Liberation—but How?
Containment Or Liberation?
By James Burnham
John Day. 254 pp. $3.50
The sum total of James Burnham’s philosophy puzzles me. I have never been able to see how his famous Managerial Revolution, predestined by history, fits into his later exposition of power politics with Communism as the sole menace. Nevertheless, in each of his books taken alone, Mr. Burnham is always readable, sometimes dogmatic, generally explicit, and usually plausible.
In his latest book he argues that foreign policy has no meaning for the United States except as “policy toward world Communism and the Soviet Union.” There are only three possible choices: appeasement, which has by now been almost unanimously rejected by Americans; containment, as described by George Kennan; and liberation. Mr. Burnham is a slashing critic of containment and an ardent advocate of liberation—which great word means, to him, the breaking up of the Communist empire.
It is not hard for our author to make a strong case against the adequacy of containment as a long-range policy in terms not only of morals but of practical politics. In any case, Mr. Kennan has now been retired from the State Department—to our country’s loss. In his behalf I could argue that Mr. Burnham at points comes close to caricaturing the policy of containment as described by Mr. Kennan and as interpreted by American action in Greece and Korea; and that his own actual policy of liberation differs mostly in words and emphasis, and in minor proposals of dubious value.
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But my own case is somewhat different. I am willing to concede that the very nature of Communism as a secular religion, seeking universal power over the bodies and minds and souls of men, makes it impossible to believe that, over an indefinite period, it can be dealt with only in terms of containment. Coexistence for the Communist rulers may be a temporary necessity, but when Stalin and Malenkov accept it, they are indulging in verbal tactics rather than stating an honest conviction. The ultimate hope of the world requires profound modification of Communist imperialism by pressures from without or changes within.
However, one may effectively criticize containment without thereby automatically establishing a sound policy of liberation. It becomes of the utmost importance to inquire what specific program is offered as an alternative. In Secretary Dulles’s case it looks as if responsibility has brought prudence, and his “liberation” policy is scarcely more than the Truman-Acheson one of recent years expressed in somewhat different phrases to appease Republicans and give the appearance of carrying out what were rather reckless campaign pledges.
As for Mr. Burnham, with all his brave talk one hardly discerns a really significant practical program. Piecing together his suggestions, one finds a program which runs about as follows:
First and most basic, an announcement of America’s intention to liberate the nations which have fallen under Soviet power. (Mr. Burnham occasionally speaks of “peoples and nations now subject to Soviet imperial domination,” but he isn’t much concerned with possible differences between peoples and nations and his emphasis is on the latter.) Mr. Burnham is naturally concerned to say that this proclamation does not mean the immediate declaration of world war or an encouragement of premature risings. Positively, he says, liberation will mean the withdrawal of recognition “from the puppet Warsaw government in favor of the Free Polish (London) government.” He acknowledges that in the captive states, “In the end, the political outcome depends on those who remained, not on the exiles. At the same time, the United States should keep searching for forms that express the ultimate conviction of freedom, should always act as if the present captivity were only an episode and liberation inevitable.” An immediate project would be the formation of military units “under the flags of the now captive nations.” This program of liberation “will at once transform the problem of escapees who have been sitting like undigestible dough on the stomach of the free world.” There will be plenty for the escapees to do. Just what, and how, the author doesn’t tell us in detail. At a public meeting following Stalin’s death, Mr. Burnham added suggestions that we immediately release our anti-Communist prisoners in Korea, some of whom may find their way into Chiang’s or the ROK’s army, and that we “do something” to free Albania. Since Communist power operates outside as well as inside the Soviet sphere, “the liberation perspective suggests that the principal strategic aid in the non-Soviet nations should be the outlawing of the Communist enterprise. To that end all our political warfare should be directed.”
Mr. Burnham’s immediate objective in military terms is, like Mr. Kennan’s, to stop further Communist progress in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In Asia, “along with strengthening Japan, the needed minimum is to prevent the consolidation of Soviet control in China, Southeast Asia, and India, so that those areas, even if under Communist governments, will be not assets but rather liabilities in the total Soviet power system.” “The real development of Africa,” Mr. Burnham almost casually remarks, must be envisioned by “the youth” of France, Italy, and other countries “as a European frontier.”
In the course of his argument, Mr. Burnham is critical of all or almost all of our potential allies, and contemptuous of the American desire to be “loved.” De Gaulle is our best hope in France, rather than any “wobbling third force.” Marshall Plan aid was badly managed and didn’t amount to much in political warfare.
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I have every reason to know by experience that even the most careful summary of a program which the author has already tried to state concisely is not quite fair. Nevertheless, it is my sober opinion that the careful reader of the book will find that my summary pretty accurately indicates Mr. Burnham’s extraordinary and dangerous indifference to world opinion and our imperative need for allies, and his failure to give any content to the word liberation except the mere fact of anti-Communism.
His book will be read by most Asians and Europeans with a mixture of fear and anger. They will say his program points not toward liberation but straight to war. They will, for example, point to Mr. Burnham’s rather extraordinary footnote in which he dismisses fear of preventive war by defining it as “the term used by the spokesmen of the Department of State to refer to proposals that the United States should attempt to recover the strategic initiative.” He admits our need of allies for mass armies, but ignores our need of raw materials as well as the problem of ideological support.
His critics at home and abroad will not be at all impressed by Mr. Burnham’s argument that “the Soviet Union is never in fact provoked. If Moscow wants general war, then general war will begin.” For myself, I agree that Moscow at the moment does not want general war. It is, however, a gross misreading of history to say that the mightiest dictator is so completely the master of the forces he unleashes that he can decide absolutely when, if at all, a war shall begin. Nations which play at the edge of a precipice easily fall over.
