No More Vietnams? The War and the Future of American Foreign Policy

Part II

In November, the Atlantic published Part I of an excerpt from the proceedings of a conference on the lessons of Vietnam held by the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs in Chicago last June. In last month’s installment, Adam Yarmolinsky and Theodore Draper opened with a debate about the origins of American involvement in Vietnam, and about theories of limited war. Stanley Hoffmann and Ithiel de Sola Pool put forth conflicting views of America’s use of its power.

In this concluding installment, Samuel P. Huntington proposes a case for a continuing active American world role after Vietnam, and for a new emphasis on aid designed to strengthen the political stability of emerging nations. Eqbal Ahmad attacks Professor Huntington’s premises from the point of view of one who is a native of “the third world,” and other participants in the conference comment. Then, James C. Thomson, Jr., offers a plan for a post-Vietnam foreign policy of “low posture,” aimed at avoiding extremes of interventionism and isolationism, and Edwin Rcischauer leads a series of responses.

The full proceedings of the conference are soon to be published as No More Vietnams? The War and the Future of American Foreign Policy by Harper & Row. Richard M. Pfeffer, a fellow of the Stevenson Institute, both organized the conference and edited the proceedings.

I

In the first installment, Samuel P. Huntington argued that “it seems unlikely that a situation like that which developed in Vietnam will develop elsewhere, in the immediate future.” He also cited Frank L. Klingberg’s theory of an alternating cycle between active and passive moods in American foreign policy, and wrote, “The shift in opinion on foreign policy in the mid-1960s appears to be simply the latest alternation of American attitudes toward foreign affairs between introversion and extroversion.” Here he continues his discussion:

Samuel Huntington: Whatever happens in Vietnam, tendencies toward introversion will be a reality conditioning American behavior in foreign affairs for the immediate future. A primary problem facing the American political system, and certainly a top issue confronting the President who takes office in January, 1969, will be to reconcile this new restraining attitude with the responsibilities which the United States accumulated during a quarter century of international involvement. In the past, periods of introversion meant isolationism in foreign policy: we could retreat behind the oceans. Today, this is clearly not the case; Walter Lippmann’s proposals that the world be divided into spheres of influence and that we limit our concerns to the Western Hemisphere and adjacent waters are very quaint — and quite unrealistic. The nature of distance and the constraints imposed by distance have changed fundamentally and made old-style geographical isolation simply out of the question. The problem now is how to adapt to introversion without succumbing to isolation.

The principal instruments which the United States has used to influence domestic developments in other countries have been economic and technical assistance, military aid, covert operations, and military intervention. In the past, these have not been very effective in promoting political stability; in the future, introversion is likely to make them less available to foreign policy makers. Economic and military assistance programs will undoubtedly continue, but probably at greatly reduced levels. The reluctance of any Administration to intervene militarily will be very great. The day of the massive foreign policy program may well be past.

Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of Department of Government, Harvard; consultant to the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State and to AID; author of Political Order in Changing Societies.Eqbal Ahmad, assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. William R. Polk, director of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs; former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State. Sir Robert Thompson, Deputy Secretary and Secretary for the Defense of Malaya, 1957-1961; head of the British Advisory Mission in Vietnam. 1961 1965. Chester Cooper, director of the International and Social Studies Division, Institute for Defense Analyses; Special Assistant to Ambassador Harriman, 1966-1967; senior member of the National Security Council Staff responsible for Asian Affairs, 1964-1966. Stanley Hoffmann, professor of government, Harvard; author of Gulliver’s Troubles.Daniel Ellsberg, RAND Corporation consultant to the Department of Defense on Vietnam; Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Adairs, 1964 1965. Theodore Draper, author of Castroism: Theory and Practice, and Abuse of Power.John McDermott, associate editor of Viet-Report; author of Profile of Vietnamese History.James C. Thomson, Jr., assistant professor of history, Harvard; East Asian specialist at Department of State and White House, 1961-1966. Edwin Reischauer, University Professor, Harvard; Ambassador to Japan, 1961—1966; author of Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia.Mans Morgenthau, professor of political science and modern history at the University of Chicago; author of Politics Among Nations and Politics in the Twentieth Century.Frances FitzGerald, author of articles on Vietnamese polities, including “The Tragedy of Saigon,” Atlantic, December, 1966, and “The Struggle and the War,” Atlantic, August. 1967.

Social reform and political institutionalization are two goals, the successful promotion of which in a modernizing country would reduce significantly the likelihood of U.S. military intervention.

Beginning in the last years of the Eisenhower Administration there was an increasing tendency to make American economic assistance to modernizing countries contingent upon those countries’ embarking upon appropriate programs of social reform. In 1961, of course, the link between economic assistance and social reform was crystallized on a grand scale in the Alliance for Progress. The assumption here was quite clearly that by promoting social reform the United States would reduce the likelihood of Castroite revolutions in LatinAmerican countries and thus avoid the dilemma of either accepting another Communist state in the Western Hemisphere or intervening militarily to prevent it. After 1961 the role of social-economic reform as a means of preventing instability and violence was stressed again and again in negotiations between the United States and aid-receiving governments. It received particular stress, of course, in the relationship between the United States and the GVN.

There are, however, at least two major problems in emphasizing social-economic reform as an alternative to instability. The first concerns the presumed effects of such reforms. It is assumed that reform is a substitute for social revolutions. In some cases, however, reform may well be a catalyst of revolution. This was Tocqueville’s argument on the French Revolution; there are reasons to suggest its applicability to contemporary modernizing countries. Reforms aimed at urban and especially middle-class groups seem likely to produce violence and disorder in their wake. Land reforms, in contrast, have usually had the effect of turning peasants from a potentially revolutionary force into a conservative bulwark of the existing order.

A second problem concerns the effects of American efforts to promote social reforms. So long as American efforts remain relatively small and are limited to the carrot and the stick of economic assistance and its denial, the impact of these efforts on social change will be relatively small. Where the United States massively intervenes in a society, however, its effects on the promotion of social reform, economic change, and modernization tire likely to be overwhelming and revolutionary. American liberals frequently think of U.S. involvement in the politics of another country as inherently biased on the side of the status quo. This is, however, only a half-truth. In fact, there would appear to be a direct Correlation between the scope and direction of American involvement. The more extensive the American involvement in the politics of another country, the more progressive or reform-oriented is its impact on that country. In those countries which it has governed militarily or colonially, the impact of the United States has generally tended to undermine and destroy the traditional order, promote social and economic equality, expand human welfare, and stimulate economic development. In the years since World War II, for instance, rapid and thoroughgoing land reforms have (with one exception) been carried out under two auspices: Communist revolution (China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia) and American military occupation (Japan, Korea, and at a second remove, Taiwan). The only other country which has carried out a land reform as sweeping as these is Bolivia, and that was done by a revolutionary government financed by the United States.

The revolutionary and modernizing impact which a massive American presence has on a foreign country is in part the result of conscious desire to promote reform and in part simply the by-product of the exposure of a traditional culture to the ways of an egalitarian, affluent, liberal, modern society. On the other hand, where the American presence is relatively limited - and in particular, of course, where the American govern-

The desire for reform promotes the continual expansion of the American presence.

mental presence is limited — the net effect of the American impact tends to be much more conservative; witness most of the states of Central America. In a sense, this relationship between the scale and the direction of the American impact parallels that which students of colonialism have noticed between direct anti indirect colonial rule. Countries subjected to a massive and prolonged colonial rule, it is argued, were in a much better position to modernize and develop than those, such as the Middle Eastern countries and China, which were subjected to indirect, marginal, and hence irresponsible colonial influence.

This seemingly positive relationship between intervention and reform obviously creates problems for the American liberal. On the one hand, he is against intervention; on the other, he is in favor of reform. Outside government, he can add up the balance one way or another. In the government, however, and anxious to promote social-economic reform (and this includes, I would argue, the bulk of State, AID, and CIA personnel, despite myths to the contrary), he inevitably also finds himself promoting more and more American intervention. Vietnam is the perfect case in point. There, as in so many other non-Western societies, the forces of traditionalism, elitism, apathy, corruption, family, and self-interest were so strong as to make extremely difficult achievement of reforms through the indigenous political system. As a result, the life of the American adviser was typically one of intensifying frustration. Adhering to the canons of advisershipness, the new American arrival inevitably starts by attempting to become chummy with his Vietnamese counterpart and then gradually tries to induce him to take the actions which to the American seem obviously needed to promote social welfare. The Vietnamese smiles approvingly and does nothing. The American becomes more insistent; the Vietnamese becomes more resistant. In the end the Vietnamese eventually orders some action to be taken, but then also ensures that it will have just the opposite effects than those which the American intended. By that time, the American adviser — who arrived with such idealistic hopes and progressive ideas of promoting social good with the Vietnamese — has come to the conclusion that if any good is to be accomplished it must be done by Americans to the Vietnamese. If he still has any time left in his twelveor eighteen-month tour of duty, he will demand five more American assistants and plunge in to do the job himself. The desire for reform thus promotes the continual expansion of the American presence; and the expansion of the American presence promotes both intended and unintended social and economic change.

This issue of reform versus nonintervention is perhaps most dramatically posed by the problem of corruption. Many ol those Americans who have voiced doubts about the American role in Vietnam and have argued for a decrease in the American presence there are also precisely those who have argued that we must do whatever is necessary to eliminate corruption there. Achieving the latter goal, however, would inevitably mean much greater American intervention and involvement. The United States could, for instance, simply refuse to recognize or to cooperate with GVN officials known to be more corrupt than the average. If this policy were to be effective, however, it would soon mean the exercise of a veto power by U.S. officials over virtually all appointments in the ARVN and the GVN. The results might well be successful, but they would be achieved at a price. Which is worse: toleration of Vietnamese corruption or expansion of American colonialism?

Many AID and other provincial advisers in Vietnam have tacked up on their office wall one of those many verses from the poet laureate of the British Empire which now seem peculiarly relevant to American dilemmas?

The instinct of Americans, however, is to draw quite the opposite lesson than Kipling intended. If the East cannot be hustled, it must be replaced. If the Vietnamese won’t reform and change their own society, we must reform it for them. And few phenomena are more unsettling in their consequences than masses of energetic and high-minded Americans intent on doing good.

If promotion of social reform seems unlikely to reduce the pressures for American military intervention, what about the promotion of political institutions capable of channeling discontent into peaceful paths? If the United States is to make social reform a condition for economic assistance, it may also have some responsibility to help governments to develop the political institutions required to make such reforms a reality.

A major goal of American policy is the promotion of stable political institutions in modernizing countries and particularly the development of strong political parties.

