NINE VITAL OBJECTIVES OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

by

Lincoln P. Bloomfield

Address delivered in Washington, D.C., August 27, 1968.

This is a chore I take very seriously, particularly being asked
to put into 50 minutes the views of one solitary civilian on a subject on
which all of you are experts, and which really only the President of the
United States should be in a position to articulate.

The vital national interests of the United States represent a formidable topic, in that they constitute a synthesis of that which we are, that in which we believe, and that which we are to do in the world.

Simply to avoid the usual cliches and platitudes about security, peace, mother, and whatever else traditionally appears at the beginning of national security policy papers, is in itself a chore. Particularly this year I would like to try to tackle this topic in a way which is responsive to the real problems of the real world, including both the possibilities (which have always been interesting and exciting to Americans), and the limits (which have not always been either exciting, or well understood).

There are several problems, even apart from one's own inadequacy, in grappling with as protean a subject as this without collapsing into triteness. One difficulty is whether the United States is one of 124 countries, (130 if you count the divided ones)--simply one among many nations representing a unit on someone's chart of interaction of the international system, with no special claim to superior morality or wisdom, and no unique mission in the world. All of our American rhetoric for almost 200 years has tended to identify the United States of America as _not_ simply one of those circles on an interacting chart, but, rather, "a unique metaphysical idea." As John Adams also said, "Our pure, virtuous, public-spirited Republic will last forever, govern the globe, and introduce the perfection of man."

There are some people today who think we are well on the way to governing the globe, but there are not too many who credit us with having completed the perfection of man. The notion that the idea of America is "to serve humanity"--Woodrow Wilson's phrase--represents the humanitarian side of what otherwise sounds like a fairly imperialistic view of the United States. But these great themes, with their crusading image, echo through our history, and for a very long time we _did_ supply a beacon and a standard to which men elsewhere could repair. I think this was more true at a time when we were poor and struggling and somewhat antagonistic to all external powers, than in more recent times when we have become fat and rich and superpowerful. But the notion of a transcendent mission

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still is found in our statements of national purpose. I suspect some
of it still belongs there. But one of our problems is what in truth
belongs today in the first paragraph of a document entitled, "The
National Purpose of the United States."

Many of you have contributed to BNSPs, country policy papers, the
Air Force's "Plan", and private writings on the subject. Such documents
invariably open with the great theme of American mission. But in the back
half of those papers one finds as counterpoint some pretty hardheaded
calculations about what is really going on and about the tactics that
the United States must use to achieve its objectives. Perhaps one is
the music, the other the words. What is sure is that we _do_ need an
orchestrated view of national strategy.

There is a great deal that ought to be up for reexamination this
year. Things which one said on this subject only last year do not
necessarily hold up. In one degree or another all of our assumptions
about the "proper" American role in the world of the late 60's and the
early 1970's are up for grabs. We will continue to find much continuity
in our national purpose. But we can no longer afford simply to copy the
old rhetoric word for word from the old basic national security documents,
without staring at them very hard indeed.

It is, then, a time of reappraisal. But there is a real question as
to where one should look for this reappraisal. A few years ago it was
possible to write just such a document, in or outside the U.S. Government,
simply by looking at American policies and programs in the world. That

series of electrifying American decisions and programs in the late 1940's
and the 1950's constituted in my view the best kind of American response
for its times to a massive series of problems and challenges. It was a
pragmatic response. It was possible to look at the great tidal, seminal,
American moves during that period and say, "Those reflect the following
interests: . . . They are the basic strategies. The objectives are
self-evident to all of us." There was not a vast amount of sermonizing
about it . . . and there was nothing like a "doctrine" to refer to
*before* the decisions were made: the doctrine came out of the decisions.
My point is that for these times one could sit down and write a paper
about American interests and American objectives by a purely inductive
process.

I am not sure the same thing is true today. I am not confident
that by such a simple process of logic one could infer from the menu of
current large-scale, serious, or important American actions on the world
scene--or from decisions about military strategy or weapons systems--a
necessarily appropriate interpretation of American national interests in
1968. I am even less certain that such actions tell us what we need to
know about what the proper posture of the United States of America *should*
be over the next 10 years. I think that is an open question, not a
closed question. This is why I find it more difficult than usual to phrase
what seem to me reasonable, suitable, and appropriate objectives.

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The underlying reason for this sense of uncertainty is that, among
other things, ours is an age of revolution. And ages of revolution are
extraordinarily hard to make plans about, particularly if one happens to
be located in the middle of the revolution, in effect in the eye of a
series of hurricanes. A major complication is that the new revolutions
are not precisely like the familiar ones of history, neither like the
Peasants' Revolt of the 16th century, nor the French Revolution, nor even
the Russian Revolution. And a source of special confusion for Americans
is that few of them look anything like the American Revolution either.

