The Toughminded and the Tenderminded

The critique of the State Department White Paper on Vietnam in I.F. Stone's Weekly (March 8) shows why any rational person should oppose--in terms of the wellbeing of the Vietnamese people--the new American military policy.

You cannot use napalm bombs and supersonic bombers until you regard the guerillas and the peasants among whom they live as synonymous. American pilots do not make any distinction now, and with reason. If the villagers were not against Diem and his U.S. advisors from the start, they unquestionably oppose his successors and the Americans now. The rebels are receiving some aid from the North, but their spirit and most of their weaponry come from the struggle in the South.

A catalogue of facts supporting these commonplaces can be drawn from The New York Times. I.F. Stone has reprinted a fair selection. Yet such catalogues impress neither policy makers nor old-line liberal commentators who support the government position. Both tend to shrug off attention to the local injustices of the war as characteristic of the tendermindedness of radicals.

These commentators assert that the U.S. is facing a subtle, fiercely imperialistic adversary in the Communist Chinese. The assertion is not without truth. Although this view ignores the fact that Vietnamese peasants, and not Chinese, oppose the U.S. in Vietnam, it clarifies the fact that China stands behind this whole movement to sweep the West off the peninsula. There is a Chinese imperialism, just as real as American imperialism, that would gain from U.S. withdrawal.

Adherents of the May 2nd Movement, and of similar groups, ignore the other half of the reality. They alternatively argue that the Chinese have nothing to do with the specific injustices at issue in Vietnam (i.e. it is simply a peasant revolt in which the U.S. has no business meddling); or that the liberal warmongers malign the peaceloving Chinese with their charges of aggression; or, in their frankest moments, that Chinese imperialism is better for the East than American imperialism. This underlying bias is in no way preferable to the liberal bias. It is one of the minor tragedies of undergraduate politics that M-2-M has become the most vocal center of protest against the American position in Vietnam.

The Chinese Will Join the Game

If you admit what each side excludes in attacking the other, you come closer to the truth about imperialism. All three of the vital major powers in the world--China, the U.S., and Russia--have sought ideological and economic hegemony over the countries on their borders. In addition, the two nuclear powers have tried to extend this hegemony to the entire globe. Each believes any increase in the other's domain means a decrease in its own power. As soon as the Chinese are able they will join the game.

The old-line liberals point out that the United States is the only non-totalitarian of the three great powers. Thus any war America fights against the dominions of the Russians or Chinese is anti-totalitarian. Furthermore, it is urged, there is no power imperative for withdrawing in Vietnam, since the cost of the predominantly aerial offensive is marginal, and since U.S. nuclear superiority will enable the U.S. to outbluff the Chinese and the Russians on ground escalation. Therefore the day-to-day facts I.F. Stone documents are only the superficial phenomena of the power realities. Radicals, liberals say, have always shivered in horror and mistaken atrocities for the real issues. As de Gaulle once remarked, "blood dries quickly." The old-line liberal infers that you must look beyond the atrocities to the alterations in power relationships that every retreat implies.

These arguments on each side suggest why the liberals and radicals are unable to communicate about Vietnam. Each denies the importance of the other's argument. The radical says: look at the discrepancy between American slogans and what the U.S. is doing. Look at the atrocity pictures in our pamphlets and count the injustices U.S. policy has produced. The liberal replies: in the struggle for world hegemony, ours is a holding action. An aggressive opponent will always find the most politically embarrassing ground on which to oppose you. Vietnam is no exception. To end this struggle between the Communists and the West a world police force is needed, but the powers distrust each other too much to make that possible. Until the police force becomes a reality, the U.S. must oppose the mass of human resources the totalitarians can marshal with everything at its command.

If the facts of the White Paper distort the reality, the liberal says, it is distortion in the good cause of holding Vietnam. And better to hold here, where the peninsula may still be defended, than to fall back to positions which will again be made untenable. If the Asian peninsula falls to the Chinese, the liberal argues, Japan and India might reconsider their relations with a power whose influence is waning in the East. Those are the real stakes, for which the liberal is willing to bear an extremely dirty war in Vietnam.

But this time, it is the liberal establishment--both commentators and policy makers--which confuses the tough and tendermined points of view. Without using nuclear weapons, the United States is too small a nation, in population resources, to follow this policy of turning countries into strategic hamlets when Communism threatens. U.S. planners recognize this: they count on the threat of nuclear war to keep Russians and Chinese from responding to American bombing in North Vietnam. Although the U.S. can threaten a holocaust if China re-escalates, the fact is that nuclear weapons cannot win the kind of war the government engages in to oppose the spread of Communism.

The Government tries to convince itself and the people that the war continues because of aid from China or Russia, even when the facts clearly demonstrate that the aid is marginal. The true impetus of these wars stems from the fact that the Communists have identified themselves with the protests against the proto-feudal governments that still hold power in many backward countries. The Communists support the reform movements: they do not actually create them. On principle, the U.S. only opposes the Communists. In fact, the U.S. finds itself fighting reform because the Communists are urging it. Almost as necessarily, the State Department turns to the old overlords for support. True toughmindedness lies in understanding that this is repeatedly the case, and tendermindedness in ignoring it.

The Administration may or may not bluff Russia and China out of replying to U.S. escalation in Vietnam but the bombings will certainly accomplish one thing. They will create a sharper hatred for America than already exists in most of Asia. What do Asians gain from a doctrine that promises to preserve freedom for Americans by pounding the jungles and sweeping the villages with napalm-bomb fires wherever Communism threatens? And one day, in this or some other war like it, the opponent may not back down. Nuclear war would not be the last even in world history, but the United States would not emerge stronger from it.

It is hard for those old-line liberals who watched what the Russians did in East Europe to alter their conception of how Communism operates, or to learn to distinguish between Communisms and make decisions based on those distinctions. Yet the time has come when that learning process must take place.

But what should be learned instead? How can a nation with huge investments in underdeveloped countries--investments crucial to their economics--out-revolutionize the Communists, who have no investment to protect? Even if it were possible for an American President to advocate nationalization of those investments, what would happen then? Economic growth would be stunted since no further investment would be forthcoming. It is equally hard to follow de Gaulle's formula of staying out of the internal affairs of other countries, when it is clear that Russia and China have no intention of doing the same.

Treading Between the Abysses

What are the slogans of a movement that tries to extract the truth from both the liberal and radical positions? What does one reply to the crowd of students that the May 2nd Movement can muster, that march down Massachusetts Avenue chanting "Stop the War in Vietnam, Bring the Troops Home"? "Neither May 2nd nor McGeorge Bundy" is the sentiment of the synthesis. But that does not make a very good slogan. A sound American foreign policy involves, as Stanley Hoffmann has said in a different context, "treading between the abysses." That means supporting radical social reform while opposing subservience to the totalitarians. Since admiration for Marxism and enthusiasm for reform are usually linked in the modern world, that means recognizing and supporting indigenous independent Marxists. To the extent that Tito and Castro are independent, reform-minded, and relatively unoppressive rulers, that means maintaining open relations with them.

On the other hand, Americans may well retain their distaste for totalitarianism as well as for dictatorships--for conditions in Albania and China as well as for those in Angola and the Union of South Africa. It is an extremely difficult policy, that of reconciling the concern for social justice of the radicals with the sense of power-realities of the old-line liberals, but it has one advantage: The Chinese are unlikely to prove any more popular in their attempts to run other people's countries than have the Americans. Then, in the struggle for world begemony, the vital ingredient of public enthusiasm may lie with a community of genuinely independent nations.