It is at times argued that intervention to promote political development is bound to be ineffective or self-defeating. American support for a particular party or group, it is said, will be the kiss of death to this group. In some cases this may be true, but it should be noted that people in most countries think that the United States intervenes now to support particular groups, even when it does not do so. In many ways the United States suffers all the stigma and disadvantage of political intervention and reaps few of the benefits. In addition, in many countries important groups have strongly urged the United States to play a more active political role, but the United States has hung back and refused to do so. It is also argued that American intervention in the politics of other countries runs counter to the general desire of the people of those countries to manage their own affairs and will consequently give rise to violently anti-American nationalism. Quite obviously, however, the control of politics, even more than that of the economy, will remain in local hands. The elites of each society will choose their own forms of political organization. All that foreigners can do is to advise them on the prerequisites and requirements of political organization, even as they do for economic development, and give them technical and material assistance in the development of political organizations.

Then, it is at times argued that the United States is so much a victim of liberal myopia that it is hopelessly incapable of understanding the political needs of foreign systems and of adapting its own goals and methods to meet those needs. Americans, it is said, will inevitably attempt to reproduce in the most unsuitable foreign soil all the characteristics of their own highly distinctive two-party, liberal, pluralistic, constitutional democracy. Obviously, Americans, like anyone else, like to see the virtues of their own system and to flatter themselves by seeing it reproduced elsewhere. On the other hand, it is also quite clear that Americans have been able to rise above such parochialism in the past, and there is no reason why this should not be even more of a pattern in the future. Indeed, many of those critics who accuse the United States of attempting to export its own institutions at the same time also accuse the United States of supporting reactionary and repressive personalistic dictatorships around the world. Such critics would be more persuasive if they were less inconsistent. In fact, the United States has, wisely or not, supported and attempted to promote the development of the most varied types of political systems around the world.

Surely few political systems differ more fundamentally from the American system than that which has existed in Iran. Yet the United States has engaged in the most active efforts to strengthen and develop this essentially authoritarian monarchy. Whether this is a wise policy or not and whether it will succeed or not are other questions, but we certainly were not inhibited in our efforts to promote monarchical development by the failure of the Iranian political system to conform to the American model. In similar fashion, the United States has played an active role in promoting oneparty systems in Tunisia and Bolivia, a military-led dominant party system in Korea, monarchicalbureaucratic regimes in Thailand and Nepal, and also, of course, a variety of competitive democratic systems in which the dominant groups have been socialist, Catholic, and liberal, as well as highly conservative.

The United States clearly can affect the political development of other countries only in marginal ways. Yet we also clearly have some interest in doing so, if only because such action might marginally reduce the probability of more Vietnams. There are perhaps at least five things which we might do in this area.

1. We could consciously recognize, even if we did not publicize it, that a major goal of American policy is the promotion of stable political institutions in modernizing countries and particularly the development of strong political parties. Our support for and cooperation with political leaders or military juntas could depend upon their actively attempting to develop grass roots political organization. If we do get irrevocably committed to any one leader, no matter how charismatic he may be, we could, like the Russians in Cuba, try to nudge that leader into the difficult task of political institution building.

2. We could devote much more effort to the study of the conditions and patterns of political evolution and to the elaboration of new concepts and categories useful for the analysis of societies undergoing rapid social change.

3. We could evaluate economic and technical assistance programs not only in terms of how they contribute to economic development but also how they affect political development. We could try to identify those types of economic assistance which may contribute to both forms of development. We could develop criteria and guidelines for balancing prospective economic gains against political losses and political gains against economic losses.

4. We could inaugurate new activities directed specifically toward political development. These might include assistance to political parties, programs to develop and train political leaders, assistance to more broadly based and public-oriented interest groups, and more widespread support for community development programs.

5. We could create some office in our own government which would have a primary responsibility for political development. Until recently, the Agency for International Development has been, in effect, an agency for economic development. Somewhere, either inside AID or outside AID, we need an office for political development; the new Title IX office might serve as a staff nucleus, but it is clearly much too far down in the hierarchy to carry much weight. We need diplomats and economic planners, but we also need to recruit and train personnel skilled in the techniques of analyzing political change and promoting political organization. What we could use, perhaps, is a new-style CIA, more skilled in building governments than in subverting them.

All this may seem highly adventurous. But it is, I would suggest, a highly conservative prescription for promoting political stability and avoiding military intervention. Such a program of preventive political involvement would be less visible to both the American public and foreign publics. In an age of introversion and of hostility to massive expenditures overseas this has much to be said for it. Stimulating political organization, in particular, would get the United States out of the job ot attempting to promote social and economic changes on its own. Instead of trying to pressure a reluctant government to introduce land reform as a substitute for peasant revolution, we would focus on the promotion of peasant organizations which could then, if they wished to, put pressure on the government. Political involvements of this nature could well be more discreet, less expensive, and more productive of political stability than current reliance on economic development, social reform, and ultimately, military intervention.

Eqbal Ahmad: Professor Huntington’s presentations are a mixed bag of welfare imperialism and relentless optimism. They reflect that strange compound of assumptions and attitudes which characterizes American policy in the third world, and which invokes among those of us from the third world feelings of bewilderment and fear. The policy-makers in Washington will be pleased by his assertion [elsewhere in the discussion] that Vietnam may not after all be regarded as a failure when there is a “reckoning of the benefits of the intervention.” The invocation of the Klingberg cycle¹ must gratify the isolationists and the pacifists with the knowledge that America has reached the end of its twenty-seven-year period of “extroversion.” But the cold-war liberals ought to be soothed by the intimation that while America may have to eschew military involvements of Vietnamese proportions, it cannot disengage from its responsibilities to the underdeveloped. The hawks, of course, can look forward to the next cycle of extroversion, sometime after 1984. Finally, those most vociferous of all Americans — the sociologists and political scientists — must rejoice over the promise of their promotion to an unquestionably lucrative and highly challenging role as engineers and architects of political ideologies, parties, and participation — modern-day philosopher-kings engaged and anointed by a super-CIA.

Professor Huntington’s remarks, in an abstract sense, are an excellent product of the American pluralistic, bargaining political culture. There is something for everyone within a defined boundary, and there is room for orderly settlement ol differences provided there is a consensus on broad goals. Yet precisely for the reasons of its cultural symmetry, it fails as an analysis for underdeveloped countries which are still torn by cleavages on goals, and where antagonistic interests and values dominate social, political, and economic realities.

The phased modernization of Western European countries, the United States, and even Japan had the benefit of the luxuries of time, superior psychological, economic, and cultural resources, plus the opportunity of channeling to the colonies and the expanding frontier the tensions and ambitions produced by technology and social change. Yet they had their share of excesses, civil wars, revolutions, disorders, and ideological aberration. Today, the third-world countries must undergo a triple transformation — social, economic, and political — simultaneously, in telescoped time, and under the multiple pressures of colonial heritage and growing population. In the circumstances, our relative calm should surprise observers. We may hope to avoid the extremes of excesses — regression into colonial, racist, fascist, or Stalinist aberrations. Yet we shall inevitably experience conflicts and disorders in the process of reformulating our values and reconstructing our societies. If a superpower enters our world committed obsessively to orderly change and with an interest in maintaining stable clients, it will necessarily distort our development, sharpen our conflicts, and also render itself vulnerable to the perpetual temptation of intervening militarily in behalf of its losing protégés.

Our formal independence has given us, at best, an unenviable position as pawns in the game of high politics. That is why we react in fear when one superpower serves notice on a country, as America has done in Vietnam, that it will cajole, coerce, and finally conquer a people that would not conform to its inverted image of freedom and democracy, and another great power insists, in the name of justice, on subverting a people driven by want and search for dignity, so that the attainment of justice becomes an excuse for the strangling of human freedom. Vietnam is important to us only because it has dramatized our agony and exacerbated our fears.

When a nationalist movement acquires a radical content, when it threatens to nationalize property and socialize national resources, when it becomes diplomatically assertive and neutralist, it initially elicits an unfavorable response from the United States. Its programs threaten potential or actual American investments; its diplomatic posture involves the loss of a potential or actual ally in the cold war; its revolutionary doctrine appears dangerously congruent with the Communist enemy’s. If a country threatened by such a nationalism happens to be a client state, then a United-States-mounted coup d’etat or sharp, swift military intervention seeks to restore the status quo. Interventions of this type include Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Iran. In nonclient underdeveloped states such a radical nationalist movement is tolerated by the United States if it comes to power unexpectedly, or turns radical gradually and without serious challenge under a legitimate and popular leader — although relations with such regimes remain reserved if not restrained. Egypt is an example of the first type, Tanzania of the second.

American tolerance toward these countries appeared to be increasing in the Kennedy Administration; neutralists were not regarded invariably as allies of Communism. There was even a tendency to encourage actively their radical posture, especially in the zones of French influence (Tunisia became an AID showpiece during this period and has since shown unabashed loyalty to the United States). The unusual popularity in the third world of the Kennedy Administration was due not so much to actual change in U.S. policy as largely to the feeling among us that America was beginning to understand the nature of our nationalism, that the puppeteer view of the world was giving way to a more sophisticated understanding of our drive toward sovereignty. But only among the Eastern European clients of the U.S.S.R. has American policy consistently welcomed, and where possible, encouraged, reactive nationalism.

Professor Huntington gives us a very keen analysis of how, in the U.S. alliance with conservative nationalism, the interaction between U.S. economic aid and desire for reform promotes the expansion of American presence and finally ends in intervention. Military assistance produces much the same, if more dangerous, symbiosis between the United States and the recipient indigenous elites. The more a foreign power involves itself in native problems, the greater becomes its economic and psychic investments. As the relationship gets more institutionalized, it becomes harder to extricate itself from the commitment. The tendency then is to blame individuals and not the system, which inherently lacks the:capacity to maintain and enhance its legitimacy.

Identification with a foreign power erodes the legitimacy of a regime.

Professor Huntington ignores this important problem of legitimacy when he makes his recommendation in behalf of political development. I do not question his central positive theme, that the achievement of consolidation of power by a regime followed by advances in the area of social reforms and political institutionalization will reduce the chances of U.S. military intervention. Yet his belief that the United States should actively engage in fostering political development is fraught with risks and is likely, at best, to be self-defeating.

No foreign power has the ability to equip a native government with legitimacy (the essential quality of rulership), nor with the will and capacity to open channels for peaceful change — unless it is the case of a military occupation which for some historical or psychological reasons is accepted by the population.² In fact, the reverse is more true; identification with a foreign power erodes the legitimacy of a regime.

