America after Vietnam

The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes extreme judgment on social systems that have outlived their vitality.

—Karl Marx, The Eastern Question

The President of the United States, though he is not a man known for a reflective turn of mind, has lately been directing his thoughts—as his namesake Richard II was represented by Shakespeare to have done—to “sad stories of the death of kings” and indeed, in Mr. Nixon’s case, to the death of entire empires. Speaking last summer in Kansas City, Missouri to the American press, Mr. Nixon touched on Greece and Rome. “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome, and you see what is left—only the pillars,” he said. “What has happened, of course, is that great civilizations of the past, as they have become wealthy, as they have lost their will to live, to improve, they then have become subject to the decadence that eventually destroys the civilization. . . . The United States,” he concluded somberly, “is now reaching that period.” But America would, he hoped, find the strength to go on—“the strength out through this heartland and across this nation that will see to it that America not only is rich and strong, but that it is healthy in terms of moral and spiritual strength.” America, he believed, would shoulder the responsibilities thrust upon it by the new world order emerging around us.

The President’s vision of that order was novel, and it is curious that the talk in which he expressed it should have received so little detailed analysis, for it was a serious intellectual effort. It was, moreover, the best single indication of the direction his ideas have taken in response both to his own preconceptions and the teachings of Henry Kissinger, and thus it also provided a clue to what lay behind the China initiative only a few days earlier, and his save-the-dollar moves of mid-August.

The actual details of the President’s vision will concern us later. What is important to consider first is the tone of the speech. And here we meet one of the reasons why its radical contents have gone largely unnoticed. For the tone is the old tone habitually adopted by Mr. Nixon: it is the tone of moral earnestness—boring, self-gratula-tory, small-town American earnestness.

Thus there is his account of American involvement in world politics over the course of the 20th century: “We have been in four wars in this century, and four times young Americans have gone abroad. We have done so without any idea of conquest or domination. We have lost hundreds of thousands of lives and we have not gotten a thing out of it. . . .” Not the slightest acknowledgment made here or the slightest awareness registered that World War I transformed America from a debtor nation to a creditor, or that the aftermath of World War II saw American business acquire a huge interest in European production at artificial bargain rates (using bloated dollars) and a favored position for the national currency that would have been tolerated so long for no other country.

There is his account of the American role in the Cold War: “Here is a nation that did not seek the preeminent world position. It came to us because of what happened in World War II.” Now even if we are prepared to dismiss the Soviet version of history entirely, and even if we were to discount the somewhat more careful arguments of the philo-Soviet revisionist historians, there would be still General de Gaulle’s tougher view of American hegemonism in the postwar world to take into consideration. Yet again Mr. Nixon registers not the slightest awareness of any such view—and de Gaulle was a man for whom he has frequently expressed the greatest admiration.

There is, finally, the whole business of the strained comparisons of modern America to Greece and Rome. A sensibility formed by the films of Cecil B. De Mille might, surveying the contemporary scene of protest, live-ins, drugs, and hard-core pornography, imagine itself in Babylon or in the Rome of the decadence. But need one, perhaps a bit gracelessly, remind the President that in the case of Greece, at least, the problem was not at all that the people drew back from civic responsibility? On the contrary, in the full flush of their strength, victims of hubris, the Athenians embarked on a course of imperialism that eventually plunged all of Greece into a suicidal civil war. Strained by that war, needing all their resources of men, money, and intellect for the problems they had brought on themselves closer to home, the Athenians nevertheless went off to invade Sicily—bogging themselves down in a hopeless campaign whose outcome, even if successful, could not really have altered the outcome of their deadly struggle with Sparta. The Spartans remained the same narrow-minded, duty-minded prigs to the end, and they were defeated not by decadence from within but by superior military might from without—by Thebes, Mace-don, and finally Rome. As for the Rome of the Caesars—of the homosexuals Julius and Tiberius; of the slobbering half-wit Claudius; of the incestuous Caligula; of the matricidal egomaniac Nero—it was in actual fact an expanding Rome, not a contracting or withdrawing Rome, and when it fell, it fell in no small measure because its imperial commitments had extended far beyond its military and administrative strength.

