America and the World Out There

By Hedley Donovan

The following is excerpted from a speech delivered by the Editor in Chief of Time Inc. at Deere & Company in Moline, III.

"Crisis" gets fearfully overworked, and journalism may be the chief offender, but sometimes there is no avoiding the word: the U.S. is caught up in a crisis of foreign policy. It is not so much the dangers and difficulties pressing on us from abroad, as a crisis in the making of foreign policy here at home--in the process itself and in the thinking that underlies the policy.

The war in Viet Nam and the scandal of Watergate dominated a whole decade of our national life and led to a severe alienation of many Americans, especially the young, from their Government. Two Presidents were destroyed by those two tragedies. Now we have in the White House our first appointed President, a nice man with a weak base in Congress and spotty ratings in the public opinion polls. So we came up to the very harsh events of this spring of 1975 with our whole foreign policy process, which has come to rest heavily on popular trust in the Executive, already in disrepair.

We have to recognize that the almost unanimous popular and congressional support of a highly activist foreign policy, which lasted from Pearl Harbor in 1941 to about the middle of the 1960s, was something new in American history. The older American pattern was popular apathy about foreign affairs, in which the President often shared, or else a sharply divided public opinion, as in 1939-41, or 1914-17.

We also have to remember that the tremendous preponderance of American power in the world, from roughly 1945 to the early 1960s, in itself was another abnormality. It could not have lasted, and it did not. We had been a major power from about 1900 on, and then after World War I, the strongest single power. But we came out of World War II a kind of colossus, with more economic and military power than all the rest of the world put together. Even ten years after the end of World War II, with Europe and Japan both fully recovered from war damage and with their production higher than prewar, the American gross national product was 36% of the total G.N.P. of the world, including the Soviet. As late as the Cuban missile crisis in '62, we probably outweighed the Soviet Union at least 10 to 1 in nuclear striking force. All that has changed. Today we are in rough military parity with the Soviet Union; our G.N.P. in 1974 was 27% of world G.N.P.

At the same time, we have in America a far bigger and better-informed foreign policy constituency than ever before. The problems of conducting foreign policy in front of and with the consent of this constituency are something new. Henry Kissinger, in his melancholy vein, recently despaired as to whether you can have a truly consistent foreign policy in a democracy. He is sometimes accused of hankering after the good old days of Prince Metternich--one autocrat who can say yes or no; one agent who can speak for the autocrat; no necessity to troop up to Capitol Hill and explain it to six different committees that may then vote against you. But the formation of foreign policy in a wide-open democracy that happens to be a superpower is an art and a relationship we have to figure out, we the people as well as the government.

P: We must start by not expecting complete consensus, except in times of a major war. A coherent foreign policy must start with a coherent view of our purposes as a nation, and it is not a bad thing if two or more strong views of the national purpose are in contention. But one such view must be advocated and articulated by the Administration, far more clearly than the Ford Administration has done. Indeed, that should be one of the definitions of an Administration: that it has a clear view of the national purpose. Opposition politicians are entitled to oppose. Private citizens may agree or disagree, or improve and amend as they can.

P: It might be an interesting experiment in November 1976 if we were to elect a President and Congress of the same party. For the past quarter-century, more often than not the party in control of the White House has not controlled both houses of the Congress. We have proved that such a system can operate --sort of. But must we make it standard practice? It imposes enormous strains on the conduct of foreign policy in an increasingly complex and sometimes dangerous world.

P: Our foreign policy must be supported by a powerful defense establishment. The Defense Department should get just about everything it is now asking for: authorizations totaling $105 billion in the coming fiscal year, actual spending projected at $93 billion. This would still represent about as low a level of defense spending, as a proportion of national output, as we have had in 25 years. It is very likely that the Soviet Union in real money is now outspending us on defense.

P: We need generously funded intelligence services permitted to operate in secrecy. There is no proof that the CIA in any important way has infringed on the domestic liberties of American citizens. If we want to worry about the CIA, the thing to worry about is: Is it really good enough at its work? Congressional scrutiny of our intelligence activities must somehow be improved, without having it all end up on the front page.

