The dominoes of American disengagement
The United States is the richest and, both actually and potentially, the most powerful State on the globe. She has much, I believe, to give to the world; indeed, to her hands is chiefly entrusted the shaping of the future. If democracy in the broadest and truest sense IS to survive, it will be mainly because of her guardianship. For, with all her imperfections, she has a clearer view than any other people of the democratic fundamentals.
Thus Lord Tweedsmuir in 1940; and every word he wrote then remains true for us today. The question, however, that casts a shadow over Tweedsmuir's truth is whether the United States any longer has the will to act as the guardian of anything; and whether her allies and those ultimately dependent on her — most notably the European powers — are intelligent enough and sensitive enough to give their great friend the kind of help and sustenance she needs to continue in the great role for which two world wars cast her. For, not only have we seen a gradual souring of American support for overseas Involvement following the disastrous intervention in South-East Asia, but there are signs, too, of a contraction of American horizons everywhere: following the agitation of such as Senator Mansfield for a reduction of American troop levels in Europe we are now told that at least sixty per cent of the American citizenry no longer thinks that Europe ought to be fought for, even in the event of a Russian invasion.
The development of such a feeling is understandable. The Vietnam war, and the level of intensity at which it was fought, was unwise in the first place, for a far better line of defence in the area could have been chosen, and it was the commitment of the United States to a worldwide anti-Communist crusade which confused the judgement of those responsible for the protection of American interests around the world. While the United States became more and more deeply embroiled in that hopeless conflict, moreover, a greater and greater coolness developed between her and her European allies, especially France under General de Gaulle, and Britain under Mr Heath. The difficulty has been that the eventually necessary withdrawal from Vietnam did nothing whatever to restore the faith of the American public in the ability of their statesmen to pick and Choose between areas of probably effective and necessary foreign involvement, and those where they would be neither wise nor sensible to entangle themselves.
Nor has the particular development of dplomacy under Mr Nixon and Dr Kissinger been a happy one. Apart from the recognition of China — which had the great merit that acceptance of obvious facts always has in foreign policy — not a great deal done in the name of the United States abroad since 1968 has been wellconsidered. In the latest South-East Asian FrIsis, for example, it has become increasloglY apparent that Dr Kissinger and Mr Nixon, when withdrawing from Vietnam and Cambodia, quite genuinely believed that the settlement they had created there would actually hold, and that both Russia and China would withdraw their hand from the aggressive ambitions of the Viet Cong and the Khymer Rouge: it was to be expected that they would not, and they did not. Yet, in the period of trust, an enormous amount was sacrificed to the supposed susceptibilities, and the supposed needs, of the two totalitarian Powers. In particular, the President and his Secretary of State gave needless and Probably lasting offence to India during her war with Pakistan, because China was on the side of Pakistan, and they thus probably made a lasting concession to Russian influence in the Indian sub-continent. Again, in both the Aegean and the Middle East, Dr Kissinger's conception of the balance of power as a perfect, even and mechanistic construction — and not one in which the statesman strives to ensure that his ally holds the balance—has led to a waning of American influence in Greece, Turkey and Israel which has gone as far as is compatible with the ultimate dependence of those states on the United States. At the other end of Europe, moreover, the casual and indulgent attitude of American statesmanship to affairs in the Iberian peninsula has demonstrated Dr Kissinger's failure to understand the significance for American and NATO interests of the birth of a putative Communist dictatorship on NATO's Mediterranean flank.
It is the duty of her allies to appreciate the depths of American misery produced both by Vietnam and by the Watergate scandal. Yet, in Europe especially, there has been an excessive tendency to grouse at the American character and mean-spiritedly to deny the Americans the limited succour which an ally can offer them in a time of intense trial. The European powers are fortunate in the degree to which those at the top of the present American administration have, despite developments in public opinion at home, yet remained committed to the defence of Europe, especially when the unwillingness of the Europeans to make any comparable provision for their own defence has been taken into account. It is now doubtful how long the American commitment to Europe will last: for all the widespread intellectual willingness to distinguish between the present world situation and that of the period which we dub distinctly isolationary there has clearly, in the last decade, been a marked contraction of American horizons and ambition, and there is no reason to suppose this trend will not continue apace, especially if President Ford is succeeded by a Democrat other than Senator Jackson. All around the world American horns are being drawn in, and the already shaken and insecure allies of the United States behold the spectacle in a bemused fashion, covering their realisation of the potentially disastrous effects of that contraction with reassuring words. Self-confidence has been collapsing throughout the Western world and, to adapt a metaphor of the late Walter Lippmann, the peoples of the West, in order to stop their hands shaking, are preparing to welcome manacles.
Desperate men
However much the methods chosen by Britain's inshore fishermen taken to protect their interests are to be deplored, their plight is one which must excite sympathy and support. The general inability of the present Government to look after the interests of those of its people who are not members of the established trade union movement, and the crass incompetence and clumsiness of the Ministry of Agriculture in particular, have deprived the fishermen of both the understanding and the support to which they are entitled from their elected politicians; and a flood of foreign produce now threatens their livelihood. This Government has been pusillanimous enough in its assertion of British interests abroad; and it has been particularly pusillanimous — not to say downright stupid — in its assertion of British interests in the North Sea and along the continental shelf. But even Mr Peart and his colleagues have transgressed the ordinary bounds of discourtesy and blindness by refusing even to become involved in negotiations with the fishermen: it is understandable, therefore, that the latter have been driven to desperate measures. The best course for the Secretary of State is now to open talks with the fishermen as soon as possible, so that the damaging and possibly ruinous blockade can be called off.
Imperilled press
A wholly totalitarian and left-wing Britain was brought one step nearer last week with the submission of the Labour Party's evidence to the Royal Commission on the Press. For, drawing its inspiration from work earlier carried out by a committee under the chairmanship of Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the Labour Party has now made definite proposals for what it calls a public intervention in the newspaper industry. Fleet Street is in dire trouble as it is, not just because some management is inefficient, or because costs have escalated so remarkably, but because the Fleet Street trade unions, and especially the printing unions, are so consistently disruptive. More: behind the disruption of recent years lies, in many, cases, a clear political intent to determine, or at least to influence seriously, the contents of the papers themselves. Any such intent will be materially helped by the promise of government subsidy or economic intervention in newspapers, for this and this alone can remove the newspaper business from the harsh disciplines of the free market. Government intervention (or public intervention, as the Labour Party calls it) is but the first move towards government control through the medium of militant unionism.
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