Even if Mr. Burnham’s concept of liberation were richer and fuller than it is, his scarcely concealed contempt for the leaders and the groups, whatever their weaknesses, who are most sincerely interested in democracy in Europe and Asia is a positive hurt to the United States in terms of successful political warfare. We Americans are powerful but not omnipotent. We should not expect to buy love—even children don’t exactly love Santa Claus—but we need allies whom Burnham must estrange.
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The great weakness, however, of this book lies in the poverty of the author’s very idea of liberation. Granting that the mere absence of Communist tyranny would be a blessing, that fact is anything but self-evident to most peoples of the world, and the ideological poverty of Mr. Burnham’s concept of liberation against the seeming promise of Communism as it is presented outside the Iron Curtain condemns his type of political warfare to failure.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Burnham is right when he refutes the too easy notion of many good people that Communism is born solely of poverty and can be defeated by more Point Four aid to industrially backward areas. There remains, however, the problem of the strong appeal of Communism and the more pressing problem of making the democratic alternative more attractive. At this point, absolutely basic to “political warfare,” Mr. Burnham gives us no help at all.
It is true enough that poverty does not automatically breed Communism, but Communism is much more than merely a dynamic “political apparatus” with able sales agents. And it is thus that Burnham describes it. Communism very successfully exploits poverty, and that not merely among the workers and the poor, but among intellectuals and even the rich.
The appeal of Communism is tremendous in regions once dominated by the older imperialism, British, French, and Dutch. Communist Russia, and now Communist China, say to India, Pakistan, Indonesia: “As you still are, so once were we, weak and fearful in the presence of the strong Western powers. We also were once peasant nations. Look at our growth in power, in standing in world politics, and in industrialization. We owe it all to Communism.”
More than once I was told in India by people still non-Communist: “We do not like Communism but India must go Communist because only so can she be disciplined for industrialization and accumulate capital even at the expense of our hungry stomachs.” The testimony I heard in Southeast Asia was universal to the effect that the important Chinese colonies in Malaya, Thailand, and Indonesia were at first to a man pro-Communist because of their pride in the new unity, dignity, and power that Mao supposedly was bringing to China. Today if many of the “overseas” Chinese have fallen away, it is because they have learned how illusory are the benefits of Communist rule in their homeland, and how grimly real are Communist tyranny and oppression.
There is no conceivable political warfare which can win against Communism in Asia today, and Africa tomorrow, unless the democracy of the West can present an economic program, a political ideal, and a concept of world fraternity better than that which Communism offers, and infinitely better than Communism delivers once it has power. It is as part of such a program that Point Four, revised and improved, has value beyond Mr. Burnham’s apparent contempt.
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What alternatives do we have to “containment” and “liberation”?
There is no conceivable program which could wholly atone for past mistakes (and I agree with Mr. Burnham there have been serious mistakes) while guaranteeing to us Americans and to mankind the inestimable boon of abiding peace and perfect freedom. Nevertheless, there are certain definite things that we can and should do better than we have done. The overwhelming mass of mankind recoils from atomic war and has no hope of liberation through war. This is the moment in history when President Eisenhower should speak out and directly challenge Soviet talk of coexistence and love of peace. He should say to the world with a power, persistence, and ingenuity which may ultimately penetrate even the Iron Curtain:
“We Americans believe that freedom and peace will only be secured when they bless all the sons and daughters of earth. We believe that the free world can coexist with the Soviet empire without general war but only if there is a transfer of conflict out of the realm of global warfare by acceptance of universal, fool-proof disarmament down to a police level, supervised and enforced under a strengthened United Nations. The mere acceptance of disarmament would of itself end many of our conflicts. The basic struggle of freedom and democracy against totalitarianism must still go on, and we challenge the advocates of totalitarianism to wage it without resort to oppressive preparations for war, fought with instruments so horrible that the survivors of the conflict may envy the dead. We intend to maintain our military strength so long as a military threat continues. But we stand ready to sit down and consider working agreements for bringing about disarmament and for maintaining it. We stand ready to divert the billions saved from armaments to constructive and cooperative war against our own poverty and the world’s misery.”
I doubt that the Soviet government would easily accept the controls necessary for effective disarmament. Yet we could find ways to remind them, and even, to some extent, the Soviet people, that the one interest we all have in common is to banish the threat of war’s unimaginable destruction and to lift the terrible weight of the arms race off all our backs. The kind of statement I urge could almost at once recover for us an initiative for peace and the respect of the peoples who passionately desire it.
Doubtless there are some among the refugees from the Kremlin satellite states and from Mao’s China who in their bitterness see no hope for their freedom save in another war. I do not think they speak for the masses of the people in the countries which they have left. I do not believe that America’s dedication to “liberation” will strengthen us among the captive peoples if they can be persuaded that “liberation” means atomic war.
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Since this was written President Eisenhower in a magnificent address has proposed to the world sound conditions for achieving the peace about which the Kremlin talks. The high point of his message was his vision of what the end of the arms race would mean to mankind. His plans are endangered by two opposite delusions: one, that the Kremlin’s talk represents a change of heart rather than tactics; the other, that we can win by ultimatums—and, many Congressmen would add, at the same time reduce taxes. In fact democracy has a better chance to win without global war than Communism if it can combine firmness with wisdom and steadily hold before the eyes of the world the President’s vision of humanity uncrushed by the weight of competitive armaments.
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