Air University Review, September-October 1969
In the last several years, critics of American foreign policy have advanced a variety of arguments against foreign involvement. Some question commitments in specific geographical areas; others attack foreign commitments in general. Another dispute arises over the type of activities the nation should undertake beyond its borders, regardless of area. Should American assistance be limited to economic aid? Should it include military materiel but not personnel? Advisers but not combat forces? Should aid be provided only to those regimes fostering political democracy and social reform?
In the face of issues like these and the protracted war in Vietnam, it is not surprising that in February of this year Dr. George Gallup detected an upswing of isolationist sentiment in the country. But many of the critics would reject the isolationist label. Richard J. Barnet is one of these, yet there can be no doubt about his quarrel with recent trends in United States foreign policy.
Barnet’s argument in Intervention and Revolution: The United States in the Third World* begins with the notion that a group of men whom he labels “National-Security Managers” make American foreign policy. These policy-makers unfortunately see the world in terms more appropriate to the 1930s than to the 1960s, for stability is their major goal, and they equate anything that threatens to upset the stability of the world with the imperialism of Nazi Germany. Aggression, if not stopped, can only lead to more aggression and ultimately to a direct threat to the United States.
Because of this outlook, these men find especially alarming the instability which today characterizes the “Third World,” an area “roughly equivalent to what used to be called the underdeveloped world,” in which Barnet includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia outside the Soviet Union. (p. 4) But the National-Security Managers are not so disturbed by just any disruption of the status quo in this region as they are by left-leaning movements, which, they fear, provide openings for Communism, a menace with international implications.
This viewpoint, according to Barnet, has led to extension of the cold war and its attendant horrors to the Third World and assumption by the United States of the role of international policeman. The final result can only be an intensification of the very revolutionary fires which the policy-makers desire to bank, while at the same time the national revolutionaries themselves are driven to believe that their only hope lies in international action. “The United States,” writes Barnet, “has succeeded in fulfilling its own prophecy.” (p. 57)
What explains the National-Security Managers' outlook? Barnet argues that security, stability, and peaceful change have become obsessions with them because, seeing these as normal conditions, they fail to realize that other societies may be unable to operate with or share such values. Yet the National-Security Manager feels perfectly justified in using violence as a coercive instrument to bring such societies into the modern, stabilized, American world (and, in the process, to make the world a safe place for Americans).
Such an approach amounts to an American policy of unilateralism. Barnet’s solution is a policy of multilateralism—a revitalization of the peace-keeping and (if I read correctly between the lines) the social and economic machinery of the United Nations.
Within Barnet’s own framework, however, evaluating his policy preferences proves difficult. About two-thirds of his study concentrates on essentially historical material, and most of the remainder consists of observations on the present scene. His proposal of multilateralism receives attention only in a part of his last chapter (Chapter 11), and the discussion there contains few specifics on the new policies (or nonpolicies) which he wishes the United States would implement. Thus, unless Barnet succeeds in convincing his readers that anything would be better than the present system, he really establishes no case for trying his solution.
But since so much of his account does consist of historical material, I think it fair to begin an evaluation of the book by assessing the quality of Barnet’s history. A review of his history, of course, will not automatically establish the worth of his conclusions. For one thing, the logical relationship between his historical and other empirical data and his conclusions is not well developed. Nevertheless, the historical segments of Intervention and Revolution provide insight into Barnet’s standards of scholarship and judgment.
To begin, one might well question the adequacy of Barnet’s background
history, that is, his treatment of the pre-1945 period. In discussing American
foreign policy in the l930s, for instance, he correctly pictures the early New
Deal as, on balance, isolationist. (pp. 83-84) But he also indicates that “[Franklin]
Roosevelt himself supported the Neutrality Act of 1935,” without noting that
FDR’s actual preference was for legislation that would have given him selective
powers to invoke neutrality, rather than for the act actually passed, which did
not permit him to discriminate, as he wished to, between aggressors and their
victims.1
Barnet then goes on to portray FDR’s quarantine-the-aggressor speech as “his first major step away from neutrality in the direction of asserting world police responsibility for the United States . . . . “But at least one recent study seriously questions whether Roosevelt had anything so bold in mind.2 Thus Barnet’s brief treatment of the middle and late 1930s would lead the reader to think that there were sharp turns in policy, when in fact that was not the case.