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Having said all this, however, let us admit that when the President worries he still has some sort of point. No one who has any feeling for what the country was, or seemed to be, in the not-so-distant past, can look at the United States today without a pang of anxiety. But the real question is not whether American society will have the strength to go on shouldering its putative international responsibilities. The real question is why the country is under strain and what is to be done about it.

Here the President seems to be talking dangerous nonsense when he speaks of losing “the will to live, to improve.” The society around him is asking just what its true responsibilities are—whether they really do include a willingness to continue shouldering some of the burdens of the past, and whether such a willingness, far from being a test of the country’s greatness, might be a mark of its foolishness and its thrall to illusion: might indeed have been so even in the past. If this is the mood of the country, it is no good talking about Greece and Rome. There are serious issues to discuss.

It is striking that a year which has seen Americans ride a dune-buggy on the moon in a dazzling display of technological expertise; which has seen Mr. Nixon hold out the heady prospect of a rapprochement with China or at the very least the revival of something like diplomacy in the Far East; and which has seen the Soviets come a humiliating cropper in the course of their Middle East machinations—that a year which has seen all that has nevertheless done so little to relieve the general air of despondency. The country remains depressed.

Partly it is the lagging economy—an economy whose long-term prospects in the world are not bright, dollar-salvage and clarion calls to economic competitiveness notwithstanding. But I doubt that it is only the economic situation that explains the troubled mood of the country. There seems to be something more. We get some indication of what this is from a recent survey by an opinion-testing institute in Princeton, which showed that a substantial majority of the American people, except for the blacks, but otherwise regardless of age, sex, religion, education or geographical distribution, were reluctantly of the belief that the country, in the last ten years, had simply “lost ground.”

It is certainly some sort of vindication of democratic theory that the common man in America can admit the unpleasant. This means there is reason to hope that America is not doomed, like some latter-day imperial Spain, to go on repeating sterile and outworn formulas and policies in a futile effort to fend off contact with reality. In this respect the ordinary person has been in advance of a good many among his intellectual leaders, few of whom have been notable for their realism of mind—neither the Establishmentarians nor the general run of critics of official policy. In opposing the war, to be sure, the ordinary American has lagged behind the universities. But in his refusal to condemn the nation out of hand, his tendency to shrink from the sort of hyperbole not at all uncommon among the anti-war intellectuals—charges of a deliberate American policy of genocide, for example, or cries that American imperialism is worse than any the world has known—the man on the street has often seemed more sensible than the country’s elites.

Still, even in a democracy, the man on the street does not initiate policy. He can only respond to propositions and choices put by others. He can only follow or not where others seek to lead. And here his morosity seems well justified. It is the duty of the elites to provide the framework of debate, the propositions and the choices among which the many can choose. In this duty, the elites of America have of late been failing very badly. Those who have attacked the war in Vietnam have been unable to set their opposition to the war into a coherent view of the country and its role. They have been right in this opposition but they have never been able to agree on a convincing explanation of why the war is wrong, and what the whole experience means. They have seemed fickle in their causes—moving from Vietnam to pollution to feminism to educational policy and back again, often at bewildering speed, and often in a style repugnant to a citizenry surfeited with the very idea of violent protest and confrontation. Not content with carrying forward the difficult task of educating the electorate to the notion that we cannot always win and that Vietnam is, in any case, from this nation’s point of view, a tragic, and criminal, waste, they have asked the ordinary American to see his country as an evil force aimed at subjugating and even exterminating the non-white peoples of the world. And as if this were not enough, they have demonstrated a perverse skill in joining the issue of the war to other issues—especially involving sex and pornography—which have been calculated to assault the values of the ordinary American and to offend his most vulnerable sensibilities.