Professor Huntington seems to take essentially a technical view of political development. But the primary factor in promoting political institutions is not improved professionalism, as is largely true of the Army, Navy, hospitals, and so on. Rather, it involves a vision of society, the choice of values and goals. These arc not exportable goods or skills that can form part of foreign-aid programs. It is incorrect, therefore, to put political parties in the same category as hospitals and armies.

I can only agree with Professor Huntington on the uniqueness of the Vietnamese situation. But, as others have said, the uniqueness rests with Vietnam, not with American policy. It refers to the historical and political configurations which permitted the Vietnamese people to organize a successful resistance against American intervention. It does not refer to the assumptions, attitudes, and patterns of relationships with indigenous elites which have frequently caused the United States to intervene militarily on behalf of a threatened status quo.

The post-war interventions generally succeeded in obtaining their immediate goal of defeating a radical coalition and maintaining a friendly and manageable, preferably reformed, status quo. The Philippines, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iran, and the Dominican Republic are frequently cited as examples of success. In Lebanon it was a standoff, in Cuba a fiasco, in Laos a suspended failure. Only in Vietnam has the dialectic of intervention resolved into a seeming disaster; mistakes led to blunders, and blunders have been escalating into a crescendo of crimes. An effective style of protecting clients, which admitted American involvement in internal conflicts either by proxy (through advisers, training Special Forces, and military aid) or by swift and discreet police action of short duration, has been caught in the Vietnamese quagmire. Professor Huntington believes that the duplication of such a situation is unlikely) although he himself points out that Thailand and the Philippines, among others, are potential scenes for future U.S. military involvement in internal war.

William R. Polk: I would like to recall some of the ways in which at least part of the State Department in 1961 and 1962 thought about the process of guerrilla warfare. At that time, and today as well, we did not have a single adequate political history of any guerrilla war. Practically every study dealt with the military or security aspects of guerrilla warfare. Inevitably, the emphasis on security led to administrative prescriptions to counterinsurgency.

Only in Vietnam has the dialectic of intervention resolved into a seeming disaster; mistakes led to blunders, and blunders have been escalating into a crescendo of crimes.

For example, in much of the early thinking in 1961 about the Vietnamese conflict, the experiences in Greece, Algeria, the Philippines, and Malaya were our teachers. But the lesson we learned from each was that the political outcome of the confrontation depended directly upon the administrative and military prescription. In Greece, it was in the form of American military assistance; in Algeria, French regroupment of the Muslim population; in Malaya, the creation of fortified villages; and in the Philippines, civic action. In Washington, there was a general feeling that once these prescriptions were combined they would produce a successful answer to the insurgency in Vietnam.

However, a more sophisticated look at any of the specific issues destroys the simplistic models. For example, I have always believed in the Greek case that it was not the application of large-scale external assistance or, indeed, even the closing of the Yugoslav frontier which was lethal to the Greek guerrilla cause; rather, it was the split in the Greek Communist Party. It was not until Greek Communists began killing one another, as they did after Tito’s defection from the Cominform had been duplicated in the split between the nationalist and Cominforni wing in the Greek Communist Party, that the civil war collapsed. Hence, unless this sort of split could be duplicated in Vietnam, the lesson of Greece was probably not pertinent in the way in which it was being drawn.

The critical political factor in the case of Vietnam may be missed if we use 1962 as the takeoff point in our discussion. The critical political factor, as Professor Kahin has suggested, may go back to 1945 or 1946.

It seems to me that to arrive at a rough rule of thumb, one can say that something like 80 percent of the process of guerrilla warfare is political; 15 percent is administrative, and only 5 percent military. Applying this scale to the Vietnamese conflict, one can say that the political issue was largely decided as early as 1946, the administrative issue by about 1957, and that we are talking today only about the residual 5 percent.

Sir Robert Thompson: One should not become involved politically. The prospect of going in as a political reformer frightens me more than anything else. I would not touch political reform in these territories with a barge pole, and I certainly would not touch it with an American political scientist.

I am not against political reform or political change. All I say is, let the people do it themselves —don’t get in on the act. Any measure of aid you give in the form I have suggested is bound to effect, in the long run, political and social changes, and these should be allowed to occur in the people’s own time in the country concerned, not tomorrow morning in your time.

Samuel Huntington: After Sir Robert’s remark about barge poles and political scientists, I ought to rise to a point of personal privilege. I waive that, however, to speak not on behalf of political scientists but again on behalf of the priority of politics, a very fundamental issue we have touched on.

As one looks at the program of priorities Sir Robert advanced earlier, he gives lirst priority to building up the administrative structure — taxation, communication networks, economic assistance, including social services and a rural aid program — in that order. This is pretty much precisely what we have tried to do, not very effectively, in Vietnam. It is an administrative, technical, and economic approach to what is essentially a political problem.

The reason it doesn’t work in Vietnam is, I submit, not because of any inherent defects in the way in which we went about it, but simply because it is only at best marginally relevant to the major problem there, which is one of a lack of political organization and social cohesion. An administrative program like Sir Robert’s presupposes the existence of a political system, which is precisely the thing lacking and causing the problem in Vietnam.

This gets me directly to some of the points Sir Robert made earlier about leverage. I think there were some moments in the game when we had leverage. We did have some leverage at the time we first influenced people to the side of Diem. We had no leverage on Diem, none at all. Nothing we said or tried to say was credible to him. We could have exerted pressure, however, with the next group. President Johnson had some leverage at the moment he first came in. True he was not the elected President, but as an elected Vice President who succeeded to the presidency he did have a great deal of support within the country. In looking back on it now, I think just after the succession there was a period of a month or so when he could have exerted some leverage on the government in Vietnam. We also could have exerted some leverage when we began bombing. This was a major step in our involvement for which we could have exacted some price.

But after we put in combat troops, we lost our leverage. In point of fact, one of the interesting aspects of progressive involvement, I think, is that our leverage decreases as our involvement increases. Our stake in this thing gets so high that nothing we can say or do to gain leverage will be credible to the government we are trying to help. By then we are in deeply, and insofar as they are concerned, it becomes increasingly our problem.

Chester L. Cooper: First with regard to “leverage.” What influence can the United States bring to bear as it becomes progressively involved in the affairs of another state, a state which is in some trouble, or presumably we would not have gone in, and also a state with a not very effective government, at least by our standards?

When we talk about counterinsurgency, one of the missing ingredients in the analysis — and it is hard to believe there are any missing ingredients in a concept that has been so intellectualized and overkilled — is the whole question of how the United States can get the government it is attempting to help to do the sort of things the United States thinks should be done, without, on the one hand, either taking charge or, on the other hand, going along with existing arrangements and being very much stymied in the process.

Now, if we cannot succeed by these means in Vietnam, one alternative is to take over. However, in one sense, I don’t think we are that smart. And, in another sense, if we took over, we would be in a worse situation than we are now.

Stanley Hoffmann: Let me go back to a point you made, Professor Huntington. I was struck by the formalism of your recipes. If I understood you correctly, you are saying there are two kinds of things that can be done. To promote social reform is one, but it ends up being very hard to control and possibly destabilizing. So you pass on to the next, political institutionalization. There you have a set of recipes, a set of techniques which strike me as very much a projection of the American conception of politics, with the usual underestimation of the potential of conflict.

This raises the question, first of all, whether we should do this. In other words, is it really in the American national interest to engage in social engineering thus conceived? From the point of view of good old-fashioned power politics, is it in America’s national interest to go around the world building up the kind of techniques and institutions you propose? It may be in the recipient’s interest; it may be in ours; but we cannot assume that it will always be in both. Ours may well differ from theirs, and doing good to others because one thinks it is good for them is a bizarre definition of one’s national interest.

The second question, which is really more serious, is, can we do it — can anybody do it?

Your whole approach is one which never mentions the word “nationalism.” You don’t seem to recognize that, after all, there is a difference between, on the one side, telling somebody literally what values to create, what the national will should be, what social and political policy should be, and on the other, giving limited technical advice on economic development. Political institutionalization and nation-building are largely phenomena growing out of what Mr. Ahmad calls “will,” or what one might call national or political selfrespect. It seems to me very difficult for any foreign nation to do very much in this area, except give the kind of advice which is likely to be misleading if it is largely a projection of its own national experience.

I must then add that of all the nations which are, shall we say, not primarily well qualified to go around the world and give this kind of advice, the United States stands out, exactly because of what has made American history on the whole so different and in many respects so fortunate. This has opened up a kind of communications gap between “us” and “them.” In many ways your statement exemplifies the very problem you are trying to solve.

Daniel Ellsberg: I am also very disturbed by several lessons Professor Huntington has drawn from experience. This, by the way, does not lead me at all to think one should avoid learning lessons; I think that is essential, and it is not at all too early that there be efforts such as the one we are on.

Professor Huntington has generalized that the more extensive the American involvement in the politics of another country, the more progressive is its impact on that country. He several times alludes to a possible relationship between intervention and reform.

Now, the first thing that strikes me about this proposition is that Vietnam itself provides a spectacular counterexample. The period of our intervention in Vietnam — which includes the period from 1950 on, and especially from 1954 on— cannot be described in general as a progressive or reform-oriented interval by any means.

Doing good to others because one thinks it is good for them is a bizarre definition of one’s national interest.

One thing, perhaps, that might have misled Professor Huntington — it has misled a lot of other people — is the amount of talk there has been about reform, generally from lower-level staff members, and occasionally, official pronouncements. When he refers to the stress on reform by people in State and CIA, he is mainly talking about the FSO’s who accompany visitors to Vietnam. But this does not characterize very much of what their superiors have said, in official internal policy statements and decisions, and it characterizes even less what we have effectively done.

In fact, if you look at examples that seem to support Huntington’s case, they can be much more precisely defined. The critical factor is not presence but occupation. It is as simple as that. When we Americans occupy a militarily defeated country and are not plagued by a continuing resistance in the country, experience shows a considerably progressive and reform-oriented impact. But experience does not show whether those efforts would have survived a resistance movement. We have not been tested on that.

Incidentally, I know that the historical examples of U.S. occupation misled many people in the Administration in their predictions of the benign effects of a great American buildup in Vietnam. Many of them had had experience in military government in places like Korea, Japan, or Germany, and this led them to think of us as inevitably a force for reform. But lacking in Vietnam the responsibility we had in occupied countries for the long-term political and economic development of the country, we were in no sense effectively a force for reform. Therefore, to accept your proposition, Professor Huntington, would surely lead us greatly astray in countries where we do not propose fully to take responsibility.

Samuel Huntington: I disagree with you on the specifics of Vietnam and the nature of our impact. If you want to go back over the period since 1954, the more we have become involved, the more we have had precisely the sort of impact which the proposition states we will have.

