The Road Back to Internationalism

Mr. Cleveland, American ambassador to NATO since 1965, teas formerly Assistant Secretary of State for International Affairs.

The mood at home, they tell me, is “anti-commitment.”We have domestic problems; our first obligation is to do something about the poor and keep the peace right here in America. To an American politics-watcher living abroad, what is puzzling about this mood is not its pleasing righteousness but its dubious relevance.

Righteous we have always been, as much when we thought we were saving the world as in that earlier time when we thought we were saving ourselves from entanglement in it. And there is food for just indignation: Others are not pulling their weight in peacekeeping and international cooperation. The rich Europeans have drawn in on themselves; the poor in other continents are still depending too much on outsiders to do tlreir nation-building for them. But looked at from abroad, our own performance is no longer so impressive either. With only two exceptions, Vietnam and strategic nuclear deterrence, we are spending proportionately less now on U.S. foreign policy than in any year since 1939, the date of our last Neutrality Act. And our congressional and public debate reveals that influential Americans, frustrated at our inability to withdraw from Vietnam, are determined to withdraw from the rest of our foreign policy instead. The old cliches about commitment were certainly too global, too focused on what Vmeriea might do, too American in their conviction that it worse came to worst, we could solve any given problem.

But the problems are still right there iu front of us, and we are committed to tackling them because we have thecapaeitx to act. Science and technology keep producing more power to he internationally contained. more pollution to be interuationallx controlled, more ethically neutral instruments of change-from atomic energy and connacrptives to trade patterns and weather control. We are all staring, fascinated bin paralyzed, at global gaps in wealth and weaponry that seem wnbridgeably wide. The tensions and technologies of the 1970s will make imperative new international restraints on national action and new dimensions in international cooperation. At this extraordinary moment of history, we just happen to be the* world’s strongest economy, its most durable democracy, its greatest military power, and its most creative fount of scientific discovery and technologic at triumph.

Withdrawal and anti-commitment cannot he our “thing.”Our problem is not to decide whether we will he involved, but how. Our capacity to act comes in a package with the obligation to choose a course of ation.

Our international commitments are usually justified, before or sometimes after an irrevocable act, on the basis of abstract principle—the sovereign tight of independent stales to defend themselves, and to ask lot help in doing so; the obligation ol the 101 innate to help the disadvantaged; the common interest in cooperative endeavor. These abstractions are indeed the stuff of politics. Civilized people are moved by them to accept burdens, appropriate money, and join the Marines. And it so happens that these three abstractions stand for the three main kinds of international undertakings to which the United States is continually recommitted by word and deed: “security,” “aid,”and “technical cooperation.”

We help arm other countries if we perceive a U.S. national interest in their defense*that is, if we judge that not arming them might, in a pinch, require us to undertake their whole defense with out own arms. We join in international development schemes partly because our growing antipoverty commitment at home enlarges out amipoveny commitment abroad, whether we like it or not. But we also help in international development because most Americans vaguely fear the social and political and military consequences that is, the greater costs— of trying to live in our wealthy manor in the midst of a global slum. We join infernalional organizations (fifty-four ol them so far) and attend international conferences (more than six hundred of them each year fifteen or twenty in any given week) because there are so many fields in which we can better serve out own interests by pooling them with those of others: like forecasting the population and the weather, allocating resources and radio frccpiem tes, pursuing sc ientific truth and dope* peddlers.

In facing each new commitment, or deciding wlielhet to continue old ones, the question foi the policy, maker almost never seems to be whether to enlarge or extend out international obligations. Instead, the from of the policy question is nearly always the opposite: What can we effectively do to avoid getting in too deep? Most of the time the purpose of “commitment” is to avoid or minimize or economize on large) commitments that otherwise would probably have to be made. We involve ourselves in limited ways precisely in order to avoid getting involved in unlimited ways.

The explosive growth of international cooperation in the last couple of decades seems to have obscured from public view the tact that the motivation for most of out commitments is commitment-avoidance. But it is worth remembering a lew of the dozens of oceasions when we did not get committed.

We referred to the UN a 1960 Congo request tor direct military intervention.

We did not move militarily (in 1956) in Hungary or (in 1938 or 1948 or 1968) in Czechoslovakia.