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But if the common man has not been well served by the opposition intellectuals, he has if anything been even worse served by the Establishment. For the dominant characteristic of the American Establishment today is exhaustion—exhaustion of ideas, exhaustion of will, and most damaging of all, exhaustion of the power to generate popular faith in its ideas. Twenty-five years of American world guardianship and crypto-empire have left the inadequacies of Establishment thought naked to view, including the view of the common man who knows as well as anyone that very little has worked out as previsioned by the Establishment—not even those few things which have worked out well.

In Asia, our China initiative aside (for it is still too early to tell what its effects will be), we are very nearly alone—except for the uncertain allegiance of petty Asian stipendiaries whose support we have had, for the most part all too obviously, to buy. And what these stipendiaries will do now as the new China policy, if it is indeed a policy and not merely a ploy, continues to unfold and their more sordid interests are threatened, no one really knows. In Europe, where the great postwar hopes of the American leadership have in fact been realized, we cannot decide what to do next. In Latin America, after a third of a century of repeated starts in what is always billed as creative hemisphere diplomacy, America is still mistrusted and the prevailing social landscape is still one of economic and political retardation. As for Afro-Asia, more than twenty years of warning that if we did not succeed in sponsoring development there the Soviets would, have left the American electorate bored and indifferent—subliminally aware that nothing very much seems to change in these regions and that outside powers, whatever their ideological or political hopes, never really win.

The American people have been cried wolf to, over and over again, and the inevitable reaction has set in. Even the calm with which the news of the China initiative was accepted may reflect less the growing maturity of the nation than its simple exhaustion.

But if America were merely suffering from physical or financial exhaustion, the problem, while serious, would not be a deadly one. After all, so far as international relations go, we are in a kind of trough of history: this is not, fashionable opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, a turbulent age, in any sense comparable to the age of Hitler or the postwar age of Stalin. Considered as a tragedy internal to Asia, even Vietnam is relatively small as compared, say, with the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion in China in which 30 or 40 millions died or, for that matter, no worse than the massacres which occurred in Indonesia in 1967 and in Bengla Desh in 1971. Lest I be misunderstood I want to stress the point: the killing in Vietnam is a tragedy, and may very well be, with respect to the American involvement, a crime. But the dreadful truth is that the historical significance of the war lies not in what it has meant and done to Vietnam, but in what it has meant and done to America.

It is worth reflecting too, as a further curiosity of the present depressed situation, that the United States has actually won the Cold War as measured by the objectives defined in 1947-48 when the now canonical American foreign policy was originally laid down. For if our purpose was to reconstruct Western Europe and Japan while preventing their seizure by the Soviets, that aim has been amply achieved. The Soviet Union has grown since the Second World War, developing a formidably hyper-modern military technology along the way. But there was nothing to be done about that by America except to undertake sensible programs of defense, avoid clashes, and seek a reasonable adjustment of interests around the periphery of the USSR once the messianic fervor of the Soviets had begun to wane—as indeed it did begin to do after Stalin’s death.

This was what the Cold War was really all about. But it became mythologized into a gigantic clash of systems in which the ridiculous Soviet pretension to serve as a complete alternative to the Western way of life was taken at face value by many Americans, and in which resistance to the Soviets all along the spectrum came to be seen in America as the supreme test of national greatness. Then, after the victory of the Chinese Communists (not the Soviet Union) in China and in response as well to the Korean War, we panicked, so that the measured foreign policy devised in the early postwar years by men like George Kennan and Louis Halle, mere containment, was subtly infused with a spirit of anti-Communist crusade. Yet despite its formidable military and economic power, the Soviet Union was, is, and for the foreseeable future will be inferior to the United States in everything but the ability to trigger mutual nuclear suicide—an ability, incidentally, which in the world of the closing third of the 20th century is less and less the exclusive property of the so-called superpowers.