When you talk about occupation, that is precisely the point. This is an extreme case of American intervention. The logic of your argument seems to suggest that if we only did go in and take over Vietnam and run it the way Korea was run or Japan was run, we would have these effects. Here it seems to me you are focusing on an extreme case and building an argument for even more intervention.

Daniel Ellsberg: I certainly do not want to be misunderstood in my remarks. I was interpreting your proposition. I believe it is wrong to say that there is anything like a smooth function relating intervention and a progressive impact.

As we have increased our presence militarily, economically, politically, _and in every other way, we have, of course, demolished the society of Vietnam. From a very-long-term view, this is what is happening right now. Out of this ruin, perhaps, one might say some benefit may come, at great cost. However, in any case, we are perceived by the Vietnamese correctly as having first supported the French regime and second the Diem regime, hardly progressive reform governments, whatever else they were. Finally, we are seen now as having saddled them with a deplorable military regime with essentially nothing to recommend it. This has been our impact, and it is creating intense anti-Americanism.

As for occupation, I am scarcely suggesting that is the solution. Conceivably it would have led to more reform, but that isn’t the only criterion anyway. I do not believe it would be acceptable in either Vietnam or the United States, nor should it be.

Theodore Draper: I read Professor Huntington’s remarks with a kind of double-take reaction.

At first, I thought he had settled everything nicely because he seemed to suggest that we need not expect any more military intervention until after 1980. If he had stopped there, he would have been ahead.

However, he then proceeded to tell us that we have to get in even more than we have gotten in before, that we have to go from promoting social reform to developing the political institutions of the countries in which we intervene, and the development of political institutions requires a party system.

The question arises: If we are going to develop political institutions, are they going to be institutions like our own or not? Our people, at best, can help to develop institutions like our own. We get into trouble at this point — do the local residents want our type of institutions? Are their background and conditions the same as ours? Now, if the institutions we are going to develop elsewhere are not like our own, then we are really helpless, because our people simply have no experience with anything else.

In the end, however, Professor Huntington seems to regard political intervention as if it were a case of self-denial on our part. Whenever we do not intervene more than we do, the reason is not that we are denying anything to ourselves but that it is simply beyond us. It is, in the fashionable word, counterproductive; it does not work; it hits back at us. Now, when you recommend the impossible, you are really recommending not doing it, and, therefore, by advocating intervention to the point of developing other people’s political institutions, Professor Huntington has actually, in an inverted way, presented a persuasive anti-interventionist position.

My feeling if that the only way to get out of this contradiction is to think of intervention as a last resort. It is a most desperate and dangerous thing to do. It is invariably based on political failure. Therefore, it should be done only as a very last resort in a situation of extreme danger to the United States. When you have that kind of situation, most of these problems are not so acute, and on the other hand, when you don’t have that kind of situation, these problems become insoluble.

Samuel Huntington: I would like to congratulate Mr. Draper on getting the message. Let me respond to three points raised. The first is, Under what circumstances, if ever, is it in our national interest to become involved in the politics of other societies? It seems to me it is quite clear that the most successful intervention is no intervention and that, particularly in what I view as the coming phase of American introversion, our capacity to become involved in other societies is going to be limited. In other words, our perceived interests in doing so are going to be limited, and therefore, the primary rationale for becoming involved at all in other countries is that such involvement may be the only alternative to becoming involved later in a much bigger way.

Obviously, we should only intervene in other societies when it is in our interest to do so. And I would define our interest in very narrow terms. In some cases, our interests may coincide on specific issues with those of other elites, and in other cases they may not. But I think it is a mistake to assume that you only can have effective cooperation between elites when they share the same philosophy and the same basic values. I think it is quite clear that groups can work together for shared specific objectives, even when they do not share many other things.

The second issue concerns the question whether we can do it, and I must say I was a little amused by the seeming assumption that I was urging the promotion of two-party American liberal democracy in other countries. I don’t think you can find this anywhere in my statements. I have argued that we have promoted very different kinds of political institutions in various countries around the world. On the evidence we are not limited to promoting that which is a mirror reproduction of our own system.

I think quite clearly that in any given case what we will be able to do will be very limited and the type of social forces and political institutions which it will be in our interest to promote will obviously reflect the nature of the particular society.

Finally, there is a question whether even this sort of limited political involvement may not lead, as Mr. Ahmad suggests, to larger involvement. I think this is quite clearly a danger. But it is one which can be minimized to the extent that these involvements, as I tried to suggest, are kept reasonably limited, discreet, and covert. Many of the problems of our involvement in other countries in the past decade or so have come from our choice of means, in which we relied very heavily on massive economic aid programs, military assistance, and military intervention.

It is quite possible that one of the side benefits of a shift toward introversion in our society will be less public concern about foreign policy. This development in our domestic politics, which may make more limited forms of foreign involvement necessary, may also make them possible, in the sense that there will be less public attention and concern directed to these issues.

Eqbal Ahmad : Professor Huntington, I was rather surprised at how you have squeezed out of the kiss-of-death argument regarding American aid to foreign political institutions. You conceded that the legitimacy of any political party advised and supported by the United States or by any foreign power will suffer. You therefore suggested such support and advice should be kept covert.

Now, really, doesn’t that impose a certain character on a political institution that is supposed to invite political participation and be responsive to its membership, a political institution that is being based on something people who belong to it don’t even know about?

It would seem to me this covertness in itself would compromise the institution at its very inception. It would involve the kind of compromise of principles from which one can go on making more and more. Doesn’t the idea of covertly supporting a participatory political institution sound like a contradiction in terms to you?

Samuel Huntington: The answer is no.

John McDermott: Just by way of preface, I am not exactly sure that it is going to be possible in this country to continue to maintain the covert quality of some of the operations. You have now the growth of a very substantial guerrilla scholarship on foreign policy matters — young men and women who think nothing is more fun than to go through the abstracts to find out what kind of contracts are around and to expose them. Part of the trouble at Columbia, I think, grew out of that. I think this is a new political fact which has to be taken into consideration.

Now, I want to go to a different point. I was really very happy with Professor Huntington’s remarks until he began to speak of promoting political development. Then I wish he had clearly introduced a distinction — which may be there, but should be clearer — between political systems in which the relationship of governors to the governed are command relationships and those in which they are bargaining relationships. It seems to me that Professor Huntington is envisioning command relationships of governors to the governed. The kinds of political organizations he seeks are what the New Left today calls co-optive organizations.

In this regard, I was very much interested in Edward Thompson’s very good book called The Making of the English Working Class, which is now a kind of underground rage. I think Huntington’s assumption is that the resources for political development do not exist in the masses. For him, political development requires inputs from elites, people with ideas, consciousness, and so on.

Thompson’s book suggests quite the opposite. He talks, for example, in his book about the importance of popular myths, such as the myth of the freeborn Englishman, which enables people subject to new economic and political experiences to organize responses by themselves.

It seems to me that in the underdeveloped world we might begin to look for some of this. Miss FitzGerald and I were talking earlier, for example, about myths of the Vietnamese rural classes, which I have a feeling have played a similar role in Vietnam to the myth of the freeborn Englishman in the development of the English working class.

Thompson speaks also about the experience of organization — the ability to form committees, put out broadsides and leaflets — which came out of dissenting churches in Great Britain. He talks about the growth of primitive notions of class, mainly conceptions which identified a group of people who were then thought to have some sort of solidarity against another group, and last, he talks of relationships to sympathetic auxiliaries in middle and upper classes.

I don’t think creation of political institutions in other countries is a technical problem.

Samuel Huntington: Neither do I.

John McDermott: And I don’t think it is a problem which can be very effectively attacked from the outside. On the contrary, I am very much bothered, for example, by your insistence that you work down from the elite toward the masses; that you look for elites within certain structures who have a stake in the modernization processes. The army is always one of these; I gather that people who are culturally westernized also are a fairly good one these days. The assumption is that somehow this process will work down the pyramid to the mass base. If you don’t establish bargaining relationships, you are in trouble.

Samuel Huntington: I just cannot find any place where I committed myself to building from the top on down, although, in fact, this may be necessary in some circumstances and in some systems, depending upon the nature of the system.

It seems to me that what you were getting at is the necessity in most societies to develop some sort of structure, probably some form of party system for mass participation and for the decentralization of power. I agree. I think it is particularly necessary in Vietnam, where to a very large extent our problem has been precisely due to efforts to build from the top down, without capitalizing on the assets which exist in the form of local and grass roots organization.

II

James C. Thomson, Jr.: To ponder the effect of Vietnam on future U.S. patterns of intervention is to treat a twofold subject: on the one hand, what might be the effect, an exercise in pure speculation, and on the other, what ought to be the effect, an exercise in preachment. Neither speculations nor preachments offer much in the way of answers; but they can sometimes raise useful questions.

There seems to me one central lesson to be learned from the Vietnam conflict: never again to take on the job of trying to defeat a nationalist anticolonial movement under indigenous Communist control in former French Indochina.

Now that is a lesson of less than universal relevance. I cite it nonetheless to stress Vietnam’s uniqueness — and, alas, every situation’s uniqueness. I cite it to caution against all attempts (including my own) to formulate guidelines for future interventions on the basis of Vietnam. And I cite it in full realization that many Americans will assuredly learn other “lessons” from Vietnam, and that many of those lessons will be the wrong lessons — for instance, that America has no proper role in Asia, or that we should never intervene anywhere, or that we should at least steer clear of the less developed world, or that we are inherently and incurably imperialist when we move beyond our shores, or that we should never again trust foreigners.

Two further cautionary comments: First, I find myself uneasy with the phrase “U.S. patterns of intervention.” Most “patterns” discerned, by historians, critics, and observers of American foreign policy seem to me to do damage to the realities of a pluralistic government in a multiregional world. Washington’s attitude toward Latin America (particularly the Caribbean region) and its willingness to “intervene” there will probably remain very different from its stance toward Africa. The Middle East touches a different set of responses, mainly rooted in domestic politics. Similar distinctions must be made for Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South Asia, and “the Far East.” Furthermore, times change, perceptions of threats change, leaders change, and so does their rhetoric. “Patterns” are generally the product of hindsight or polemics; to impose them is usually to overlook diversity and disorder in the policy-making process. It is also to overlook that crucial ingredient of policy, the accident factor.

