William Appleman Williams—professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and the author, most recently, of The Contours of American History—here comments on Robert A. Nisbet’s “Foreign Policy & the American Mind,” which appeared in our September 1961 issue. In that article, Mr. Nisbet was critical of the moralism and ideological fervor which he believes to have interfered with the proper conduct of American foreign policy in recent years, and he expressed the wish that we might return to the classical diplomacy of the 18th and 19th centuries. Mr. Nisbet is vice-chancellor of the University of California.
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William Appleman Williams:
Robert A. Nisbet’s essay invites comment because it creates a promising intellectual tension that unhappily is never resolved. His judgment that our troubles result from “some major difficulties of perspective” is precisely on target. The issue does go deep: right down, indeed, to the very way we make sense out of ourselves and the world. And when he goes on to define two crucial symptoms of our distorted outlook as a loss of a sense of limits, and a propensity to externalize evil, he puts us seriously in his debt.
But it is essential to account for those weaknesses—to get to the causes behind the symptoms—if the remedies are to be relevant and effective. And Mr. Nisbet fails to offer either a rigorous diagnosis of, or an adequate prescription for, altering the point of view that creates extremism and “futopianism.” Hence for the reader the tension and the disappointment.
Mr. Nisbet does of course make some keen observations. His warning about the effects of the containment policy upon the United States is particularly shrewd and timely. It implicitly (and perhaps unintentionally) raises a question that has been neglected too long: whether or not, on balance, containment has benefited the Soviet Union as much or more than it has helped the United States.
On the other hand, Mr. Nisbet wanders rather far from his avowed confrontation with the central issue of warped perspectives. A good part of that meandering results from his nostalgia for what the self-styled realists imagine to have been the diplomatic Garden of Eden. He walks with those “wishing for a return” to the “classical diplomacy of the 18th and 19th centuries. . . . The diplomacy of professionals operating in a finite world. . . [with a] sense of limits.”
Only the facts mar that idyllic vision. Those ostensibly restrained diplomats wiped out French holdings in the Western hemisphere, erased Spain from the New World, unified Central Europe by means of a war with a neighbor, and took over most of Africa and large parts of Asia. The Americans practiced self-discipline by destroying Indian society, by relieving Mexico of all its property north of the Rio Grande, and by then moving out into the adjacent oceans. It is, after all, necessary to consider the results of that diplomacy as well as the rhetoric of its protagonists and their admirers.
In their emphasis on and concern with power per se, these modern realists are in reality close emotional and intellectual kinfolk to the old romantics. Thus Mr. Nisbet argues that the emerging nations can only be understood in terms of their “vision of power” and the “deep compulsion to absolute power” that drives their leaders. He caps this interpretation with the asseveration that Castro would be pro-fascist if Hitlerite Germany was the chief non-American power in the world.
Both particularly and in general, this is a serious error. Specifically, Castro did lead a true social revolution, and did indicate from the start a persistent disposition to effect a modus vivendi with the United States. And he does have a Weltanschauung that would ultimately have prompted him to turn to the Soviet Union in the 1920’s or the 1930’s just as it has in the present. In the broad sense, Mr. Nisbet’s realism risks distorting the world as badly as the outlook he criticizes. For the great majority of leaders in the new nations do have quite clear ideas of the good society; ideas that do in practice guide and limit their actions. And to ignore or discount this is to ask for serious trouble.
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The same emphasis on power prompts Mr. Nisbet to discount drastically the significance of Marxism (or socialism in general, one gathers) either in evaluating the appeal of Russia, or in understanding changes of substance and style in the Soviet Union. To be a mite facetious, a more accurate estimate might be put in this fashion: despite their best efforts, the Bolsheviks failed to destroy the image of socialism as a better way of life. It still provides an ideological and a moral focus for many people caught up in the revolution of rising expectations.