This somewhat Olympian view, of course, is easier to maintain in the present decade, when the defects of the Soviet position and the growing multipolarity of world power are manifest, than it would have been in the hectic 1940’s and 1950’s. Even so, we ought not to have lost our cool. However alarming a threatened Indian adhesion to Communism might have seemed a decade-and-a-half ago; however alarming to budget-hungry American admirals the presence of an inferior and ill-conceived Soviet fleet on the world’s oceans; however alarming the rhetorical alliances concluded between the Soviets and such romantic Afro-Asian revolutionaries as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Sukarno in Indonesia, or Karim Kassim in Iraq, indeed whatever paper alliances the Soviets might yet conclude, like their recent agreement with India—such ephemeral successes could never offset the actual deterioration of the Soviet position implicit in the consolidation of economic and political power in Western Europe, the rise of a hostile China on its eastern flank, and its imminent dethronement as the world’s second economic power by a newly rising Japan.

The Cold War, then, has been won—had been won, tragically enough, by the time the Kennedy administration embarked on its ill-fated Vietnam adventure. The external dangers to the United States, or even its friends, are no longer severe. (The Israelis are of course in danger but are well able to defend themselves if given adequate armaments.) In this situation the old ideas and myths are dying, with very little to take their place. The Establishment has nothing to offer and its liberal critics are apocalyptic or empty or sentimentally absurd.

Yet it is not only true, as is often said, that a nation usually gets the government it deserves; it is also true that a nation gets the intellectuals it deserves. In other words, if America is suffering from an exhaustion of spirit and ideas, it is the inherited American political faith—the very nature of the country in a sense—that is most fundamentally to blame.

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I realize that it has been usual to speak of the Americans as a pragmatic people—down-to-earth and severe with ideas, endlessly testing them, piercing through pretension. Very possibly in technology and business this was so; very possibly it was true, on occasion, in domestic politics. But in their view of themselves as actors on the stage of history, and in their view of the external world, Americans as a nation have been surprisingly ideological. Underlying American political actions there has always been a coherent political faith.

What were its main features?

There was, to begin with, the notion of the United States itself as a kind of special creation—a new thing in history destined to bring the world along in its train. This was the strain of American messianism.

There was the congenital dislike of the external world—the Old World—with its “corruption” and “vice” and “class” and “backwardness” and with its irrational, and intolerable, national “hatreds.” All these defects were held to be absent from America—so that Woodrow Wilson, that archetypical American figure, could even say while bringing his nation into the titanic struggle of the First World War that the “jealousies and rivalries of the complicated politics of Europe” which had gone into making the war he did not wish, in any sense, to know. (It is interesting, however, that the Americans had the support of the Old World itself in developing these righteous attitudes. “Amerika, du hast es besser,” said Goethe, summing up a common European idea. If later, during the years of America’s first intervention into world affairs, an exasperated Clemenceau or Lloyd George found themselves repelled by the moral certitudes of Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, their respective peoples displayed no such reserve when the American President appeared before them. For the frenzied millions of post-World War I Europe, America remained the very incarnation of the just and un-corrupted dream. And even the post-World War II intellectuels méchants of St. Germain, like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, so savage in their strictures on American politics and culture, often seemed, in their passionate and anti-rational angers at America, more like disappointed lovers than anything else.)

But there were other elements in the American political faith. There was the belief in progress—in an automatic progress which led the nation, and through it mankind, forward on an ascent which could be only momentarily checked. There was the related belief in the limitless power of reason to reduce human affairs to knowable causes and in the power of technics to turn such knowledge into a practical science in which experts and professionals might be trained. There was the faith in the possibility of a material solution to any problem and a correlative faith in the sovereign power of wealth. But above all there was the faith in the validity of the American experience—of American doctrines and American institutions—as a prototype for all mankind.

