The High Price of Reversal

If Tuesday's New York Times report from Santo Domingo is correct, President Johnson has decided to embark on a daring policy reversal in the Dominican Republic. After two weeks of telling the U.S. and Latin America, that the pro-Bosch rebels are Communist-controlled, Johnson has asked Antonio Guzman, a former Bosch aide, to form an interim government.

Although the U.S. still hopes to set up as non-Communist a government as possible, a fundamental change in policy has taken place. Instead of trying to make a junta government palatable to the pro-Bosch rebels, the U.S. is trying to make a Bosch government palatable to the military that supports the junta.

We welcome the American policy reversal, and also the decision to offer control of the U.S. troop contingent to the Organization of American States. If intervention was necessary, this should have been U.S. position from the beginning. But one pays a price for policy reversals, even when they are undertaken with the most laudable objectives, and it is worth suggesting what that price is.

* The reversal will cost a lot of lives. The junta is desperately trying to destroy the rebels with whom McGeorge Bundy is negotiating in order to make itself de facto master of the republic. The rebels, on the other hand, are more prepared than ever to fight hard. They believe that if only they last a while longer the Americans will swing to their side.

* The reversal may not work. If the U.S. insists on too moderate a Guzman coalition, it may find itself with a government neither the rebels nor the junta will support. Again it will be forced to change its line.

* Even if it works, the credulity with which American accept what Johnson tells them will diminish. To say one week that troops are being sent to protect American lives, the next week that they are there to fight Communist rebels, and the week after that the rebels are not Communists, might work in a totalitarian state. But it will not work indefinitely in the U.S.

* The incredulity with which other nations hear the rationale for U.S. foreign policy will increase. Whatever Johnson tells the American people, Latin Americans will hear his words with Averell Harriman's explanations of why the U.S. had to follow the opposite course still fresh in their minds.

* Both in Latin America and the rest of the world, the new pro-democratic policy will not have the luster of idealism that might have covered American intervention if the new policy had been followed from the beginning. Instead, Johnson's motives will appear merely power-pragmatic: The rebels in Santo Domingo defied the American military force, and Johnson decided it would be more expedient to deal with them than to destroy them. Thus the U.S. will get no credit for a good policy, while it was legitimately blamed for a bad one.

Nonetheless we are glad the attempt to support a Bosch candidate is being made. We hope that the maneuver is executed with firmness and decision. The price for salvaging the Dominican situation is high, but Johnson's belated morality and realism is better than none at all.