For the fourth time in this century, the United States has gone to war. The Vietnamese War, unlike World Wars I and II, has not become a great crusade with total war aims either of making the world safe for democracy or unconditional surrender. In fact, the Vietnamese War more closely resembles the Korean War. On the Korean peninsula, the United States and United Nations forces drew a line when North Korea, with Chinese and Russian assistance, attempted to use limited war as an instrument of Communist world revolution. As in Korea, our war aims in Vietnam are limited ones: to preserve the independence and freedom of a nation requesting our assistance, and in the process, to thwart the latest Communist political-military strategy for advancing their national and international interests—“just wars of national liberation.”
For a variety of historic, strategic, and political reasons, South Vietnam has become the testing ground for two different ways of ordering the world. Historical perspective makes it clear that contrary to General Omar Bradley’s famous observation, Korea was the right war at the right place at the right time, for it alerted the Western democracies and forced them to rearm and fight the limited Communist challenge. The Korean War, however, was not popular in America. One of the reasons was that bitter ground warfare was the very type of conflict that theoretically was never supposed to happen. We had largely convinced ourselves that the next war would be a push-button affair, an intercontinental air power war fought by B-36s armed with atomic bombs.
As the United States painfully and almost disastrously learned in the Korean conflict, world Communism did not wish to fight technological total wars. It is very significant that the Korean type of “line crossing” aggression defeated by U. S. and U. N. forces has not been attempted since that time.
It is likely that future historians will write that the Second Vietnamese War (the first being that fought by the French) also was the right war at the right place at the right time. Historians probably will record that the United States and its allies, at the height of the world revolution in the middle 1960s, proved that, in Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s words, “the new face of war is no less pernicious than the old—and ... it can be defeated by those of strong mind, stout heart and a steel will.”
Thermonuclear weapons and the threat of cataclysmic nuclear war have not outlawed or deterred all types of war, but they have forced the level of world conflict down to lesser, but probably more frequent, incidents. Such low and middle intensity local conflicts are inherently dangerous because they carry with them the possibilities of entangling or engaging the great thermonuclear powers’ vital interests, either strategically, psychologically, economically, or militarily.
As the world moves through the seventh decade of the 20th century, it has become increasingly apparent that the bipolar world of the 1940s and ’50s has dissolved. In fact, the disintegration has taken place literally under our unseeing eyes and so quickly that American foreign policy, understandably organized and institutionalized to cope with the bipolar world, has lagged seriously behind the world revolution. Unfortunately, the American people’s understanding has also been slow to develop. One of the major results of a Great Debate on foreign policy should be to educate the American people to new challenges and new responsibilities. With the shift of the international struggle to the third or underdeveloped world of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the need for broader knowledge and understanding will be even greater than in the past. American knowledge of geography is notoriously bad, and we are an impatient people, preferring the short-run technological solution to the long-run political answer.
In our obsession with Chinese revolutionary pronouncements and maneuverings, we often forget that it was Chairman Nikita Khrushchev in January 1961 who first committed the Soviet Union to support “just wars of national liberation.” Thus, in September 1965, Red China’s Marshal Lin Piao challenged the United States and the Russians in his 20,000-word statement, “Long Live the Victory of the People’s War.” Communist China, the Marshal pledged, will continue to support revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries in the hope of eventually isolating the United States, Western Europe (and the Soviet Union).
Mao Tse-tung’s military strategy holds that revolutionary bases must be established in rural areas so that cities can be encircled from the countryside. Marshal Lin declared that Mao’s theory was
of outstanding and universal practical importance for the present revolutionary struggles. . . Take the entire globe—if North America and Western Europe can be called “cities of the world” then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute “rural areas of the world.”
Since World War II, the proletarian revolutionary movement has for various reasons been temporarily held back in North America and West European capitalist countries while the people’s revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America has been growing vigorously.
In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of cities by rural areas.
In the final analysis, the Chinese Communists evidently are convinced that the whole cause of world revolutionary struggle will be centered in the Asian, African, and Latin American peoples, “who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The Socialist countries should regard it as their international duty to support the people’s revolutionary struggle in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
A Scandinavian computer reportedly has deduced that in the 5,560 years man has been “civilized” and capable of writing history, there have been 14,531 wars or over two-and- a-half wars per year. Thus, it would be unique in history if there were no conflicts in the years ahead. More than that, it would be a modern miracle if the world could follow completely Pope Paul’s stirring admonition, “No more war; war never again,” and eliminate war from history. Modern arms, especially thermonuclear weapons, have made any recourse to total war as an instrument of foreign policy unthinkable, and for the first time in the 20th century, total war has imposed limits on all men’s ambitions. In this sense, Pope Paul is absolutely correct: God has been reintroduced into the 20th century through the H-bomb’s infinite destructive power. And henceforth it can be predicted that the inherent truth in Stalin’s classic question, “How many divisions has the Pope?” will be increasingly revealed.
