Another limitation on the freedom of our government to act in formulating its foreign policy will be found in the commitments into which our government has already entered—or allowed people to feel that it has entered. These are of two kinds: the formal military alliances and the others.
Let us take first the alliances. There are two of these: the North Atlantic Treaty and the Security Treaty with Japan. Both represent commitments of great seriousness. So long as they endure, they demand our faithful recognition and observance. But both, if they are to be related to their original purposes, have been profoundly affected by the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a major military power; and both require reexamination in the light of that development.
We have, in the case of Japan, the Security Treaty of September 8, 1951, with the many supporting agreements concluded in later years. It is on the provisions of that treaty that the stationing of American forces on Japanese territory and the American use of certain military facilities in Japan are based. The basic engagement was negotiated at the time of the Korean War and was retained in the ensuing years in the light of the official assumption by both parties that the Soviet Union was a threat to the security of both parties—a threat calling for, and justifying, their close collaboration in the military field. The question that now arises is whether that assumption still holds and whether this kind of collaboration is still justified.
From the standpoint of American security, Japan occupies in the Pacific region a position analogous in certain respects to that of the British Isles in the Atlantic region. In both instances, the United States has a definite interest in seeing that the respective archipelagoes do not become victim to aggression or intimidation by any of their great continental neighbors, and that there is preserved a relationship with their governments that is based on the recognition of a community of strategic interests.
These lines are being written at a time when Japanese-American relations are strained over economic-commercial issues and when the Japanese authorities cannot be expected to view this country with the same feelings of confidence, or of need for American protection, that prevailed in 1951. Nevertheless, the United States remains, even in Japanese eyes, a major military and naval power; and the advantages, to both powers, of a collaborative relationship between them in questions of the military security of the Pacific region are so great that they deserve recognition even in the absence of any very encouraging political relationship.
Most of the original rationale for the existence of the present defense arrangements was obviously lost with the ending of the Cold War. (Something of it, we should remember, will continue to exist as long as the problem of the effort of the North Korean regime to develop nuclear weapons is not solved.) Whether the Japanese government would like to see these military arrangements continued unchanged, the layman has no means of knowing. If it does not, there is no apparent reason for their retention in their present form, and we should welcome their abandonment or modification. But if any suggestions from our side for their abandonment would be regarded by the Japanese as a hostile political gesture, incompatible with a desire on our part to maintain the present collaborative attitude on Pacific problems in general, then the alliance would probably better be retained in some form until and unless the situation changes.
A somewhat similar situation prevails with respect to NATO. Here again, and particularly with respect to the security problems of the European continent, NATO has certainly lost much of its original rationale. It is the view of this writer that the time has passed when there was a necessity for the stationing of American forces on the European continent; and more will be said about that in the next chapter. But there are certain questions about the place of Europe, generally, in the spectrum of American interests over this coming period which deserve a word or two of comment at this point.
It is true that the focus on Europe that predominated in American opinion and policy from the time of the foundation of the republic down into the first half of this century is now being relatively weakened by changes in the ethnic and national composition of the American populace and by the growing importance for this country of Latin America and the Far East. And this might well be seen, along with the disappearance of the “Soviet threat,” as reason for the abandonment of the NATO tie.
But things are not quite that simple. The British Isles and parts (particularly the northwestern part) of the European mainland are still the source of a major portion of our cultural and political heritage. To say that the peoples of that region are our “friends” would be misleading. Friendship between peoples and countries is not the same thing as friendship between individuals. The best we can hope for from other peoples is that they should be aware of having a stake in our survival as a great power and of the value to themselves of a relationship of mutual confidence with us. This has been the basis for the relationship of most of the European peoples with us over the past century. It is in our interests that it should continue.
