Asia

Apparently human beings have a stubborn attachment to old beliefs and an equally stubborn resistance to new material that will upset them.

Roberta Wohlestetter¹

It is, of course, impossible to distill the behavioral research of the past two or three decades into a single shibboleth. Still, if one had to reduce that research into its gist, perhaps there would be agreement about this chief principle: human beings see things pretty much as they want to see them. One need not know the arcane argot of seasoned social scientists--who are sometimes given to elaborate explanations of defense mechanisms and of cognitive dissonance--in order to recognize that human beings tend to accept whatever data reinforce their beliefs and tend to reject whatever data subvert those beliefs. Students of military intelligence will be reminded of the work of Roberta Wohlstetter and others who have lucidly demonstrated that responsible statesmen and high-ranking officers are as susceptible to wishful thinking as are any other people.² According to Wohlstetter,

That the tendency to wishful thinking is not something just recently diagnosed by some social psychologist is attested to by the Apocryphal Book of Sirach (written about 200 B. C.): "Empty and false are the hopes of the senseless, and fools are borne aloft by dreams. Like a man who catches at shadows or chases the wind, is the one who believes in dreams." (34:1-2) Not for nothing has the renowned American civilian strategist Bernard Brodie testified that "good strategy presumes good anthropology and sociology."⁴

Most Americans are of European descent. We feel comfortable with most European manners, customs, religions, and languages. We even felt comfortable, in one rather odd application of that adjective, fighting certain Europeans during the world wars. Such is not the case, however, with respect to Asia. Relatively few Americans are of Asian descent. We feel less comfortable with most Asian manners, customs, religions, and languages. And one need hardly dwell on the" discomfort" of the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. Americans simply do not have a good understanding of Asia. Even in the midst of the Pacific War in 1942, for example, a poll indicated that 60 percent of the American people could not locate China on a map. And, at a meeting in the State Department in 1945, the U.S. Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., is said to have asked one of his subordinates to tell him where Korea was.

Even to the American reading public, Asia is sometimes--I hate to use this hackneyed word--"inscrutable." Whatever fault there is for such inscrutability as exists is manifestly not that of the Asians; it is, rather, a blatant discredit to us Americans that we should for so long persist in viewing Asia and the Asians through stereotypical spectacles. To some, it seems as though the more they look at Asia, the more it shifts, defying their Occidental understanding.

Since the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to direct American involvement with Asian political and military affairs, the United States has been a protagonist on the Oriental stage. While we have been reluctant to relinquish our role, we seem to know relatively little about the script. The Asian continent covers about a third of the world's land area and has about three-fifths of the world's people (about 2.5 billion). American diplomatic and military policy toward Asia has too often been characterized by a rampant ethnocentrism or provincialism. Because we so often tend to see in Asia precisely those images we want to see, rather than the realities that are there, one can greet with some enthusiasm serious books about Asian politics. Scholarship alone cannot cure American myopia toward the Far East, but it may provide us a new prescription for glasses through which we can take a fresh look at the forty-one nations of Asia.

The book Dragon and Eagle* is a worthwhile collection of fourteen essays that deal, primarily, with China. As the editors of the volume point out, "...the American interest is an increasingly prosperous and informed China, able and willing to contribute to the creation of a stable world order." That is the tone of the essays in the book. The China scholar will find little here that is seminal, but the serious, general reader will find essays that are clear, concise, and cogent. Useful, too, is a fourteen-page bibliography. One should note that, while political prudence dictates American conversation with China, human decency itself requires that Americans not behave supinely--one is reminded of the etymology of the word "kowtow"--before the government of Hua Kuo-feng, the Chinese Communist Party chairman. In a recent column, William F. Buckley, Jr., in describing the current situation in China with regard to the human rights of the 800 million people there, said: "The scandal is so egregious--the persecution of Chinese people is on a scale so awesome, so awful-that inevitably what one would expect to happen has happened: we have all got used to it."⁵ In short, in dealing with contemporary China, the statesman must deal with political realities as they are, in hopes of eventually bringing into existence his image of things as they should be. Dragon and Eagle, while too bland about events in the 1984 we call China, is nonetheless a book to be commended to scholar and generalist alike.

Even though the Korean War has been over--actually, it is only in recess--for a quarter of a century, we still do not fully understand such things as how the war started or how the war will (finally) end. The Korean War, edited by Francis H. Heller, * makes a genuine contribution to our efforts to come fully to grips with the American role in the Korean War of 1950-53. The book is a record of a conference convened in early May 1975 at the Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. The papers given and the remarks made by such scholars, diplomats, and soldiers as Lawrence Kaplan, John E. Wiltz, Robert Simmons, Richard Leopold, Matthew B. Ridgway, J. Lawton Collins, W. Averell Harriman, Clark M. Clifford, and others will be of interest to students of the Korean War and of the early 1950s. With the exception of the essay by Wiltz, "The Korean War and American Society," which is a good general essay on the impact of the Korean police action on the United States, this book will be of most use to close students of that war. Although some of the remarks of the participants may be new to scholars, there is little in this volume that is not generally available elsewhere.

