Air University Review, September-October 1979

The editor of a broad-spectrum collection of essays must possess imagination, discipline, and stamina. Robin Higham of Kansas State University, .the impresario who has orchestrated a number of anthologies, evinces these qualities to a large degree. His idea of building a book around the long-standing dilemma of American intervention or abstention abroad and of demonstrating that the problem transcends the military dimension was certainly sound.* But, as with any collection, Higham's must address the question of whether it will stand the test of time or succumb to the fate of yesterday's newspaper.

*Robin Higham, editor, Intervention or Abstention: The Dilemma of American Foreign Policy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975, $14.75), 221 pages.

Despite its copyright date, the substance of Intervention or Abstention unfortunately does not go beyond 1972. Consequently, in this fast-moving decade, no contributor was able to address events that have bedeviled American foreign policy in recent years: the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the civil war in Lebanon; the collapse of South Vietnam and the aftermath in Indochina; the crises in Angola, Mozambique, Biafra, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rhodesia, and South Africa; or the new problems of international terrorism and the safeguarding of endangered oil-producing regions. By the same token, instances of outdated allusion include the matter of Portugal in its erstwhile African colonies.

The infusion of continuity into a collection is usually best achieved by bridges between selections. Higham provides no bridges, no separate conclusions, and no index. Passages in his 19-page introduction may puzzle some readers (American landings in the Dominican Republic in 1965 "raised all the old liberal resentments at home that have their roots in the attitudes to British redcoats of colonial days"). Other readers will find portions of the introduction insulting to their intelligence ("The attack on Pearl Harbor was an affront that could not be ignored") or silly (Richard Nixon was able to "reestablish the traditional American-Chinese ties in a new Union Pacific"). Feeblest of all is Higham's verdict that, in sum, the United States finds itself faced with "the twin dilemmas of intervention or abstention, or even a bit of both at the same time."

The case histories selected for examination include expected episodes: P. Edward Haley on Mexico (1914) and Dominica (1965); Norman A. Graebner on Manchuria (1931-32); Theodore A. Couloumbis and M'Kean M. Tredway on Greece (1944-70); and P. Wesley

Kriebel on Korea (1950-53). The Vietnam War, however, is examined from bipolar standpoints: domestic pressures for abstention (Ted Goertzel) and surrogate intervention through alliances and air power (Donald J. Mrozek). Dennis Deutsch considers the Palestine question only during the time frame of 1944-48, focusing on American domestic pressures for intervention besetting the president. Economic factors receive the attention of Janice J. Terry--abstention vis-à-vis the Aswan Dam; and of James C. Carey--intervention affecting Peru and Chile. William L. Richter injects the term "relative abstention" in his consideration of India and Pakistan. A useful historiographical overview leads off the collection: Kenneth J. Hagan on the historical significance of American naval intervention. To his credit, Higham limited Kansas State University collegial participation to Carey, Mrozek, and Richter.

The volume as a whole lacks definition of terms. Couloumbis and Tredway act on their own by carefully explaining, in a footnote, their use of the terms "influence," "intervention," "interference," and "penetration." Haley defines intervention and treats the conceptual gap between belief and reality briefly. The editor does require from each contributor a bibliographic note and suggestions for further research. Only Couloumbis and Tredway supply footnote citations to the text.

The value of collected essays is enhanced when the contributors adhere to the assigned topic. I found the piece by Couloumbis and Tredway, however useful, to be relatively more centered on domestic developments inside Greece than on external American considerations. Discrepancies also appeared between the assessment of the importance of American public opinion in Deutsch's probing of Zionist and other lobbying pressures and in Graebner's survey of American press reaction to the Hoover-Stimson policy. In the latter case, one wonders about the editorial importance, in larger terms, of the St. Paul Dispatch, the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, or even the Brooklyn Eagle. Deutsch has been outdistanced by events, as he acknowledges in his postscript; viz., "Today we have a Republican administration (traditionally more responsive to large corporate concerns than Zionist interests) and a Jewish secretary of state."

As for Goertzel's essay, some will find it excessively polemical, as in his oration stating that

while the business elite which led America into Vietnam is still largely in control of foreign policy, we may hope that they have learned that domestic progress and tranquillity are at least as important to the security and well-being of the [United States] as imposing anti-Communist dictatorships on small nations around the world.

This Vietnam-era rhetoric brings to mind John Whitney Hall's wry comment that "the problem with argumentative overkill is that it inhibits further inquiry."

IT Will be noticed that none of Higham's contributors featured the most sensational case involving an American decision to intervene or to abstain, one which brought the world to the verge of nuclear holocaust for the first time: the Cuban imbroglio of 1962. Herbert S. Dinerstein has performed a masterful analysis of the triangular American-Soviet Russian-Cuban confrontation in his The Making of a Missile Crisis.* To a certain extent it is unfair to conjoin the Higham and Dinerstein books, apart from topical interlocking. Higham could allow each of his authors only 15 to 20 printed pages, whereas Dinerstein has the luxury of 238 pages of text, 35 pages of statements and thematic analysis, 20 pages of footnotes, and 8 pages of index.