Those are things we can do at home, things entirely within our own control. As we look outward, can we form a coherent realistic view of that deeply complicated, enormously varied world out there? Equally difficult, can we arrive at a world view without casting it in concrete--can we accept that we will have to change it, can we learn to keep it up to date?

We must begin by distinguishing areas of vital interest to the U.S. from areas of limited interest and from areas of marginal or negligible interest.

The U.S. has a vital interest in the independence of the countries of North America and the Caribbean, of Western Europe and Japan. Even within the North American citadel, however, we have seen a country "go Communist," Cuba, without lethal consequences to our security.

Within our high-priority regions of concern we would surely include the special cases of Israel, Australia and New Zealand, not on any hard-boiled strategic reasoning but because of historical ties and moral commitments. These attachments are also part of the real world. We have defense undertakings with South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines and U.S. forces stationed there. That is another form of reality, subject to renegotiation, of course, on our part and theirs.

Within our zone of vital interests, clearly there are some important differences in the character of U.S. commitments and obviously in the attitudes of the other governments. A country may be crucially situated, from the U.S. strategic viewpoint, and it may be thoroughly congenial, i.e., democratic in its ideology, and still not particularly receptive to any sort of leadership from the United States--witness France, or for that matter, Canada.

That, then, is what might be called "our side," and there is no need to feel embarrassed at calling it the "free world." It does in fact include almost all the truly free societies of this world, and it includes only a few that are not. But it is not a monolithic bloc in itself, and it excludes a number of important nations whose interests on many matters may coincide with our own.

South America is perhaps a kind of courtesy member of the free world, democratic in only one or two of its governments, a rich continent of considerable economic and strategic interest with a special relationship with the United States, yet still a little removed from the main theater of international politics.

The Third World, socalled, is a place of vast variety. Originally, and rather vaguely, it meant the countries that were not Communist or clearly antiCommunist, which were neutralist in foreign policy, with a general implication that they were also underdeveloped economically and usually not of the white race. A later euphemism was the L.D.C.s--the less developed countries. (A grammatical purist might object that all of the countries in the world except Abu Dhabi, which has the highest real income per capita, are by definition L.D.C.s.) Now, as the number of countries on earth has kept increasing and as the disparities in resources become more and more spectacular, people are speaking of a Fourth World, meaning Bangladesh, India, Uganda and many others deep in poverty, lacking sufficient export earnings.

The classic geographic-strategic considerations in foreign policy are now clearly intersected and overlaid by a whole mosaic of economic and technological considerations. It still matters to the U.S., for all the sound traditional reasons, whether the Soviet Union acquires Atlantic Ocean naval facilities from Portugal. But it might matter to us just as much how the new King Khalid of Saudi Arabia and his half-brother Prince Fahd feel about the U.S. The lines of north-south traffic and controversy between the major raw-materials producers and consumers are a kind of Crosshatch over the familiar national lines of conflict and alliance within the northern latitudes. Oil is the obvious and overwhelming example of the new power relationships. Other raw materials may become almost equally famous. It is worth remembering that the U.S. is the world's most prolific and efficient producer of the most fundamental material of all: food. We must also get used to the idea that foreign policy is about weather control and birth control, desalination, pollution, the law of the seabed.

The whole history of the 30 years since World War II suggests that nations and nationalism are more powerful than many visionaries had supposed or hoped. Internationalism of any sort is more fragile. Yet interdependence does increase. We give up some measure of sovereignty every time we sign a trade agreement or any other form of international undertaking. We will be signing more of these, unless we retreat toward autarchy. And maddening as the United Nations can be, we must be willing to take it and other multilateral organizations seriously, or help reform them, or help invent better international institutions.

