In finally taking over responsibility for the Middle East, the United States, as so often before in this century, is doing in the end, at great cost, what it was perfectly clear from the beginning she would have to do—and what, if done earlier, might have been accomplished with relative ease. Only this winter John Foster Dulles warned Congress that the Russians were penetrating the Middle East and that we might face World War III if we did not rush to fill the vacuum left by the retirement of the British. Yet it was Dulles who for a year pooh-poohed just such warnings from the British, French, and Israelis. And it was Dulles who put pressure on the British to evacuate the Suez Canal Zone, and whose policy afterward helped to drive the British out of the Middle East and to create the vacuum which now so alarms him.
In the disputes between the British and the Arab nationalists, as in the disputes between the Arabs and the Israelis, the United States was not against anybody. We simply refused to exert our will in the matter. We recognized of course that Western Europe could not afford to allow the Suez Canal and the Middle East oil fields to fall into hostile hands. But we felt that we could hardly impose our will on Colonel Nasser, or help the British impose theirs, without increasing Arab antagonism and making matters even worse than they were. Besides, strong nations, no matter how justified they thought they were, had no right to impose their will on weaker nations. These disputes, we felt, must be settled according to legal procedures. They must be negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations.
The trouble with refusing to take a stand is that it always seems to require you to take a very positive stand against the people on your own side. America’s pre-World War II neutrality involved, as a positive program, seeing to it that no aid got sent to the Spanish Loyalists and the Ethiopians; so that Hitler, in looking ahead to the war with Britain and France, must have counted the American Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937 among his chief military assets. In the same way, we demonstrated our refusal to exert our will over Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal by taking very positive steps to prevent the British and French from exerting theirs. We insisted they negotiate, at the same time that we insured the failure of the negotiations by taking away from the British and French any bargaining power which their ability to apply or even threaten pressure might have given them.
During the Suez invasion we worked actively in the United Nations to insure its failure. We did not hesitate to threaten the British with economic ruin in order to force their withdrawal from Egypt, and we later applied similar threats to Israel. We have yet, however, as far as anyone can see, to apply a comparable pressure upon the Arab states to make them cooperate in a Middle East settlement. For that would be to exert our will; and it is, by our curious reasoning, only when we threaten our friends, especially when these threats are to the detriment of our own interests, that we regard ourselves as playing fair. Now that we have been left to wrestle with Colonel Nasser over a Suez and general Middle East settlement, it remains to be seen whether we will be forced to change our tactics and apply pressure to him. If we do, we will soon find ourselves in a position vis-à-vis Nasser not unlike that of the British, and we will be cursed just as roundly by Nasser and his supporters.
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However much Americans may deplore the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, it was that event which woke us up to our responsibilities in the Middle East and made us realize the mistakes we had been making. It forced us, in the month following the invasion, to learn again the lesson which American policy of the past decade had on the whole given us to believe we had learned—that a great power cannot stand off from events, that if you will not manage events yourself you are handing the management of them over to your enemy.
The history of the 20th century has made it clear that whenever the United States does not seem to know what she wants, and does not exert power in a definite and positive way to get what she wants, trouble ensues—not only for us but for the whole world. I say we do not seem to know what we want, because deep down we do know. The fact that we always in the end take action in what is for us, though apparently not for our enemies, a perfectly predictable direction is a sign that we do know. The Communist invasion of South Korea took place after the United States had in many ways indicated that Korea was not for us an area of primary strategic importance. Yet as any thoughtful American could have predicted, once the invasion started we went to war to stop it.
We proceeded to make the same mistake in the Middle East when we indicated that we did not consider it an area of primary strategic importance for us. We indicated this by staying out of the Baghdad Pact and by putting pressure on the British to evacuate the Suez Canal Zone without their first getting adequate guarantees for the protection of allied interest there. We certainly indicated our detached attitude toward the Middle East when, after Nasser’s seizure of the Canal, Secretary Dulles, while undermining all the efforts of Britain and France to protect themselves, talked grandly of taking the case to the United Nations and even of not being able to support the “so-called colonial powers.”
To the Russians—who are, we must remember, as cynical about our motives as we are about theirs—Dulles’s talk must have seemed the sheerest hypocrisy. For they would have decided that when the United States feels its really vital interests at stake, it does not—as in Okinawa, Iceland, or Formosa—talk about colonialism or depend for action upon the United Nations. The Russians would not have forgotten Korea, where we announced our intervention first and then went to the United Nations for approval. Nor would they have forgotten the revolution that brought down the pro-Communist government of Guatemala—a revolution they would be sure we had inspired.