And the conflicts over emphasis and priorities that rage within Marxist thought continue to play a significant role in the changes in Russia and other Communist states. To interpret the struggle between Tito and Stalin (or even that between Gomulka and Khrushchev) as merely one of conflicting nationalisms is seriously to oversimplify the nature of history as well as of Marxism. Here Mr. Nisbet comes very close to externalizing evil in the way that he criticizes. He says flatly that “Communism, wherever it is, and however isolated it may be, is an evil.” But this denies the reality of change generated within a given Weltanschauung. And that is precisely what has been happening within every Communist country. Drawing distinctions between Communisms, and within them, is very apt to be the key to influencing the world in the direction we desire.
Mr. Nisbet’s nostalgia for an imagined past also bears directly on his fondness for quoting George Frost Kennan. That is all very well, but he overlooks an aspect of Kennan that is vital to his own thesis. And regardless of my own disagreements with Kennan as a historian, or my strong opposition to his clear and active elitism, I think it is very important that Kennan be given credit for the right thing. For what he has done is much more difficult—and much more important for America’s welfare in the present crisis—than merely having been right all the time.
Mr. Nisbet argues that containment was turned into a dreadful distortion of itself largely through the efforts of John Foster Dulles. In evaluating this thesis, one must first remember that Kennan’s “X” article was at the very least a second revised draft of a long official dispatch he had filed during the Iranian crisis of 1947. Given Kennan’s command of the language, and his sense of responsibility, that means it is fair to take his words, images, and metaphors as if he did in fact know and mean what he said. When that is done, it seems clear that Kennan’s initial statement of containment carried the seeds of all that Mr. Nisbet complains of while taking Kennan as his guide.
Consider first the substance and tone of Kennan’s description of the Soviets. They are “visionary and impractical” men embarked upon “the quest for absolute power,” and are “not likely to be swayed by any normal logic.” Furthermore, “they themselves had provoked” their troubles by “their own aggressive intransigence.” And observe particularly the images in his key descriptive passage: their government “moves inexorably along the prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force.” Thus nothing but “facts of unchallengeable validity” can have an effect.
In describing those facts, Kennan repeatedly uses the word force. American policy should be based on “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force”; a “policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point.” Nor does Kennan doubt that America is powerful enough: the “decision will really fall in large measure in this country itself.” It “has it in its power . . . to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection . . . and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”
This is not the advice of one who has any real sense of limits on American power. But it certainly is the analysis of one who externalizes a great deal of the world’s evil in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of Americans read or paraphrased the article in that manner at the time. And while John Foster Dulles often indulged his flair for unrestrained rhetoric and further dramatized that estimate of the problem, it is undeniable that Dean Acheson and a whole host of American leaders took Kennan’s article at its face value and in its obvious meaning. And most certainly the Kremlin did. It is stretching credibility to argue that Kennan used the word force in the way that he did while meaning something else.
But kennan deserves great credit for changing that 1947 estimate of the problem into the more restrained and balanced interpretation that he began to offer some five years later. Kennan did in fact exactly what Mr. Nisbet wants each of us to do. And in missing or minimizing that shift, Mr. Nisbet overlooks a method that would help him achieve his own objectives. For while the Russian fabrication of nuclear weapons no doubt contributed to Kennan’s change, it also seems clear that Kennan was influenced by his study of American history. And that way of learning may be the most promising—as well as the safest—way of dealing with the “major difficulties of perspective” which so upset Mr. Nisbet.
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For his part, Mr. Nisbet accounts for our loss of a sense of limits and our externalizing of evil by a passing reference to the Gospel of Progress, and by Kennan’s argument that our own propaganda has seduced us. I would suggest instead that we will go much further along the way to self-knowledge if we follow the clues offered by the image and the cliché of the frontier. The frontier is the idiom and the reality of American history at least down to 1950—52. But it is time to stop treating Frederick Jackson Turner as a historian (let alone as a social scientist!). He was a poet. A poet blotched by his education, to be sure, but nevertheless a poet. He saw the central role of the American frontier and in a moment of profound insight called it “a gate of escape.”
