BUCHAN [Y]

January 25, 1969

Mr. Alistair Buchan, Director
The Institute for Strategic Studies
18 Adam Street
London W. C 2, England

My Dear Alistair:

Many thanks for your letter. I was sorry to
have missed you when you were in the States but
hope we shall be able to get together before too long.
I meant it when I said that I wanted your advice. I
shall be in touch as soon as I am organized.

I appreciate your sending me the copies of
your work. I have not, as yet, had a chance to read
them but plan on doing so very soon.

Please accept my apologies for my belated
reply.

Again, many thanks.

[lc]

DEFENCE RESEARCH BOARD 20TH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM

"The Changing Pattern of International Security"

by

Alastair Buchan, C.B.E.

Director, Institute for Strategic Studies, London, England

I am very honoured by your Chairman's invitation to open this distinguished annual conference. I note that my predecessors have been natural scientists but since I have no qualifications in this field, I hope you will excuse me if I use this opportunity to discuss some rather broader problems that confront us in maintaining a relative degree of peace and security in the 1970s. I am a political animal and my concern for many years has been with the political and social implications of strategic choices, something that for shorthand we call strategic studies.

But before doing so I should like to make plain my own indebtedness to the defence scientists of many countries, particularly in discussions on the control of armaments, and my own appreciation of the influential, not to say dominant, role that technological change plays in the evolution of strategic concepts and therefore in shaping the structure of international security. Perhaps I feel more conscious of the accelerating pace of technological change in Ottawa than in any other city. For I spent the first weeks of a six years' war that ended with the detonation of two nuclear bombs, upon the back of a horse as a subaltern in a Canadian Cavalry regiment practicing sabre drill a mile or two from here, a military art that had hardly changed in two centuries. And we know that the world of 1945 is almost as distant from that of 1968 in terms of the development of strategic and tactical weapons as if another two centuries - not just two decades - had elapsed.

We live in an era of unique disquiet and danger because it marks the convergence of three or perhaps four distinct but related historical developments, each of which has been gathering momentum for several generations. The first is cleavage between the Communist and non-Communist powers of what used to be called "the civilized" but now with greater modesty is called "the developed world". It is a cleavage whose more dangerous external manifestations both sides have learnt, over 20 years to control. No one talks today of crusades to liberate countries of the opposing system or boasts that he will bury his opponents. It is a conflict within which the leading states on each side have succeeded in identifying certain common interests - the avoidance of war by miscalculation, for instance - what has been called a "limited adversary relationship". But it remains a conflict all the same, and the events of August in Prague and Moscow have served as a reminder that this area of identified common interests is still

CARLETON LECTURES

I. UNITED STATES AS A GLOBAL POWER

Alastair Buchan

Some thirty years ago I remember hearing a Scotsman in the service
of the Crown in Canada earnestly dissuading a visiting British member of
parliament from airing any views about the policy of the United States while
on a lecture tour in Canada. "Canadians," he said, "are very critical of
many aspects of American life and policy, but they share a common culture
with their southern neighbors; and if there is any criticizing of the United
States to be done they prefer to do it themselves. If an Englishman makes
comments about American life or policy in Canada, he must expect the same
kind of raised hackles as an American would if he came to Edinburgh and thought
he had a safe base from which to criticize London."

If this advice is still good what am I doing delivering two public
lectures on the United States in the capital of Canada? Am I risking too
much on the change that has occurred in these intervening thirty years?
Perhaps not; not only has the disparity between American power
and British- become roughly equivalent to that between British and Canadian
power before the war; in addition the United States has acquired a range of
responsibilities which makes its policy and well-being the object as well as
the subject of attention from every serious country in the world. The Canadian
and British dilemma between "quiet diplomacy" and "independence" are in many
respects identical. And the domestic problems of the United States have an
impact far beyond the shores of North America.

Nevertheless, I feel that I must offer you my own personal credentials
to talk about the United States. I was brought up in the household of a man

-2

who was a passionate student of American history and literature and in which
American friends and scholars were regular visitors. I had been to New York
and had bathed in the Pacific before I had ever been to Paris. I was taught
American history and politics at Oxford by Dennis Brogan, one of the greatest
living Americanists. I spent five of the most fruitful years of my life as a
correspondent in Washington and have been there every year since then. And I
have known every American president from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon,
though none of them intimately. But more important I have a profound affection
for the country and its people. May I offer you a quotation which summarises
and parallels my own sense of admiration and affection for the United States.

"No country can show such a wide range of type and character, and I am so constituted that in nearly all I find something to interest and attract me. This is more than a temperamental bias, for I am very ready to give reasons for my liking. I am as much alive as anyone to the weak and ugly things in American life: areas, both urban and rural, where the human economy has gone rotten; the melting-pot which does not always melt; the eternal coloured problem; a constitutional machine which I cannot think adequately represents the efficient good sense of the American people; a brand of journalism which fatigues with its ruthless snappiness and uses a speech so disintegrated that it is incapable of expressing any serious thought or emotion; the imbecile patter of high-pressure salesmanship; an academic jargon, used chiefly by psychologists and sociologists which is hideous and almost meaningless. Honest Americans do not deny these blemishes; indeed they are apt to exaggerate them, for they are by far the sternest critics of their own country. For myself, I would make a double plea in extenuation. These are defects from which to-day no nation is exempt, for they are the fruits of a mechanical civilisation, which perhaps are most patent in America, since everything there is on a large scale. Again, you can set an achievement very much the same in kind against nearly every failure. If her historic apparatus of government is cranky she is capable of meeting the "instant need of things" with brilliant improvisations. Against economic plague-spots she can set great experiments in charity; against journalistic baby-talk a standard of popular writing in her best papers which is a model of idiom and perspicuity; against catch-penny trade methods many solidly-founded, perfectly organised commercial enterprises; against the jargon of the half-educated professor much noble English prose in the great tradition. That is why it is so foolish to generalise about America. You no sooner construct a rule than it is shattered by the exceptions." (1)

1

John Buchan. Memory Hold The Door.

-3

Those are not my own words, they are from my father's autobiography, written
a generation ago.

It is right and legitimate that we, non-Americans for the most part,
should discuss the United States, for one can paraphrase Calvin Coolidge to say
that today "the business of America is everybody's business." If the United
States proves ungovernable in the face of new pressures, then there is no
hope for a world order. If the problems of racial integration proves intractable
in the United States, then the prospects elsewhere are in doubt. If the
problems of developing an effective and orderly system of higher education
have been misjudged in the United States, then they have been misjudged
elsewhere. No one who cares for the values of a liberal society can wish to
see American society degenerate, however critical his reaction may be to
various acts of American external policy. There is a confused feeling in
the world today that the United States has ceased to be "the last best
hope of man" and has become the cockpit of violence, adolescent malaise and
racial tension, a network of decaying cities in which the virtues of the
American past have been obliterated, the home of all that is meretricious
or corrupt, a selfish imperial power with an unfounded sense of "mission
civilatrice." Our task at this conference as I see it is to sort out sober
truth from distorted fantasy.

