The Road Back to Internationalism

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 their 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 America might do, too American in their conviction that if worse came to worst, we could solve any given problem.

But the problems are still right there in front of us, and we are committed to tackling them because we have the capacity to act. Science and technology keep producing more power to be internationally contained, more pollution to be internationally controlled, more ethically neutral instruments of change--from atomic energy and contraceptives to trade patterns and weather control. We are all staring, fascinated but paralyzed, at global gaps in wealth and weaponry that seem unbridgeably wide. The tensions and technologies of the l970s 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 technological triumph.

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

Our international commitments are usually justified, before or sometimes after an irrevocable act, on the basis of abstract principle--the sovereign right of independent states to defend themselves, and to ask for help in doing so; the obligation of the fortunate 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 our own arms. We join in international development schemes partly because our growing antipoverty commitment at home enlarges our antipoverty 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 international organizations (fifty-four of 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 our own interests by pooling them with those of others: like forecasting the population and the weather, allocating resources and radio frequencies, pursuing scientific truth and dope peddlers.

In facing each new commitment, or deciding whether to continue old ones, the question for the policymaker almost never seems to be whether to enlarge or extend our international obligations. Instead, the form 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 larger 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 fact that the motivation for most of our commitments is commitment-avoidance. But it is worth remembering a few of the dozens of occasions when we did NOT get committed.

We referred to the UN a 1960 Congo request for 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, "The United States is the world's biggest neutralist nation--it tries to be 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. Yet 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 Nation Charter, the farthest-reaching commitment of all--

"to maintain international peace and security and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the 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 our peace and security obligations had better start by undermining the UN Charter.

What has made all this vulnerable in our domestic politics is the demonstration, in Vietnam, that commitment-avoidance doesn't always work, that one thing can lead to another with unintended results. 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 Vietnams." And "world policeman," an honorable term when used in the early debates about establishing the United Nations, has in a short generation become a political epithet and a summary indictment of American foreign policy.

"In Solitude, In Trouble"

We've learned, the hard way, the happiest irony of modern power politics: the more power a nation has, the more difficult it is to use that power without partners. The cure for that feeling of overcommitment is multilateral commitment. James C. Thomson, Jr., speaking at the "No More Vietnams?" symposium (held at the Adlai Stevenson Institute, and excerpted at length in the Atlantic last winter [See Endnote]), captured this idea when he said Americans seem to want "a sense of joint enterprise with other nations rather than a sense of the American flag in solitude and, often as not, in trouble."

It is already noticeable that U.S. international commitments of all kinds are less vulnerable in our domestic politics when they are more multilateral in structure.

Thus in the past twenty years our Atlantic relationships, together with our UN policy and our commitments 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 our treaty commitments or the CHARACTER of our cooperative arrangements that is in the line of fire. Rather, the criticism is narrow-gauge short-term, and tactical--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 East (not that it shouldn't have been there in the first place); that European defense is too hard on our 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 international 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 General MacArthur to start resisting in Korea even before the UN Security Council could meet and make that resistance a UN operation, but it did become a UN Command constitutionally related to the Charter and the Organization. President Eisenhower sent troops to Lebanon, but announced they were intended merely to hold the line for UN peacekeeping and mediation; the UN came into the picture considerably later, and after the imminent crisis was resolved, but the UN involvement was crucial for the general opinion, of Americans as of mankind. The Dominican 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 later decision--better late than never--to conduct the peacekeeping chore under the auspices of the Organization of American States, which enabled order and politics to be restored in Santo Domingo--after a year of skillful mediation by an OAS commission headed by an American diplomat, Ellsworth Bunker.

When the Congo blew up in 1960, being 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 Hamarskjold 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? Each 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 banks 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 close. 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 industries, 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 multitilateral aid programs to hard-nosed 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-forecasting 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 largest 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 more non-American troops helping South Vietnam than there were in the UN command that helped South Korea in the early 1950s. 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 Korea, so it was natural to go to the UN Security Council the weekend of the attack across the 38th Parallel. But in Southeast Asia we set out on our lonely and imponderable way in 1954, when we stood aside from the very Geneva 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 trigger international action. Other nations came 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 became 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 different--perhaps some of them would even have been different--if it had not been for the too-American 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 under 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 on other lessons of the war, the outside agent in Vietnam's horoscope is relentlessly American. The intellectual blunders thus revealed could be troublesome as Americans adjust to a more interdependent post-Vietnam world, for if both proponents and critics of U.S. actions in Vietnam derive only unilateral lessons from the experience, then No More Vietnams comes 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 Aggression. 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.

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