The ideology of post-World War II American globalism was essentially an amalgam of all these beliefs—though in a nation self-consciously anti-ideological, the very existence of the ideology was usually denied. It was an ideology simultaneously capable of appearing immensely sophisticated and—as formulated in the popular literature of interventionism—embarrassingly naive. The historical era in which it held sway is in actual chronology only three or four years distant, but so emotionally distant has it grown that only die-hards remain explicitly loyal to its major tenets today. In this process of disenchantment what has been instrumental, however, is not reason or maturity; it is the war in Vietnam. For in this single war the American leadership, with the acquiescence of the American populace, even if that populace was not always candidly informed of the nature of the undertaking, invested every one of the elements subsumed under the ideology of American globalism. And as they have met frustration and defeat, each of these beliefs has been compromised as well.

Thus the notion of the universal validity of the American experience has been blasted by the incomprehensibility of a quasi-colonial war, dirty and unending, fought out amidst obscure factions in a blind and hostile land. The belief in reason and technics has been discredited by the failure of all the experts gathered together in the State Department and the Defense Department and the White House to design a viable strategy or foresee what the next year would bring. The notion of wealth as a sovereign remedy for psychic and political ills has been blighted by the spectacle of the stipendiary South Vietnam reduced to degradation by the American material presence. The belief in the moral separateness and superiority of America has been damaged, if not destroyed, by the news of My Lai and other such hideous episodes.

We need not go on with the list. Most of all, what seems to have been irretrievably lost in Vietnam is the old American sense of omnipotence on which the national optimism had always, in the last analysis, been based.

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It is not going to be easy to repair the damage inflicted by the past twenty years, and certainly not with policies based on the same political faith and the same temperamental qualities which got us into so much trouble in the first place. For a nation like the United States, disappointed in its visions of the international order and bitter over all the blood and effort it has expanded, is far more likely to retreat in sullen disappointment from the world than it is to relearn, or indeed to learn for the first time, the true grammar of world affairs.

This is not to deny that the Nixon administration has made an effort. It is to say, however, that the effort is a timid effort and not a vigorous one. And the past lives on. The talk in Washington is of policy departures—and in the China initiative there truly seems to be such a departure. But in Europe, where if anywhere the Nixon Doctrine of transferring the primary responsibility for their own defense to our allies, rather than assuming the burden ourselves, could and should apply, and in Vietnam, where the crying need is to get out, the old immobilism holds and many of the old evasions remain.

Yet there are some changes. It is noteworthy that in the two State of the World Reports issued this year and last, and in the Kansas City talk to the press, Mr. Nixon acknowledges what no postwar President before him has ever been willing to acknowledge—that we live in a plural world and that American power is past its apogee. The Kennedy administration, to be sure, spoke of making the world safe for diversity—and was in practice the most imperial-minded administration we have had in this century, leading us straight into the tragedy of Vietnam and into a pointless collision with the independent ambitions of Europe: a will to independence embodied in, but not limited to, the figure—so perversely misunderstood in America—of Charles de Gaulle. (This same will to independence is embodied today in less attractive form by the German bankers who no longer feel a philanthropic urge to subsidize American imperial visions by subsidizing the dollar—though paradoxically they whimper at the thought of having to defend themselves.)

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No, there is a new tone in the White House. “Many of you . . . are old enough to remember what America was twenty-five years ago,” Mr. Nixon said in Kansas City. “We were number one in the world militarily, with no one who even challenged us because we had a monopoly of atomic weapons. . . . Now twenty-five years having passed . . . we see five great economic superpowers, the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and, of course, Japan.” His conclusion was simply that “the United States, as compared with that position we found ourselves in immediately after World War II, has a challenge such as we did not even dream of.”

This is good talk to hear from an American President, even though its effect of tough-minded realism is somewhat vitiated by the moral exhortations, the faint echoes of Chautauqua, that accompany it. There is also the nagging question of whether Mr. Nixon’s vision of the world of 1985 as a benign arena in which the five “economic superpowers” joust in a purely economic game (again a good clue to the new economic policy he was to announce a few weeks later) is still not at bottom a little visionary, a little utopian in the old American style, and a little simplistic as well.