Whatever one's view of American society, and no one can know the
whole of so vast a country, few people who are concerned about the structure
of international society can seriously envisage a later twentieth century in
which the United States is not the acknowledged, and indeed respected, leader
of a very wide group of powers. She is one of the two pillars of the central

-4

strategic balance that gives our present international system such stability
as it possesses; the nations on whom she could devolve a certain measure of
regional responsibility, a western European grouping, Japan, India perhaps,
are not yet in a position or frame of mind to accept it. The pace of
European cohesion will be a slow one; Japan's sense of international
responsibility is still tentative. Without the United States western Europe
would be a Soviet dominated, though not necessarily Communist, sub-continent;
without the United States the relationships of the free countries of the
Pacific and southern Asia might degenerate into chaos, made tense by the
rise of new nuclear powers. The United States is the largest shareholder,
if not the centre, of the western monetary system. She is the country that
can still effect the process of development in the third world most profoundly,
whether through trade or the liberalisation of trade.
Finally, without consistent American interest and support, the United Nations
would go the way of the League.

The United States is much more than just the world's richest power
or the one with the largest strategic arsenal. She is as much by geography
as by policy the centre of an international system which has many different
institutional forms of expression, political, economic or military, but which
is more broader than her immediate alliances. Parts of this system are urgently
in need of repair, but few countries, I would submit, are anxious to see the
American international system collapse or fragment. Few countries, including,
one suspects, the Soviet Union would care to contemplate an American abrogation
of her role in the central balance of power, least of all in Europe where such
an abdication could not fail to lead to a series of panic measures including
very possibly the re-emergence of Germany as a strategic power. No one
certainly in Britain or Canada can wish to see the western monetary system,

-5

shaky though it is, break in to two separate dollar and European zones. No
one would wish to see the United States lose her sense of responsibility for
development aid, even though she may sometimes use the leverage it brings her
for political ends. Few would be content if the United States simply acquiesced
in the process of nuclear proliferation, even though they may feel that her
pretentions as the guardian of international order are incapable of fulfillment.

If these are our initial premises, that we wish to see the American
system reformed in many particulars but cannot envisage any serious alternative
to it, then we have to examine two particular sources of anxiety about the years
ahead. The first is the growing divorce between American power in the world,
economic and strategic, and American authority. The two are not synonymous.
Power does not automatically attract respect, but without respect power must
be exercised more frequently and more openly, with its attendant risks, including
that of a still further loss of authority. The second danger is related to
this, that the United States, sensing a declining authority within its own
system, feeling merely wanted but not respected, having failed after a
generation of commitment to impose her own concept of international order
upon the world, may go home. Go home, not in the sense of the old isolationism,
for the United States cannot really abandon its overriding role in the central
strategic balance without endangering its own security; but "go home" in the
sense of becoming unilateralist in both policy and action, concentrating on
her relations with the Soviet Union and later with China, at the expense of
her relations with her allies, acting less and less through the multilateral
organizations which are largely her own creation, such as the United Nations
and it's agencies, through OECD and NATO, and at the same time become increasingly

introspective.

The problem of defining what contributes to the authority of a great power in international politics is an extremely difficult one and I do not intend to explore it in any detail here. Obviously in our sort of society it is very closely connected with a degree of popular support that the nation's leader enjoys, for the government of a divided nation can exert only limited authority abroad, as President Johnson recognized last spring. This in turn depends, on the relationship between a country's definition of its interests and its ability to support or protect them. But in the case of the United States, whose society is in a sense a microcosm of the world, her authority also depends to a much greater extent than is the case with other countries, on the success with which she handles her domestic problems. It is on this aspect that I would like to concentrate in my second lecture.

For the United States the problem of defining her external interests is far more difficult than for any of the old great powers. For nineteenth century Britain the touchstone was India; almost the whole of her non-European and much of her European policy, revolved around the need to develop and maintain communications with India. For France it was the containment of first Prussian, then German expansion, all else was secondary. For Russia it was the guarding of her western frontier. For Germany the avoidance of conflict on two fronts. But in the last third of the twentieth century the United States has only one over-riding interest, namely the preservation of her own territory. Now this may be infinitely more complex than the defence of any national territory in the past and has largely been made so by the United States itself, by the development of nuclear weapons and long range means of delivery. It requires a vast expenditure of financial and intellectual resources.

7

But it no longer requires, as it did in the 1940s and the 1950s, in
mid century, the cooperation of allies. It is useful to have Polaris
bases in Scotland and in Spain, to have air and naval bases in Okinawa
or the Phillipines or communication bases in Australia; useful but
not essential as it once was. The only country whose terrain is vital
to the security of the United States is Canada.

One can go further. One of the original justifications to
the American people for breaking President Washington's stern warning
against entangling alliances and for forming a collective security and
defence treaty with a dozen European nations in 1948, was that, if
western Europe fell into Russian hands, the balance of industrial power
in the world would be tilted decisively against the United States. The
same argument was used to justify the Japanese security treaty. But
these arguments need re-examining. Western Europe would, as I have said,
be vulnerable to Soviet pressure if the United States were not involved in
its security. But it is not likely that it would be communist; if the Soviet
Union has so much difficulty in living with a moderately dissenting Czechoslovakia
or a tiresome Cuba, would she risk trying to absorb Germany and

8

Italy, let alone France and Britain into the communist system? Is it not
more likely that if the United States withdrew from her European commitments
that the European-American relationship, instead of being an integral one,
would become merely frigid or opportunistic on the part of the western
European countries, rather than pro-Soviet or implacably hostile? Would
not the same be true of Japan? May it not go that way in any case? True, some
American economic interests would suffer, especially the great international
companies, and the long ground swell of unevenly distributed affluence and
expansion in the United States might suffer a sharp break. But no one could
argue that the United States would be impoverished and there would be certain
economies to off set the losses. A second line of argument that was used in
the 1940s was that, even if American security were not imperilled by the loss
of Europe, the United States could not survive morally and spiritually isolated
in an unfriendly world. But has not American society become
so dynamic in its own right, as to invalidate this argument? Is there not
some logic in the old cry of "America First"?

The fact that no one considers it probable that the United States
will even contemplate so radical a re-alignment in the immediate future,
the fact that the domestic political process eliminated in 1964 and in 1968
its advocates on both the left and the right wing of the American political
spectrum, suggests that, beneath the rhetoric of commitment and anti-commitment,
there is still a broad popular consensus that the United States has a range
of external interests which are permanent, even though they may need re-
definition from time to time. A nation's sense of its own interests is to
a large extent a subjective one, which defies precise analysis by others -
one reason among several why the contingency of war and crisis can never be
eliminated from international relations. But the external observer of the

9

United States can still point to overwhelming evidence of an American sense that the country has a range of responsibilities as a centre of a broad international system, responsibilities which derive from the magnitude and centrality of American power rather than from her own economic or strategic necessities.

But on either side of this pole there is still a difficult problem of definition. On the one hand, there is, or there has been, the argument from ideology, the conception which derives from the early years of the cold war, of the United States as the principal opponent of the spread of Communism; as manning the frontiers of freedom. It has become fashionable, not least in the United States itself, to criticize, indeed to ridicule, this as a criterion of American policy or action. This is largely because the United States, in asserting this criterion in two areas of the world, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, has, in the one case, been unable to live up to its pretensions, and in the other has misjudged the nature of the threat, and in both has behaved with a high-handedness which has discredited the cause of anti-Communism.

So much has been written about this aspect of American foreign policy that I will not dwell on it in any length. But some of the criticism of the ideological element in American foreign policy is, I think, misplaced. The two principal powers with which she finds herself in an adversary relationship, China and the Soviet Union, couch their declaratory policy entirely in ideological terms, even though they may act more pragmatically, and no longer act in concert. Though it is easy to criticize what Stanley Hoffman calls the "Wilson syndrome," the tendency to couch the language of American interests in moral terms, or to accuse Americans of seeing Communists under the bed, it would have been impossible to mobilize the American people to undertake permanent commitments for the purpose of providing countervailing power to that of the Soviet Union without mobilizing the forces of ideological and moral concern. Moreover, when an event occurs which is consistent with a Soviet conception of the over-

riding importance of ideology over other political considerations, such as
the assault on Czechoslovakia, other countries, including stern critics of the
United States like France, react in much the same moral terms as she
does.