Dulles’s legalistic talk would therefore have been interpreted by the Russians as a sign that Washington had written off the Suez Canal and the Middle East oil fields as indefensible in case of war. Yet it was clear to any American who looked ahead that we could not and would not, when the pinch really came, allow the Russians to take over the Middle East.
Our action, when the pinch came, is a sign of what might have been done earlier. The President announced that we would oppose the dispatch to Egypt of Communist “volunteers,” and all Communist talk of “volunteers” stopped abruptly. The President’s indication that we viewed with “concern” the shipment of Soviet arms to Syria, and would view “with the utmost gravity” any hostile move against the Baghdad Pact nations, probably saved the government of Iraq from collapse. And enunciation of the “Eisenhower Doctrine” for the Middle East has put new life into the Baghdad Pact—as evidenced by the meeting of the Moslem members of the Pact at Ankara—and has posed a threat to Nasser’s “neutralist” bloc of Arab nations—as evidenced by King Saud’s trip to Washington and the subsequent division at Cairo between the anti-Communist attitude of the Kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan and the pro-Communist “neutralism” of Egypt and Syria. Finally, the explicit stand of the United States (forced from us, to be sure, by Israel) against the Egyptian claim to rights of belligerency against Israel could, if followed through consistently, lead to a Middle East settlement which would protect the area from further Russian encroachment.
Why then did it take us so long to realize, or at least to act as though we realized, that we would not allow the Middle East to fall into Russian hands? All nations make mistakes. But the mistakes of other nations usually come from a misdirection of will, while ours come more often from an abdication of will. We seem to need a crisis to force us to take, not so much the right action, as action itself. Why?
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The question lies at the heart of most of that postwar discussion of American foreign policy which has tried to account for our refusal before World War II to act like the world’s greatest power, and to insure our acting that way in future. Typical of the kind of lessons being taught us nowadays is a recent book, An Introduction to American Foreign Policy (1955), by two professors of Political Science, Edgar S. Furniss, Jr. and Richard C Snyder, which traces the history of American foreign policy in order to show how after 1939 we changed from a small-power to a great-power way of thinking about world affairs. Speaking of the crisis in American thinking that led after 1936 first to our rearmament and finally to our participation in World War II, the authors write that the thing Americans had to learn was to stop being afraid of words like “national power” or “power politics.”
Those who sought [before World War II] to demonstrate what is now, after World War II, self-evident—that both phrases can be used, not as value judgments, but simply as recognition of the fact that the presence or absence of the attributes of national strength plays a great role in the relationships between sovereign states—were bitterly assailed from both flanks, by idealists who wanted the United States to lead the world toward Utopia by the strength of its moral position, and by those who wanted to retain for their country the inherently contradictory luxury of a powerful nation behaving like a small, weak state. Abnegation and denial of power had characterized American foreign policy after World War I, and many wished to continue this role of irresponsibility.
Since World War II, nobody has bothered to attack the latter group, the old-fashioned isolationist’s—victory on that front having generally been won. The effort now would seem to be to woo us away from, or at least to modify, that evangelistic spirit in foreign affairs which in its latest manifestation as Wilsonian idealism one had supposed to be the very opposite of isolationism. One sees now, however, that Wilsonian idealism belongs to the same small-power point of view as isolationism; for it supposes that we can exert paramount influence in the world without exerting paramount power. One sees now that Wilsonian idealism is the natural outgrowth of that isolationist spirit which, having considered America too pure to soil her hands in European politics, presumes, once intervention is forced upon us, to teach those benighted Europeans the few “American” principles necessary to set their house in order.
These principles boil down to the single one that foreign affairs ought to be conducted as we conduct our affairs at home: according to strict legal and parliamentary procedures, and democratically. Delegates ought to respond to the pressures of their electorates, and negotiations ought to be conducted publicly where they can be subjected to popular scrutiny and judgment. Since World War II the effort of what might be called advanced thinking on foreign affairs has been to show us the practical limitations of such principles.
In a series of lectures delivered at Princeton (published as Democracy in World Politics, 1955), the Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, opposes to the Wilsonian slogan “open con-venants openly arrived at” the words of a French diplomat, “The day secrecy is abolished negotiations of any kind will become impossible.” And Max Beloff, in lectures at Johns Hopkins (published as Foreign Policy and the Democratic Process, 1955), speaks of the new affection for the “old diplomacy,” stimulated by the abuse of the United Nations and of international conferences for purely propagandistic activities.
Like so many people these days, Beloff quotes Count Alexis de Tocqueville on his visit to the United States in 1831.
Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses; and they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those faculties in which it is deficient. . . . A democracy is unable to regulate the details of an important undertaking, to persevere in a design, and to work out its execution in the presence of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy, and it will not await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or to an aristocracy; and they are precisely the means by which an individual people attains to a predominant position.
Beloff then goes on to show how the events leading up to and following World War II have forced Americans to realize that Tocqueville’s prediction had more validity than we were earlier willing to recognize.
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The high respect we nowadays give to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a sign of our new critical attitude toward certain democratic assumptions. Although Tocqueville is sympathetic to American democracy, he turns upon it a mind which, because we recognize it as alien—as European, aristocratic, “hard”—strikes us as more realistic than the “softer” American or democratically oriented minds we are used to. The taste for Tocqueville is part of a new taste for “hard”-minded writers; it is a manifestation of that new post-World War II climate of opinion which, whether it parades under the banner of the new Moral Realism in literary discussion or under the banner of what in political discussion is sometimes called the New Conservatism and sometimes the New (or critical) Liberalism, shows Americans as preoccupied with reality because they are up against situations for which their inherited ideas can no longer serve as guides.
“Reality” is the key word in current discussions of American foreign policy—as in George F. Kennan’s recent book, Realities of American Foreign Policy (1954), which by its title alone criticizes our democratic illusions on that subject. Americans would like to think of diplomacy as an intercourse between peoples and hence our faith in international parliaments. But “in international affairs,” says Kennan, “it is governments, not peoples with whom we have to deal. . . . Only a government can speak usefully and responsibly in foreign affairs.”
Walter Lippmann wrote his latest book (The Public Philosophy, 1955) precisely to blame the decline of the West on the misunderstanding of democracy which has caused the cession of executive power, the power to deal with other governments, to the public at large. In 1917, says Lippmann, a subtle revolution took place inside the Western democracies. In order to get the people to work harder and harder as the continuing war required, the Western governments democratized their war aims and conduct by pursuing total victory and by promising total peace. Thus they lost the power of strategic decision over the war and the peace.
This revolution appeared to be a cession of power to the representative assemblies, and when it happened it was acclaimed as promising the end of the evils of secret diplomacy and the undemocratic conduct of unpopular wars. In fact, the powers which were ceded by the executive passed through the assemblies, which could not exercise them, to the mass of voters who, though unable also to exercise them, passed them on to the party bosses, the agents of pressure groups, and the magnates of the new media of mass communications. The consequences were disastrous and revolutionary. The democracies became incapacitated to wage war for rational ends and to make a peace which would be observed or could be enforced.
The danger, according to Lippmann, is that the public will have nothing less than total or absolute ends for foreign policy, yet always chooses, when it comes to action, the “soft” rather than the “hard” policy. The public always prefers to do nothing or as little as possible rather than to do something decisive.
The trouble with Lippmann’s analysis is that he assumes that left to its own devices the government would pursue “hard” policies. Yet the history of this century does not suggest that the governments of the democracies have been appreciably ahead of their peoples in willingness to take strong action. In major instances—the Spanish Civil War, the appeasement of Hitler—they have been distinctly behind, at least behind the more vocal part of the population. It was governments, especially the professional diplomats and soldiers, who were inclined to see Hitler and are now inclined to see Nasser as just another politician with whom we could do business. The professionals have shown themselves to be even less adept than the public at seeing through to the irrational motives of nations and their leaders and to the ultimate moral implications of certain policies.
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Kennan is more satisfactory than Lippmann because he sees the danger as a misapplication of moral ideas—ideas we all share, governors and governed alike. We are, he suggests, too moral in the wrong places and not moral enough in the right places. He reminds us that “we cannot, when it comes to dealings between governments, assign to moral values the same significance we give them in personal life.”
Let us face it: in most international differences elements of right or wrong, comparable to those that prevail in personal relationships are—if they exist at all, which is a question—simply not discernible to the outsider. . . . Do you find this shocking? There is hardly a national state in this world community, including our own, whose ultimate origin did not lie in acts of violence.
This does not mean that Kennan is an exponent of power politics. On the contrary, he takes a stand against those Americans who were overwhelmed after World War II by the realization that we had destroyed the German monster only to make way for the Russian one and became wholly absorbed with power values, with the necessity of solving the world’s problems by destroying the latest monster. We must, says Kennan, stop seeing our enemies as monsters whose exorcism would leave us a world without conflicts. Our enemies’ ambitions arise from causes which will always produce new enemies for us. Let us stop supposing therefore that the task of international politics is to eliminate the evil nation and then to rely on rigid legalistic procedures to maintain the good nations in their present status.