A second cautionary comment: Future U.S. interventions, whether patternable or patternless, will be deeply affected not merely by our involvement in Vietnam but by both the reality and the appearance of a Vietnam settlement. Washington’s ability to intervene will depend, at least in part, on the post-Vietnam mood of the electorate and its Congress. A Vietnam settlement that looked quite soon like a “sellout” would surely cause political recriminations at home; but whether those recriminations would lead to irresistible demands for renewed and escalated intervention, or whether they would instead lead to a revulsion against foreign adventures, is quite unknowable. The most that can be said is that a settlement that had the look of nondefeat, and sustained that look for a while, would leave Washington somewhat freer to intervene or not in future situations. If executive flexibility is our goal, our Vietnam settlement had better look “honorable.” If, on the other hand, our goal is to apply some brakes to the allegedly interventionist momentum of our national security apparatus, a case might be made for a settlement that bore the clear look of a nonsuccess. As indicated above, however, such a result would entail a risk.

Against this cautionary backdrop, I turn to the speculative question: What might be the effect of Vietnam on future U.S. patterns of intervention?

Here we already confront at-least two radically different forecasts.

On the one hand, one hears the recurrent prediction that “more Victnams” will in fact occur, and that they will produce more American interventions— whether in Thailand, Burma, Guatemala, or Bolivia. The proponents of such a view are a curiously mixed lot: among them, Cold Warriors in Washington, Maoists in Peking, and large sections of the New Left, both here and abroad. Ironically, the central repositories of the now familiar thesis that Vietnam is the ultimate test of the theory of wars of national liberation seem to be Washington and Peking. Other capitals have a more sophisticated comprehension of the unique mix of factors that makes Vietnam a less than conclusive test of anything much. Nonetheless, the fact remains that many believe the Communists eventually will raise promising insurrections in much of the underdeveloped world, and that Washington will certainly counter with intervention. Those of the New Left who are convinced that interventionism is endemic to our federal apparatus certainly hold to this view; and so, I daresay, for rather different reasons, does an influential body of America’s military men and conservatives.

One hears, on the other hand, a strongly conflicting forecast: that the result of our Vietnam involvement will be a national withdrawal into “isolationism” or “neo-isolationism.” Many of the proponents of this view are deeply concerned internationalists who fear that the American people will abdicate their global responsibilities in revulsion against our Vietnam experience.

Such a fear is understandable. The congressional revolt against foreign aid seems an ominous harbinger. Yet the forecast itself may mislead through semantics. “Isolationism” is a strong, loaded term. Its historic connotations are irresponsibility leading to tragedy: America’s rejection of Wilson and the League; and nonintervention in Manchuria, Ethiopia, and Hitler’s Europe. It also conveys, one feels, a sharp sense of guilt on the part of the interwar generation. And, indeed, many of those who warn of “neo-isolationism” are men who reached adulthood in the 1930s.

Yet is “isolationism” actually what such men see ahead? Closer questioning reveals no real fear that America will withdraw from the United Nations, nor that we will abrogate our treaties, nor that we will cut back on our foreign trade or dismantle our network of diplomatic relations. Too much has changed since the interwar period: the revolution in communications and transportation, and the advent of nuclear weapons, to cite only two central developments. A return to “isolationism” seems out of the question.

What, then, is the real concern? On the one hand, some seem to feel that we will fail to help resist “aggression” and thereby feed the “appetites” of aggressors; President Johnson said in July, 1965, “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else” — and who will be there next time if not us? Others, however, have a different fear: that the United States will cease its efforts to bridge the dangerous gap between the very rich and the very poor, the white and the colored, the minority and the majority of the world’s people. Clearly the first concern relates to a willingness to intervene, and the fear implicit is a fear of “noninterventionism.” As for the second concern, what is foreseen is an abrupt termination of our post-war governmental programs of assistance toward “modernization.” Both noninterventionism and an end to foreign aid are aspects of a somewhat reduced overseas involvement — a lower posture in world affairs. But they are not “isolationism.”

It is interesting to note that the two predicted consequences of our Vietnam involvement — either a retreat into pseudo-isolationism or continued and even escalated interventionism — seem reflective of two traditionally conflicting themes in America’s view of its role in the world. I have in mind, on the one hand, those who from our earliest days saw America as a beacon and an inspiration — a “city built upon a hill” — and on the other hand, those more activist types who, with Jefferson, believed that the American Revolution was “intended for all mankind” and should be exported. With the turn of the century, mission and manifest destiny became “imperial democracy.” But throughout the process there have been ardent and eloquent anti-expansionists, anti-imperialists, and noninterventionists, arguing that who we were at home was far more important than what we did abroad.

Both noninterventionism and an end to foreign aid are aspects of a reduced overseas involvement. But they are not“isolationism.”

Now between these two general forecasts — “more Victnams” and “isolationism” — one must note that there are the makings of a further middle option. We have seen so far only brief glimpses —the formulations are few and preliminary. But the glimpses include the Johnson Administration’s noninterventionist policy toward Indonesia both before and after the abortive Communist coup of September, 1965. Neither an Indonesia that was apparently sliding under Communist Party control nor an Indonesia that had become fiercely anti-Communist could tempt intervention after our Vietnam experience. A policy of nonembrace and multilateralism has (so far) replaced the old interventionist instincts of the 1950s. A more cautious approach was similarly evident in Washington’s response to two crises on the Indian subcontinent: the frontier war with China in 1962, and the India-Pakistan war of 1965. As for the Middle East war of 1967, selfrestraint again seemed to prevail — though Israel’s lightning victory prevented a real test of Washington’s interventionist instincts. Finally, the congressional uproar over sending planes to the Congo was widely viewed as a strong reminder that the legislative branch is hypersensitive to the danger of “more Vietnams.”

Out of these glimpses has come one recent attempt within the Administration to formulate a new approach toward intervention, at least in the Asian region. This is found in the May 7 Pomona speech of Dr. Morton H. Halperin of the Department of Defense. Halperin proposed three principles that seemed to him to embody the “U.S. attitude toward intervention”: (1) self-help, (2) regional responsibility, and (3) residual U.S. responsibility. His elucidation of these principles may be, one hopes, a first step toward the officially approved formulation of a middle course that reflects lessons learned from the Vietnam conflict.

I turn now from speculation to preachment — an attempt to answer the question: what ought to be the effect of Vietnam on future U.S. patterns of intervention?

A simple answer comes easily: Vietnam ought to make us more careful. It should make us look before we leap. It should even make us look before we step.

But the simple answer tells us next to nothing. What kind of guidelines should we offer to future U.S. policy-makers on the subject of intervention?

It seems to me that the baffling aspect of the question involves something other than the European power balance where, for better or worse, ground rules have been established on the basis of the U.S.Soviet nuclear balance, the NATO-Warsaw Pact symmetry, and a divided Germany. Here patterns of deterrence, negotiation, and conciliation are pretty well established, at least for the foreseeable future.

It is in those regions of greater chronic instability, the underdeveloped world, that the question of intervention becomes most pertinent and baffling. Instability makes great powers nervous, and the itch to intervene is heightened by concern that if you do not, your great power adversaries will — or, alternatively, that they already have, so you had better join in to prevent an upset of the regional balance of power.

It is perhaps traditional concepts of “balance of power” and “power vacuums” that mislead us in these instances. All too often they reflect a bipolar — or tripolar — view of the world that overestimates one’s adversary’s ability to establish and maintain control and underestimates the power and resilience of indigenous nationalisms. This view is a legacy of the cold war. But it neglects the rising tide of polycentrism in the West as well as the East.

What seems clearly needed is a more realistic response to instability in the less developed world. What should be the ingredients of such a response?

First, we must early ask ourselves whether the nation or region in question is of any direct relevance to our national security. To put it another way, would “hostile” control of that nation or region pose any real threat to our national security (as opposed to our pride or self-esteem)? If the question were applied not only to Vietnam but to all of mainland Southeast Asia today, my answer—and the answer of most Asian specialists, I daresay — would be no. If it were applied to Japan, on the other hand, my answer would probably be yes; “hostile” control of the economic and potential military strength of Japan would add significantly to power that could be used against us.

Second, we must early ask if the instability of a nation (or a region) is caused by overt aggression across an internationally recognized frontier or by something else — either indigenously rooted insurgency or foreign-supported insurgency. If the answer is international aggression, wc should join with others through the mechanisms of the United Nations and other instruments of mediation to end the aggression and to reconcile the parties. But if the answer is insurgency, then a further set of questions must be asked.

Third, then, what is the nature and source of the insurgency? Contrary to much official rhetoric over the past decade or so, insurgencies — rebellions, even revolutions — are neither inherently iniquitous nor, even if iniquitous, automatically to be resisted by the U.S. government. At the risk of offering a banality: much insurgency (including foreignsupported insurgencies) is rooted in genuine economic, social, and political grievances — in resistance to widely sensed injustice. At what point should America side with “duly constituted local authority” or “legitimate” regimes (the source of the legitimacy does not usually bear close examination) in order to preserve “stability” against insurgency? The answer takes us back to Question One.

If, in fact, the overthrow of the legitimate government will pose a direct threat to our national security (in Canada or Mexico, for instance), our intervention should presumably be wholehearted. But such clear-cut cases arc rare. And so an additional question must be asked of the far more frequent marginal cases: Is there a chance that with a moderate amount of American assistance the “legitimate” government will succeed? If not, we should not try. Yet here we move into the jungle growth of ignorance, poor intelligence, wishful thinking, and competing constituencies within the U.S. government. For in raising the key question of our chances for success, we bring to bear human frailty and human illusions, qualities that have repeatedly led us astray in Vietnam. We also confront, here, the reality of the cultural gap between our own society and those of many parts of the less developed world. We confront, as well, the inapplicability of many of the instruments of our technology (not to mention our politics) in such alien cultural environments. I, for one, am dubious about our ability to bridge such cultural gaps in the foreseeable future.

Surely multilateralism should be the sine qua non of future American interventions.

Out of such pessimistic thoughts a fourth question emerges, one that should be early asked of situations of instability: what multilateral mechanisms are available to help treat instability and case crises in the less developed world? Too often in the past such questions have been asked too late, if then; “more flags” for Vietnam was an afterthought, as was resort to the United Nations.

Clearly one way to avoid deepening unilateral involvement is to multilateralize the effort from the start; and one way to avoid the embarrassment, of one nation’s defeat in a losing or at best unpredictable effort is to engage as many others as possible from the start. Surely multilateralism should be the sine qua non of future American interventions: multinational efforts to assist developing nations; multinational efforts to cope with insurgency; and multinational attempts to resolve open hostilities.

Vietnam suggests a further question for future interventions. In my view, our Vietnam relationship has been profoundly and increasingly complicated by what I have earlier referred to as rhetorical escalation and the problem of oversell. To what extent can such rhetorical escalation and oversell — allusions, for instance, to our “national honor”—be avoided in future instances of necessary intervention abroad? is it endemic to bur democratic system? If so, we are in for severe trouble; we will be incapable of limited but sustained involvements and particularly involvements that show liLLle in the way of short-term success. Here again, one cure can be multilateralism — a sense of joint enterprise with other nations rather than a sense of the American flag in solitude and, often as not, in trouble.