But beyond that we must recognize that the British and the peoples of continental Western Europe emerged from the experiences of the two world wars with a strong sense of insecurity, founded in a distrust of their own ability to assure their security or even their postwar recovery exclusively by their own efforts and without American help. It was this that led some of them to press us, at the beginning of the year 1948, to enter into a military alliance with them. The impression that there really was a Soviet threat had something to do with it, of course, as did their lingering fear of the Germany in their midst; but behind that, and more important still, lay their own lack of confidence in themselves, bred of the bitter memories of the two great wars and the realization that without American support they could scarcely have ended either of those wars without jeopardy of their political independence and security. Something of this insecurity and of this sense of dependence on the United States has endured to the present day, despite the complete recovery of their economies and the extensive revival (particularly in France and Germany) of their military strength. It has not been fully relieved even by what has recently happened in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. The idea of facing a world, however changed, without the assured support of the United States still arouses among the peoples of Western Europe feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.
It is undesirable that these, our most reliable European friends, should be thrown unnecessarily into the apprehensive frame of mind that would flow from a complete and sudden abandonment by us of our contractual ties with that region. That the reasons for this sensitivity on their part are largely subjective and not fully rational does not render them less important.
Beyond that, we must remember that NATO, while designed mainly as a military pact, was not entirely that; it had, in the minds of its founders, nonmilitary purposes as well as military ones. Whether it will continue to be needed for these nonmilitary purposes has not yet been clarified, but it is not impossible. The alliance has begun to take an interest in the broader question of the reconstruction of the security structure of the European continent in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and in the promotion of the movement of European unification. It remains to be seen how far this involvement on NATO’s part will go, or what significance it will have, but precisely because of this uncertainty, the present is no moment for any final decisions about the future of the alliance. The best we can do, as we watch the unfolding of these great readjustments in European affairs, is to bear in mind the fundamental considerations that should underlie our relationship with that great region, and to be alert for opportunities to play a helpful role without violence to any of these deeper principles.
The two relationships of alliance continue to stand, then, despite the disappearance of most of their original rationale, as claims on the attention of our policymakers and of the resources we have to devote to our external relations. There is, surely, a lesson in this. The lesson is that far-reaching involvements with other countries, if allowed to endure for long periods of time, have a habit of surviving the situations that gave rise to them in the first place. Their very existence creates new situations, which their creators could never have envisaged. Thus any effort to put an end to them, however logical and natural this may appear in the light of the fading of their original purposes, becomes a new political action, the desirability of which has to be judged against the changing realities of a new day.
The Implied Alliances
Beyond these two formal alliances, the terms of which exist in writing and have had the ratification of the U.S. Senate as provided by the Constitution, there are a number of special relationships with countries of lesser size and military power which are all too frequently referred to as “allies” but in regard to which the use of that term stands on shaky ground. How many of these there are, I would hesitate to say. Outstanding examples would be Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan, and others whose qualification for this dubious distinction seems to even be more ephemeral. In a number of instances, the use of the term “ally” with regard to these countries seems to rest on little more than the fact that for long periods of time, originally for Cold War reasons or in deference to long-standing Middle Eastern commitments, we have been devoting large sums of money to the maintenance and the strengthening of their armed force establishments—have been doing this, in fact, for so long and with such prodigal generosity that it seems to have become a habit, so that its withdrawal, like many other benefits long accorded, would be regarded as a signal offense.
It is not my intention to deal, in this book, with the current relations of our government with specific other governments. So I shall not go into the justification for this beneficence on our part in individual cases. Some of these handouts appear to be essentially rental payments for territory or facilities made available to American armed forces. I can only say that since most of these relationships, too, like the two alliances mentioned above, have origins that are now being increasingly questioned, I should think they all deserve some reexamination in the light of present conditions. But I would like to take this opportunity to register my objections to the use of the term “alliance” to describe them. I am not aware that any of them have been defined as “alliances,” as such, in treaties properly negotiated and ratified by the Senate of the United States. This sloppy and careless use of the language simply sows confusion of understanding.
The Third World
Beyond the great-power allies and those other countries just mentioned (let us call them, for want of a better name, the “favorites”) with whom we have special relations, there lie approximately 150 other “sovereign” entities, members of the United Nations, which are objects of our attention and with which, with rare exceptions, we maintain at least formal diplomatic relations. The majority of these are the beneficiaries of one or several of our many aid programs, military and civilian; and our involvements with them consist very largely of arrangements for one-sided assistance.