We did not fight though we did try to make peace in two wars between India and Pakistan, and three wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

We avoided direct involvement in confrontations between Indonesia and Malaysia. Morocco and Algeria, the North and the South in the Sudan, and a dozen other pairs when they fell to fighting. In all these cases, and in dozens of other small wars or near wars or civil wars, either or both sides asked for U.S. help or would have been glad to have it. But as a committed Asian once told me bitterly, I he United States is the world’s biggest neutralist nation—it tries to he neutral on more subjects than anyone else.”

This is not, on a sober look at modern history, the record of a messianic policeman to the world. Net for one reason or another, we have picked up forty-three allies—fourteen in NATO, twenty-one in the Rio Pact, and eight in Asia to help avoid the scourge of war through collective security. And we have undertaken, in the United Nations Charter, the farthest-reaching commitment of all—

to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for tin1 prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law. adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

What a commitment! Anyone who wants to cut back out peace amt security obligations had better start by undermining the UN Charter.

What has made all this vulnerable in out domestic politics is the demonstration, in Vietnam, that commitment-avoidance doesn’t always work, that one thing can lead to anothet with unintended usuhs, Both the inarticulate majority that supports the war and the articulate minority that opposes it seem to have found common ground in the slogan “No More \ ietnams Mid “world policeman.” an honorable term when used in the early debates about establishing the United Nations, has in a slum generation become ;t political epithet and .1 summary indictment of American foreign polity.

“In solitude, in trouble”

We’ve learned, the hard wav, the happiest irony of modern power politics: the more poyvcr a nation has, the more difficult it is to use that power without partners. The cure for that feeling of overcommitment is multilateral commitment, fames C. Thomson, Jr., speaking at the “No More Victnams?” symposium (held at the Adlai Stevenson Insti tute, and excerpted at length in the Atlantic last winter,¹), captured this idea when he said Americans seem to want “a sense of joint enterprise with other nations rathe) than a sense of the American Hag in solitude and, often as not, in trouble.”

It is already noticeable that U.S. international commitments of all kinds are less vulnerable in out do mestic polities when they are more multilateral in strut ture,

Thus in the past twenty years out Atlantic relationships, together with our UN policy and out commit ments in the Western Hemisphere, have been consistently bipartisan and comparatively noncontroversial. When there is a row about a UNESCO program, or a UN peacekeeping operation, or NATO troop levels, or the Alliance for Progress, it is not the depth of out treaty commitments or the character of out cooperative arrangements that is in the line of fire. Rather, the criticism is narrow -gauge, short-term, and tactual that a booklet subverts our teachers (not that a UN agency shouldn’t produce booklets with our money); that the peacekeeping force shouldn’t have been pulled out of the Middle Fast (not that it shouldn’t have been there in the fust plate); that Kwropean defense is tothard on out balance of payments (not that we should withdraw from our NATO commitment): that the Alliance for Progress has not abolished hemispheric poverty (not that it shouldn’t try).

Even when the essence of an inlet national operation is the U.S. input the Korean War, the Lebanon and Dominican Republic crises, the Children’s Fund, the World Weather Watch dependable domestic political support requires the operation to have an international character. and international governance. President Truman ordered Ceneral Mac Arthur to start resisting in Korea even before the UN Security Council could meet and make that resistance a UN operation, hut it did become a UN Command constitutionally related to the Charter and the Organization. President Fisen hower sent troops to Lebanon, hut announced they were intended merely to hold the line for UN peacekeeping and mediation: the UN came into the picture considerably later, and alter the imminent crisis was resolved, but theUN involvement was crucial for the general opinion, of Americans as well as of mankind. I he: Dominic an Republic affair started in the middle of the week as a unilateral rescue operation, but to be workable as a peacekeeping operation it had to be internationalized. It was the latot de cision beltet late than never to conduct the peacekeeping chore tin der the auspices of the Organization of American Slates, which enabled order and politics to be restored in Santo Domingo—after a vear of skillful mediation by an OAS commission headed by an American diplomat. Ellsworth Bunker.

When the Congo blew up in 1960, during the first week of its independence. the government appealed to President Eisenhower to intervene: instead he encouraged the UN to act on a similar request Dag llammarskjöld had from the Congo: then the President and his two successors backed the UN operation to the hilt. Later, as the Congo erupted again and again, those of us involved found ourselves again and again in President Kennedy’s office, and he always seemed to ask the same question: Is it still true, as you told me last time, that if the UN has to withdraw, the United States might get drawn in? Path time he got an affirmative answer, and each time he told us to go back and help the UN restore peace in the Congo.