The language is certainly realistic—and without being bellicose either:

Even if we find ways to avoid confrontation . . . and perhaps work out a negotiated settlement for mutual force reductions in Europe and the problem of Berlin and all the others that come to mind, we must recognize that the Soviet Union will continue to be a very powerful, potent, aggressive competitor of the United State of America. And ironically— . . . as we have more and more success on the negotiation front, as for example the Soviet Union, like the United States, may be able if we have a limitation in nuclear arms, if we are able to turn our eyes more towards our economic development and our economic problems—it simply means that the competition changes and becomes much more challenging than it has previously.

On China he had much the same to say:

. . . the very success of our policy of ending the isolation of mainland China will mean an immense escalation of their economic challenge, not only to us, but to others in the world. . . . 800 million Chinese . . . as a result of that opening will become an economic force in the world of enormous potential.

The burden of all this was that the United States economy would have to be strong in order to meet the challenges. Predictably, economic strength came down to sound spirits in healthy bodies. But the vaporings aside, many questions arise. Can we, for example, believe that a world of jostling economic competition will not be one of political tension as well? Will arms races be, as it were, beaten into trade wars—or will it be the other way around? And, anyway, just how sound will the American economy prove in the long run?

There is also the question of the simple plausibility of Mr. Nixon’s vision. Thus, while no one can deny that the Soviet Union is an immensely powerful country, in economic terms as well as military, it is hard to see the Soviets exporting much else beyond relatively crude heavy industrial products like steel, commodities of which the Western world and Japan already have a surfeit. They are not likely to beat the Italians at the refrigerator game or the Japanese at computer technology and services for a long, long time indeed. Where then is all this Soviet competition to come from that Mr. Nixon sees as developing?

The other point is simply that neither by tradition, structure, nor planned design is the Soviet Union a trading country on the international capitalist scene. And what is true for the Soviets is doubly true for China. It is noteworthy that a few weeks after Mr. Nixon’s speech, Chou En-Lai, in an interview with the New York Times, cast doubt on the whole idea. China, he said, is going to concentrate on its internal market for years and years to come. And it is well for him to say so. For China would have to do superbly well in the next twenty years to match even the current economic impact of so relatively small a country as Italy on world trade.

If, then, Mr. Nixon is looking for economic challenges—and if he does not they will soon come looking for him—he had better search the horizons much closer to home.

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Still Mr. Nixon is not a bad President and his foreign policy is not bad either—if we understand by bad the blind, activist seeking of disasters that has characterized most previous administrations in the postwar period. The real question is whether he is good enough—and fast enough. And here there is sufficient cause for worry. The pace is abysmally slow. Said Mr. Nixon in his second State of the World Report: “. . . the method is crucial. Clearly we could not have continued the inherited policy on Vietnam. Just as clearly, the way in which we set about to resolve this problem has a major impact on our credibility abroad and our cohesion at home.” This is the choice that has met the President at every turn—in European policy, in the dollar crisis, in Vietnam. And each time he has opted for caution—caution masked by some showy and ultimately ineffectual action, as in maintaining our outworn commitment to Saigon while lunging into Cambodia.

There is also the matter of the administration’s repeated Middle East interventions. Do we really need a Middle East hubris to replace the old Southeast-Asian hubris? How can an administration which acknowledges the end of total American preeminence, and which (at least verbally) seeks to cut the coat of American foreign policy to the now shrunken cloth of American emotional stamina, toy with a policy of externally imposed settlements and guarantees in the Middle East? The all-too-predictable outcome would be an eventual breach of conditions, to the detriment of Israel, and a consequent American obligation to make good on its security guarantees. Would an exhausted America do it? It is permissible to doubt.

The more one examines the foreign policy of the Nixon administration, the more patchy it seems, and the less it suggests a coherent strategy of interlocking regional policies. In general, Mr. Nixon gives the impression of impulsiveness and improvisation, as in the Cambodian invasion, which dealt yet another blow to a sagging American faith in the country’s leaders, and which established an ill-understood commitment thereafter to the fortunes of the anti-Sihanouk government. And the same qualities are evident in the entire idea of Vietnamization, which proceeds on the fantasy that the South Vietnamese alone will be able to do what they were unable to do with the help of a huge American army.

