Friday, Jan. 08, 1965

The New Isolationism

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Georgia's Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been a generally strong supporter of global U.S. foreign policy from the Marshall Plan onward. Yet last week he grumbled: "We made a terrible mistake getting involved in Viet Nam. I don't know just how we can get out now, but the time is about at hand when we must re-evaluate our position." He wants to re-evaluate other areas too. "It would be nothing less than tragedy for us to go and get involved in the Congo as we are in Viet Nam," he said.

Nobody else was particularly eager to get deeply involved in the Congo either. Yet these words from Richard Russell marked a strange new mood about foreign policy--far from general, but significant. Only a short time ago the most enlightened men in both parties made it a cardinal principle that the U.S. must assume, if not downright seek out, global responsibility for freedom. Now many of those same men are beginning to say that the U.S. is badly overextended, that it is not strong enough to assume responsibility all over the globe, and that it is time to pull back in Viet Nam and elsewhere.

Is it fair to call this mood a new form of isolationism? Columnist Walter Lippmann, for one, does not shrink from the word: "If it is said that this is isolationism, I would say yes. It is isolationism if the study of our own vital interests and a realization of the limitations of our power is isolationism. It is isolationism as compared with the globalism which became fashionable after the Second World War."

Globalism & Scatteration. As Lippmann sees it, the vital interests of the U.S. are in Europe and the Americas, not in the "soft regions" of Asia and Africa, where the U.S. has been sucked into the power vacuum left behind by the colonial rulers. As a result, "we have scattered our assistance to such a degree that we help everybody a little and nobody enough . . . In this globalism and scatteration we have created enough disappointment and frustration to generate a wave of anti-Americanism . . . Our security and well-being are not involved in Southeast Asia or in Korea and never have been."

Similar views are not surprising from that Democratic loner, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, or from Senators Mike Mansfield and Ernest Gruening, who have previously advocated various forms of withdrawal or neutralization in South east Asia. A tentative new recruit to this school of thought is Idaho's Democratic Senator Frank Church, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His vague and heavily qualified views probably would not have been widely noticed had they not been plucked out of an interview he had granted three months ago to Ramparts, a small-circulation magazine (22,000) for Catholic laymen, and given frontpage display and editorial praise last week by the New York Times--which has long advocated "true neutrality" as a way out of the Viet Nam mess.

Church concedes that the U.S. has no present alternative except to continue its military support of the Saigon government, but argues that if the situation in Viet Nam can be stabilized sufficiently so "that it would be possible to go with some trump cards to the conference table, then I think we might reach an international agreement, declaring this whole region to be neutral, and requiring the withdrawal of all foreign troops." Such an arrangement might be guaranteed by "our own military power"--just how, Church does not say.

Cease-Fire & Negotiation. Beyond Capitol Hill, a group of 105 religious leaders in the Washington area urged President Johnson "to initiate efforts for an immediate cease-fire leading toward a negotiated political settlement." The University of Chicago's Political Scientist Hans Morgenthau joined the ranks of 17 lawyers, authors, ministers and academicians who recently published an open letter to President Johnson urging a similar course. Morgenthau concedes that the Hanoi Communists might then take over in the South, but contends that Ho Chi Minh would turn into a Tito-type Red, independent of Peking.

Although the U.S. has learned to live with many forms of neutralism and Communism, as far as Viet Nam is concerned, "neutralization" merely misrepresents the issue. For the foreseeable future, it would amount to Communist takeover. Tempting though it would be to avoid jungle neighborhoods like Southeast Asia and the Congo and confine U.S. efforts to the more manageable and powerful parts of the world, writing off any area would simply mean inviting in the Communists--who can always extend their influence more cheaply than the U.S. through local Communist parties.

Only a few years ago, it was widely accepted doctrine that the real confrontation between Communism and the West would come in the "third world" of Asia and Africa. If the U.S. today were to start dismissing all of Asia and Africa as "soft regions" beyond the range of U.S. vital interests, just how long would Europe or the Americas remain "hard"?

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