There is one final issue that must be treated in any consideration of the future of American intervention. This is what Ambassador Reischauer has referred to elsewhere as America’s “moral imperative to help those who need help.” Or as Dr. Halperin said at Pomona, “The presence in the world of sick and hungry children, and of peoples striving to improve their standard of living and to increase the measure of human dignity afforded to the individual, arouses our sympathies for reasons almost entirely unrelated to American security.” Now no one can doubt that this “moral imperative to help” is very much part of our bloodstream. That moral imperative can lead us, however, into entrapment: too close an attachment to even, through our rhetoric and our press, glamourization of — regimes through which our assistance is necessarily channeled; too close a tie to the often Western-educated (and therefore attractive) elites who temporarily administer the recipient nations but may be gone tomorrow; and eventually, a philanthropistmendicant relationship that sooner or later arouses the nationalist ire of the mendicant, not to mention the philanthropist’s outrage over “ingratitude.”

Here again one obvious solution is multilateralism: the channeling of our largess through intermediate bodies that can muffle the collisions and avert the embarrassments of bilateral relationships. It will be no easy matter to convince the American people and their Congress to put foreign aid in the hands of such intermediaries. In many circumstances, however, the lesson of recent history may well be that no foreign aid at all is better than most bilateral aid.

But multilateralism on the receiving end may not be enough. A more far-reaching solution may well be in order. For what we have seen in the decades since World War II is not a new phenomenon. The export of American benevolence under “the moral imperative to help” is a very old national tradition, a tradition rooted in the efforts of generations of religions mission boards, educational institutions, and eventually, foundations, to transform, reform, and modernize other societies. What is new, in the post-war years, is not merely a massive increase in the export of benevolence, but also the nationalization of the export. Today’s reformers and modernizers are largely representatives of a state of vast wealth and power. With them go the flag and prestige of that state. Private reformers still abound, to be sure; but their efforts have been submerged by the programs of the state.

In this context, one might ask if the quantitative change has not produced a qualitative change — if the escalation of international reformism has not altered the character of the enterprise. Private citizens could afford to “fail” — to be thrown out, to allow nationalism and even Communism to run their course. But states tend to find failure unacceptable. And those states that find failure most unacceptable of all are those imbued with concepts of mission and manifest destiny.

We are moving away from the application of the “balance of power ” and “power vacuum” concepts of the cold war.

In recent years America’s new efforts to eradicate poverty at home and transform its cities have been pushed toward a restructuring and decentralization. In the years ahead it may well be necessary to restructure, decentralize, and even denationalize our overseas aid undertakings. In a sense, the Peace Corps has pointed the way. What might be the prospects for the creation of semipublic foundations on the Washington end of the export of benevolence — to disentangle our overseas aid programs from the flag, our prestige, and the “national honor”? In so doing, we might more easily avert future situations where a right-hearted imperative to help would lead us into wrong-headed impulses to intervene.

Speculations and preachments bring me to a final hopeful guess: that America will in fact assume a lower posture, post-Vietnam, without withdrawing from the responsibilities of power, but with the responsibilities defined in less grandiose terms. For we will realize that not only are we not alone as “guardians at the gate,” but that there are actually a great many gates, most of them characterized by a brisk and healthy two-way traffic.

Edwin Reischauer: I accept Professor James Thomson’s cautionary comments but feel that he both underplays and overplays the most important one. We are still too far away from a final denouement in Vietnam to know whether or not we will have an “honorable” looking settlement, as Professor Thomson seems to assume, or something that at least in retrospect is tagged a “sellout,” or possibly even a simple “pullout” because American public opinion refuses to continue to tolerate a seemingly endless and hopeless war. Each of these endings would give a very different spin to the ball of American politics, producing quite different attitudes toward future involvements in Asia and the less developed world in general.

On the other hand, while the twist of the ball may still be unclear, the general direction in which it will go, I feel, is much clearer than Professor Thomson admits. The “central lesson” of Vietnam — at least as the American public perceives it — is already, I believe, quite obvious and much more widely applied, whether rightly or wrongly, than Professor Thomson implies. We may still re-escalate the present war if the negotiations fail, but, assuming that some sort of Vietnam settlement is achieved, I find it hard to believe that even a relatively strong “sellout” case would produce “irresistible demands for renewed and escalated intervention” in other parts of the world. Vietnam may be a “less than conclusive test of anything much,” but at least it has shown the limited ability of the United States to control at a reasonable cost the course of events in a nationally aroused less developed nation. That this “lesson” has sunk home in this country can be seen in the strongly anti-interventionist reaction in the Administration, in Congress, and among the public to the Indonesian, Congo, and other recent disturbances, as correctly cited by Professor Thomson.

This “lesson” can and, I believe, will lead to the broader conclusion that no external power can control (and thus exploit to its own advantage) less developed nations which are large enough in population and have enough national consciousness to be real national entities. I believe that we are moving away from the application to Asia of the “balance of power” and “power vacuum” concepts of the cold war, and in the process we no doubt will greatly downgrade our strategic interest in most of the less developed world. This is the direction in which we are moving, I believe, but just how far and fast we move is still to be determined by the specific outcome in Vietnam.

At this point “neo-isolationism” becomes a real question and not the series of straw men that Professor Thomson so easily demolishes. Those who have used the term have never meant to suggest a return to the 1930s type of isolation from Europe and the other advanced parts of the world. This indeed is unthinkable and impossible. Nor have they meant a more cautious attitude toward intervention in internal instabilities in less developed nations. This is coming and will not, I feel, be labeled as isolationism. Their fear is the very realistic one that the United States will not just move to greater caution about intervention in the affairs of less developed nations but far beyond this position to virtual unconcern in their fate. The result could be a dismantling of the capacity to intervene in the cases where intervention may indeed be in our national interests and an unwillingness to give economic aid or take other measures that would contribute to the long-range development of the less developed nations.

This, I feel, is no idle fear. Past aid programs have been wheedled out of Congress largely on the basis of our alleged great strategic stakes in the less developed world. Cold logic, however, will increasingly show that we have few, if any, immediate, vital national interests in the less developed world, either strategic or economic. And added to logic will be the emotional responses to our present crises at home and abroad. The Vietnam fiasco is beginning to produce the conservative response that, if Asians do not appreciate our efforts in their behalf and are not willing to do their share, they deserve to be left to “stew in their own juices.” The liberal response is that we should concentrate first on the great ills of our own society (the beam in our own eye) before trying to help distant people with their ills. Cultural (possibly even racial) biases strengthen both positions, as Professor Thomson suggests. Even he admits that “the congressional revolt against foreign aid seems an ominous harbinger.” I cannot see why he does not take the threat of this sort of “neo-isolationism” more seriously or discuss the possible answers to it.

The only reason for not adopting an attitude of unconcern toward the less developed countries that I find in Professor Thomson’s paper is the argument based on America’s “moral imperative to help those who need help,” which he quotes from me, only to warn against it as an attitude that could lead to dangerous cultural imperialism. I cited this “moral imperative” as an element in our whole culture, but, if this were indeed the only reason for our concern, I suspect that we would move for all practical purposes to the “neo-isolationism” Professor Thomson discounts.

I would suggest two reasons why the United States has very real interests in the stability and development of the less developed nations. The first is that no clear line exists between our very immediate interests in the security and stability of the advanced nations (such as those of Europe, Japan, and Australia) and conditions in the less developed world. For example, a complete disruption of all the oil lands of the Middle East might spell catastrophe for Europe and Japan. Spreading chaos which reduced the capacities for trade of the countries of South and Southeast Asia would be hard on a country like Japan, for which trade with these regions is important. While we can guarantee the defense (both nuclear and conventional) of Japan and Australia from across the Pacific Ocean, we cannot defend from such long distances the sea-lanes on which both depend. Neither could we so defend South Korea, which if lost to a hostile power might seriously affect Japan’s stability. If basic unconcern in the less developed areas led to an abandonment of our capacities or will to intervene on occasion in those parts of the world, this might have a serious secondary effect on areas of the world that are immediately important to us.

The second reason is very long range and less easily defined but probably more important. In a rapidly shrinking, ever more closely integrated world, in which interrelations and mutual influences grow constantly stronger, vast discrepancies of wealth and opportunity between various region’s and nations and the resentments and hostilities these breed become increasingly dangerous to world stability as a whole.

I thus come to an advocacy of the same middle course between overinvolvement and complete unconcern which Professor Thomson reached more easily by not attempting to justify it. I am less sanguine, however, than he that we will be wise enough to take this middle course. The arguments for it are either complicated or very long range, while the arguments for the “neo-isolationism” of unconcern are clear-cut and emotionally appealing.

On the optimistic assumption, however, that we will attempt to find our way down the middle course, I would accept most of the specific points about it that Professor Thomson makes, though I would formulate the basic principles to be followed in somewhat different terms:

1. We should distinguish clearly between our capacity to intervene and our commitment to do so, maintaining the former (at least to some degree) but minimizing the latter. For example, we should maintain the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific, thus protecting the freedom of the seas and giving us the option to intervene against aggression, thereby probably inhibiting it to some extent, but without commiting ourselves in advance. Prior commitments to less developed nations may be necessary in some cases (in East Asia, South Korea probably needs such a commitment, and Taiwan and the Philippines are also possible exceptions because of a long historical involvement on our part and their easy defensibility, as islands, from aggression), but such commitments should be regarded essentially as liabilities rather than assets.

2. As a general rule, intervention in internal instability or civil war should be avoided. Exceptions might be countries that are both very small and highly strategic, if such exist. If a regime — with our aid, in case it is worthy of it — cannot handle internal problems of this sort itself, we probably could not do it for them. The chief problem we would face is to be sure that we maintain a strict line between aid to a beleaguered regime and intervention in a civil war. Depending on the case, the line beyond which we should not go might be: (a) purely economic aid; (b) weapons; (c) military and constabulary training and advice.

3. As another general rule, we should attempt to assure that any intervention against aggression is international in character, but we cannot assume that this can always be achieved and there may be cases where we would have to intervene unilaterally. For example, a North Korean invasion of South Korea, a definite possibility, might not elicit an international response but might demand an American unilateral intervention.

4. No intervention should be allowed to become open-ended. As Vietnam has shown, we must retain the ability to stop the escalation of our involvement, if our initial efforts do not produce the expected results.