On the other hand, the postwar willingness of the American government to undertake formal political and military commitments abroad definitely does mark a distinct departure from past practice. Yet one’s understanding of the new approach gains nothing from Barnet’s contention that since World War II “the national-security bureaucracy has assumed for the first time in over one hundred years that the United States is vulnerable to attack.” (p. 77, italics added) From Lincoln and Seward and their fear of British intervention in the Civil War, down to Franklin Roosevelt and his concern with what he saw as a Nazi military threat, at least some policymakers have recognized U.S. vulnerabilities.
Barnet could have avoided such infelicities had he consulted a broader range of sources; as his book stands, however, it rests too often on an overly narrow base. In discussing the nineteenth century phenomenon of Manifest Destiny and again in reviewing the diplomacy of the New Deal, for example, he strangely overlooks, among other standard accounts, a number of respectable histories written by members of the “New Left” (or “Wisconsin”) school of historians. Thus, from relying on Weinberg’s Manifest Destiny, first published in 1935, Barnet describes the nineteenth century thrust for empire in largely ideological terms, whereas LaFeber’s 1963 study, The New Empire, might have directed his attention to some concrete commercial factors underlying expansion in the latter part of the century. 3 Similarly, Gardner’s Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy might have led Barnet to mention the international economic implications of the same early New Deal policies which he sees as isolationist politically.4 (I do not mean to say, of course, that the New Left’s approach to the study of American diplomatic history is without fault, for it most assuredly has its own defects, and I suspect that it ultimately will prove more provocative than convincing.)
But Barnet is most concerned with the period since 1945, which, because of its immediacy to the present, best illuminates what he regards as the current misdirection of American policy toward the Third World. Thus, early in his account, he stresses the importance of the Korean War (pp. 66-68), which he describes as “the most mysterious event in the long history of Stalin’s dealings with foreign communists,” adding:
It is one of the essential assumptions of official Cold War history that Stalin ordered the war. Indeed, Korea being the only [sic!] case in the postwar period of the overt use of communist armies across an international frontier . . . , it has been used again and again as the prime example of communist aggression.
Others have also questioned why Stalin ordered the Korean attack, but for Barnet the mystery begins to dissolve if one rejects the assumption that Stalin ordered the attack and if one considers the provocative actions taken by South Korea in the two years prior to the attack. “It is certainly at least as plausible that the North Koreans attacked to forestall an attack from the South,” he concludes, “as that this was a case of Hitler-like aggression.” Significantly, the South Koreans had taken a highly belligerent stance toward the North during the two or so years prior to June 1950, as evidenced by Major General Charles A. Willoughby’s statement that “the entire ROK [South Korean] army had been alerted for weeks and was in position along the 38th parallel.” Additionally, South Korean President Syngman Rhee had been publicly proclaiming his intention to unify the peninsula by force.
In arguing his case, Barnet closely follows Professor Fleming’s revisionist
account, The Cold War and Its Origins. In fact, as he acknowledges, he
took the Willoughby quotation from Fleming, who in turn took it from an article
by Willoughby in Cosmopolitan Magazine for December 1951. But Fleming’s
version of the Willoughby quotation has the North Korean army, not the
South Korean, alerted and in position. (Actually, as Willoughby himself has
described elsewhere, both armies were in position by 25 June.)5
More important, the composition of the ROK forces needs mentioning. Intended and equipped primarily for internal security duties, the South Korean army lacked the capability to undertake an invasion of the North. That fact alone, of course, does not rule out the chance that the North Koreans saw the South Koreans as a real threat. Their view of reality may have been a warped one. But in the absence of any concrete evidence on how North Korea did perceive its southern neighbor, it would seem proper to note that the condition of the ROK army could easily have worked to discount the conclusion that South Korea posed a threat.