Our national enemies have from the outset been those who blocked that gate of escape. The Puritans, let us remember, ran away from a showdown fight at home. From that beginning, Great Britain became the externalized evil until the North defeated the pro-British South. Along the way, we began to externalize evil in the image of the Indians and the Mexicans. Finally, at the turn of the century, it was the Spanish. Then we shifted to the Germans and the Japanese, and still later to the Russians and the Chinese. Several of those nations ultimately became evil even though they had earlier been admitted as fellow knights—or at least squires—in the Righteous Order of the Open Door.
This definition of the frontier as both a gate of escape from evil and an open door to prosperity and democracy is much more central to America’s difficulties of perspective than the Gospel of Progress. For one thing, the Founding Fathers were fundamentally pessimists. They viewed their work as the labor of holding the line for as long as possible, not as cranking up a machine for perpetual progress. Furthermore, most of them confronted very bluntly the exact dilemma posed and skirted by Mr. Nisbet. However they phrased it, they took hold of this central issue: how, without expansion, could America sustain democracy and prosperity?
In the end, of course, they opted for expansion via the frontier. But not without anguish and trepidation. Along with George Washington, James Madison, and a good many others, John Quincy Adams clearly recognized the inherent dangers of that solution. The frontier-expansionist outlook externalized evil because it externalized good. For if prosperity and democracy are tied causally to expansion, then those who stand athwart that frontier are by definition and in practice evil.
Adams realized that it was not war propaganda that caused the externalizing of evil. The propaganda, and the moralism, stemmed from the antecedent definition of good and evil in terms of the frontier process. Adams was deeply concerned as early as 1823 about the moralism that was even then beginning to provide a gloss for more mundane motives, and to operate in turn as an independent engine of wholesale and unrestrained expansionism and combativeness. If America continued its propensity to go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” he warned, then it would lose its own soul even if it became “the dictatress of the world.” And as one reflects upon that axiom, it is quite to the point to notice that Kennan did not quote it in his famous “X” article. He turned to that wisdom only after the Russians developed their bombs.
This propensity to abandon limits and externalize evil was clearly encouraged by always winning the frontier conflicts. If we are unique, and in this sense we may be, it is only because we have never lost. Only the South has been defeated, and that did not count because it was already defined as evil and hence deserved to be beaten down into unconditional surrender. A people who can do that to their own blood kin can and will do it to anyone—as Hiroshima and Nagasaki serve to remind us.
Only the Russians and the poor countries have been able to stop (and even reverse) the frontier process. Small wonder, then, at our frustration, impatience, and propensity to respond with extremist solutions. We lack the very thing that Mr. Nisbet mentions in his discussion of the poor countries—a sense of self-commitment. America’s “major difficulties of perspective” stem directly from its lack of self-commitment. It defines itself in terms of others, and hence can know no peace until the others have become like itself.
This kind of internationalism, which is today the article of faith with most liberals and conservatives, is the historical as well as the logical product of the frontier-expansionist outlook. It has caused grave practical problems and has created a dangerous intellectual and semantic legacy. For the internationalists have manufactured an almost wholly negative image of any alternative to their outlook. To speak directly and candidly of self-commitment and self-containment for the United States is to ask to be damned and dismissed as an isolationist who entertains fantasies of a Fortress America. The discussion and debate so desperately needed is thus choked off at birth, and the internationalists continue with their tragic work of sustaining a situation in which the United States is literally becoming a fortress.
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Self-commitment and self-containment are neither isolationism nor narrow, hysterical nationalism. They are the manifestations of a mature sense of identity. Only that kind of self-identity makes it possible to deal with others in a realistic and creative manner. One must know his own self before one can be true to anyone. Like John Quincy Adams more than a century earlier, Senator William J. Fulbright understood this in the recent Cuban crisis: to be an American should mean that one simply does not seriously entertain certain projects—let alone actually undertake them. But even Fulbright often appears confused by the false equation that the internationalists have created between isolationism and self-containment. He seems to interpret self-containment as the policy of despair whereas it is in truth the policy of confidence, and of a belief in America’s creativity.