5. Economic and technological aid—which to my mind should be the main thrust of our policies toward the less developed nations, rather than military defenses — should be handled in such a way as to avoid our own political and emotional commitment to specific regimes and to minimize their fears of our domination. For both purposes, the internationalization of aid mechanisms and the use of semipublic foundations would be helpful, as Professor Thomson suggests. I would also add the concept of divorcing planning and operations in the development process from the providing of funds and materials, putting the former completely under the control of the aid recipient and relegating the aid giver to the role of banker, who provides the funds and materials for development programs and, when needed, the funds for hiring the necessary planning and operations staff, but who is not himself directly involved in drawing up plans or implementing programs.

Sir Robert Thompson: I would like to say how much I agree with Messrs. Thomson and Reischauer. I have always feared that Vietnam might produce U.S. isolationism. This risk, in my view, has been made even more severe by the fact that we may not have seen the real end of this war yet. While we all hope there can be a satisfactory conclusion, I am very much afraid that at the present moment we still could be heading for a catastrophe.

What the effects will be within the United States worries me enormously. There has been dissent and disunity on the war up to now, but what might the dissent, disunity, and recrimination be like if we ended with a catastrophe in Vietnam?

I also agree that the gap is growing between the rich and the poor countries of the world. And the one thing that really worries me about violence — whether Communist-inspired or not, and especially in highly populated agricultural countries — is that we are rapidly moving into a situation where food is going to become the major world problem, particularly if there is disruption of production in these agricultural countries. I am therefore more worried about what I would call the food button than about the nuclear button in relation to the long-term dangers in the world.

You cannot divorce power and responsibility; and the whole secret of power is not to use it.

The only other point 1 would like to refer to is the previously proposed distinction between military intervention and other forms of involvement. I really don’t think the military side can be separated from the economic or political.

For example, the great problem in military intervention is what you tell your general to do. I would dearly love to see the directive — if there were such a directive — that was given to General Westmoreland in Vietnam. What was he told to do? If the directive simply says win the war, then you are telling the soldier to use all his professional means, and you cannot dispute those professional means with him, because he is the professional. If you do not tell him to achieve particular political results, then, if the physical means of power are divorced from the responsibility for the political end result, you are bound to get into a mess. To a certain extent, we saw that at the end of the Second World War, where we focused on winning the war rather than on achieving certain political results.

I would like to leave you, therefore, with two thoughts with regard to power — that you cannot divorce power and responsibility, and, second, that the whole secret of power is not to use it.

Hans Morgenthau: A great deal can be learned from a consideration of the intrinsic mistakes which led us into this involvement.

First of all, I think one can learn that counterinsurgency is not just another military technique — it is not something like placing machine guns in a different way to have greater military effect. Counterinsurgency is an attempt to defeat and stamp out a genuine revolution, or what is called a war of national liberation. We cannot succeed in counterrevolution, short of the destruction of the indigenous population, as long as the insurgents can at least base their activities upon the indifference, if not upon the active support, of the indigenous population.

Another lesson one can learn from the Vietnam War concerns the relationship of massive, mateiial, military power to the subtle and almost intangible problems one faces when one deals with an enemy who, if only because he cannot help himself, must rely upon different techniques, to which this massive military commitment is utterly irrelevant. In other words, we are in the position ol a man who has been attacked by a swarm of bees and who can defend himself only with a submachine gun. by the law of averages he is going to hit a bee from time to time, but he is not going to have a very effective defense.

Third, one can learn from the Vietnam War lessons which have been brought home to me during a prolonged recent stay in India - that there is, indeed, an enormous difference in psychology and attitude between a white nation which, with the best of intentions, tries to reform an Asian nation and the Asian nations themselves. Time and time again cabinet ministers and other prominent people in Asia have said to me that the United States does not care if Asian lives are profusely expended, but that it makes a great deal of difference to Asians.

I remember vividly a dinner party I attended at which a prominent member of the Indian Cabinet and other leading intellectuals were present. They all said that the Tet offensive was the third great historical event in the relations between Asia and the West. The first was the Russian-Japanese war of 1905. The second was the defeat of the French, Dutch, and English by the Japanese during the Second World War; this was the third. This was the last colonial war in which a Western power was lighting on the soil of Asia, and failing.

Now, then, let me say a word about intervention in general. Obviously, as others have said, it is quite impossible to lay down abstract principles to tell you under what conditions you ought to intervene and under what conditions you ought not to intervene. One cannot do this any more than one can establish guidelines telling you exactly when you should go to war and when you should not go to war, when you should deploy your navy and when you should not deploy it, when to send an ultimatum to a foreign power and when not to send an ultimatum. This is not a question of abstract principles but of the concrete circumstances of the case which are to be decided by prudential judgment.

It would certainly be wrong to conclude from the Vietnam experience that the United States should never intervene in the affairs of any other country, but it would be just as wrong to say that we should dispense with taking the lessons of Vietnam to heart and intervene again whenever there appears to be an occasion to stop Communism.

The asserted danger of impending isolationism is, in good measure, I think, the result of U.S. government propaganda. I found in India a very strong ambivalence with regard to the Vietnam War. On the one hand, there is hardly anybody in a responsible position who supports our activity in Vietnam, but on the other hand, almost everybody is mortally afraid that if we disengage from Vietnam we might disengage from Asia altogether. I think this danger has been conjured up by spokesmen for the Administration, who have made it appear that the United States has only two choices, either to stay in Vietnam or to get out of Asia. However, those are not the only two choices.

I have opposed involvement in Vietnam from the very beginning, from 1961 onward, not because I am opposed to the involvement of the United States in Asia but because I have always considered this particular involvement under these particular circumstances to be politically unprofitable and militarily preposterous. However, to argue against a particular move on the Asian continent is not tantamount to arguing against the vital American interests in the maintenance, or, if need be, the restoration, of the balance of power in Asia. The United States has been aware of this interest and has put it into action, beginning with the opendoor policy, through our opposition to Japanese imperialism, to the ill-conceived policy ol peripheral military containment regarding China.

This was the last colonial war in which a Western power was fighting on the soil of Asia? and failing.

Therefore, the ultimate and perhaps most fruitful lesson which can be drawn from the Vietnam experience concerns the policy the United States ought to pursue in Asia, which ought to be neither piecemeal military intervention on the mainland nor disengagement altogether. This, I think, is the real problem for the future.

Chester Cooper: I have several points concerning intervention.

Many years ago I did an analysis of the concept of strategic importance, in an effort to try to come to grips with it. I discovered at that time — and there were fewer such countries then than there are now — that you could find in the literature that reached high places in our government some fifty countries that were designated as being of vital or critical strategic importance to the United States, in one form or another, by one or another government agency. Depending upon what your criteria are, you can make a case that a lot of countries all over the world are of critical strategic importance. But even if you wanted to intervene in every place judged critically important, you just could not do so. Therefore, if you are going to base your decisions regarding intervention on the judgment of whether the area is critically important, you bad better take another look at the standards we used in measuring this whole concept of strategic importance and at some principal choices that have to be made.

All standards for intervention are going to be very difficult to apply. But by the time you heed Jim Thomson’s caveats regarding what we should do before we intervene, future U.S. intervention is made very unlikely. But I suspect that the world we are going to confront after Vietnam is going to be one that will be a very tough one for us to live in alone.

If we can draw a lesson from Vietnam in terms of intervention, I suspect it is that the threshold will be higher for future intervention — that the alarms will have to be louder and more traumatic, that the case for United States security being affected will have to be somewhat more convincing, I am not arguing whether we should intervene or not. I am suggesting the kind of standard likely to emerge after Vietnam, and life being what it is, this standard will have a life expectancy of only five years or so.

James C. Thomson, Jr.: I thought Mr. Draper made a very useful point earlier in trying to put military intervention in a separate category. He would place the beginning of our military intervention in Vietnam at about 1964-1965. I gather he feels that our intervention in Vietnam from 1954 up through about 1961 was not military intervention.

I would accept this distinction, except for what I would describe as the “slippery-slope phenomenon,” which makes me deeply worried about economic aid and the like. It strikes me that in our reaction to situations of instability overseas there is a built-in progression from economic, technical, and internal security types of assistance to military intervention, when the initial nonmilitary intervention doesn’t work. The slipperyslope phenomenon gets compounded by our great power sense of omnipotence and grandiosity.

Edwin Reischauer: I wish we could get away from the word “intervention” to describe economic aid. This puts it very much in the wrong way. Intervention, to my mind, does not build toward our long-range interests; it reflects only short-range interests, in terms of regimes that are there today or vote in the UN tomorrow, things of that sort. However, these are not ultimate interests on our part.

We should view our role in economic aid in an entirely different way. We should not raise great hopes that we can reconstruct other societies by giving economic aid or that we can construct democratic-leaning regimes and things of that sort. But we can contribute to institutional development and economic growth in ways that local people appreciate, and this in turn can contribute at least peripherally to these other objectives.

Stanley Hoffmann: I am particularly glad to hear the remarks of Professor Reischauer in relation to economic aid. If we are not able to put marks on the famous continuum of policy and to distinguish between providing plant seeds on the one hand, and intervention for political development, or military intervention, on the other, then I think we are really lost.

If we consider that all this is interconnected, that the only choice we have is between buying a whole loaf or nothing at all, then American Stimsonianism and New Dealism are likely to be replaced by the neo-isolationism Mr. Reischauer and I are both worried about. To avoid this, one must have a new look at the world and a new look at what kind of interests the United States has.

What worries me is a sense that we have not yet realized enough of what I call the foreignness of foreigners.

In some parts of the world I would call the interests we have noncompetitive, interests we share with practically all other nations. We have interests, as a rich, industrialized nation, in avoiding general chaos. Economic aid flows from such interests. If we arc afraid of the slippery slope that Jim Thomson was talking about, then indeed we should try to master multilateral techniques of aid so as not to be tempted by the siren of involvcmeat and intervention. But, we might be mature enough to know that economic aid is not necessarily a prelude to grandiose interventions to reshape the outside world.

What worries me ultimately in listening to some of the discussion is a sense that we have not yet realized enough of what I call the foreignness of foreigners — that when one acts abroad, one is treading on mined ground. Mr. Reischauer and Mr. Fairbank have, I think, a tendency to believe that this is particularly true when we deal with Orientals. However, our dealings over the past twenty years with that famous Oriental General, De Gaulle, leads me to the conclusion that what is involved is a more general faith, or belief, that we can affect the will of others, whereas others really cannot affect our will. This is a very deep trait, one which we have to learn to modify.

John McDermott: I am concerned with the rhetorical gap, wherein the words we use — the same words Messrs. Ellsberg and Thomson used within the government—make Professor Schlesinger happy, while their policy results kept Mr. Pool happy.