Within the framework of these aid programs, some fourteen billion dollars would appear to be leaving our treasury annually, to end up, in one way or another, in the hands of foreign regimes. Over half of the “programs” are ones for military assistance; the remainder, the civilian ones, come under the heading of International Development and Humanitarian Assistance.
Although there is a sizable portion of this largess that could, in my opinion, be well omitted, I do not mean to suggest that all of it should be. A portion of it—something like two billion dollars—seems to be routed through multilateral organizations; and for this, if only for public relations reasons, there would seem to be good reason. Another four billion would appear to be going mainly to the “favorites,” in the form of grants, largely for military purposes. The rationale for these, as we have seen, would seem to lie largely in the power of Cold War habits, as yet not fully overcome, or in the support they are seen as offering to our involvements in the Middle East. The remainder, some seven or eight billion dollars, directed principally to smaller countries, may seem negligible in monetary terms compared with the remainder of our budgetary outlays; but for a government confronting our deficits it is a not inconsiderable figure. And this financial aspect of our aid programs is not the only, or even the principal reason, for the doubts I have to express about them.
The first of these doubts have to do with the sheer numbers and complexity of the administrative effort involved at the Washington end. If I interpret correctly the governmental figures for the fiscal year 1990, some eighty-four countries were then benefiting from American economic aid, and ninety, largely but not entirely the same ones, from our military assistance programs. One shudders to think of the number and complexity of the various written agreements these programs must have involved; for the aid took various forms and categories, and there must have been multiple agreements with many individual countries. To get any idea of this vast and confusing network of engagements would be a task of research requiring many days not just of individual effort but of staff effort as well for its completion. And this task would be multiplied severalfold if it were extended to include an examination of the uses the respective recipient governments made of this aid.
What legislator, one wonders, could possibly dispose over the amount of leisure time it would take to survey all these programs? Or what common taxpayer, either, for that matter? I find it hard to believe that there is any single person or office, even in the State Department, where all this information is conveniently available, its content critically surveyed at frequent intervals, and the results of such oversight effectively fed into the formulation of national policy. To figure out what we are really doing, and to what results it is all leading: this would be the policymaker’s nightmare and the bureaucrat’s heaven. The question presents itself, Is there not something badly wrong, and even dangerous, when the operations and obligations of public authority in a given field attain so great a profusion and complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to mention private, oversight?
Even more problematical is the question of the motivation for all these “programs.” The government’s official professions along this line sound very inspiring. We are going to “alleviate suffering,” to “promote sound economic policies,” to “promote the growth of market-oriented economies through budgetary support,” to “provide expert advice to foreign governments,” and so on. And, oh yes, we are going to “support the emergence of democracies as well.”
But is there anyone in Washington, it may be asked, who ever stacks these noble aims up against the results actually achieved? I cannot recall any of these aid agreements ever being canceled because it failed to reveal any great usefulness in any of these respects. Indeed, the wide spread of them (military aid programs, for example, for all but seven of the fifty African countries, and for twenty-two out of the twenty-four Latin-American countries) would suggest that these benefits are distributed sweepingly, by categories, and that little or no attention is paid to the results, or lack of results, in individual instances. Some eighty-seven countries are, we are given to understand, benefiting from aid programs under the title of Military Education and Training. We are presumably teaching the soldiers of these countries how to use weapons; and I have no doubt that in many instances we are supplying them, directly or indirectly, with the weapons we are teaching them to use. But against whom are these weapons conceivably to be employed? Forty-three of these recipient governments, for example, are African ones. They are not greatly involved in intercontinental conflicts. It is hard to imagine against whom they could use these weapons, and the training we are supposedly giving them, if not against their neighbors or, in civil conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?