It may not be fair, however, to judge Barnet too harshly on this matter, because he contends that for his purposes “the crucial question is not whether communist military forces attempted to conquer noncommunist military forces in a divided country, but whether the communist forces were directed by the Soviet Union.” In dealing with this question, he finds plausible the argument of W. W. Hitchcock, who had earlier been with the United States military government in Korea, that North Korea attacked without consulting the Soviet Union. Yet Barnet cautions that “the mystery remains, for it is hard to credit a communist government established by Soviet occupation with an act of such audacious independence.”
But does this suffice as an adequate assessment? Hitchcock’s article was
published in 1951, well before the war in Korea was over and well before many
of the historical returns on it were in. In fact, much of what Hitchcock says
does not stand up in view of later evidence, and much of it rests on a
particular set of assumptions. Beyond that, we have fairly conclusive evidence
that Soviet advisers were attached to the North Korean army down to the
divisional level and that the final preparations for the attack took at least
ten days, which makes reasonable the inference that the Soviets knew beforehand
of the attack. And in a day when the North Koreans were almost totally
dependent on the Soviets for military materiel, not to mention other types of
aid, it seems unlikely that the Soviets could not have stopped the attack had
they wished to.6
Unfortunately, Barnet’s treatment of Korea is not his only debatable interpretation. In the five chapters that comprise Part Two of Intervention and Revolution (“The Truman Doctrine and the Greek Civil War,” The Lebanese Civil War and the Eisenhower Doctrine,” “The Dominican Republic: To the Johnson Doctrine,” “America in Vietnam: The Four Interventions” and “The Subversion of Undesirable Governments”), he takes sufficient liberties with some of his major sources to raise doubts about the whole enterprise.
In discussing the subversion of leftist regimes, for instance, Barnet argues that the United States supported the central government of the Congo against the Stanleyville secessionists because American policy-makers feared that otherwise the Communists would move in. Especially seeking to discredit the idea that the Americans had any humanitarian motives in aiding the rescue of the Western hostages held by the Stanleyville rebels, he maintains that the United States could have saved the hostages simply by ordering the central Congolese government to stop bombing Stanleyville. That such action was not taken is evidence for Barnet that the real and primary objective of the United States was to bring down the Stanleyville rebellion. (pp. 248-51)
He bases his argument on Ambassador William Attwood’s account of his adventures in African diplomacy, an account which indicates that a number of Africans told Attwood that Stanleyville said the hostages would be released if the bombings ceased. But Attwood also makes it plain that there were other indications that the Stanleyville authorities could do little to control their own troops. In other words, no matter what the Stanleyville government said it might do, harm was likely to befall the Western hostages held by the rebel forces.7 Barnet may be correct in his conclusions (and undoubtedly the actions of the United States were prompted by more than simply humanitarian motives), but if he cites a former ambassador as an authority, he has an obligation to report his views accurately.
Similar problems occur in connection with Barnet’s use of Major Edgar O’Ballance’s The Greek Civil War, 1944-1949 and John Bartlow Martin’s Overtaken by Events, an account of Martin’s Dominican experiences. And while it is still too early to judge the accuracy of much of what Barnet writes about the Vietnam intervention, the title he gives the chapter on Vietnam is itself strange and betrays a basic weakness of the whole book. Barnet fails to specify what he regards as the four interventions in Vietnam, and the reader is at a loss to determine this for himself because Barnet never states his criteria for determining what constitutes an intervention.
More broadly, the book echoes the oft-repeated complaint of contemporary foreign policy critics that Americans, or at least American policy-makers, suffer from mistaken ideas about American omnipotence. In seeking to impose American-style stability on the world, the critics charge, the United States has attempted the impossible and in the process has created strife in the developing nations and stifled their legitimate aspirations. Such an accusation is clearly implied by a statement like this:
For years the model of a successful counter-insurgency was Greece . . . But in the process, the political structure of the country was undermined. In the atmosphere of suppression, the extreme-right wing flourished. Twenty years after the Truman Doctrine was announced, the most reactionary military dictatorship in Europe or the Near East came to power . . . . (p. 277)
But does it make sense to blame the present situation in Greece on the Truman Doctrine? One might as easily assert that the Greeks today are not behaving much differently than in the past—during, say, the inter-war period. To put the point more generally: Even if Americans have sought worldwide stability, it may turn out rather to be the critics of American policy who harbor the real illusions of American omnipotence. For it is difficult otherwise to understand how they could lay at the doorstep of one nation quite so much responsibility for all the tribulations of the world.