The relevant distinction is not between political and military intervention but between coercive and noncocrcive policies. Very small political and economic coercions shape rapidly and imperceptibly into major coercion. 1 he mainstream liberals are even more blind to this iact titan the military brass and the national security bureaucracy.

To reformulate, we should think of intervention as a large baloney. We should recognize that the trouble with the interventionist baloney is that when you start cutting off the left end — which you may call economic — you very, very shortly get up to the middle, and then to the right end —which is called military. And then you have no more baloney, which is where we are right now.

This suggests a good operating rule for staying out of Dutch in the world: if we would not do it in the Netherlands, then wc should not do it anywhere else.

Frances FitzGerald: I would adopt an even more stringent operating rule than Mr. McDermott. If we want to stay out of Dutch in the world, then we must be much more careful in the developing states than in the Netherlands, because the Netherlands have the ability to say “no" to us and to usher us out. This is hardly the case in Vietnam.

Our relationship there to our Vietnamese allies, despite enormous amounts of human contact, is basically unsatisfactory, primarily because it is unclear to the Vietnamese exactly what the nature of the relationship is. They do not or cannot see us exactly as colonialists, but on the other hand, they cannot see us as equals either. There cannot be a bargaining relationship involved.

Our dominant relationship with them is not exactly coercive — much as we may wish it were —• because they refuse to be coerced by us. Instead of being our puppet, the Saigon government is rather more like a sort ol tar baby. It has nothing to do anymore with its own people; it is now entirely concerned with managing what comes from the outside, with managing us.

[ would imagine this has been the case since the fall of the Diem regime, although I am not personally familiar with the period prior to 1966. Part of the reason why some people in Saigon today are mourning the tall of the Diem regime is that Diem had one crucial ability which all the subsequent leaders have lacked: the ability to say “no” to the United States. This is what made him a somewhat effective governor.

What has happened in Vietnam since Diem is, curiously, totally reversed. In fighting us, the NLF and Hanoi have become much more like us than the government we support, and they will be able to respect us more in the end than the present Saigon government will, simply because they can see us as equals. There is an important relationship there. They see us as enemies, and that, of course, is a very clear and firm relationship. When the direct conflict is over, there is a possibility to form another sort of relationship with them, whereas there is no longer that possibility with anything we might call the government of Saigon.

In terms of Professor Huntington’s argument, my experience in Vietnam suggests the extreme caution one has to use in proceeding with any sort of political manipulation of anybody else, if only because one cannot tell what the extended ramifications of one’s acts will be. The effects you actually create are usually very different from the ones you expect. And, when one puts oneself into a situation, it becomes difficult to remain objective.

Edwin Reischauer: I just want to put forth the rather old-fashioned point of view that the human mind does have power over baloney. This must reveal my humanist background — that I think we are not yet completely victims of machines and social scientists. Of course, I am talking in relation to the comments made by Mr. McDermott and not the usual baloney. I am not sure we have much control over that.

Mr. McDermott has suggested that innocent aid-giving, the loan of seeds, for example, leads on and on into political intervention, into a Vietnamtype war, and that this is inevitably one big baloney — that once you have sliced part of it, you go right down the whole thing. This isn’t necessarily so at all. In this connection, you can perfectly well conceptualize three baloneys, and probably more in many cases. You can have the strictly economic kind of baloney and the political baloney, as well as the military intervention baloney. These, in turn, might be composed of several little baloneys. You might have baloneys on training, advice, and things like that.

What I am trying to say is that we have a perfect possibility of controlling many of these things if we just see the problem. The trouble is that we have not yet seen the problem. We have thought of involvement as being an inevitable continuum, and so we have made it that. I think we are obviously moving toward a feeling that there isn’t much balance of power at stake in most of Asia, and not many areas of strategic importance to us. In this regard, I am sorry Roger Hilsman is not here, but let me take as an example his fascinating chapter on Laos. He devotes one paragraph at the beginning of the chapter to saying that Laos is a strategic place. He backs that up with a vague statement that one could build a road through there which might affect something. He then goes on in the rest of the chapter to deal with what you can do about this strategic place. I believe we are presently moving away from this kind of blind assumption of the importance of small countries. And we obviously are not left with just the choice of complete interventionism or complete isolationism. I think most of us realize that there must be roads in between, and these are what we are trying to define.

I think the word “isolationist” also is a bit unfortunate because it has been used in so many different ways. As Professor Morgenthau pointed out, it has even been used to characterize anybody who had doubts about the Vietnam War. However, I think the way we have been using it here has been quite different — to describe people who are really unconcerned about Asia and the other less developed parts of the world. In the Chinese tradition of rectification of names — finding the right word for the right thing — I would suggest we use the word “unconcerned” rather than “neo-isolationism” to describe this attitude.

Eqbal Ahmad: I would like to lake off from where Professors Reischauer and Morgenthau have left us. It seems to me that the specter of neoisolationism has been bothering all of us for the last two days. It seems an unnecessary concern. Unnecessary, first of all, because neo-isolationism is probably as unlikely to come about today as is the hope of returning to the virtues of village life in many parts of the world. It is difficult to conceive that Americans will become, given the present situation, somehow isolated from the rest of the world, and therefore we have to think in terms of new forms of relationships rather than in terms of isolationism, even if some people like to talk about it.

First, it seems to me, the United States has been unable to grasp the force of nationalism in the third world, and insofar as it has been grasped, the policies America has pursued have been basically antinationalist. It has been supporting nationalist movements only during the phase of selfdetermination, but when nationalist movements have acquired social and radical content, the U.S. response has been negative.

Social conflict is likely to occur and even sharpen in our part of the world in the coming decades. The United States’s interest probably does not lie in influencing the outcome of these social conflicts. U.S. interest basically lies in confining these conflicts within national and regional boundaries.

Therefore, from this argument, I would argue that United States policy should lay greater stress on demilitarizing the third world. I think the United States should put as much stress on demilitarization of the third world as it puts on great power disarmament, perhaps more. The great powers should agree, if possible (and I think it will be possible), not to supply heavy arms to the underdeveloped countries. The denial of such heavy arms might be the first and probably most important step in keeping these conflicts somewhat more confined, perhaps less destructive, and also away from big-power interferences. The three great powers — I include China — can, in the meantime, maintain commitments to certain countries to defend them against attack from other powers. After all, South Korea has a right to be defended if it so desires, and for that matter, so does India.

Stanley Hoffmann: I agree entirely with Mr. Ahmad’s point, with one small exception, to which I will come.

On the whole we can distinguish, at least intellectually, two kinds of interventions, one of which we have practiced with some proficiency over the years. This category has been what I would call negative interventions. We did not exactly know what we were for, but we did know what we were against. We intervened essentially against a threat, and we have sometimes been quite successful — Guatemala, Iran, and what have you. As for this category of interventions, I would argue that in the future we at least ought to define more rigorously what it is that so threatens us that we feel we have to intervene either by political subversion or by military action.

The second category is intervention to do something positively. Here again, a plea for modesty and limitation is in order. There are a few things we know we can do, particularly in economic aid. However, I am quite convinced, especially after listening to this discussion, that we cannot intervene effectively to build up somebody else’s political process. Here we are dealing really with a completely different kind of baloney altogether.

Let me add that for any negative and positive interventions to be successful we generally need to meet the essential conditions set by Mort Halperin. On the other hand, I agree with Mr. Cooper that there may be occasions when governments can’t sufficiently help themselves alone and still should get American aid. But I would hope that one lesson of the Vietnam War is that we will never again interfere militarily or with a high degree of political involvement on behalf of governments that do not know how to defend themselves. If we have not learned this, then I really don’t know what we have learned.

This docs not mean that wc are going to deal with an easy world. Here is my point of disagreement with Mr. Ahmad. I entirely agree with his principles, but if we settle for a world of great domestic turbulence and nationalism, as I think we must, then there is a contradiction between accepting nationalisms and demilitarizing (or denying weapons to) other nations, because they will insist on the right of sovereign states to have weapons. We should consider the kinds of troubles wc may have if we refuse to go along with them while continuing to arm ourselves.

James C. Thomson, Jr.: Well, I have some bits and pieces, but I do not have a closing benediction.

My first bit relates to semantics. I wonder if the purveyors of baloney in the room would mind if, to avoid unnecessary ambiguity, we shifted the image to salami or liverwurst.

With regard to the possibility of isolationism in today’s world: Mr. Reischauer proposes the term “unconcern,” which I think is a very useful way to put it. However, as my own policy prescription, “deactivism” or “disengagement,” I think, would be more appropriate; actually the phrase I use is the Japanese term “low posture” — a “low-posture foreign policy,”

Edwin Reischauer: I think everybody would be for a low posture.

James C. Thomson, Jr.: When I read papers like Mort Halperin’s, I keep finding words like “America’s commitments,” and passages to the effect that of course we cannot disregard our commitments. I would like to propose as a partial brake against future interventions not that we disregard our commitments but rather that we more soberiy and deftly try to re-examine, sort out, and selectively de-einphasize the accumulated commitments that are the baggage each new Administration inherits from its predecessors.

In 1961 we gave ourselves little latitude in East Asia, and in many other parts of the world, not merely because of inherited commitments but, regrettably, because of rather rigid interpretations of those commitments. The Secretary of State urged such rigidity. I would hope we could gradually revamp our understanding of certain commitments without selling our allies and friends down the river or causing them undue alarm.

This brings me to my final point. My hope, out of all of this tragedy, is that America will somehow be a chastened nation in the aftermath of Vietnam. This is the first war we have watched so closely on television. This is a war about which we have more volumes of printed literature than any previous war. The record of our failure is available to the general public as never before. I hope we will go through a chastening period in which we will be knocked out of our grandiosity — a period in which we will see the self-righteous, illusory quality of that vision of ourselves offered by the high Washington official who said that while other nations have “interests,” the United States has “a sense of responsibility.”

I hope that we may also rid ourselves of what Mr. Schlesinger referred to as “Stimsonianism” as well as the evangelical liberal tradition overseas — a tradition represented here by our distinguished colleague who aims to create “a world in which the political systems of all states are democratic and pacifically oriented.” It surprises me to still hear such grandiose objectives proposed.

If Vietnam can result in a reduction of grandiosity on our part, it should likewise result in a discovery that, we are, in one sense, quite similar to everyone else — we have our own problems: look at our cities. But it should also make us discover that in another sense we are also very unlike others, and that in this highly diverse world there are diverse routes to development.

My hopes are strengthened, I might just add, by a conviction that at least some of the new generation of Americans emerging from our colleges and universities will continue to be activists and, hopefully, will become makers of foreign policy. I do not think that these are people who will permit us to remain on the closed track of the cold-war era.