The Foundations of American Policy II
By MAX BELOFF IT is not difficult to understand how Europeans should have come to misunderstand the underlying character of Ameri- can foreign policy in the post-war world. The fact that the participation of the United States in the defeat of Germany and Japan should have been followed, so swiftly by its measures to resist the Communist challenge has tended to make people forget that the two phases of American policy did not simply flow the one into the other. We overlook in our awareness of the omnipresence of America's armed strength the determined haste of America's post-war demobilisation; we hardly remem- ber the fact that there was an American policy before the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan, that so far from wondering whether America's anti-Communist zeal would drag us into war, our concern was whether or not America would convince itself that ,the stability and defence of Western Europe were vital to its own security.
It is perhaps because of this inability to keep pace in our minds with the swiftly changing course of world history in the last two decades that we fall too easily into the habit of taking for granted the presence of United States strength outside the United States' borders; or, as in much of continental Europe, ascribe it to an American imperialism which, although it un- doubtedly exists in certain quarters, is far too weak and far too contrary to the general trend of American thinking and feeling to be a dominant factor in national policy. When all allow. ances are made for the kind of attitude prevalent in some Service quarters, and for the violence of feeling which Com- munist China in particular still excites, it is still the case that Europe has more to fear from American isolationism than from American aggressiveness; nor indeed could this easily be otherwise. The rapid scaling-down of American military strength in the period 1945-47 was more characteristic of the American outlook than the subsequent build-up; the attraction of such dangerous slogans as 'massive retaliati,m' or 'letting Asiatics fight Asiatics,' the appeal of the 'new look' in arma- ments with its suggestion that the forces' demands for man- power might then decline—all these reveal the ingrained reluc- tance to regard as permanent the burden of defence that the United States has in fact shouldered over the past eight years. Alone among fully sovereign Great Powers, the United States has not brought itself to accept the idea of military training as an obligation upon all its citizens; the draft can be thought of as a temporary measure: UMT would mean a permanent commitment to the `garrison-state.'
When President Eisenhower has chosen the more concilia- tory of the alternatives presented to him in all the recent crises in foreign policy, he has done More than merely give expres- sion to his own obvious horror of war and to his deep con- sciousness of what large-scale war might now involve for the future of humanity`itself; he has also given effect to what the vast majority of his nation clearly desire. Non-involvement with Europe's wars has been a central component of the `American dream'; its force has not seriously been weakened by events, and involvement in Asia's wars is no more popular an idea. Military conscription was one of the things from which the European immigrant fled to the New World; it remains a symbol of the kind of social order Americans have hoped to avoid. It is this, rather than the protective instincts of American mothers, that remains the great barrier to univer- sal military training.
The traveller in the United States today, however strident the headlines about 'Red aggression' or 'Communist infiltra- tion,' still finds himself in a world which is essentially inward- looking. It is still the realising of human opportunities on the American continent that is the staple of life and the proper and normal subject of conversation and speculation. And this is so whether the human opportunities are thought of in the form of labour-saving gadgets in the household or of a wider diffusion of the appreciation of the fine arts.
The stereotype of a pre-fascist situation that some Euro- peans bring with them and apply to the quite different, if deeply disquieting, phenomenon of `McCarthyism' is obviously inapplicable to a society which still pivots around the absorb- ing trivia of daily life. Compare the antics which surround any college football game with the dedicated solemnity of any European 'youth-movement' of the fascist era and the patent ablurdity of the analogy leaps to the eye. This is a society that would rather build than destroy, would rather. live than die— a society in which family and neighbourhood stand for more than the Nation or the State.
This deeply pacific way of life and the deerily pacific senti- ment that underlies it are understood and reckoned with by the makers of American policy; indeed at times they behave as though only by preaching the imminence of danger can this society be made to take the minimal precautions for its own defence. They may be right. What nearly all important sec- tions of the American people desire is a lesser not a greater commitment to maintaining the world balance of power. The individual citizen is primarily concerned with his and his family's lives and fortunes; with some exceptions business still believes in the limitless potentialities of the domestic markets, and even where it would like to buy and sell abroad it still instinctively mistrusts the long-term overseas investments that would be required of a country genuinely aspiring to emulate Britain's nineteenth centuryrole; Americans are to be found in jobs all over the world, but it is in America that they wish to build their lives, and meanwhile, as with their soldiers, they would like to take as much of America with them as possible— this is not the stuff of which imperialism is made. Even the boom created by defence contracts is regarded-with suspicion; and one has the feeling that what business would like above all is to be free of the difficulties and hazards of working for the government, to be released from the whole current pre- ocpupation with 'defence' whether military or civil.
convinced are Americans of the values of a civilian,- minded society that they find it hard to imagine that other peoples may not resemble them in this. Hence, in part, their almost total insensibility to European fears that an armed Germany would be quite unlike an armed America; hence, too, despite all the current denunciations of Communists and Com- munism, and the atmosphere almost of panic which the subject engenders, the growing certainty that the visitor acquires that there still survives in a great many quarters a lurking hope that the Russians may turn out quite different from the current stereotype, that there may be a genuine liberalisation of the regime, and above all that the 'iron curtain' may be lifted and the two peoples begin by personal contact to find out about each other.