Furthermore, the uses of military force more and more must be in line with traditional views of morality: the just and the unjust war; limitations on weapons, targets, and tactics; renewed distinctions between combatants and non-combatants; and the return of civilized warfare. It will no longer be necessary merely to have weapons for a flexible response; they must be available for and employed in a measured response as well. President Lyndon B. Johnson, in defending his limitations on targets in North Vietnam, reminded his critics that destroying steel and concrete bridges is preferable to killing people. In other words, the American military establishment and its doctrine calling for the use of force must be brought nearer in line with the overriding political imperatives of the new revolutionary age.
Almost daily for the past year commentators, editorialists, columnists, and politicians have advised President Johnson on how foreign policy should be conducted during these trying times. Lincoln, under similar circumstances, told some domestic critics the following story:
Gentlemen, I want you to suppose a case for a moment. Suppose that all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin, the famous rope walker, to carry across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Would you shake the rope while he was passing over it, or keep shouting to him, “Blondin, stoop a little more! Go a little faster!” No, I am sure you would not. You would hold your breath as well as your tongue and keep your hands off until he was safely over.
Now the government is in the same situation. It is carrying an immense weight across a stormy ocean. . . . It is doing the best it can. Don’t badger it! Just keep still, and it will get you safely over.
Perhaps, harassed as he was, Lincoln overstated the case for silence because honest disagreement and responsible dissent are essential ingredients of a viable democratic society.
The use and abuse of democratic rights in this new age are confusing indeed. Most of our current difficulties and problems revolve around the correct use of our unimaginable and sometimes unmanageable political-military and economic power in the world arena. Adlai Stevenson, in a speech before 1,400 newspaper executives, defended the administration’s “two-pronged war and peace policy in Vietnam” as “directed toward stabilization there.” And then Stevenson described the function of U. S. power in the world today: the “measured but unequivocal military response is a major contribution to the containment of forces of aggression, while our offer for unconditional discussion with our adversaries as well as our friends emphasizes our desire for a peaceful settlement.” “Our power,” Stevenson reminded his audience, “and our will to use it remain the underpinning of worldwide freedom. But we should seek to mediate its application through the international institutions which seek to express the general judgments of mankind.”
There have been many varied instances of the application of national power during the past two decades, and Americans slowly have become accustomed to the use of force in foreign policy. From the appearance of the battleship TJSS Missouri (BB-63) in the eastern Mediterranean in 1946, through the breaking of the Berlin blockade by a superbly imaginative airlift, the limited conventional war in Korea, the amphibious passage to freedom in Vietnam, the show-the-flag Marine landing in Lebanon, the measured application of conventional sea power beneath the nuclear shield in the Cuban missile crisis, to the limited and controlled application of force in combating counterinsurgency and wars of national liberation in Southeast Asia, the United States has responded successfully to the political-military challenge through the use of carefully controlled and limited military power as an instrument of national policy. The seemingly unending series of political-military crises gradually has taught most Americans something about the burden, pain, and anguish that come from being the world’s greatest power and the underwriter of Western civilization’s insurance policy of freedom. An editorial in the Washington Post has expressed with some eloquence this burden and glory:
And this is the real misery of the mighty. Once power descends upon a people, it can no longer achieve national peace of mind, even if it can achieve peace in the sense of avoiding war. From the moment its power position is achieved, the nation must live in anguish. . . . No country can have great power and a quiet conscience. Its people and its leaders must suffer either the reproaches of having used force or the reproaches of having failed to use it. Life alternates between the miseries of Vietnams and Munichs and is seldom free from one or the other.
American policy has rightly rejected the shrill calls from the extreme Left for a “new Munich” in Southeast Asia and from the extreme Right, “who urge us to use our great power in a reckless or casual manner.” Instead, President Johnson, with no “desire to extend the conflict,” has followed the moderate middle of the road course, a path that often is as tricky as Blondin’s tightrope. President Johnson intends to do “what must be done” because he rightly believes that he has an American consensus to follow the middle path between deserting South Vietnam and vaporizing North Vietnam.
