Why Be Afraid of Americans?

As a new and potentially climactic crisis approaches in the fitful fever of Viet Nam, a beleaguered U.S. President seems a captive of his repeated assertions of the past and his personal passions of the moment. As he has done so often, Richard Nixon spoke again last week of how "the position of the United States as the strongest nation in the world" was at stake in Viet Nam. A defeat for the U.S. might be "repeated in the Middle East, in Asia and in Europe," he warned. He feared that the world might "lose respect" for the office of the President and he vowed: "I will not let that happen."

That is puzzlingly belligerent rhetoric for a leader who is actually withdrawing his nation's troops from a war it has not won. By all logic, if so much is at stake in Viet Nam, his disengagement could be considered grossly negligent. He ought to be pouring U.S. troops into the conflict, rather than pulling them out of it. This mysterious dichotomy between act and word cannot be explained as an attempt to deceive the enemy; the Communists watched the U.S. troopships leave, coolly ignored Nixon's warnings and attacked more massively than ever. The Nixonian rhetoric seems to reveal a misplaced fear that the American psyche cannot handle any tinge of "defeat" or abandonment of professed "principle" in Viet Nam. The President appears to be fighting the phantom of a mythical constituency on the American political right, a spectre perhaps shaped by his own past and never severely examined.

Yet samplings of U.S. opinion show that the public is overwhelmingly weary of the war. Even George Wallace concedes that he is. Americans want their troops back home, the prisoners released and the killing stopped. To be sure, they do not want to see U.S. forces humiliated in a panicky flight for the beaches or watch Communist troops seize immediate control of a Saigon government that the U.S. has supported at such a high price for so long. But they are certainly in the mood for reasonable compromise. Moreover, even most military men feel frustrated by the futility of the conflict, especially the prolonged demonstration of the limits of U.S. power in a restrictive situation. And they cannot help but be apprehensive when so much American naval and air power is concentrated in a far corner of the Pacific, leaving other areas weakened. The handful of remaining hawks who want to bomb Hanoi into dust pose no political threat to the President. And the Democrats who oppose his re-election could only applaud a lowering of U.S. sights in Viet Nam; it is what they advocate.

All of the tired talk of fading U.S. prestige, of nations falling like dominoes, of a massive Communist-inflicted bloodbath, form a self-made trap that only exacerbates the very public reaction that seems to so obsess the President. It could lead him, in turn, to drastic measures that would endanger that "generation of peace" which Nixon so often cites as his prime presidential goal.

It is time to break out of that trap, to take a more detached and longer perspective. If he did so, Nixon could perhaps develop and articulate a policy for Southeast Asia that fits logically with his constructive overtures to China and the Soviet Union and his grand design for peace. At present, even the most sophisticated young anti-Communist in Asia must be totally confused at the thought of mighty air and naval armadas massed against an apparently independent little Communist nation while the President negotiates cordially with the two major Communist powers.

The abandonment of apocalyptic rhetoric might even lead to the realization that the practical negotiating positions of Washington and Hanoi are not hopelessly different. While Communist oratory cannot be taken at face value, Hanoi does regard its public pronouncements seriously. North Viet Nam's Le Duc Tho professes that Hanoi does not demand "a Communist takeover" in South Viet Nam as part of a settlement, will not attack withdrawing U.S. troops and will return the P.O.W.s. But he does demand the removal of South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. For its part, the U.S. can hardly abandon Thieu in the present circumstances. If Hue should fall, his position could become academic. If Thieu's troops hold, then he probably would remain a strong national leader. Thus military events in Viet Nam, rather than any action by Washington, will probably determine Thieu's fate. This is part of the test of Vietnamization, although it is also a probable script for continued deadlock and a prolonged war.

There is in short a vast difference between humiliation and the reality that Nixon's oratory only beclouds. His own deeds in the realm of constructive negotiating offers in fact belie the narrow negativism of his public words.

It will inevitably be difficult for Americans to accept the proposition that so many of their young men died or were maimed without achieving the full goals for which three U.S. Presidents sent them to Viet Nam. But there is a sensible, minimum American goal in Viet Nam that can yet be achieved: the restoration of peace without imposing any Communist government on South Viet Nam. That would not be defeat. Practically, the U.S. can hope for little more.

By shedding his preoccupation with false fears of the psychological damage that an unhappy end to the Viet Nam War might wreak on America, Richard Nixon would be free to exercise the immense power that every President has to influence public reaction in his special preserve of foreign relations. And by putting Viet Nam into its proper perspective on the grand scale of global affairs, the U.S. might well gain rather than lose credibility as a world power --and grow in moral stature as well.

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