Much of the criticism of the ideological content of American
foreign policy really conceals anxiety on other scores. In so far as it comes
from Europe, it has often been purely selfish, a fear that the United States
was becoming deeply enmeshed in a local conflict in Asia to the detriment
of American support for European interests. In so far as it has come from
liberal opinion everywhere, including American opinion, it reflects an
instinctive revulsion at the use of technological means of destruction
against a small country that cannot reply in that particular coin, even
though it may not scruple to use even more barbarous means, such as the
deliberate murder of civilians on a large scale, in order to apply counter-
pressure. In part criticism of the Vietnam involvement comes from a
sober fear that the evidence of American ineffectiveness in Vietnam may not
only lead to a national revulsion against any form of external American
commitment, but rob those that do survive of their credibility. As John
Holmes has rightly pointed out "the compelling reason to end the fighting
in Vietnam is to prevent American power from discrediting itself" and he
continues:

11

"The Americans have also created difficulties for themselves because the rigidity of their ideology, in the past more than the present, has left their associates sceptical. They too often mistook native revolt for international conspiracy. As a result their conviction about the world order they seek have often failed to convince. The extension of their commitments to what look like hopeless causes have worried even those who agree with them on the need to "contain" communism. With the decline of the Cold War, the United States role as guardian of the world against communism is being written off. If the Soviet Union and China do not intend to march across Europe and Asia, it is argued, then the peace of the world is assured; we can disband our armies and devote our energies to economic development. This belief that United States military power has been accumulated to deal with the caricature of an antagonist encourages the view that disarmament of the United States and disbandment of its alliances is the path to peace. A half truth creates a dangerous *non sequitur*. In Canada and elsewhere there is an undiscriminating opposition to arms, armed forces, and the military brass, all assumed unjustifiably to be bloodthirsty - a witless anti-militarism which lacks the integrity of pacifism." (2)

But those who ridicule the element of ideology in the shaping of American foreign policy too seldom reflect on what would be the consequence if the compass swung to the other pole, if American policy came to be governed primarily by consideration of *realpolitik*.

Inevitably, the United States has a delicate problem of maintaining a two plane relationship within the developed world, with the Soviet Union and soon perhaps China also at one level, with her European and Pacific allies at another. De Tocqueville once remarked that "two Deputies, one of whom is a radical, have more in common than two radicals, one of whom is a Deputy"; namely that status is more unifying than conviction. Nevertheless, the complex balance of power relationship that has developed between the United States and the Soviet Union has given them a common language which they share with no other power, including their closest allies, though Britain may be an occasional interlocutor. For the past two years, they have in effect been co-operating in trying to inhibit the possibility of nuclear proliferation by treaty, at the price of considerable tension between the United States and (2) Canada and the Pax Americana

12

own
Italy
important countries within her/international system, Japan, Germany, and
Israel. The pace of technological innovation, as it affects such possibilities
as the mutual deployment of continental BMD systems which would raise the
strategic balance to a new level of complexity and cost, as well as creating
dangerous new uncertainties in its operation, plus the spread of military
technology to other nations, imparts an urgency to the Soviet-American dialogue
which it has not had since the early 1960s. Moreover, there are areas of
political involvement where now only the one can help the other, the Soviet
Union with American entanglement in Vietnam, the United States perhaps with
Soviet entanglement in the Arab world.

What the Soviet Union and the United States are searching for is
a formula which will enable them to stabilize their competition at the strategic
level while maintaining it at the political level. At some point, though not
necessarily in the near future, it will be necessary for the United States to

It is a very difficult distinction to make and it is not yet certain that it can be
embark on the same search with China./ given the fact that the United States /made. So
is the centre of a large group of alliances, many of whose members still have
a serious conflict of interest with the Soviet Union or China, there must
therefore be a certain tension between the requirements of strategic stability
on the one hand, and on the other of maintaining political confidence and cohesion
within the international system of which the United States is the centre. And,/ each major crisis
every act of ideological over-commitment on one side or the other/strengthen了 the
every blunder
suspicion that the two super powers must move towards traditional spheres.
of influence policy in the interests of their own relationship. The relatively
mild American reaction to the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia, an act
which deeply shocked the whole of Western Europe and tumbled their policy assumptions
about East-West relations like a house of cards, the knowledge that President
Johnson was with difficulty persuaded to cancel his trip to Moscow that might

13

have given him a chance to leave office with an achievement in the field of foreign policy only strengthened the suspicion, in Europe at least and I believe in Japan as well. Equally, if the Soviet Union helps extricate United States from Vietnam, it cannot fail to weaken her position within the much more precarious international system of which she is still the centre.

Many Sovietologists have traced the declining influence of Marxist ideology in Soviet policy, and the steady rise of the national interest as the guiding element in Soviet behaviour - at any rate outside Eastern and Southern Europe. The failure of the Soviet Union to support communist parties in Africa and Latin America, the highly traditional manner of its assertion of power in the Middle East, sustains this view. China has consistently behaved as if her policy was guided by national rather than ideological considerations in such assertions of power as she has attempted, including the very selective manner in which she has promoted revolutionary warfare only where a small investment can be expected to produce good returns to herself.

If the next generation of Soviet and Chinese leadership, behave simply like the leaders of big powers, although autocratic ones, may not the United States be tempted to do the same, particularly if her friends and allies in the interim have poured continuous scorn upon her ideological interest in the security and prosperity of free societies as a guide to policy and commitment. What then would guide her policy? Her commercial interests? Successive American administrations have been able with pride and with truth to refute the Marxist accusation that capitalist interests dictate her actions and assessments, and it has been striking how little the great American international companies have influenced the priorities of American foreign policy. Her ambition to wield influence? For citizens of so large a power Americans as individuals have singularly

14

little ambition to exercise power for its own sake. Security? As I have suggested, this prompts caution and co-operation with the Soviet Union and is no longer dependent on other countries.

A world, therefore, in which the United States has lost interest of free nations in the promotion of a coherent international order, in which she is primarily interested in looking after herself, in which she has been derided out of any distinction between liberal and illiberal societies, democracies and tyrannies, is in fact one that we should have good reason to fear. And this would be not just from alarm that the United States might not come to our assistance in a crisis, as from endemic uncertainty as to how so large and self-contained a power, one with so much at risk in playing an active role in the world, would define her interests - much the same fear that haunted the inter-war years.