Perhaps John Donne, one of the saints of American internationalism, offers a way of dramatizing the need to alter our fundamental outlook if we are to resolve those “major difficulties of perspective.” One of Donne’s striking lines—“No man is an island, entire of itself”—became in the 1930’s and 1940’s the Hail Mary of the internationalists. (One sometimes feels, indeed, that a good many of those who call themselves realists pilfered their conception of realism, as well as Donne’s line of poetry, from the writings of Ernest Hemingway.)
Now that use of Donne’s quotation is in some ways legitimate as well as effective propaganda. Specifically, Donne was an Elizabethan who argued that expansion would sweep the streets clean of unemployed. And in the broader sense, of course, Donne’s aphorism is true: no individual can become a fully human being, let alone can he develop his creative powers, in literal isolation.
But donne also realized that one does not cease to be an island merely by expanding himself: that only makes a bigger island. He put that insight into a bit of poetry every whit as moving and as relevant to foreign affairs as the one quoted by the internationalists. Apparently they never read it. Or, perhaps, they missed its point: “Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.”
In neglecting this part of Donne, the United States has become little more than a bigger island which now finds the world its jail. That is the source of those “major difficulties of perspective” which rightly trouble Mr. Nisbet. But the only realism that can resolve those difficulties is not the kind that deals with symptoms, it is instead the kind that boldly admits that the traditional frontier-expansionist outlook has become a fantasy completely out of contact with reality. Only by giving up that chimera can we proceed to establish a new perspective grounded in the real world.
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Robert A. Nisbet:
I am grateful to Mr. Williams for his thoughtful and stimulating comments. Even though there is probably too wide a gulf between our basic perspectives to reach agreement on the question he poses, they lead to a widening of the issues involved and, we may hope, to further clarification.
First, there is what Mr. Williams calls my “nostalgia . . . for the diplomatic Garden of Eden.” I would admit, under oath, to a preference for pre-totalitarian, pre-thermo-nuclear Europe, recognizing, of course, that in Adam’s world the good rarely appears without some bad. But I really don’t think nostalgia was involved in my argument. Not this time.
The character of the old diplomacy I referred to has been abundantly described by un-nostalgic historians. In any event, I made plain that I see little likelihood of this diplomacy reappearing in our age, given the removal of most of its necessary conditions. What I did suggest was that we might learn a good deal from the qualities of mind that went with it—such qualities as patience, empiricism, and a sense of limits. When Mr. Williams draws such acts as the partition of Africa and the erasure of Spain from the New World across our path, he seems to imply that they are inseparable from the format of diplomacy within which they took place. But is it not more realistic to say that they were reflections (even as were many other aspects of the 19th century) of the state of public morality of the time? Today a different moral atmosphere prevails in the West; one that would not permit obvious amoralities of this sort. Witness, for example, the reaction to so comparatively mild a breach as Britain’s landing at Suez in 1956.
But the modern international atmosphere does permit and encourage something as dangerous as amoral politics, and that is moralistic politics. Obviously a war in behalf of exalted moral objectives is more just than one serving purely economic or colonial objectives. But this leads to the heart of our tragic position. Moral wars tend to be, by the very nature of their issues (freedom, justice, rights, etc.), total, unconditional, and unlimited. How can you be partial, conditional, and limited when you are waging war, not with a finite nation, but with Evil? Senator Dodd declared in Los Angeles not long ago that “the only alternative to total defeat in the struggle against Communism is total victory.” This is what many said in the 1930’s about fascism. But I do not know how you tell when total victory or defeat takes place in a war concerned with transcendent moral ends. Surely the defeat of Russia alone—or even Russia together with China and Yugoslavia—would not represent the “total defeat” of Communism in a world that shows unhappy signs of spawning collectivism in countless places.