“The task of international politics is not to inhibit change,” says Kennan, it is to recognize conflict and change as normal and “to find means to permit change to proceed without repeatedly shaking the peace of the world. This task will be best approached not through the establishment of rigid legal norms but by the traditional devices of political expediency.” For it is just in the really vital issues over which nations go to war that they will not submit to legal judgments, especially to UN resolutions passed by nations who are themselves voting to advance their own interests. India, after all her preaching to others, flouted the United Nations over Kashmir; Britain, France, and Israel, who have an important stake in the United Nations, nevertheless flouted it, at least temporarily, over Egypt. Can we sup pose that the United States, if forced to choose between a United Nations resolution and what she considered to be her really vital interests, would act any differently?
It can be objected that political expediency is the oldest diplomatic game in the world and has never prevented wars. It can also be objected that Kennan forgets Hitler, who, bent on universal holocaust, never showed much consideration for expediency; or Stalin, who used the cold war to maintain despotic power within the Communist world and would not have been deterred by any bargain we might have offered him. The answer to these objections is first, that where expediency does not work legalistic procedures certainly will not, and second, that Kennan is addressing Americans and seeking to correct specifically American errors of thought. He might have made quite other proposals to citizens of other countries.
This brings us to the sense in which Kennan would have us be more moral than we are—and, incidentally, break once and for all with our long isolationist tradition, both in its pre-Wilsonian and its Wilsonian phases. He would have us, without renouncing our present purposes, still renounce the claim to a “special moral distinction.” He would have us “admit that we Americans, like everyone else, are only people, in whose lives the elements of weakness and virtue are . . . thoroughly and confusingly intermingled.” Not only would such a renunciation give us a more honest moral position, but it would also free us from the sense of shame that goes along with the claim to a special moral distinction—the “sense of shame over the fact that we do exist, that we are a great nation, and that as such we occasionally have needs we are obliged to express to other people and to ask them to respect.” Such a renunciation would be a real break with isolationism, for we would finally give up the illusion that we can avoid the fate of other great powers—that we can take responsibility for the world’s affairs without soiling our hands in the world’s good-and-evil.
It is just here, I think, in the fear of our own power, which is to say the fear of taking the moral chances of genuine commitment, that we find the answer to our original question—why in this century has the United States been so consistently late in taking the action overseas which she knew from the start she would have to take? We have, I think, been reluctant to give up that irreproachable reputation we enjoyed in the last century, at least in the other hemisphere, where we had no really vital interests. In this hemisphere, where we had our vital interests, our reputation was on the contrary quite bad. The aim of Kennan and of all those who are trying to change our way of thinking about foreign affairs is to bring our thinking up to date with our present position in the world and the foreign policy it requires. It is to give us a moral rationale for that policy so we can execute it more effectively, and without being afraid of it as outside our moral understanding and therefore as wicked reality. It is to make us stop feeling guilty about our power and use it, confidently and decisively, to accomplish the things we believe in. The aim, in other words, is to make us stop thinking like a provincial nation and start thinking like citizens of a nation whose decisions determine the course of world affairs.
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Does this mean Realpolitik, that moral considerations are to play no part in our foreign policy? Not at all. Our moral principles remain what they are, both as to ends and means. The difference is that we must now take more facts into account in making practical moral judgments. We must test our principles against the difficult ambiguities of actual conditions, which means that we must really exercise our moral intelligence.
It began to look during the post-World War II decade as though we had learned to make such complex judgments. We combined with our support of the United Nations certain actions taken outside the United Nations—the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey, the stationing of the Sixth Fleet between Formosa and the Chinese mainland, and even Truman’s initiative in first announcing our intervention in Korea and then going to the United Nations for approval. We also combined with our traditional anti-colonialism an alliance with Britain and France and a rejection of certain nationalist movements—in Indochina and Malaya, for example—which were dominated by Communists. But the strain of reconciling so many conflicting considerations was apparently too much for us: the breaking point came with the invasion of Egypt, when we found we could no longer reconcile our anti-colonialism and allegiance to the United Nations with our friendship for Britain, France, and Israel.
The tortuous route by which we have since that time groped our way toward a Middle East policy shows perfectly the difficulties we face in finding a moral position consonant with the facts. Not only did a majority of Americans breathe a sigh of moral relief when the administration took its stand against the invasion, but during the month following the invasion America went on a regressive binge, taking a holiday from the arduous responsibilities of the last ten years. Isolationist voices were raised once again, hailing the break with Britain and France as finally freeing us from the need to underwrite their “imperialism” and giving us the chance to pursue at long last an “American policy.” When the President himself proclaimed, after the invasion of Egypt, that “we cannot subscribe to one law for the weak and another for the strong. . . . There can be only one law or there will be no peace”—we were back to the position so dear to American hearts, the position of irreproachable righteousness.