Much of what I have said might well sound contradictory to an American policy maker, indeed encourage just that tendency to unilateralism that we all fear, by suggesting that America's friends either do not know what they want, or want to have their cake and eat it, and therefore should not be taken seriously. For what my analysis has suggested is that her allies and friends with one breath deplore such manifestations of the ideological element in American policy as the Vietnam imbroglio or the Dominican intervention and with another passionately desire to retain an ideological commitment to the security and prosperity of their own particular country or area; that they wish to see the United States exercise restraint but retain an overwhelming capacity for intervention; that they wish the United States to preserve a policy of stability rather than all out conflict in her relations with the Soviet Union, eventually with China, but do not wish to see their own autonomy diminished by any sort of condominium of the super powers. Yet these are just the pressures, the contradictory though they may be, which press upon a country of size and centrality

15

of the United States; success lies, not in ignoring, but in affecting a con-
structive resolution of them.

process

There are several elements to such a process of construction
The first is an examination of the real scope of American power, using the word "power" for the moment in its sharpest sense of military and political power that can be used to affect or avert events anywhere. We all know that the United States is the strongest power, economically and militarily, that the world has ever seen. But it is not correct to describe her as a global power in the sense of being able to dominate the whole of the international system or to take action at any point in the globe, little alone sustain it. There have been several ingenious attempts to compare the position of Washington to that of Rome. (3) But the comparison falls to the ground on several points. First, Vietnam has shown, as Korea did earlier, that the assertion of American power at a great distance from her shores involves a level of expenditure and sets up a degree of internal resistance which makes it impossible to sustain it over any prolonged period; it was only three years from the introduction of American ground forces into Vietnam to President Johnson's decision to negotiate, and three years is a mere instant in the life of a true imperial system. Second, it overlooks the nature of the modern world in which not only has the number of small sovereign states doubled but their obstructive power has greatly increased. The international systems if much more fragmented and intractable than it was say a century ago, which is one reason why any analogy between the Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana is misleading. Third, for the United States to have the capacity to determine the pattern of events in Asia or Africa or the Middle East, let alone Europe, would require a degree of single minded dedication, and monopoly of the country's best brains within government, and thereby a degree of social stratification, for which there is no taste in American society.

³ c.f. *Imperical America*, International Politics of Primacy by George Liska

16

Moreover, to girdle the world with power, to place, for instance, a great fleet in the Indian Ocean, or to have strategic reserves capable of intervening in several continents at once, would require an even higher level of military expenditure than today's already astronomical ten percent of national income.

A "global influence" the United States can not fail to have because of her technological dynamism but the beginning of wisdom is to decouple/"global" and "power". I think this is already recognized in relation to Africa, and will, I judge, shortly become accepted in relation to both Latin America and to certain parts of Asia.

The second element concerns the relations between the super powers. Some of the confusion that has existed in inter-allied relations, between the United States and several of the middle powers of the non-communist world, during the past decade is explicable in terms of an anxiety, inherited from an earlier phase of international diplomacy, that any stabilization of Soviet-American relations or Sino-American relations must adversely affect the interests of the neighbours of Russia or China, by leading to tacit or mutual recognition of each other's spheres of influence. But this overlooks the fact that the pace of technological innovation is now so rapid that it can create situations in which there are no winners, in which everyone loses security or support or both. At present, for instance, Moscow and Washington are faced with the problem of achieving an agreement which will permit both parties to refrain from the deployment of BMD and other devices, and of maintaining a central balance upon the basis of mutual vulnerability of their cities and the mutual invulnerability of their retaliatory systems. If they fail to do this they must endure a period, which might last for decades, of uneven and experimental progress in defensive system and counter-defensive systems so that their relations are subject to the maximum strain and obscurity

But from which neither they nor any other country stands to gain. / The awesome potential of the modern strategic balance creates no automatic equation between stability and amity just as there is no equation between superiority and dominance. Because both powers have relatively equal scientific and technological capabilities neither can in fact demand a political price for strategic restraint; it must be negotiated in its own terms. Since this is little understood in the United States' Congress it is not surprising that it is not understood in Bonn. If there are spheres of influence in certain parts of the world, and clearly there are in Europe and in Asia, it is because of the nature of the nuclear balance of power which creates an element of self-deterrence, rather than from any super power collusion. Soviet-American tacit or explicit. In point of reality, an unrestrained competition in strategic armaments would place severe strains on the relations between the United States and her major allies, in Europe and / rather than consolidating them. For one thing, it would cause a diversion of resources from the American provision of other forms of security; for another, it would create a severe psychological cleavage if these two vulnerable areas had to rely merely on the equivocal equation of deterrence, while the United States availed herself of the option to acquire a direct physical protection of her civilization, which for reasons of resources and geography is not open to them.

If I have correctly analyzed these two elements in the problem, first the physical and political limitations on the exercise on American power, and second that there is no inherent dilemma between seeking stability in super power relations and supporting the interests of the /, then it becomes possible

18

to consider a positive reorientation of American policy. This would be
to redefine the position and interests of the United States as a central
element in a community - better still a Commonwealth - of developed powers
rather than as the prime guardian of the whole international order. For the foresee-
able future this community consists of northern and western Europe, Japan, Canada,
and Australia, but with time and infinite patience there is a reasonable prospect that
it will come to include the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as those
countries that achieve an effective level of development.

To limit the range of American interests to a community of developed
powers is by no means to advocate that the United States should retreat within
a rich man's club and show no concern for poverty, or development, for new
countries whose societies may be subject to internal conflict or chaos. It is
simply to acknowledge that American power, economic and military, is not
unlimited; that she can only influence and co-ordinate those countries whose
and
economies and societies resemble her own;/that it is by influence on them rather
than by unilateral action that she can effectively increase the total resources
available for development or strengthening security in the developing world.
It carries with it, of course, the implication that much more of her own develop-
ment aid as well as theirs should flow through multilateral rather than through
national channels. It implies a fresh impetus towards the liberalization of
trade within the developed world. It implies increasing rather than diminishing
emphasis upon the renovation of the United Nations.

a

I think that there are great difficulties in realizing such/concept,
limited though it may be. But before I explore them, both in their international
and in their domestic implications, I would emphasize that its value lies in not
removing the element of idealism in the American perception of its
responsibilities, for a United States governed by a Metternichian policy is a

19

frightening prospect, but in giving it a constructive focus. Instead of the
negative objective of containing communism, a task that is largely accomplished
in Europe and is incapable of achievement in Asia, that of broadening the
influence and liberalising the policies of the developed world is a positive
one.

But there are two central dilemmas to be confronted before anyone
can say that this is real out alternative to an American self-conception
of the United States as a lonely Titan holding up the world single handed.
The first is whether she is prepared to devolve responsibility on the
middle powers of the developed world or whether they are prepared to assume
it. In some fields this is largely a matter of attitude and policy, and the
signs of American encouragement are already apparent. Japan, for instance,
has been prodded for some time by the United States to assume an increasingly
active role not only in Asian trade relations but in development. Since
1965 the Federal Republic has received explicit American encouragement to
develop her own relationships with Eastern Europe. The United States has to
a large extent come to regard African problems as the specific responsibility
of the European powers. After politically undermining Britain's position in Asia
for many years, the United States belatedly regretted Britain's decision to
withdraw from Eastern Suez when eventually it had to be taken for economic
reasons last year. Americans can point to the consistent enthusiasm for
Western European unification as evidence of continuous readiness to accept
a devolution of power and authority within the Western system.

But there is a sharp distinction between American attitudes in the
economic and strategic field. Since in the advent of the Kennedy administration
and even earlier, there has been a dogmatic insistence on the centralization of/
decision making in Washington, and equal dogmatism in forcing American strategic
concepts on her allies, as well as a more understandable reluctance to acquiesce in

20

the growth of other centres of nuclear decision making.

And beneath the dogmatism there is a genuine dilemma. Of all dangers the one that each superpower must most closely guard against is being embroiled with the other through the action of some third party. The speed with which a serious crisis can now develop makes it difficult to consult a wide group of capitals, and it is the reaction of the largest power which is, in any case, decisive; an American warship or Marine battalion in the Adriatic in the event of a Soviet threat to Yugoslavia has a quite different value from, say, the deployment of Italian forces. It was the failure to confront the dichotomy between political and economic devolution on the one hand and strategic centralization on the other which made the Kennedy Grand Design of European-American partnership a hollow one.