As it all too clearly begins to appear, all the administration has been doing in Vietnam is to prolong the agony, to disappoint yet one more hope of the American electorate, and to ensure that the final bargain with the Vietcong and the North (and it will be struck) will be worse than the bargain we could have struck immediately after Mr. Nixon took office. Mr. Nixon has held on doggedly to a falling stock, and has seen it fall lower with every passing day.

All of which brings us to the China initiative. There are many reasons for an approach to China—not the least of them being that it could, in the foreseeable future, increase pressure on the Soviets to make a satisfactory settlement in Europe. One suspects that the administration has no such coherent strategy in mind and that, good as this move certainly is in itself, it may be nothing more than a gambit. Perhaps Mr. Nixon has at last begun to despair of a better outcome in Vietnam and hopes that in the larger picture of a Chinese-American rapprochement no one will greatly care. Or perhaps he hopes that the Chinese and the Americans together (with the Russians or without?) can arrange and impose a settlement over the protests of the warring factions of Vietnamese. If so, this would prove that the illusions of great-power omnipotence are not dead in Washington yet.

But in the final analysis, for all the air of realism that tricks out the administration’s pro-nunciamentos on foreign affairs, they are based on an overriding illusion: that America can win the same victories in the world as Mr. Nixon’s predecessors sought, but at bargain-basement prices. Mr. Nixon, for all his acknowledgments of the dethronement of America from a one-time position of nuclear and economic preeminence, still wishes a political preeminence for America. He said as much in Kansas City and in his dollar speech—though, of course, he claims to seek that preeminence not for the primary good of America but for the good of mankind as a whole.

For essentially the same outcome in Vietnam that Mr. Nixon until very recently wanted, the Johnson administration was willing, by hook or by crook, to invest an American army of over 525,000 men, with all the killing and maiming and social strain at home that such a policy entailed. It was a tragic error; but despite the trickery that the introduction of so large an American force entailed, despite all the lying about body counts and aircraft losses and clandestine special forces, it was logical and an internally consistent policy with a fair chance of success. It happens that the enemy was more formidable than Mr. Johnson and his advisers supposed, but that was the policy’s only major conceptual flaw. Mr. Nixon’s foreign policy is largely one of self-deception and that, in the end, may be worse.

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The role of the Vice President in the present administration is an ambiguous one, and it is probably a mistake to assume too easily that Spiro Agnew actually speaks for the government on any single occasion, or for that matter in more than a general way at all. Yet there has been one angry theme stressed repeatedly by the Vice President which has found its echo in Mr. Nixon as well: that is the theme of neo-isolationism.

According to the administration, the great danger is that the critics of Vietnamization, the critics of the Cambodian invasion, the critics of the Laotian subterfuges, the critics of the indefinitely prolonged American presence in Europe, the critics of the continued stationing of the American Seventh Fleet in the Straits of Taiwan—all these critics, “neo-isolationists” at heart, will swamp the painfully acquired sense of international responsibility which is the great American achievement of World War II and the postwar years.

Just what the administration means by neo-isolationism has never been clearly defined. In fact, the term properly refers to a school of thought and foreign-policy analysis which began, some ten or twelve years ago, to point to and explore the implications of the breakdown of the Soviet-American duopoly and the emergence of a multiplicity of new power centers. It was the view of this school that both the United States and the Soviet Union were mired in illusion, dangerously mired in illusion; that the threat of further Soviet expansion was minimal; that the alleged combat between democracy and Communism for the adherence of the “Third World” (on which the outcome of the Cold War was widely believed to rest) was pretty much an unreal struggle. It followed that the task of American diplomacy was to draw back from this nation’s overextended responsibilities, while simultaneously, through pressure and persuasion attempting to facilitate a corresponding Soviet retreat from overextension. For overextension was deeply damaging and, in the long run, dangerous to the Soviets, to us, and to the world as a whole.