Yet the facts show that the President’s stand was untenable whether by realistic, moral, or legal considerations. Realistically, it was clear that we were weakening our side and strengthening the Russians in the Middle East and that we would eventually have ourselves to supply the power to fill the vacuum we were helping to create. Morally, we were standing against three of the world’s staunchest democracies in favor of a proto-fascist backed by a Communist dictatorship. Nor was there any doubt where in a moral sense the original and ultimate aggression lay—who was out to stir up trouble, who was out to annihilate whom. Even legally speaking, the “one law” to which the President alluded simply does not exist. If it did the invasion would never have taken place, for Egypt would not have been allowed to go on practicing her aggressions.
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The trouble with an untenable moral position is that it forces you to alternate between stupidity and hypocrisy—between ignoring the facts and then, when you are finally forced to face them, using your inadequate morality to cover up what without a rationale must prove to be a clumsy opportunism. That is why it would be a misunderstanding of Kennan’s idea of a realistic diplomacy to suppose that he would favor the hypocrisy any more than the stupidity. What he is after is a moral position which would enable us to act in consonance with the facts and our just interests. It is of course an old American habit to feel most sincere and high-minded at just those points where American policy seems to ignore the facts as well as American self-interest. Against that habit I can only cite the words of a political theorist friend of mine—“In politics stupidity is not moral.”
That is perhaps the essential lesson Americans must learn. We feel righteous when we are regaling each other with truisms and uneasy when we have actually to look into the moral substance of things. We would rather moralize than be moral. We have therefore to get it established that we can, for example, believe in the self-determination of subject peoples without having to approve of Nasser’s kind of nationalism—which thus far has had nothing but hatred to offer as a cure for Arab ignorance and poverty; or without having to support all the political maneuvers of the log-rolling Asian-African bloc.
In the same way, we can be all for the United Nations without having to pretend that the international community is analogous to the national community. Since international affairs are still largely anarchic and nations bear arms as private citizens do not, we cannot judge aggression as in domestic law we judge crime—by a single technical criterion: who fired the gun or who stepped across the border with a force above a certain size. In judging aggression the whole situation, which is to say moral quality and intent, must be taken into account. In Korea, the moral quality of the two sides would not have been different had the South Koreans got wind of the attack and crossed the border first to forestall it. Nor is the moral quality of the Israelis and the Egyptions different because Israel could not afford to continue exchanging raids with the Egyptians while waiting patiently for the final slaughter. If the United Nations cannot, like a domestic government, protect its members against limited aggression, then it cannot deprive them of the means of protecting themselves. That is why the best way to serve the international community is not to suppose that, at this point in history, any legal mechanism can automatically secure its interests, but to remember the difference between those nations whose policies serve the interests of the international community and those whose policies do not, and to work in a positive way for and with the former. That is the kind of thing Kennan means when he warns us not to rely for maintaining the peace upon rigidly legalistic procedures, but upon what he calls political expediency.
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But our government does of course, beneath its confusing talk and its still more confusing behavior, rely on political expediency. We have now, with the Eisenhower Doctrine, thrown our own power into the breach in the Middle East, though we still do not know how we are going to introduce that power without offending anybody. In the same way, it was not the United Nations but the United States which, by a combination of threats and promises, forced the Israeli withdrawal from Sharm el Sheikh and the Gaza Strip. The result is that responsibility for Israel’s security now rests squarely upon the United States. But then the United States has now, having added the Eisenhower Doctrine to NATO, SEATO, and the Truman Doctrine, undertaken responsibility for the security of just about the whole non-Communist world. This means that we have been bold and clear-headed enough to identify our interests with those of the international community and to place at the service of the international community that power without which it can never become a reality.
Dimly, circuitously, we do grope our way toward a morally realistic and a realistically moral policy. But since we have still no adequately articulated principles to guide our foreign policy, who can be sure that we will not once again backtrack, deny our power, and try selling out our friends in order to buy the friendship of those whose friendship is for sale? Who can be sure that, having applied pressure on Israel, we will now take the inevitable next step in procuring a Middle East settlement and apply comparable pressure on Nasser? Who can be sure that the administration will not once again leave the question of Gaza and the Gulf of Aqaba to the United Nations, which is to say to the Arab and Soviet blocs? It is a sign of the unreliability of our foreign policy that people should even be wondering these days whether or not the United States is going to sell Israel down the river. In the long run, we will not. In the long run the United States seems always to come back to a recognition of her true interests and her true friends. The only question is how many more short-run blunders our friends, if not we ourselves, can survive.
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