So this leads to my second question: If there are good reasons why the United States cannot devolve real authority in the strategic field, can she retain the confidence of the middle powers by modifying the structure of decision-making in Washington so that they have some influence on her policies and choice of objectives? Let me illustrate the problem by quoting from a distinguished and influential American public servant and an intelligent critic of Vietnam, General Maxwell Taylor, who in a recent series of lectures has divided international society into what he calls "the trouble makers," primarily the Communist powers, the "victims," the emerging nations, and "the bystanders," in which he includes Japan and Canada, "who are little more than onlookers of the troubles in the developing nations." "In seeking a guide for selectivity," says General Taylor, "in general terms, it would appear in our interest to attempt to discourage the troublemakers, to help the victims, and to stimulate the onlookers to join us in making common cause in the maintenance of a just peace. But such a formula is so general as to give little practical assistance to the political leaders who must make

21

the decisions in specific cases. To help them further, we can at least
make clear our judgment that they should not let the United States become
an international Don Quixote, trying to rescue the distressed and punish
the unjust in every quarter. We can express our conviction that they should
use all practical leverage on our prosperous, bystanding friends, to get
them to join with us in carrying an appropriate part of the burden. We
have ways of influencing such countries, if we are willing to be sufficiently
unpleasant -- and it is sometimes necessary to be disagreeable. 4/11

But such an attitude overlooks the fact that the United States
no longer has powers of command over the other developed countries, who,
in most situations, have at least the alternative of neutrality or neutralism,
and who have become increasingly sceptical about leaving the broad direction
of Western policy in the hands of the United States: who are, indeed,
becoming dubious about the future of the United States itself.

Before one can answer the question, therefore, of whether the
United States can re-define her position as the principal dynamo and the
natural centre of a group of increasingly autonomous developed powers,
rather than as the embattled leader of a series of anti-communist military
alliances, or whether from lack of international support the United States
itself will relapse into unilateralism, it is necessary to examine the nature
of social and political change in the United States itself. Specifically,
we must ask the question whether the brilliant talent for innovation in
technology and industrial decision-making which distinguishes the contemporary

4/ Responsibility and Response, General Maxwell D. Taylor, Harpers, 1967.

22

United States is to find a counterpart in the sphere of national and
international diplomacy, or whether we must live with a system in which the central
member of the Western world pursues a course of social and industrial
revolution and political stagnation.

December, 1968.

PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY -

INTERNATIONAL REPERCUSSIONS

Alastair Buchan

I concluded the first of these lectures, which dealt, though only
in general terms, with the redefinition of American foreign policy and
interests, by echoing what Robert McNamara said in Montreal two and a half
years ago, namely, that the United States is not the world's policeman,
and by suggesting that her true role is to act as the leader and dynamic
centre of the community of developed powers which at present stretches
from Sweden to Australia and which may one day stretch considerably further.
Tonight I would like to explore whether the process of social and economic
change in the United States itself makes it possible for her to play this
role, and to ask whether she can display a capacity for political innovation
comparable to the dynamic pace of economic and technological innovation
that we have witnessed in the past decade or so. If she cannot do this,
if she cannot master her own domestic problems, will she come to be feared
more than admired, even by countries that have close affinities with her;
will she alienate the developing world; will countries like Canada and
Britain, France and Japan, come to feel that they must develop policies
aimed at the containment of American power and influence rather than of
cooperation with it? But first, I would like to make two points, the extent
to which non-political considerations determine American influence in the
world, and the similarity in American problems and those of other advanced
countries.

In the novel which lay unfinished at his death, Scott Fitzgerald
made his central figure a distinguished film producer who wishes to make
a great epic about the United States itself. He is baffled where to begin

2

or in what form to cast it, for "France was a land, England was a people,
but America, having about it the quality of an idea, was harder to utter."
I think one should never underestimate the extent to which this "quality
of an idea," the sense that the United States is the greatest experiment
in human organization ever attempted, influences other countries -- other
and older countries -- in their acceptance of American leadership and in
the resolution of the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise between
a country of such enormous power and its friends and allies, let alone its
adversaries. Therefore, quite apart from the direct impact that domestic
American policy may have upon the interests of other countries, whether it
be protection, urban violence, racial tension, or the export of technological
revolution, the extent to which other countries are prepared to identify
their interests with those of the United States depends to an intangible,
but still important, degree upon their sense of whether the United States
is solving her problems in accordance with the ideals which she proclaims.
There has always been a connection between the external authority and the
domestic policy of a major power; in the case of the United States, it is
more direct, because, as I said earlier, the United States is in a sense
a microcosm of the world.

Let me give more substance to this point. I think there can be
no question that the reason why Marxism and Communism did not make greater
headway during the 1930s and in the immediate postwar years was due to the
fact that the New Deal and the framework of governmental action which it
established, provided an alternative focus of loyalty and interest, not
1/ The Last Tycoon.

3

only for intellectuals but for practical politicians also. If the New Deal
had not preceded the entry of the United States into the centre of world
politics, I am not sure that American leadership would have been so readily
accepted throughout the non-Communist world in the immediate postwar decade,
despite the desire for American aid or American protection. Let me quote
the words of a great European intellectual, Isaiah Berlin, about the influence
of the New Deal on thoughtful Europeans:

"Here was this vast society, the direction of which really was to
a large extent determined not simply by the collision of various
persons in power, but by the quite open, unashamed and enthusiastic
acceptance of ideas. There was no false shame about ideas under
the New Deal, there was no resistance to the intellect because it
was intellect. There was no fear of intelligence and no fear of
cleverness, which was one of the most admirable characteristics of
the regime. People were not frightened about ideas nor contemptuous
of them and were prepared to implement them. They were not terrified
of being called doctrinaire or even intellectuals and they were not
over-impressed by the wisdom of businessmen or the wisdom of other
empirically successful persons, but had confidence in themselves
and their own intellectual equipment and really did marvels with
it. That is the thing which I think produced a lifelong impression
upon me: as it did on the world. . . . It was really the first
time that a great modern democratic industrial society tried to
reform itself in the direction supplied by what are ultimately abstract
ideas in a not over-doctrinaire fashion with due attention paid
to the imperfections of the human beings who were being governed
or for whose benefit this was done, and, it seemed to me, with the
most exceptional sensitiveness to the particular nature of the human
beings, to the asymmetrical, to the irregularities, to the peculiarities,
to the idiosyncrasies, to everything that could not be reproduced
in its statistical form, on the part of the people of the United
States." 2/

This is elegantly expressed, but I think one would find its
substance echoed by most people of my age or older, who grew up in the

2/ In *Conversations with Henry Brandon*. London: André Deutsch, 1966.

4

1930s and 1940s. But now the world sees a very different picture. The economic dynamism of the United States, which was restored by the New Deal, has continued unabated, indeed in certain new industries it has acquired a momentum which alarms even its progenitors, let alone its competitors. The involvement of the federal government in the regulation of economic activity, which was the principal contribution of the New Deal, is fully accepted, but a much higher proportion of the central government's budget than in any other country is now devoted to the stimulation of those industries that are connected with defence; and that key sectors of the economy now have a vested interest in a high level of military expenditure is beyond question. Even more important, one of the fundamental assumptions of the New Deal and the Fair Deal, that a rise in the general level of economic activity would diminish the gap between rich and poor, has proved unfounded. Poverty is a real problem which has not turned out to be susceptible to indirect solution and must be tackled head on. The problem of colour, which was the blind spot of the New Deal reformers, has become involved with the rapid transition of the United States from a primarily rural to a primarily urban society, with all the problems of urban violence and social tensions that this creates. The individualist tradition of American society is now in direct conflict with its own requirements, whether it be the control of firearms or the less wasteful use of land resources, the control of pollution, or the evolution of a decent inland transport system.