This point of view which we neo-isolationists expressed was, I believe, right ten years ago and is still right today, and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Agnew do no service in attacking it. By rejecting its arguments while there was still time for sensible measures of reform, the globalists who have for the past twenty years dominated the foreign-policy Establishment—the State and Defense Department professionals, the docile politicians, the conventional practitioners of “political science” in the universities, the think-tanks, and the foundations—merely insured the resurgence of what is more accurately described as paleo-isolationism than as neo-isolationism—a complete revulsion against American involvement in the world amid national conditions of anger, disappointment, and financial strain.

For the fundamental tradition of America—on the Left as well as on the Right—is isolationist. The promiscuous interventionism that has characterized American foreign policy for the past twenty years was never, at bottom, more than a psychological inversion of isolationism: since the world would not let America alone, America would set out to make the world over in its own image.

Now that this doomed undertaking has failed, the signs of excessive reaction are everywhere about us. Thus, in response to the failure of American arms in Vietnam, the very notion of force as an instrument of national policy is now scoffed at in many circles of opinion. Yet contrary to the current dogma that even the superpowers no longer dare to use force, the truth is that examples of the successful use of force are still all too abundant, as Biafra, Czechoslovakia, and Bengla Desh all sordidly testify. Force remains an option and will always remain an option, the issue being when and how and how much a nation can prudently use.

Thus too, having invested lives, treasure, and emotion in Vietnam to no good purpose and finding it difficult—indeed under the present administration agonizingly difficult—to ensure a definite terminal date for the involvement of American troops in that tragedy, our politicians succumb to a new impulse: to withdraw our troops from Europe instead. Now I am the last to deny that alternatives to NATO need examination and implementation. But surely to leave without a meaningful settlement is to reverse the proper order of things. Surely too in Vietnam it would have been better to negotiate seriously toward a settlement—because we are, after all, obligated to help clean up the bloody mess we made—long, long ago.

Running parallel to the impulse to pull up stakes and go home is a tendency to strike out at the laggardly Establishment in substitute spheres. As the demand to leave Europe now is one consequence of Vietnam, so is the new vogue for hitting the “military-industrial complex” (as if it had ever been anything but reluctant about getting into Vietnam) in surrogate ways—voting down SST’s, scoffing at the moon program, etc. There is, moreover, the contempt in which a good many simple and honorable men who have themselves been badly duped by their leaders (yes, I mean the United States officer corps) are held by increasing numbers of the population at large. In typical American fashion we do nothing by halves, so that the very notion of the armed services is now implicitly called into question—regarded not as an instrumentality that ought to be used with infinite caution, but as an intrinsically evil thing.

This is the new spirit of isolationism—the notion that America, in Charles Péguy’s phrase, can best have clean hands by having no hands at all.

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Having, then, for more than twenty years exaggerated the confrontation with Communism—having generalized a power-political combat with the Soviet Union, finite in time and space, into a universal combat for the totality of world civilization—America itself has now fallen into internal jeopardy. The whole society having foolishly been mobilized—materially, intellectually, spiritually—the failure of this vast national effort, as epitomized in Vietnam, now triggers a totalist and exaggerated and often misdirected reappraisal in which the very legitimacy of the society and its subordinate institutions comes into serious question.

The damage has gone beyond the possibility of easy repair: no mere retrenchment now will do the trick, and certainly no feckless foreign adventures. It is hard to believe that Mr. Nixon can make the nation look truly great again, and although I do not envisage a lapse into decadence on the model of ancient Rome, I find myself remembering Winston Churchill’s words: “Nations as well as individuals come to ruin through the over-exercise of those very qualities and faculties on which their dominion has been founded.” Perhaps it is an intuitive grasp of this truth which accounts on the deepest level for the malaise of the American elites and the morosity of the American people.

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