Taking, again, just the African continent as an example: this sort of thing has been going on for years. And what do we see when we look at that continent today? On every hand, egregious overpopulation, and its unchecked proliferation; disease, particularly AIDS; exhaustion of resources; destruction of environment (the slaughtering of the rain forests and the growing of the Sahara). And democracy? In three or four cases, yes—perhaps; but in how many others—chaotic conditions, deterioration of civilization, civil disintegration. I am not saying that these latter phenomena are the results of our many involvements; but it is hard to see that the latter have had any noticeable effect in preventing or impeding them, or show any promise of having such an effect in future. And is it not apparent that in the face of these powerful trends our aid efforts are puny, and beside the point? Similar questions could be raised about programs in other continents as well. Africa is simply a particularly dramatic example.
However one views it, the evidence seems to me to be overwhelming that the great bulk of our aid programs are essentially self-engendered, in the sense that they have very little to do with the real needs of the countries to which they are addressed, but reflect very well a variety of motivations on the part of those in Washington who have authorized the programs. These would include the gratification Americans derive from picturing themselves as the teachers of others in matters of democracy and economic progress; the tendencies toward bureaucratic empire building in Washington; the incurable tendency of Americans to do everything by uniform categories rather then by careful and discriminate attention to the requirements of the individual case; the interests of official intelligence gathering (in the case of the military programs); residual Cold War reactions; cloying involvement with individual foreign leaders or regimes; and, finally, sheer bureaucratic inertia and habit—the feeling that when something has been going on for a long time, why change it?
These motivations are not all discreditable. Some are attributable to the general feeling that when one country is rich (or is usually so described), it ought to try to be helpful to those that are poor. This, surely, is a commendable reaction, testifying to the generosity of spirit of those who experience it. But does it not also reflect a serious underestimation of the depth of the problem, an overestimation of the importance and effectiveness of our response, and a lack of concern for the real results of our efforts to give aid, as compared with the comfort we derive from seeing ourselves as the giver of it?
Multilateral Diplomacy
Most of these observations have pertained primarily to bilateral relations with other countries. It remains to say a word about the multilateral ones. These take place in both the global and the regional contexts, the global ones being largely the concern of the United Nations.
Whenever the initiative for undertakings by the UN comes from us, there will be, of course, no question of our support and participation. But even when the initiative comes from others, there are two reasons why, unless we have strong reasons of principle for not doing so, we should not deny it either of those responses. There is, first, the need of the United Nations, as an institution, for our moral support. It is, as I have already said, the only symbol of the community of fate that links all the branches of the human family. It would be an immense loss—a loss to civilization generally—were that ideal to be neglected or abandoned, and this particularly at a time when the unity of the ecological structure of the planet and the demands that unity creates for the coordinating of national environmental programs are becoming increasingly evident to people everywhere.
But beyond that, for a country that wishes to present a low profile in the time that lies ahead, as this country has every reason to wish to do, collaboration with other countries in international undertakings under UN auspices, and particularly in ones flowing from initiatives other than our own, holds many advantages. It is needed not so much as a protection for others (for American initiatives for multilateral enterprises are more apt to be naive than sinister) as it is for ourselves, relieving us, as it does, of responsibilities we ought not now to be assuming, restraining us from those flights into political and verbal posturing to which many of us seem to be inclined. Not the self-trumpeting leader in great moral causes but the modest, willing worker together with others in the vineyard of international collaboration: that is the image of itself that America should wish to project to others, but primarily to itself, as the twenty-first century, so replete with uncertainties and dangers, begins to impose itself upon us.
As for multilateral collaboration at the regional level: I have already pointed out that there are many problems that, one might suppose, could be more easily and effectively treated in regional international bodies than in global ones. I can perceive no conflict between the regional and the global areas of multilateral collaboration. I am sure that the respective bodies of the United Nations will be only too happy to encourage, if not to sponsor, efforts of this nature at the regional level, wherever these promise success in bringing the various parties together and achieving significant results.
But regional organization and collaboration must take its departure, as it does in the European Community, from the nature and the needs of the respective region; and in no two cases will these be alike. North America, for example, presents particular problems in this respect, owing to the predominant geographical and economic position of the United States and the great cultural differences that divide its neighbors to north and south. It is, in fact, hard to think of any region that lends itself more poorly to intimate regional collaboration in a number of fields. Here, admittedly, one will have to feel one’s way.