The central American philosophic tradition of optimism, of believing that man is capable of meeting any challenge, so different from the central European tradition of tragedy and philosophic pessimism, now has little to feed on. True, some of its exponents talk of the transition of the

5

United States from an industrial to a "post-industrial society," one in which the emphasis has shifted from production to research and services, with increasing opportunities for leisure and individual fulfillment.

But the outside observer who knows that there are areas of the Alleghennies or the Mississippi delta which have not yet felt the benefits of the first industrial revolution, or who has seen the decaying inner cores of the great cities with their armies of unemployed negro youths, can be pardoned for scepticism. This is not from any doubt that the post-industrial society will emerge in certain advanced sectors of American life and industry, but from a feeling that the United States has less and less the characteristics of a homogeneous civilization and now reflects within its own boundaries the divisions of the North-South contrast and potential conflict between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. It is not surprising, therefore, to find in the younger generation of Americans an increasing dubiousness about the basic assumptions of modern American society, most particularly the assumption that economic growth and technological dynamism are necessarily beneficent forces or should have unquestioned priority over a better distribution of wealth and power. It is not particularly surprising, though it is disturbing, to find an acid note of class conflict apparent in the last election -- exemplified, for instance, by the vote for Governor Wallace in the North -- the feeling of the blue-collar worker that he is being left behind in the general rise of the American middle or lower middle classes to affluence.

But having said all this, I think one should acknowledge that these problems are not, for the most part, peculiar to the United States. If the shibboleth of economic growth at the expense of social objectives

6

is subjected to too little criticism by adult Americans, it is accepted even more uncritically in countries like Italy or Japan. Almost every advanced country has its poverty areas. Urban violence has been just as much a European as an American phenomenon, as anyone who recalls the bitter clashes between Communists and Fascists or between the police and both groups in the interwar years, can testify; in fact, industrial violence is potentially much greater in Europe today than in the United States, as recent events in France and Italy have indicated. And Europe displays new regional antagonisms, of which the United States is still free. Student unrest is a universal phenomenon; it merely assumes greater proportions in the United States because that is the country where there is now the largest percentage of young people in universities, and six million students are a formidable element in the community, even if only a minority are politically active. One can perhaps explain the incidence of student unrest by the conjunction of the Vietnam war with a steep rise in the size of the 18 to 20 year old age group. In many ways, American student protest seems more transitory than in, say, Germany or France, where the causes of it are more deep-seated and harder to deal with. Even the problem of race relations now has its counterpart in Britain, France, Holland, and other European countries; the scale of the problem is nothing like as great, Britain now has just under 2 percent coloured, which may grow to 4 percent in the next generation, while the United States will shortly have a coloured population that is 12 percent of the whole. But within this smaller compass, the British problem is in some ways more complex, since the coloured population is broadly half negroid, half Asian, with the differing attitudes and diminished effectiveness of leadership that such heterogeneity implies.

7

I do not suggest these comparisons with any intention of minimizing
the size of the problems that confront the leadership of the United States
over the next decades. For President Nixon, a man of whom most of us can
probably say, with Arthur Schlesinger, that "our enthusiasm has always been
well under control," is faced in most respects with a more difficult task
than any of his predecessors, including Franklin Roosevelt. Leaving external
issues -- the arms race, the uneasiness of the international monetary
situation, Vietnam, the Middle East -- on one side, he confronts a
series of domestic issues which are, for the most part, more intractable
than the regeneration of the American economy in the 1930s. Roosevelt
had a sophisticated academic discipline and economic doctrine to translate
into political action; no such clear intellectual advice is available
for the more complex sociological problems of today. Roosevelt in 1932
and 1936, like Johnson in 1964, had an overwhelming electoral mandate;
Nixon has one of the narrowest majorities in American political history.
Roosevelt's method was to "soak the rich" to help the poor; any aleviation
of poverty today must come out of the pockets of the middle class, which
feels itself hard pressed by inflation, a much more difficult proposition
to sell. Roosevelt's task was to liberate the energies of the American
people; the problem of producing coherence and stability in American society
today probably involves the use of the stick more than the carrot, though
certainly not the night stick of J. Edgar Hoover or Mayor Daley. The
control of pollution, for instance, cannot be envisaged without serious
intervention in individual choice and freedom of action. Finally, the
regeneration of the American economy after the depression required qualities
which are characteristic of American society and of Americans, activism,
energy, courage. Today's problems seem to require qualities with which

8

the American character may be less well endowed, diagnosis rather than prognosis, restraint, orderliness, even perhaps quietism. Moreover, social problems take generations to solve, where economic problems may be soluble in a decade.

But, of course, one cannot leave external issues on one side. It was an external development, the success of Vietnamese resistance to American arms and the President's consequent decision to escalate a guerrilla war to the level of full-scale non-nuclear war, which precipitated much of the current unrest in the United States, and which has had the effect of deepending tensions which originated in domestic issues. The level of military expenditure, coupled with the difficulty of varying the level of taxation, makes it hard to see how there can be a major or rapid diversion of resources to such social objectives as urban renewal, even if the President-elect and the rather complacent and well-to-do men who surround him felt the requisite sense of urgency. Unless a formula for peace in Vietnam can be negotiated in the next few months that permits a fairly rapid withdrawal of American forces, or unless an agreement can be reached with the Soviet Union which permits certain avenues of expenditure on strategic forces to be closed off, and the second is less probable than the first, there is a prospect that the United States may be devoting nearer an eighth than a tenth of its total wealth to military and space programs in 1970. Although this expenditure is by no means all socially irrelevant -- military expenditures have injected considerable resources into backward areas of the south and southwest -- its general tendency is to hasten the coming of post-industrial society in some areas but not in others, to make California or Texas richer, but Georgia or Watts no less poor. And if it becomes clearly perceived that military expenditure is a barrier to social progress in the

9

United States, the sense of popular irritation with the close allies and friends of the United States will grow, while in fact there may be no possibility of readjusting the burden unless these allies can achieve a sense of influence upon American policy in the way in which I was describing last night.

But it is not only a question of resources, for in addition I think we can make a reasonable case that it has been the concentration of many of the best minds in the United States on external problems during the past twenty-five years which is responsible for the social neglect whose consequences are now so evident. Truman, a man who had a fine instinct for domestic troubles, became immediately and almost totally immersed in the complexities of the cold war. Eisenhower was to a large extent a stranger in his own country, Kennedy for all his qualities had only a perfunctory interest in domestic problems with the possible exception of civil rights, and Johnson, who knew what was brewing at home, became the prisoner of his obsession with Vietnam. What was true of presidents was true of less influential men. The American intellectual community has been very preoccupied with external affairs in the past generation: so have politicians and even business and labour leaders. There has been an instinctive assumption, as there is in some developing countries, that economic growth would solve all problems. Those countries that have given as high a priority to social as to economic interests have tended to be ridiculed, forgetting perhaps that law and order, or social peace, are not natural attributes of an energetic society but the consequences of thought and care.