“The task of the President,” Professor John P. Roche of Brandeis University explained, “in this era of twilight wars which must remain limited is to reject both the ‘get out’ and ‘go up’ extremes and to convince the American people that ‘total victory’ and ‘unconditional surrender’ are slogans from the lexicon of the prenuclear epoch.” President Johnson is confident that the American people will support this path because
they have learned the great lesson of this generation: Whenever we have stood firm, aggression has been halted, peace restored, and liberty maintained. This was true in Iran, in Greece and Turkey, and in Korea. It was true in the Formosa Straits and in Lebanon. It was true at the Cuban missile crisis. It will be true again in South East Asia.
In order to meet the postwar challenge to freedom, no one single weapons system, no one single tactic, no one single service has been used to preserve freedom; rather, the protection of America’s national interest has required the entire spectrum of military power and balanced forces to meet this many- faceted global challenge.
If this analysis is still valid, as it most certainly was during the last two decades, what does it imply for the application of U. S. power in the future? Vice President Humphrey has described the transition the United States and the world are undergoing as moving “from a period of ‘dangerously abnormal simplicity’ into a period of more normal diversity.” Understandably, this transition into a new age has spawned a host of critics and interpreters.
Among the many commentators on American foreign policy, three broad general groups stand out: the globalists, the realists, and the traditionalists. The globalist is drugged by a dream of an American century, which he is convinced will come into being in this generation or most surely in the next. Although basically amoral, he longs for a new moral crusade to make the world finally safe for democracy, even if he has to wage pre-emptive and preventive nuclear war against Red China or the Soviet Union to accomplish it. The main thrust of this thinking is carried by pragmatic liberals with support from some conservative groups, who hope for a “controlled American peace.” The new globalism and the old isolationism are similar; in Dr. Hans Morgenthau’s analysis “both assume the self-sufficiency of American power to protect and promote the American national interest either in indiscriminate abstention or indiscriminate globalism.”
The self-proclaimed realists, on the other hand, are largely liberal intellectuals and pundits, who want the United States to return to the old and honored conception of spheres of influence. Thus, their leading spokesman, Walter Lippmann, recommended that the United States withdraw from Southeast Asia to our oceanic bases and let our preponderant sea and air power contain Red China. Initially, Lippmann condemned sending ground troops to Asia (although recently he has modified his position somewhat) because Southeast Asia is destined to be China’s sphere of influence. Following the same reasoning, Lippmann approved sending Marines and paratroopers to the Dominican Republic because that is in our sphere. Another realist, Professor Morgenthau, prefers setting up “another Tito” in North Vietnam and neutralizing Southeast Asia as the best that can be accomplished so near to Red China’s borders.
The traditionalist, however, part conservative and part liberal, rejects the Last Crusade philosophy of the globalist and the inevitability of the realist. If history has taught him anything, it is that the United States, although omnipresent in the world today, certainly is not omnipotent. Some forces in history cannot be quantified but are powerful nevertheless: the United Nations, the Papacy, geography, the American heritage, and the often maligned world opinion. Both the globalist and the realist tend to operate outside of these intangible forces. The traditionalist sees no immediate end to the conflicts of the new age. The next half century he believes will resemble more nearly the 18th and 19th centuries than the 20th, and the operative principle will continue to be the balance of power concept.
The traditionalist would have America return to our historic foreign policy. But purged of any crusading and moralistic tendencies and modified by an acceptance of the balance of power principle, it can still be a most revolutionary foreign policy. What has this foreign policy been? Throughout our history three broad themes have dominated our dealings with the outside world: self-determination for all nations; support for national revolutions; and a deep humanitarian regard for the unfortunate.
The American-sponsored concept of self-determination, or the “right of every society to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate,” has literally captured the world. Woodrow Wilson has been condemned by many liberals for initiating and insisting on this concept during World War I and at Versailles. The mistake was not self- determination but the failure of the League of Nations jointly or other nations individually to protect the weak buffer states created by the self-determination principle. For better or worse, the pre-World War II world of 60-odd nations has now grown to over 120 nations, and self-determination has been the major factor for the increase. The key question is, “How can the world prevent on a global scale the gobbling up of small countries that the League of Nations found impossible to protect in the years prior to 1939?”
The Chinese and Russians advance their interests through wars of national liberation; if our only response is thermonuclear weapons, moralist sermons, or suicidal bluffs, then the game is already lost.