But the United States has every reason to cultivate with particular care and thoughtfulness its relations with these neighbors, and especially with Canada and Mexico. And where wider possibilities for collaboration on a regional basis present themselves, let us give them every support and encouragement, ourselves treading very lightly, doing all in our power to disarm the inevitable suspicion that we are attempting to dominate the process and exploit it to our own, selfish advantage.
Such thoughts about the prospects for regional organization here in North America are one thing. Thoughts about such organization in other continents or regions are another. For the most part, these latter are matters we understand poorly and in which we have no reason to interfere or to judge.
An exception to what has just been said is Europe. There is no apparent reason why we should belong to any regional European association. There are, however, reasons why we should take a special interest in any tendencies toward such association in Europe and should give them our encouragement and support.
It is true that this country becomes, with every day that passes, less European in the composition of its population and in the relative importance of Europe among its various interests and concerns. Nevertheless, its governmental tradition and its political culture generally have been largely derived from that side of the ocean, particularly, though not exclusively, from the British Isles. And the close relationship between the security of Western Europe and that of this country has not only been recognized in two great wars but has been sealed, in a sense, by those many Americans who laid down their lives in the service of it.
For these reasons the European continent is, for us, more than just another continent among continents. Whether there is still need for a NATO at a period where there is no significant threat to the security of Western Europe from any outside quarter is, as has already been pointed out, a reasonable question. Our interest in Europe’s security will remain whether there is a visible threat or not. This does not oblige us to be a member of any European regional association. It does give us reason to hope for the continued vitality and prosperity of the civilization of that part of the world, and to be the great and good friend of any efforts by the Europeans to promote this by collective effort. The Europeans, as mentioned above, are our good friends as are the inhabitants of no other continent—not because they love us (words of that sort are misplaced when one is talking about great peoples) but because they recognize both the common traditions that unite us and the importance of our attitudes and our disposition for their own security. This is the nearest one can come to friendship in the relations between peoples. That being the case, we have reason to value the dispositions we encounter on that side of the water. And that, too, should be recognized as one of the guiding principles of American policy.
Human Rights
This brings us to the questions of “human rights.” Let us first glance at the extent of our involvement in this cause. The Department of State, as I understand it, in addition to harboring the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs headed by an assistant secretary of state, now has a “human rights officer” attached to the normally already redundant staff of every American diplomatic mission anywhere. One part of the duties of these particular officials is said to be the preparation of an annual report on the human rights record, so called, of the host country. The department, for its part, maintains in Washington a “human rights reports team,” to read and ponder such reports and to prepare a consolidated report for Congress. It does all this, to be sure, not solely of its own volition; these procedures are now, at least in part, required by law. But what is under consideration here is not the involvement of the Department of State alone but of our government as a whole in the question at issue. And thus extravagantly do we, like a stern schoolmaster clothed in the mantle of perfect virtue, sit in judgments over all other governments, looking sharply down the nose of each of them to see whether its handling of its domestic affairs meets with our approval.
That these commitments constitute one more limitation on our freedom of action in foreign affairs—one more instance in which we have committed ourselves in advance to behave in a given way in a wide category of instances, none of which can be specifically foreseen—is beyond doubt. And is this justified?
I spoke of this matter, in its purely international aspects, in chapter 4. At the risk of a certain repetition, let me now look at it from the standpoint of American foreign policy.
Let us recall, first of all, that the manner in which regimes customarily treat their subjects, worldwide, is largely a matter of tradition, habit, and popular concepts of what is right and what is wrong. All these are subject to change, to be sure, over long periods of time, but seldom, if the results are to be lasting, can the change be abrupt.
It is the habit of a great many regimes, across the surface of the globe, to deal harshly with those of their nationals who have opposed their positions of power, or who are suspected of doing so. In most instances, their opponents, if the shoe were on the other foot, would behave in much the same way. The incentives to such behavior are never-ending; and unless the national traditions and political habits sternly rule them out, they will normally be yielded to. The pressures of outside opinion may occasionally cause the respective regime to go a bit easier for a time in this respect; but unless these pressures are supported by the inherited political culture of the place, and particularly by the existence and tradition of democratic self-government, such gestures of moderation are not apt to be lasting.