It may sound a curious thing for a foreign policy specialist and the citizen of a vulnerable American ally to say, but one of the things

10

that disturbs me about President Nixon is that he has clearly devoted more
thought and interest to American foreign than to domestic policy. Yet if
you accept my two premises, that there is no substitute for American leader-
ship and that American authority in the world is closely related to the
success with which she solves her own problems, I think this is a legitimate
source of concern. Let us assume that the tensions of American domestic
society, which have become evident, remain unsolved. I can see three impli-
cations for international stability as a whole. The first concerns the
most intractable problem of all, the racial question; if the drift of
southern negroes to the cities continues at its present rate and if nothing
is done to "enrich" (to quote the curious phrase of the Kerner Commission's
report) the urban ghettoes, then I see no prospect of averting a militant
black power movement which will insist on a form of apartheid in order
to increase its bargaining power. The declared objective of some of the
leaders of CORE, namely a separate black sovereign state within the confines
of the present continental United States, may be quite incapable of ful-
fillment, but apartheid there will certainly be. Those who will draw most
comfort from this will not be black minorities elsewhere but the white
South Africans and Southern Rhodesians, with the consequence that a direct
link will be forged between unrest in Africa and unrest in the United
States, which does not exist at present, and which will further exacerbate
North-South tensions.

11

In the second place, if the United States becomes an unstable society, it will have a destabilising effect on other advanced societies. The Prime Minister of Canada said recently that he was as much concerned with the possible spread of violence from south of the border as with any other threat to the security of Canada. I am sure that he is quite right to have this fear, though I would note in passing that this was precisely the concern of the British in planning the defence of Canada after the Napoleonic Wars, namely to prevent the export of revolution from the United States, a concern that led among other things to the construction of the canal on whose banks this pleasant campus now stands. If there is endemic violence in the great American cities, white versus black, white versus white, other countries than Canada will have reason to fear too close an association with the United States. What could happen in Detroit can in an age of mass communications happen not only in Windsor but in Liverpool, or Hamburg, or Marseilles. For we live in what is called "transnational society," in which ideals, good and bad, techniques, and people, patriotic or alienated, move back and forth across frontiers largely independent of the relationships of governments. The United States is, in any case, one kind of revolutionary power, through the dynamic pace of technological innovation she sets, and the enterprise of her great international companies. If, in addition, to having a revolutionary economic and technological impact, she threatens to have a revolutionary social effect upon her friends, then an instinctive policy of containment will emerge from their deliberations, which could have important repercussions upon the global balance of power.

Finally, there is the less tangible but no less real relationship between the stability and progress of American domestic society and American

12

(vi)

authority in the world. It is easier to analyze the negative than the positive aspects of this. The upheavals of American society greatly facilitate the work of the Soviet Union in seeking to undermine the American position in the developing world and even in Europe - omitting the fact that minority grievances in the Soviet Union are a source of continuous disquiet in Moscow. Much of Gaullist literature in recent years, before, that is, the Czechoslovak crisis brought the first signs of Franco-American reconciliation, has used the instability of American society as a rationale for rejecting American leadership, and this has echoes in other countries. Here, too, the transnational character of the modern world and the role that mass communications play in it, is important. If there had been no change in the administration's Vietnam policy last spring and if there had been serious racial trouble this summer, I can think of at least two governments of small European countries who were doubtful if their publics would accept a continuing alliance with the United States when the first mandatory period of the North Atlantic Treaty expires next spring. If the United States is merely a very powerful state, militarily and economically, but her society and politics are held in fear and contempt, then the prospects of her maintaining a constructive foreign policy, of avoiding a kind of self-isolation are not good.

No one who has worked with Americans as long as I have is likely to underestimate the native genius for improvisation or the readiness of educated Americans to confront the implications of economic and social change. The revolution, for instance, that has occurred in structure of the big corporations, or in the way in which they reach decisions, is very impressive; so also is the flexibility of the American university and its hospitality to new disciplines and new ideas. There is no mandarin class here as there tends to be in European business or universities. The United States has re-cast the whole basis of national budgetting and accounting, with the introduction of functional costing,

13

a direct application of intellectual ideas to a normally intractable area
of public policy.

But there is a difference between ingenuity and reform, and what
can not fail to strike a non-American is the contrast between the speed of
social and economic change in the United States and the sluggish pace of
political adaptation and institutional change. My own country is supposed
to be tradition-bound but we have reformed our Upper Chamber three times in
ten years, and hardly a year passes without some significant modification
of the structure of central government: We are at present like other countries
in the midst of the fundamental reassessment of the new balance that must be
struck between central and regional government, and we may well have many of
the characteristics of a federal state within a decade. The balance in federal-
provincial relations and the question of constitutional reform is now under
almost constant debate in Canada.

But in the United States the discussional of institutional and
constitutional reform has been belated and fragmentary. The world held its
breath in wonder and amazement when it seemed possible that in the recent
presidential election the eventual choice might be determined by the archaic
eighteenth century device of reference to the House of Representatives. The
debate about self-government through the District of Columbia which started
long before I was born has only just produced the first beginnings of change.
Now at last the magnitude of the domestic problems facing the United States
has made it impossible to evade the question of institutional change. The
great cities are becoming ungovernable; in many areas the distinction between
urban, suburban and rural areas is losing validity. The over representation
of rural areas severely distorts legislative politics.

The New Deal left the basic institutional framework of the United
States untouched. It strengthened the power of the federal government, but

14

even there it merely proliferated regulatory agencies without re-organizing
the structure of federal power. Now much bigger questions loom, and thoughtful
Americans are beginning to ask them. Let me quote from a recent address by one
famous American, distinguished not only for his scholarship in foreign affairs
but his love for his own country, George Kennan:

> "The federal government cannot expect to regulate the intimate details of people's lives across the whole vast geographic span of this nation without doing violence at a thousand points to the particularism of social groups and geographic regions -- without, in fact, impairing the very reality of democracy. Too many feelings would have to be ignored, too many minority interests trampled upon. The country is already, if anything, too large for its own good. The greater part of new governmental powers will have to be assigned, therefore, to sub-federal authorities. But are local and state governments prepared, across the nation, to assume this task? Just look at New York City itself. Here, the problems of urban life involve not only two great governmental structures -- one municipal and one in Albany -- just within the confines of New York State itself, but also structures of two other state governments, not to mention the host of smaller municipalities scattered across the greater New York region, in the territories of all three states. Can the problems of this area be successfully met without some rationalization of this wretchedly over-complicated and archaic system? And does the same question not have to be raised in other parts of the country as well? One may well ask whether institution of the state government, as we know it today, is adequate anyway as the sole legislative and administrative entity standing between federal authority and the parochial interests of local government? One may ask whether we can long avoid not only a re-drawing of state boundaries in many instances, but possibly even the creation of new regional authorities in certain fields? I say these things to emphasize that the gap we have to fill between challenge and response, as we face our most bitter problems of this moment, is institutional as well as conceptual, and will require almost revolutionary changes in both of these fields." (3)

(3) Address to the international seminar of the International Association for Cultural Freedom. Princeton, December 2, 1968.

15

Now, if the structure of domestic government in the United States needs reformation during the next decade or generation, so also in my opinion do some aspects of the federal administration that evolve and carry out international policy. In recent years it has often been the case that different agencies, the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, ACDA, AID, pursue somewhat different policies towards a particular problem or area. Those, for instance, who recall the famous debate on the Multilateral Force in NATO in the early 1960s will remember that at least three conflicting lines of enthusiasm, of skepticism, and of downright opposition were forthcoming daily from different parts of government or senior individuals within them. And I am sure that everyone else can think of other instances, in which different agencies publicly aired different views or reactions until the subject was either dropped or reached the President's own desk.