From the beginning of the book onwards, in any case, the underlying assumption is that much, or perhaps most, of America’s postwar activity in the Third World has been ill-advised. Beyond that, Barnet’s never quite clear as to whether he is explaining why the events he writes about occurred, whether he is examining those events in order to test hypotheses that could explain the course of postwar policy, or whether he is simply describing what happened. The confusion appears early in the study at a rather explicit level (pp. 11-19) and continues thereafter. Most basically, however, what is missing is a careful elucidation of the standards one might use to judge the wisdom of America’s policies and actions abroad.
To illuminate what this would involve, one might well begin by recalling a comment that John F. Kennedy made about the game of rating the Presidents: “How the hell can you tell? Only the President himself can know what his real pressures and his real alternatives are. If you don’t know that, how can you judge performance?”8 Kennedy’s statement suggests that understanding and judging key policy decisions are difficult, at best. But this does not mean that one can attempt to assess what does go on in government or prescribe what should go on, without first trying, as best he can, to determine the pressures and alternatives that confront policy-makers as a result of both domestic and foreign developments.
For years now, it should be noted, careful historians of the policy process have sought to understand what policy-makers in particular past situations regarded as the range of alternatives open to them. They have also examined how earlier decisions served to limit the range of policy-makers’ future alternatives. More recently, in works with which Barnet must be familiar, his fellow political scientists have attempted to analyze systematically the decision-making process in general.
Only after the foreign policy critic has developed a full picture of the pressures on policy-makers and the alternatives open to them is he in the position to assess the policies and actions emerging from the governmental process. From that point on, as a minimum, he must compare the results and implications of the policies under study with the probable results and implications of both inaction and possible alternative decisions and actions. Apropos Barnet’s final chapter; one might ask when and how the outcomes of particular situations would have been different if international agencies had borne the burden of action in the Third World.
In part, this kind of comparative approach would involve fairly factual considerations. I think, for example, that Barnet is mistaken in asserting that “Isolated acts of terrorism by revolutionaries will not prevail against [the power of constituted governments] unless the authorities have lost their capacity to govern.” (p. 280) It seems to me that terrorist activities can seriously affect a government’s “capacity to govern.” Careful study of relevant situations in the recent past could perhaps resolve the matter.
To illustrate: One author calculates that there were “thirty-eight wars with an average duration of 5.8 years between 1945 and 1962.” A recent popular account focuses on 25 conflicts in the post-World War II period.9 Many of these wars and other conflicts involved insurgency against established governments. It might be fruitful to examine intensively several in which the existing governments were brought down and several in which that did not happen. But my hypothetical study would also have to make clear why particular wars received attention and others did not. Otherwise the reader would have no way of evaluating its real significance. In short, systematic attention to selection criteria is a necessity in any policy study drawing on history for its evidence.
Nevertheless, judgements about foreign policy, like judgments about almost anything else, usually take one beyond the empirical realm, for different men may use different basic frames of reference to interpret what they see in the world. Thus I think honesty dictates that the foreign policy critic should thoroughly understand, and should describe for his readers, the relevant fundamental premises of the men whose actions he is assessing, and his own premises as well. In gaining the required understanding, however, an adequate sampling process is again necessary if the critic uses the historical approach, as Barnet does. For logic demands that if the critic is to understand fully the policy-makers’ basic frames of reference—that is, if he is to determine their preconceptions both about how the world operates and about what constitutes the national interest of the United States in the world, as those preconceptions relate to insurgency, revolution, and intervention—then he must give careful attention to their actions in episodes that did not trigger American intervention as well as in ones that did.