The pressure of outside opinion about human rights sustained over long periods of time, can indeed produce beneficial changes in both attitudes and institutions. The role of private opinion in this direction, when applied in support of gradual change, is important and should be welcomed. Whether governments, and the U.S. government in particular, should be involved in exerting such pressures is more dubious. In this respect, governments have to take the world pretty much as they find it. Their task—at least, the task of the U.S. government, as I perceive it—is to conduct its own relations with other governments in a manner conducive to a minimum of bilateral friction and to the maximum of usefulness to world peace and stability. This will be most effective if the sound old principle on noninterference in the other’s domestic affairs is respected—if the lines of responsibility, in other words, are clearly recognized. This includes the responsibility of each regime for the governing of its own people. Each of them has, alone, the power to shape the situation in this respect. It must be, from the standpoint of morality, the judge of its own behavior. Outside pressure, particularly from another government, is seldom helpful, and may be counterproductive.
For a foreign government to exert such pressure, in circumstances impossible to foresee, for an indefinite time into the future, strikes me as in all respects a questionable procedure; and I cannot but regret the lengths to which we have shown ourselves prepared to go, and the leadership we have even taken internationally in promoting, on the governmental level, the cause of “human rights.”
The die is now cast. Formal obligations have been entered into. The practice has found sanction in American public opinion. So be it. But I would ask it to be noted that this is one more instance, like several others mentioned in this chapter, where indulgence of the desire to appear virtuous in our own eyes has placed limitations on the area in which we would have the flexibility to act usefully in more significant areas of international life.
Morality and Foreign Policy
Just forty years ago, in a series of lectures at the University of Chicago which later found publication in book form, I casually mentioned moralistic preaching to others, along with an excessive legalism, as one of the more regrettable features of American policy in the earlier decades of this century. This had, as it turned out, the unintended effect of landing me in a good deal of controversy. The controversy usually took the form of allegations that I had advocated for this country a cynical and amoral policy, devoted to the cultivation of America’s military power and devoid of respect for the noble national ideals of which America foreign policy ought to be the reflection.
I have, on numerous occasions, endeavored to set to rights what I felt to be the misunderstandings involved in such charges. In particular, I addressed to this subject an entire article, published in the quarterly Foreign Affairs (Winter 1985–86). But I plainly did my job poorly, for very few readers professed themselves satisfied with the answers.
I stressed, in the article just mentioned, the fact that government, although constitutionally charged with the conduct of foreign policy, was an agent and not a principal, and that the area in which a government was at liberty to be guided by moral convictions was not identical with that in which the individual had his existence and arrived at his decisions. I also confessed, in that article, my regret that I in earlier years had had a part, although a very small one, in setting up within our government facilities for the conduct of secret operations. I expressed, as the more mature judgment of later years, the view that all forms of foreign policy that involved secrecy and concealment were neither in keeping with the American tradition nor did they fit naturally with the established modalities for the conduct of American foreign policy.
Were I writing such an article today, I would go even further and add that the involvement of our government in the acquisition of secret intelligence, by espionage and other unavowed processes, while perhaps occasionally unavoidable, has had ascribed to it a degree of importance far greater than it deserves. This judgment has rested on my longstanding belief that well over nine-tenths of all that our government needs to know about life beyond our borders, even in military matters, can be better and more safely obtained by the scholarly scrutiny of information already available to us in legitimate ways than by the most elaborate efforts of espionage, secrecy, and concealment. I make these points in order to emphasize that I am concerned to distance myself from all aspects of American policy that cannot be openly and honestly avowed.
One should not conclude from these observations that I am advocating the sort of open diplomacy that Woodrow Wilson talked about so many years ago, during and after World War I. I regard it as a matter of course that all covenants formally arrived at with other governments should be made publicly known and duly recorded in the publications of the United Nations. But I feel very strongly that the privacy of negotiations looking up to the conclusion of such covenants must be protected. The results of negotiation, in other words, must be made public, but the soundings, contacts, discussions, and negotiations leading up to such agreements must be covered by the right of privacy; and it is up to the government to protect that privacy, even in the face of the often obtrusive and insistent demands of the press and the media.