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My main argument was that when a generation has become used to war and diplomacy that are directed to, and ceaselessly justified by, moral ends alone—making the world safe for democracy, exterminating fascism, defeating Communism—the crowning danger is that it will invest every strategic goal with limitless moral intensity. As I write, a Congressman from Louisiana is quoted as saying the government’s sale of planes to Yugoslavia “borders on treason.” The general outcry may well force the government into withdrawals that will have serious consequences to our security.
It is this type of thing, not the amoralities of another age, that seems to me our present problem. To worry about the possible consequences of a non-moralistic diplomacy is a little like worrying about a flood when water is needed to extinguish a fire.
This discussion bears upon Mr. Williams’s point about the necessity of distinguishing among Communisms. We will indeed have to distinguish among Communist nations. But not, I hope, on grounds of the goodness or badness of the Communism involved. This, it seems to me, would be as inappropriate as distinguishing among nations in terms of their religions. I like to think that we make distinctions on grounds that are relevant to a foreign policy, not on ideological grounds of moral acceptability.
Mr. Williams is right in suggesting that it would be an oversimplification to identify all differences between Tito and Stalin or Hoxha and Khrushchev as solely those of conflicting nationalisms. The differences are commonly put in doctrinal terms not immediately related to nationalism. But so, at first, in the Reformation, were the differences between Rome and such men as Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin. It was, however, nationalism that provided the determining context of the ideas put forward by these men, Christian though they considered themselves first and foremost. And so, I argue, will it be nationalism in the Communist world.
As to the rulers of the new nations, I do not doubt that many of them have visions of the good society. But ideas of the good society are not necessarily separated from the quest for total power, as the Grand Inquisitor and also much 20th-century history make plain. Given, on the one hand, ideas (and usually burning ideas) of the good society and, on the other, a scene of stupendous, almost inconceivable, obstacles to the realization of these ideas, preoccupation with absolute power is as certain among Western-educated native intellectuals as anything I can think of. Is it strange that they would find in absolute power the glittering promise of social reconstruction beyond anything that liberal democracy (even if it were imaginable in these areas) could provide in centuries?
Turning to Castro’s Cuba, I agree readily that a social revolution is taking place. But why should this rule out league with a Hitler if Hitler were today the chief enemy of the United States? If Castro does have a Weltanschauung that would have led to affinity with Soviet Russia even back in the 30’s, it was apparently undiscoverable by countless, trusting middle-class Cubans who, we know, welcomed his overthrow of Batista. However my essential point was not the character of Castro or his revolution. It was that we have no evidence as yet to assume sufficient affinity with Russian Communism to warrant direct action on our part.
I thank Mr. Williams for his enlargement and correction of my treatment of George Kennan and his relation to our policy of world containment. He is quite right. The machinery had been created, or at least well started, before Mr. Dulles came into office.
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When it comes to Mr. Williams’s hypothesis that behind our recent containment policy lies the expansionist-frontier psychology of 19th-century America, I have to beg off. It is Mr. Williams, not Frederick J. Turner, who is the poet. Are we privileged to infer that the Oregon Trail has led straight to Pakistan and that West Berlin shares in the national feeling that produced “54—40 or Fight”? It is an arresting, even enchanting thought, especially to one whose own grandparents made their way to California in the approved fashion. I do not say it is wrong. There may be a direct line of descent from the War Hawks of 1812 to the drum-beaters of 1961. But I cannot find it. If I could I would have a vastly different conception of America’s relation to the world since 1918 and of the intellectual and moral impact upon the free world of totalitarianism since the Bolsheviks took over Russia.
I agree with, and honor, Mr. Williams’s words on the profound need for distinguishing at this time between true and false internationalism and for a mature sense of self-identity. But, as my article tried to say, I think we have to look elsewhere than to the frontier for the roots of the perspective that at present threatens to engulf us in problems that our foreign policy cannot conceivably meet.
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