In part, of course, this is merely a reflection of the size of
the United States' government and of its range of preoccupations, external
and internal, made no easier by a constitution that enshrines a separation
of legislative from executive power. Other governments of great states,
other great bureaucracies, have exhibited the same cumbrous characteristics,
notably the government of the old Dual Monarchy in Vienna, and only an
innate secrecy prevents the exposure of similar attentions at the heart of
the Soviet empire. But Moscow is not the capital of nearly so vast a diverse
and international system as Washington, nor one that is as much dependent on
confidence and respect. The skill of American decision making in the great
business bureaucracies provides no true analogy, for there is a yard stick
of profit in business decisions which is unfortunately inapplicable to the
more complex and less rewarding problems of government, except a short term

16

profit of electoral popularity.

Dean Acheson once said that the difficulty that the government of the United States has in consulting with allies is that it is itself an alliance, of great satraps like the State Department, the Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission, the C.I.A., let alone both houses of Congress, and various entrenched lobbies and interests; by the time the varying views and positions of these great semi-autonomous organizations have been reconciled, the decision makers have often neither the time nor the energy to incorporate into their thinking the views of other countries. As I have expressed it elsewhere:

> "American public servants are perhaps the most open-minded in the world, are less hampered by traditional conceptions than their European counterparts and are closely linked to a system of academic discussion and research on public policy of great vitality. This means that in the preliminary stages of the evolution of a new policy or strategy, or reaction to an external challenge, the discussion is a relatively free one and in which the views of allies are welcome. But so difficult is the process of reconciling the views of different departments, agencies and branches of the government that the further it moves up the chain of authority the more inflexible positions become. By the time the President has made "a determination" on a particular policy, there is little that an allied government, however powerful, can do to change it." (4)

The consequence is to accentuate in every significant allied country that debate between "quiet diplomacy" and "independence" which is now under way in Canada. If a country of significant size and interests cannot demonstrate to its public that it can influence and modify American policy, if one merely has to take the word of diplomats and insiders that one's own national interests have not been neglected, what, more people in more countries are bound to ask, is the virtue of a close political relationship with the United States?

(4) Crisis Management: The New Diplomacy. Atlantic Institute, Paris, 1966.

17

There are two sides to this problem. There can be no question of the high quality of the research and discussion process on which the formulation of many aspects of American policy rests. Not all, I must add, for perhaps one of the aspects of Vietnam which has most diminished American prestige and authority is the evidence now available of the sketchiness of the analysis that proceeded important decisions and how casually some questions of far-reaching significance were decided. But for the most part those who contest or seek to modify an American position must know their facts and this represents a challenge to other governments and their emissaries which they do not always meet. There are few objective truths in international politics, and American analysis is undertaken in the American national interest: A truly collective policy can only emerge from a process of informed and expert bargaining.

I see two problems in particular if the United States is to maintain her position as a centre of a group of developed powers, encouraging them to take broader political and economic responsibility and demonstrating to them that her strategic policy is susceptible to their influence, even though she cannot devolve final decisions in a crisis. The first concerns the short service of senior American public servants, who are mostly political appointees and whose term of service is at the very maximum eight years. This constant turnover imparts great intellectual vitality to some administrations, particularly those that draw heavily on universities in the manner of Roosevelt and Kennedy. But it has a number of weaknesses: A man who has only become the real master of his job when he finds his term in Washington completed: Since all planning and most

18

policy making is long term, he is rarely called upon to implement the full
consequences of policy choices which he advocates: Those in foreign governments
allied or adversary, who have learnt how his mind works suddenly find that he
is gone. It is difficult enough for a nation of the size of the United States
to maintain confident relations with countries that have a tenth or a twentieth
of her economic or strategic power. Moreover, this constant turnover,
refreshing though it may be, gives undue influence to those who stay: Many
people who deplore the influence of the military on American policy-making
overlook the fact that the military are the only people who both spend their
life in the service of Uncle Sam and reach high positions of responsibility.
I am not advocating the creation of some new mandarin class in the American
civilian hierarchy, but I do not believe that the American role can be maintained
over the long term without the creation of a professional public service. If
war is too serious to be left to generals, policy making of a great power is
too serious a matter to be left to a rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of
intellectuals and corporation lawyers.

My second doubt concerns the very ark of political authority, the
Presidency itself. That the United States will always have a popularly elected
president, I am quite certain. But I really wonder whether the next phase of
American history -- which is as I have suggested is the history of us all-- can
be successfully negotiated if one man alone has the political mandate to decide
the multitudinous and complex questions that must arise, not only from a period
of great domestic change and reform, but in a world in which American external
concerns and obligations will be, at best, only somewhat diminished and by no
means eliminated.

I raise these questions without seeking an answer to them because
I feel that one of the crucial tests of American authority and leadership in
the decades ahead -- one of the criteria by which we shall judge whether the

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United States continues to deserve a respect equivalent to its power -- will be its capacity for political as well as economic and social innovation.

I have deliberately talked in both these lectures in general terms, from a feeling that this is a time for the discussion of ideas and broad perspectives rather than about particular policies or programmes. I have not dealt with the future of the European-American relationship if western Europe moves, as I am sure it will, towards its own definition of unity and co-operation, nor of the American-Japanese relationship if Japan acquires the characteristics of a super rather than a middle power. Both developments carry the difficult implication that by reason of her delicate relationship with the Soviet Union, the United States cannot encourage the same sort of devolution of responsibilities to these two powerful entities in the strategic as in the economic and diplomatic fields. One of the basic problems of international order in the later twentieth century, therefore, revolves around the question of whether other countries and areas which might be the subject of Soviet or Chinese pressure can retain confidence in the American commitment to their own survival. This in turn depends on a sober re-definition of American interest, moral, as much as material, in the integrity of a wide and plural group of effective friends and allies. If I have spoken more of the importance of maintaining such a relationship within the developed world, it is not from callousness about the political and security problems of the developing world. It is more from a sense that if the United States fails to provide a broad, multilateral framework for energetic countries like Germany and Japan to assume increasing responsibility without endangering peace and stability, or cannot by her diplomacy reconcile the problem of achieving a stable relationship with the Soviet Union or China with the maintenance of allied confidence in her

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leadership, both the developed and the developing world will suffer
equally.

All the societies of the developed world are open to the penetration,
in some cases the domination, of American economic strength and technological
skills; most of them depend in one way or another on American strategic
protection. There will never be an enduring relationship between the United
States and other developed powers, European, Asian or Australian, or even
between herself and some collectivity of them, if the penetration of ideas
and skills is felt to be entirely one sided; if for instance, there proves
to be no place in the American policy debate for European experience in
the solution of many of the difficult urban or local problems which now
confront the United States, no room for allied views on strategy, on
arms control, on the political problems of the developing world. The greatest
tragedy, short of nuclear war itself, would be a world in which the United
States became self-isolated by the magnitude and dynamism of its own power
and the starkness of its own problems.

December 1968.

President: The Rt. Hon. Lester Pearson

Chairman: Richard Goold-Adams

Hon. Treasurer: The Rt. Hon. Aubrey Jones

Director: The Hon. Alastair Buchan

18, Adam Street, London W.C.2.

Telephone: 01-930 3757.

Cables: Strategy London W.C.2.

29th September 1969

I have been deeply touched by the number of my friends among the Institute's membership who have subscribed to the portrait which is my farewell present, and I am writing to thank you personally for your own donation.

The portrait, which is by a young British artist named David Poole, is extremely characteristic. It now hangs in the big room at Adam Street. I am very happy to see it there, for I have left a great deal of my own immediate past in that room.

Though I am leaving ISS with great regret, I am certain that it will benefit from a change of leadership, and I shall continue to support it in every way I can.

[LC]