In international development it has also been true that spending our money through world hanks and funds is comparatively popular, while spending it by ourselves is increasingly unpopular. There is something to be said for and against both bilateral and multilateral development aid. But measured by political reactions in the United States, the choice is not even dose. The World Bank, the UN Development Program, and the aid efforts of the international technical agencies keep rising as a proportion of all U.S. foreign aid because people sense we can thereby ensure that a fair share is put up by other rich countries, and that the administrative and political troubles any aid program experiences will also be widely shared rather than come home to roost in Washington. In the five years that I was presenting the multilateral aid programs to hardnosed Appropriations Committees, I was astonished to find we almost never lost a dime from the President’s request to Congress, while our U.S. foreign aid program each year lost a larger proportion of the President’s asking figure.

The same is true of the money we pay for international technical cooperation to study fisheries, to control the airwaves, to combat illiteracy, to set up a global weather-foretasting system, to develop the Mekong Valley and the Indus and the Volta. U.S. support for international development is impressive, if grudging: we are still the hugest contributor to international development assistance, which now outranks the U.S. bilateral program as the world’s largest aid effort.

Whose flag?

By contrast, when an overseas operation is (or looks) unilateral, its domestic support seems to suffer badly, Can you think of a current example? Right the first time. I do not suggest that this aspect of the Vietnam ordeal is its only controversial feature, but surely it is that sense of loneliness, that feeling that we are doing our part but others are not. which accounted for much of the loud and effective opposition to the war in the living rooms, the universities. the Senate, and the streets. And this is true even though there have been mote non American troops helping South Vietnam than there were in the UN command that helped South Korea in the early 1930s. But in Korea we fought a UN war; in Vietnam we are fighting, people think, an American war.

There is a big difference. We had participated in the early UN arrangements in Kona, so it was natural to go to the UN Security Conncil the weekend of the attatk across the 38th Parallel. But in Southeast Asia wc set out on our lonely and imponderable way in 1954, when we stood aside from the very (icneva Agreements which we later decided to adopt as our war aims in Vietnam.

The international peacekeeping machinery for Laos and Vietnam was a three-nation International Control Commission; the world had not yet learned through UN experience that a “troika” is predestined to paralysis. A war with no clear beginning, no clear front, generated no clear signal to command international attention and triggci international action. Other nations nine in, but the framework remained parallel national action, not international action. Somehow the chance never presented itself, or went unrecognized, to attract an international involvement as our national involvement deepened.

One reason the Vietnam War betaine a domestic political issue, it seems, was precisely that the involvement was national. Perhaps the successive decisions to resist indirect aggression in Southeast Asia would have looked dilterem —perhaps some of them would even have been different it it had not been for the tooVmericau framework for that resistance.

I have no trouble remembering the time when operating under the American flag was domestically the most acceptable thing to do. Somewhere along the line, we passed, almost without remarking it, into a time when operating undo an international flag the UN. or the OAS, or NATO-is the best way to avoid or postpone an adverse domestic verdict on an overseas enterprise,

Yet in the Atlantic’s presentation of the “No More Vietnams?” symposium, thirteen scholars and practitioners discussed lessons from Vietnam for thirty nine pages, and only two—James Thomson and Edwin Reischauer-seemed to notice that our problem was more than a narrowly American one. For the others, perceptive as they often are 011 other lessons of the war, the outside agent in Vietnam’s hotostope is relentless* ly American. Kite intellectual blunders thus revealed could he troublesome as Americans adjust to a more interdependent post-Vietnam world, for if both proponents and critic’s of U.S. actions in Vietnam derive only unilateral lessons from the experience, then No More Vietnams tomes close to meaning No More Foreign Policy.

Of course. No More Vietnams cannot in the nature of things mean No More foreign Policy, or even No More Resistance to Indirect \ggression. But if this undeniably attractive slogan comes to mean sharing with as many partners as possible the responsibility for international peacekeeping and development-which means sharing not only the dogwork but the decisions as well No More Vietnams may yet achieve an honored niche in the conventional wisdom.