*Herbert S. Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, $14.95), 302 pages.

Dinerstein is an established scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of four books on communism and the Soviet Union; he has explored his topic by intensive study of Russian and Spanish language as well as English Sources. He writes with assurance, wit, and skill. Minor grammatical idiosyncrasies and some poor proofing are counterbalanced by clever expression and a rich vocabulary; e.g., gravamen, mental furniture, dubiety.

The Making of a Missile Crisis offers far more and a bit less than the title implies. An entire chapter is devoted to the Guatemalan emergency of 1954, which is soon seen to contain the seeds of subsequent crisis in the Caribbean. "Prophylactic intervention had removed the danger of Guatemala becoming socialist," writes Dinerstein, "but it smoothed the path for Cuba to adopt socialism." In other words, "the tactical Soviet defeat in Guatemala constituted a strategic defeat for the United States." The author then devotes a surprising amount of space to the unfolding and inner workings of the Cuban Revolution, the embrace of Cuba by the Soviet Union ("Khrushchev looked to the new world to redress the balance of the old"), and Fidel Castro's ultimate donning of communist garb. Only two chapters treat Nikita Khrushchev's introduction and removal of Russian missiles in Cuba. The strength of the Dinerstein book is, therefore, the making, not the dismantling, of the great crisis of 1962. Although few new facts are introduced by the author, he dissects questions of perception, mythology, leadership, and decision-making with rare skill. Like the best of teachers, he enlightens the reader about semantics and terminology, such as Soviet-Russian use of the words for provocation and economism, the differences between golden bridge, brinksman, and bargaining-counter strategies, the implicit distinction between menace, warning, and threat, and the primary duty of the professional historian to pose the right questions. The range of allusion and illustration is impressive: the early modeling of communist parties on the Roman Catholic Church, and the comparability of Castro's political self-conversion to the dynastic-religious flexibility of Henry of Navarre and Henry VIII of England.

The Cuban crisis is examined in the world context: Berlin, the Congo, Laos, the U-2 fiasco, and the overall U.S.-Soviet military balance (or imbalance). Dinerstein's text abounds with quotable passages and sage deductions. His thematic analysis of the Soviet government's statement of 23 October 1962 and of press editorials in Krasnaia Zvezda (Red Star), Literaturnaia Gazeta, Pravda, and Izvestiia could be used profitably as required reading in courses on international relations, psychological warfare, and diplomatic history. Dinerstein also draws on a privileged source to describe a Soviet naval experience in facing down a French warship's little-known effort to intercept weapons bound for the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian war--an apparent Russian precedent for coping with the American naval quarantine of Cuba in 1962.

Postulation of a direct relation between political and military power, Dinerstein argues, is simplistic. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted war in 1962; they "frightened each other into their senses--a rare instance in the history of human folly." The Soviet leader, like Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, "realized that he had been deceived by his own hopes and decided to cut his losses." The prerequisite had been that each party cease to act on "putative judgments of the other's intentions."

Is the United States still to wear the badge of self-appointed world policeman? Dinerstein, for one, is convinced that the domino theory is ready for retirement. From a reading of the Higham collection and the Dinerstein monograph, I think that we can agree with the latter's contention that the United States and the U.S.S.R. have "harmed the other remarkably little" singe World War II; "the most grievous wounds have been self-inflicted. Exaggerated fears or misplaced confidence have produced a veritable catalogue of disasters." Within that catalogue, no case history, not even that of Korea or of Vietnam, is more unsettling than the Cuban crisis, centering on a defiant island regime, a mere 90 miles from Florida, which evoked John Kennedy's grim warning: the United States would "regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response."

Yet had the advent of the nuclear missile age invalidated John Buchan's comments on American intervention or abstention, or on a potential enemy's mischief making, in the three and more decades after The Courts of the Morning appeared in 1929?

[America's] hand might be forced [one of Buchan's characters observed] if anything went wrong in the American continent itself, because of her Monroe Doctrine…. [Foreign complications] would be very awkward for her, and possibly very dangerous, and she would resolutely keep out of them, unless they occurred, so to speak, opposite her front yard, in which case she would be bound to intervene. Therefore, if anyone wanted to do her the worst kind of turn, he would stir up trouble in some place like South America.

Were Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Castro, one wonders, all fans of John Buchan? "The shark is frightened," Castro jeered, "and is asking the other little sardines to deyour the exsardine, Cuba." Perhaps Castro deserves this last bit of piscatorial bravado. After all, like the latter-day descendants of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung, he achieved his lifelong objective, at great risk: to extract tacit but effective recognition of his country's independence, in spite of the mighty American policeman whose global beats alternated between intervention and abstention.

Alvin D. Coox (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Professor of History and director of the Center for Asian Studies at San Diego State University, where he teaches courses in Asian and military history, Once a U.S. Army operations analyst military historian, and Air Force intelligence analyst, Dr Coox is a widely published author. The latest of his eight books is The Anatomy of a Small War: The Soviet-Japanese Struggle for Changkufeng/Khasan, 1938 (1917). He was the 1973 winner of the Outstanding Professor Award by the Trustees of the California State University system.

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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