Throughout our entire history, the United States has swelled with pride as nation after nation and continent after continent became infected with the revolutionary ideas of our Declaration of Independence. Today, it is fashionable to claim that the American Revolution was a conservative one because it had no Grand Terror and because it preserved private property. But Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries labored under no such delusion, for theirs was a revolution for all mankind. We often forget that our Declaration of Independence legalized and legitimatized revolution.
What America needs, in William Apple- man Williams’ phrase, is an “open door for revolutions.” Too often, American foreign policy gives the impression that we are in favor of reactionary governments and that we try to buck revolutions instead of backing them. The problem of how to distinguish a Communist revolution from a nationalist revolution is admittedly difficult, but then so are all real problems in the world.
The third traditional aspect of our foreign policy that needs rethinking is our humanitarian regard for societies less fortunate than ours. Senator Robert Kennedy has warned that “we must realize that the world is in the midst of revolution. This revolution is directed against us—against the one-third of the world that diets while others starve; against a nation that buys eight million cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. . . .” We simply will have to do better what we have been doing in the past 20 years, and this most likely will call for new approaches and new institutions.
A fourth element of our foreign policy, balance of power, is decidedly untraditional for the United States but not, of course, for other nations, notably Great Britain. Many Americans believe they fought World Wars I and II to uproot the balance of power system widely held to be the major cause of war. The last thing most Americans wanted after World War II was to be part of any new balance of power system. Unconditional surrender, mass area bombing, and total victory were designed to destroy Japan and Germany permanently as military powers. Instead of returning to the discredited balance of power system, we helped create the United Nations, which supposedly, through the instrument of great power intervention, would preserve the peace.
Since the appearance of the U. S. Fleet in the eastern Mediterranean shortly after the end of World War II, America has been the reluctant unilateral policeman and unwitting world balancer, for the most part accepting the British inheritance and responsibility first on the continent of Europe, then in the Middle and Far East. Fifteen years ago Ambassador George Kennan attempted to enlighten the American people concerning the “fundamental elements” on which American security has rested. “Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain,” Kennan wrote in American Diplomacy,
that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that more of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter—as in these circumstances it certainly would—on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia.
For four centuries Great Britain maintained a farsighted foreign policy and a balance of power in Europe by controlling “the narrow seas” of the Channel and North Sea, supplying gold to her “continental swords,” and when necessary, dispatching an amphibious expeditionary force to the continent. Britain kept the balance at first by its own energies (and those of its empire and commonwealth), but in the total wars of the 20th century it called for assistance from the flanking powers, Russia on the Eastern continent and the United States beyond the Western ocean. In other words, Britain preserved the balance on the European littoral by denying continental hegemony to Phillip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler.
But by 1947, after four centuries of playing the pivot or balancing wheel in world history, Britain found itself exhausted from its global exertions. In the years since, America gradually, although sometimes reluctantly, has accepted Britain’s historic role. Through American gold, economic assistance, troops, and ships, the United States has attempted to restore the balance and fill the vacuum so terribly shaken by this century’s two total wars. America was now an Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific power, and the Sixth and Seventh Fleets symbolized the historic transformation. No longer did American power consist of lonely gunboats on Asian rivers or wooden frigates off Tripoli but, rather, full- fledged blue water fleets.
America finally had accepted the historic mantle of British sea power. The American fleets, unlike their 18th and 19th century British counterparts, were not guarding the imperial lifeline, for we had no empire. Whether these new global responsibilities were completely understood even by our leaders is irrelevant, for the Fleets in fact lent stability to an unstable world.
In the years since 1945, the function of naval forces has broken down into six major missions: peacekeeping (Suez and Lebanon); show of force and flag (Greece and Syria); intervention (Lebanon and the Dominican Republic); evacuation (Dominican Republic and Tachens); combat (Korea and the Second Vietnamese War); and deterrence (Soviet Union and Red China). Despite the detractors from the political Left and Right of this measured and limited use of force in support of foreign policy objectives, the basic purpose of postwar deployments has been to preserve international peace and to maintain the independence of nations wishing to remain free. England’s role in world history and its relationship to America’s in the remaining decades of this century can best be described in the ratio:
England, 1588-1945 |
United States, 1945-2000 |
European Littoral |
Eurasian Littoral |
British military power and diplomacy prevented hegemony over Europe and thus played America’s game during our first century of existence. In the remaining years of this century, America must prevent any consolidation of the Eurasian littoral and thereby play the independent nation’s game. We should not, as some globalists recommend, wage pre-emptive war in an attempt to establish an American century or, as some realists insist, create giant Orwellian-like spheres of influence; but, rather, we should use our technology, geography, wealth, and moral position to act as the new balance wheel. Our basic policy should be to keep the Eurasian rimland split up by preventing consolidation there. At the same time we should retain our oceanic and littoral bases, and thereby ward off threatened encirclement by Eurasia. In order to pursue this policy, the United States must perform for the entire Eurasian littoral the same function that Great Britain did for the European littoral. Naturally, we would welcome assistance from world organizations, allies, or other interested powers.