In evaluating Barnet’s closing recommendation—that the United States shift from unilateralism to multilateralism—one should consider an additional question: Is it really possible for a powerful nation to avoid intervention, try as it may to do so? Let me stress that this is an especially significant question, for it calls attention to the likelihood that whatever great powers do has an effect on the course of the world. In sum, intervention may be an unavoidable fact of international life.
Consider a problem that has received increasing notice in the last few years. Reputable authorities contend that within ten to twenty years there absolutely will not be enough food for the world’s population, no matter how it is distributed.10 If these forecasts prove correct, a surplus-producing nation like the United States cannot possibly avoid making decisions about distribution priorities—decisions which almost automatically will constitute intervention from the perspective of some people, even if the chosen course is simply to pass the question on to a body like the United Nations. Someone is going to go hungry in any case—someone who might not have, had the pattern of distribution been different. And if, to put it bluntly, some people, even the world’s hungry people become aggressive before they die (perhaps when told that others are not so hungry), can the resulting violence be blamed on American intervention?
Or consider the worldwide operations of American business. Even the Europeans are now finding it difficult to meet what J.-J. Servan-Schreiber calls “The American Challenge.”11 Assuming that the United States government refrains from intervention abroad, American influence in the world will not thereby suddenly cease or come under multilateral control, unless a major reorientation of the domestic political economy is effected at the same time. And this seems unlikely.
The world remains a complex one and generally presents policy-makers with no completely satisfactory alternatives.
*Richard J. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution: The United States in the Third World (New York: World Publishing Company, 1968, $6.95), 302 pp.
Stanford University
Notes
1. See Robert A. Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 81-121.
2. Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 369-98. See also Divine, pp. 211-14.
3. Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968). Among the non-New Left studies which Bernet might have consulted on the subject of Manifest Destiny are Norman Graebner, Empire on the Pacific (NewYork: Ronald Press, 1955), which assesses the commercial motives underlying expansion in the 1840s; and Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Knopf, 1968), which introduces some needed distinctions regarding the ideology of expansionism.
4. Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). For two non-New Left studies of foreign policy in the 1930s, see notes 1 and 2.
5. D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), II, 589-608 (the Willoughby quotation is on p. 599); Major General Charles A. Willoughby and John Chamberlain, MacArthur, 1941-1951;(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), pp. 350-55.
6. Soon Sung Cho, Korea in World Politics, 1940-1950: An Evaluation of American Responsibility, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 245-75; Roy E. Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yala (June-November’ 1950), [U.S. Army in the Korean War, vol.1] (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1961), pp. 7-12. Hitchcock’s article, “North Korea Jumps the Gun,” may be found in Current History, XX (March 1951), 136-44. Interestingly, one of the works cited by Barnat (p 75n) in connection with his discussion of Korea is Allan S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (New York: Macmillan, 1960), which largely assigns responsibility for the war to the Soviets; but Barnet appears not to have accorded Whiting’s remarks much weight.
7. William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks, A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), l91-217.
8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p.674.
9. Ernest W. LeFever, “The U.N as a Foreign Policy Instrument: The Congo Crisis,” in Roger Hilsman and Robert C. Good, eds., Foreign Policy in the Sixties: The Issues and the Instruments (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 144; Carl and Shelley Mydans, The Violent Peace: A Report on Wars in the Postwar World (New York: Atheneum, 1968).
10. See William and Paul Paddock, Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); and Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).
11. J. J. Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge, trans. Ronald Steel, with foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.(New York: Atheneum, 1968).
Dr. Charles A. Lofgren (Ph.D., Stanford University) has been an Assistant Professor of American History at Claremont Men’s College, California, since 1966 and also teaches at Claremont Graduate School. He served as an enlisted man in the U. S. Army Reserve, 1957-63. While completing his doctorate, he was an instructor in history at San Jose State College, California, 1965-66, and in 1968-69 he held an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. With interests in American diplomatic and constitutional history and recent U. S. history, Dr. Lofgen has published articles in Military Affairs, Military Review, and The Review of Politics.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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