Beyond these observations, I am disinclined to resume the rather fruitless discussion of the relationship between morality and foreign policy with which I have had so little luck in the past. So I shall now content myself simply with an effort to state the principles by which I would like to see us and our government guided in these respects.
I would like to see this government conduct itself at all times in world affairs as befits a country of its size and importance. This, as I see it, would mean
• that it would show patience, generosity, and a uniformly accommodating spirit in dealing with small countries and small matters;
• that it would observe reasonableness, consistency, and steady adherence to principle in dealings with large countries and large matters;
• that it would observe in all official exchanges with other governments a high tone of dignity, courtesy, and moderation of expression;
• that, while always bearing in mind that its first duty is to the national interest, it would never lose sight of the principle that the greatest service this country could render to the rest of the world would be to put its own house in order and to make of American civilization an example of decency, humanity, and societal success from which others could derive whatever they might find useful to their own purposes.
If this be seen as immorality, let those who see it that way make the most of it.
Conclusions
In the behavior in recent decades of the American political establishment in matters of foreign policy, I see reflected a number of persistent motivations, most of them illustrated in what has been said in this chapter. I see, thus reflected, remnants of the astigmatism and the corruption of understanding the marked the Cold War period. I see the impulse to cater to the demands and desiderata of powerful special domestic-political interests. I see a great deal (some of it contradictory) of what I think of as diplomacy before the flattering mirror: the desire to appear as the gracious and high-minded lady bountiful (the many aid programs), as the thrilling military adventurer—the knight in shining armor, rushing to the aid of the threatened and the downtrodden (Vietnam, Panama, the Persian Gulf War)—and as the unbending champion of democracy and human rights. I see the addiction to established habit, and the ponderous inertia, of entrenched bureaucracies. And in all of this I see the never-ending compulsion of successive administrations to present themselves, for the popularity polls, in postures that feed the American public’s favorite wish-images of itself. All this I see. What I do not see is any marked concern for the national interest in the narrow sense, on the one hand, or for the wider interests of the threatened planet, on the other.
The reader may recall the observation made in chapter 3 to the effect that every political regime, in all places and all times, speaks with two voices: one for the interests of its people as a whole, the other for its own interests as one of the contenders in the inevitable domestic-political competition. And it strikes me that in the behavior of the American political establishment, as noted above, there is a decided, and undue, predominance of the second of those two voices. I am not arguing that it should not be heard at all. I know that this distortion of priorities is one of the prices we pay for the advantages of our form of government. I have no doubt that most of our politicians, confronted with this reproach, would say, “Don’t you realize that in order to have the ability to act in the national interest, we first have to gain power; and that to gain that power requires precisely the sort of compromises and pretensions that you are professing to deplore?” But to this I would have to reply, “Yes, within limits. But I don’t see any great difference in your behavior before and after an election. One electoral test successfully surmounted, you at once begin thinking of the next one; and the domestic-political considerations again crowd out the interests of the nation as a whole.”
Still, I see this situation as the fault not so much of the individuals who command, at one time or another, the seats of power but rather of the political system that installs them in those positions. Is there not, I wonder, some serious structural defect that puts so great a premium on one sort of political motivation, and so little on the other?
- I might interject at this point that if any of our numerous students or commentators on American government and politics want an interesting subject for exploration, they might do worse than to inquire into the reasons why so many of the presidents of this century (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush) have conspicuously disregarded their secretaries of state when it came to the more important questions of foreign policy, and have tended to conduct policy in such matters directly out of the White House, often through the agency of unofficial persons or security advisers (Colonel House, Harry Hopkins, Henry Kissinger, Zbiginew Brzezinski, Admiral Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Brent Scowcroft), either neglecting their secretaries of state or assigning them to tasks of partial or subordinate importance.