In any case, the overriding U. S. goal should be to harness self-determination and the revolutionary aspirations of the Third World in order to preserve national identities in a world made safe for global diversity. Our democratic pluralism at home should be transferrable to a global pluralism abroad that would lead eventually to a world society that is balanced and therefore safe. This hoped-for diversity applies throughout the total spectrum of politics, economics, culture, and ideology. The encouragement of national self-determination quite naturally would prevent local hegemony in the process.
There is a double paradox here. Military power can help bring about the eventual peaceful ordering of the world the globalist demands and the realist believes to be impossible. And the way to approach that unity is through accentuating disunity. Professor Theodore H. Von Lane, in an illuminating article on “early global history,” wrote: “For a long time to come . . . the further unification of the global world will proceed—and can proceed only—through an accentuation of disunity.” As the Western model of an urban-industrialized way of life continues to spread, it must be encouraged and allowed to expand, for inevitably it will come in conflict with other “rival universals—all of which are copies of the Western original.”
The claims of our two Communist rivals on the Third World will not be denied easily- Indeed, both China and Russia have announced publicly that through wars of national liberation they hope to isolate Western civilization. In this they are simply playing the centuries-old game of land powers trying to outflank sea powers through control of geographic land areas. America, as a trustee of Western civilization, can hope that from time to time it will be given assistance, either military, economic, or moral, from its beneficiaries in America’s attempt to preserve littoral diversity. It is obvious that we cannot be strong everywhere, and as President John F. Kennedy reminded us in November 1961, “we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only six per cent of the world’s population, and we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution for every world problem.” But we can adopt a peripheral strategy that maximizes our geographic location and our traditionalist long suits.
If the United States is to protect and patrol the Afro-Eurasian littoral, the sine qua non is the proper form of military power. The forces necessary to implement the peripheral strategy are: first, an invulnerable sea-based deterrent to deter both Russia and China from a massive aggression into the Western or Eastern marchlands, and second, an increase in America’s conventional and unconventional forces. Two new fleets will be needed— the Latin and Afro-Asian Fleets—whose main functions would be to protect the territorial integrity of existent states and thereby prevent the hegemony of any one or group of states. The new fleets should be nuclear- powered and essentially baseless. Freed for the most part from permanent bases, they would better foster “positive neutrality” by acting as great grey steel stabilizers.
Since it might be necessary for this naval force to perform other functions than peacekeeping and showing the flag, the force composition must be shaped specifically for littoral tactics. This calls logically for a Navy-Marine air seamobile force for operations on the rivers, lakes, and coasts of Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. This air seamobile force would be designed from the sea up for self- sustaining, independent existence. An important element of these new fleets would be the mobile technical task force, consisting of specialized ships for nation-building so that Western technology can help nurture a permanent revolution in the underdeveloped nations of the world.
That the challenge of world revolution is here there is no doubt; the only question is, “How does America respond to the challenge?” Attempt global hegemony for itself by preventive—pre-emptive war, withdraw to Fortress America and establish the world’s highest underground standard of living; continue to muddle through; or attempt to work out a new synthesis by stressing our traditional principles?
Thomas Jefferson remarked in 1802 that America acts “for all mankind.” Adlai Stevenson, shortly before his death, observed that “the framers of the Charter of the United Nations could not foresee the threats to peace inherent in the doctrine of ‘just wars of national liberation.’ Nor is the international peacekeeping machinery—or the procedures for using it which have been developed at the United Nations—adapted to these new techniques of intervention.” And Ambassador Stevenson added: “Until the international community is ready to rescue the victims, there is no alternative but national power to fill the peacekeeping vacuum.”
President Johnson has reiterated time after time that although he does not particularly relish the assignment, America must play the role of “guardian at the gate” primarily because there is no one else in the West strong enough to do so. This then is the role of U. S. power in the world revolution: to preserve a pluralistic world that can eventually develop into a balanced global and, hopefully, great society, and, in the process, retain what a British consul in 1881 described as “a charm connected with the word ‘America’.”