But what about the Second World, once considered "the enemy," now merely "our adversaries" when the President or Secretary of State wants to sound particularly firm? There is at least as much diversity in the Second World, fortunately, as in the First. There is the cleavage between the Soviet Union and China--perhaps not permanent but certainly one of the momentous facts of world politics today. There is the somewhat separate world of the Eastern European states. There is Yugoslavia, proof, at least as long as Marshal Tito lives, that a neutralist, independent Communist state is possible. It has often been suggested that a Communist Viet Nam could practice a kind of Asian Titoism. We shall see.

It was a great act of statecraft on the part of President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger to damp down the cold war, open up a relationship with Communist China, and pursue detente with the Soviet Union. When people say the opening to China was all ballyhoo and what has America actually got out of it, the short-term answer surely is: A sounder relationship with the Soviet Union. The Soviets are indeed adversaries, tough and still baffling in many ways, but there is no pru dent alternative to trying to reach some understandings with them, especially on nuclear arms control, and also on the Middle East.

Detente, of course, creates a general philosophical vacuum in American foreign policy. We no longer have any over arching world crisis that tells us how to classify and react to each particular situation. We miss the black and white days of the cold war. Detente is preferable, but it has a price.

The heavy Soviet and Chinese backing of North Viet Nam does not prove that detente is a fraud. It does suggest that detente had long since made our own Viet Nam policy obsolete. Our intervention in Viet Nam began when Russia and China were seen as a monolithic force pressing outward against all their boundaries through subversion and proxy aggressions. An insuperable logical difficulty arose when our Government in 1971-72 began treating Russia and China as trustworthy people to negotiate with, while at the same time insisting that the little Communist state of North Viet Nam was still a grave threat to world order. We could not have it both ways, as was tragically clear in these past several weeks.

Does the Communist capture of South Viet Nam and Cambodia prove that the U.S. is an unreliable ally? The fall of Southeast Asia is unquestionably a defeat for the U.S. -- not so much because of its intrinsic importance as because of the importance we insisted on giving it, and not because it creates doubt so much about our faithfulness as about our judgment and our competence. In this sense, there really is such a thing as worldwide "credibility," not to be exaggerated, not to be dismissed.

The leading exaggerators, shockingly enough, were the President of the U.S. and the Secretary of State. For a fort night or more, they kept applying to the events in Cambodia and Viet Nam a kind of twilight-of-civilization rhetoric and even urged the world to believe that if these regimes fell it would be because the U.S. had betrayed them. They have since toned down that line of talk, and doubtless we shall recover from those self-inflicted wounds. But Viet Nam will haunt us for a long time to come.

Our failure in Southeast Asia must not be allowed to gen erate a neoisolationism. It should help us understand that there are considerable parts of the world where our ability to in fluence events is modest and where our fundamental interests are slight. We must respect the diversity of the world. We must also renew our faith in the possibility of progress -- there are, in fact, plenty of examples of it out there. We must recognize that there are limits on American power without denying or deploring the very great power that we do have.

The bedrock purpose of our foreign policy is, in the end, to preserve the independence, freedom and prosperity of the U.S. Everything else is ways and means. Except for one thing: we also expect our foreign policy to enable us to feel good about being Americans, to feel good and be good.

The founders thought of America as a beacon to mankind, "a city on a hill." Abraham Lincoln called us the last, best hope of earth. We would be a little wary about making those claims today, but most Americans still support, even demand elements of idealism in our foreign policy.

General de Gaulle began his memoirs with the declaration that France is herself only when she is great. Most Americans still feel that America is herself only when she stands for something in the world, something more than sheer self-interest.

We must be steadfast friends to the countries that share our values, for their sake as well as ours. We must have a vision of a livable international order that can accommodate na tions with internal systems very different from our own. That vision must offer hope and real help to the countries that have least. We must spell out that vision in terms addressed to the 1970s and '80s, work for it, lobby for it, offer leadership with out attempting to impose it. And in the close choices -- of which there are a good many in foreign policy -- we should come down on the side of generosity and a willingness to take some chances on behalf of liberty. * Hedley Donovan

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