This is generally true, too, of the study by Chin O. Chung.* The single value of the Chung book, which probably will not be of interest to the general reader, is that it collects in one place the history of the rather strained relationships among Pyongyang, Peking, and Moscow. The Chung study does raise the question of which leaders, Chinese or Russian, were perceived by North Korean President Kim II-sung as being the closer to his own interests and desires.

It is interesting to speculate, as peripherally these three books do, on the probable state of affairs in the world had General MacArthur not driven to the Yalu in late 1950. The United States had informed the Chinese that the United Nations command had no intention of invading China. The idea--customary for American statesmen--was that if the threat of misunderstanding between the U.S. and China could be obviated, then conflict would be impossible. As Stanley Hoffmann has observed, "Americans like to judge others by their actions or capabilities, but to be judged on their intentions."⁶

But this was the heart of the problem with the American drive on the Yalu; administration leaders simply did not appreciate or understand the Chinese frame of reference.⁸ Americans customarily expect people in other countries to act like Americans. During World War II, for example, President Roosevelt and Secretary James Byrnes continued to hope, even in the face of disappointment, that Soviet leaders would react "like Americans" to offers of compromise.⁹ President Roosevelt was intent on getting Stalin to accept "Christian ways and democratic principles" and in getting him to adhere to the Atlantic Charter.¹⁰ The explanation of what George Kennan has referred to as "our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves,"¹¹ may in part be explained because since the time of Andrew Jackson, Americans have been so much alike.¹² This particular political and sociological phenomenon inspired Tang Tsou to write:

In short, because the administration expected the Chinese to act like Americans, it devised a policy of dangling mellifluous assurances that the U.N. army would surely stop short of Chinese territory. American leaders were simply unable to relinquish their rather paternal attitude toward the Chinese;¹⁴ they were unable intellectually to grasp--let alone empathize with--the new political reality in China;¹⁵ and they were unable to understand, even for a moment, that the Chinese government looked on the United States as the heir to imperial Japan.

As John Spanier put it, "Since American declarations of goodwill were estimated as constituting sufficient assurances for China's Communist leaders, the latter's threats of intervention were considered as bluff."¹⁶ Perhaps the principal reason that China was not taken seriously by the administration, either militarily or diplomatically, is because the administration expected the Chinese to view the world through American eyes; the Chinese had the temerity to use their own eyes. Gabriel Almond has written that "...our foreign policy must be informed by an anthropological appreciation of cultural differ'ences."¹⁷ In Korea, manifestly, it was not.

The advance to the Yalu was, td a great extent, the result of a mistaken image that administration leaders had of China. That image was a product of national stereotyping, much the same problem that presented itself before World War II when many Americans subscribed to the idea that all Japanese wore thick eyeglasses and so could not see well enough to fly planes.¹⁸ This patently ridiculous notion of national stereotypes should not for a moment be confused with efforts to understand those cultural imperatives exercising influence on national policy. As with charity, the place to begin the study of those cultural imperatives is at home. David McLellan's summary is to the point:

Serious books that help us comprehend the situations of others are invariably worthy of attention, and it is in that spirit that one can pursue with profit the works by Chung, Heller et al., and Oksenberg et al. Books like these help drive home the point succinctly made by Stanley Hoffmann: "To put it bluntly, a prerequisite for effective foreign policy is awareness of the foreignness of other nations, of the fact that they have objectives and concerns, experiences and expectations, reflexes and memories different from our own. Good diplomacy knows not only how to thwart irrevocably hostile designs but also how to accommodate differences."²⁰

By discerning realities, instead of complacently subscribing to mere images or to idle dreams, we will learn to understand others--and ourselves--much more clearly. The poet Robert Burns wrote:

1. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1962). p. 393.

2. The genre of books dealing with psychological considerations in military and diplomatic policy-making is wide-ranging, both in scope and substance. An excellent example would be Barton Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1973); a mediocre work would be William Blanchard, Aggression American Style (Santa Monica, California: Goodyear, 1978).

5. William F. Buckley, Jr., "On the Right," National Review, 25 November 1977, p. 1385.

7. Gabriel Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1960), p. 23.

8. See Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 213, 215.

10. William C Bullit, "How We Won the War and Lost the Peace," Life, August 30, 1948, p. 94.

11. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (New York: Mentor, 1951), p. 111.

12. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955), p. 302.

13. Tang Tsou, America's Failure in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 588.

14. See John Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), pp. 95-97.

15. Tsou, p. 235. An excellent little collection of essays was edited by J.C Farrell and A. P. Smith, Image and Reality In World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).

16. John Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 98.

18. Thomas A Bailey, The Art of Diplomacy: The American Experience (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), p. 216. For valuable background, see Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), or his article "Hypotheses on Misperception," World Politics, April 1968, pp. 454-79.

19. David S. McLellan, "Dean Acheson and the Korean War," Political Science Quarterly, March 1968, p. 39.

20. Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver's Troubles, or The Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 322.

James H. Toner (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is Assistant Professor of Government at Norwich University and a fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. He was assistant professor at Notre Dame, where he taught international relations. Dr. Toner served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1972. In1973, he was selected as a General Douglas MacArthur Statesman Scholar. His articles and reviews have appeared in Army, Military Review, Review of Politics, International Review of History and Political Science, and the Naval War College Review.

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.