A Time For Reconciliation

THE RESIGNATION of Daniel Patrick Moynihan as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is welcome news to all those who wish to see non-antagonistic relations between the United States and the third world. As an American spokesman, Moynihan has loudly proclaimed a policy of total contempt for most Asian, African and Latin American nations and their leaders.

In his eight-month tenure at the U.N., Moynihan attempted through public pronouncements to reestablish the justifications for U.S. world hegemony in the face of the "humiliations" of Vietnam. Moynihan presents himself as the defender of an imperiled Western civilization and increasingly threatened individual human rights. Time and again, he has pointed to what he believes is the gradual swallowing up, since World War II, of liberal democratic regimes in a sea of totalitarian states welling up from the third world. He expressed his vision most starkly in a speech last October in San Francisco: "It is sensed in the world that democracy is in trouble. There is blood in the water and the sharks grow frenzied."

But behind Moynihan's fears of the "idea of the all-encompassing State" lies his desire to convince Americans that the aims of our foreign policy are not the defense of a world-wide system of U.S. military and economic domination. In the recent past, the U.S. has attempted to bomb Indochinese anticolonialists into submission and has continuously supported and invested in overtly totalitarian regimes like Chile, South Korea, and Iran, where torture, censorship and political repression are the everyday instruments of government. Now, as popular consciousness is increasingly sensitive to the gap between American rhetoric and reality, Moynihan's efforts to create a new demonology are of crucial importance in restoring domestic support for a revived counterrevolutionary foreign policy.

EVEN WHEN Moynihan's attacks are directed against a clearly evil target, like Uganda's Idi Amin, they are couched in language calculated to offend third world sensibilities. It was a gross distortion to claim, as Moynihan did, that it was "no accident" that "racist murderer" Idi Amin, Ugandan head-of-state, was president of the Organization for African Unity. Most African leaders deplore Amin and his policies, although they accepted him as formal head of the OAU--owing to the organization's yearly rotation system--to avoid a public rift.

Again, when Moynihan attacked the reprehensible U.N. resolution terming Zionism a form of racism, his polemic was not directed at the consequences of the resolution for the continued existence of Israel, but the threat the resolution posed for the survival of "Western democratic principles." To read the actual text of his general assembly speech, one might think that Ben-Gurion, Rabin and Meir were less under attack by the resolution than Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau.

Moynihan has claimed that "the United Nations is a place where lies are told." But in his charge that the real issue in Angola is the threat of Soviet domination in Southern Africa, Moynihan himself is party to a bold enough lie. Not only is the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola avowedly opposed to Soviet bases on their territory, but massive Soviet involvement there came only in response to prior American intervention to prevent leftist victory.

Moynihan has proposed that the United States withhold foreign aid, including humanitarian and development assistance, from those third world countries who do not support the American position on the Zionism resolution and Angola. Not only is the use of U.S. foreign aid as a political weapon certain to hurt independent leftist third world regimes but such usage would be irrational even on its own terms, because it could only be used against those countries too weak to protect themselves, whether or not they are the chief opponents of American policy. It may be assumed that wealthy or strategically important Arab states will continue to enjoy American patronage, regardless of their votes at the U.N.

Of course the purpose of the threatened aid cut-offs, like the rest of Moynihan's gestures, has little to do with American foreign policy--these rhetorical proposals will almost certainly never be implemented. The proposals are really designed for domestic consumption, to advance the image of an America standing up for her national pride and democratic heritage, defending her self-image with force if necessary, as in the Mayaguez incident. This policy is identical in substance with that of Ford and Kissinger; Moynihan was merely indiscreet enough to say publicly what the exigencies of detente forbid the administration from expressing. Moynihan was sacrificed symbolically, but conservative Americans need not fear: the policy he supports will survive until Americans recognize the need for reconciliation with the vast majority of the world's people.