One does certainly come across expressions of hostility to the Communist countries so ferocious that the European visi- tor is apt to dismiss them simply as evidence of how little the realities of air warfare mean to an unbombed country. They certainly do not imply a desire to engage in the amenities of mutual hydrogen-bomb obliteration. On the contrary, these demands, which are in no way thought-out, and scarcely take into account the possibilities of retaliation against America, arise almost wholly from the very fact that popular pacifism has been frustrated and from a clumsy urge not towards con- quest but towards recovering the lost sense of security.
The popularity of the idea of arming Germany and the unwillingness to sympathise with the fears of Germany's European neighbours do not reflect, where the general public is concerned, any deep and sinister intention of adding impor- tant and efficient components to the armed forces of the West so as to build up a menace to the Soviet world; they spring rather from the persistence of the belief that if Europe were only armed properly in its own defence, fewer Americans would need to be cooped up on foreign soil.
The desire for disengagement which dominates popular thinking about European problems—the pressure for Euro- pean 'integration' is another manifestation of it—is to a great extent true even of Asia. When the Japanese accuse the Ameri- cans of wanting to enlist them into an army of mercenaries, there is a sense in which this is true; it would again mean less of a direct call upon American resources. Certainly there is no desire to proceed to adventures on the Asiatic mainland. The consternation which Dr. Syngman Rhee caused in Congress last summer when he revealed that his interpretation of Ameri- can foreign policy was that it included a determination to reunify Korea in his favour by force is evidence enough. It is true that the case of China is a more complicated one. Leaving aside the 'China lobby,' there has been a genuine and widespread unalingness to accept the fact that China had repudiated western ways and set off on a course of its own under a hostile inspiration. Quite apart from the military in- sistence on the necessity for strategic reasons for the United States to keep Formosa out of unfriendly hands, there has been the view that the Communist regime was not yet firmly estab- lished in China, that an internal upset there is always possible or likely, and that when it occurs the Formosa Government must be in a position to assist whatever new forces emerge. The refusal to recognise the Peking Government, the so-called 'unleashing' of Chiang Kai-shek, have related to an unwilling- ness to make the consolidation of the regime easier or the path of its presumed opponents more difficult. But the idea has always been that if the Kuomintang regime is to get back to the mainland it must be by its own strength: to advocate the use of American forces to invade the Chinese mainland has been urged by no one; and no one who urged it would get a hearing. And even here, despite the ambiguities arising from purely military considerations, the dominant impulse is to dis- engage. Recognition of the Peking regime is not uhthinkable except in so far as Peking's conduct deliberately makes it so.
The differences that do exist between American and British attitudes are not to be measured in terms, of greater or less aggressiveness. One great weakness is the failure of many Americans to grasp the fact that the American alliance has become a permanent major premise of British foreign policy, just as the British guarantee of the Monroe Doctrine was a major premise of American foreign policy for almost a century. If this were more generally understood it might be easier than it has proved to provide institutional means by which policies could be harmonised in advance. This is scarcely possible so long as Britain is thought to have fundamentally different objectives; and it must be admitted that the readiness.of cer- tain circles in this country to blame international tension almost exclusively upon the Americans is not encouraging for those who would like to see progress in this direction. that the narrowness of the French vote could be discounted because the votes of C6mmunist deputies need not be counted, since they were not Frenchmen but only 'agents of Moscow.' It is as though a doctor should say : 'Don't worry about the patient's high temperature; it is only the disease that is causing it.' That the real French problem—like the real Italian prob- lem—is still that of the virtual alienation of the mass of the working-class from the national community is difficult for Americans to grasp.
It is not only difficult to grasp because thinking in political terms does not come easily to a country whose devotion to its own history is counterbalanced by a considerable under- valuation of history as a key to the understanding of other peoples; it is also a reflection of the very peculiar problem that Communism itself presents for Americans. They do not see in Soviet Russia a powerful State dedicated to another way of life and assisting in promoting that way by its ability to exploit a wide variety of social and racial tensions in other parts of the world, but rather the citadel from which some mythical demon has sallied forth to destroy them. The problem of Communists and of their relation to national security—a genuine problem, but a police problem—has unwisely been magnified into a political problem. And the preoccupation with it has spread to such a dangerous degree as to inhibit clear thinking on the actual nature of the danger itself. This confu- sion is fortified by the tendency, which has obvious historical roots, to think of foreign policy largely in moral terms. This has been particularly influential in the case of China, where British policy, defended on grounds of expediency, has often been referred to simply as 'immoral.'
Yet awareness of these divergences should not blind one to saner influences at work. Fear is a poor counsellor—though the awareness of what modern science can do in war which is far more 'widespread in the United States than in Europe has certainly fortified the determination to keep out of war. More important is the vast degree of open-mindedness one still finds on all these matters, especially' among the young. America is still a free society capable of defending its freedom; though uncertain of all that freedom should imply. Its process of adjustment to the external world is still incomplete and. pain- ful; there is no reason to believe that it is beyond its capacities.
Previous page