It was Eric Hoffer who said, "It is not the actual suffering, but
the taste of better things that produces revolutions." Or as Kropotkin
put it, "The hopeless don't revolt." That seems to me a very crucial
thing to keep in mind in this period in history, both in American cities
and elsewhere in the world. Both are revolutions of what might be called
Risen-But Disappointed-Expectations.

In dealing with this kind of revolution, the United States would
still like to conceive of itself as a leader and bellwether, in tune, on
the same wave length, with the great forces which are moving. And yet
we may not be able to do just that. Bismarck said for Germany of his
day, "We can only wait until we hear the footsteps of God in history,
and then leap forward to try to catch onto His coattails." Another

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aphorism dealing with revolutions speaks in terms of not getting in
the path of a speeding locomotive. But both represent a predetermined
view of history of the sort Marxists like, and Americans reject. We
do not think of history as preordained; we think of it as something
over which we have some control. I believe we still have, although
not as much as we think.

One final note of preface. The question of time-span is of crucial
importance in planning. No one knows for certain how long revolutions
last in the final quarter of the 20th century. But there is no reason
to assume that they are all going to fit into the policy planners'
assigned time-frame. Forecast studies typically are done on the basis
of an assignment to write a plan covering some specific years, and thus
pick that as the time frame for analyzing events, trends, and probabi-
lities. The period 1972 to 1975 is currently a fashionable one. But
both may be dead spots in that process; we simply do not know. The
year 2000 has now become a popular destination for planners, presumably
because it has a nice round ring to it. But it maybe a very dull year.
The year 2002 may be the big year, or 1994--or 1969!

Put differently, planning can dodge current realities by saying,
"We will look 20 years ahead." But short-range reality says, "We have
only until the next session of Congress or the next meeting of the NATO
Council or NATO Defense Ministers or the UN General Assembly to come
up with something." Both types are entirely normal in a bureaucracy
where there are institutions with timetables and life cycles of their
own. But both artificially constrain reality. They are abnormal for
the life of ideas, and they are abnormal for the life of revolutions.

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I shall pick arbitrarily a time span that seems to me pretty
good for looking at this range of issues if one wishes both to escape
from the dense gravitational field of the present, and get a little
escape velocity that enables one to get away from some of our year-
to-year stereotypes, but without sailing off into the Year 2000.

The lead time of a new weapons system these days ranges from
between five to nine years, from the first scratch on the drawing
board to a deployed system in space or in the field. New industrial
nations are being created in about one generation. I will concentrate
on what seem to me objectives that represent definable interests in a
period roughly covering the next decade. The period is defined as one
in which we would hope to make progress toward achieving these ends,
or discover that we cannot achieve them within a reasonable number of
years.

The fundamental interest of a country is normally described in
terms of security. Walter Lippmann summed it up by saying, "The true
end of foreign policy is to provide for the security of the nation in
peace and war." I take it as given that the first charge on the Presi-
dent of the United States and his associates is national survival, with
whatever that takes--but national survival in a way that leaves us
enjoying as best we can that which we as a society have achieved. To
me that is not a trivial statement. I do not think that the achievement
of national survival is going to be worth very much if American or
basic human values have been destroyed in the process.

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This is why I do not think a contemporary President can take the advice of either of the two extremes in this country. I do not think, for example, that it is appropriate or right for him to order a surprise nuclear strike on the Communist Chinese nuclear installations. I think our self-image would run into the same problems there (apart from what it would do in the rest of the world) that it evidently did in the Cuban missile crisis, when it was finally concluded that it was quite unthinkable for the United States to launch a Pearl Harbor in reverse. Similarly, I do not think he can accept the advice of pacifists: I do not think he can disarm this country unilaterally without putting in great jeopardy not only his own political position (I am sure he would be impeached), but the values which we cherish.

I am concerned here with specific middle-range objectives, and I have tried to identify nine that I consider paramount. They represent my own list of broad but tangible, problem-oriented goals of American foreign policy, toward which American strategy--political, military, economic, socio-psychological, cultural--should be orchestrated in this planning period, and in support of which strategies American institutions, agencies, personnel, doctrines, and tactics should be mobilized and brought to bear.

Some of these are going to sound quite negative--stop doing something, prevent something, avert something. For better or worse, ours is the kind of world where "something" tends often to be something rather unpleasant. It can be the highest order of statesmanship to see that it is averted, prevented, or avoided.

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NINE PARAMOUNT MIDDLE-RANGE OBJECTIVES
OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE WORLD

1. Prevention of a general nuclear war.

A. Maintenance of deterrence to major aggression.

B. Moderation of strategic arms race.

2. Prevention, containment, termination of "local conflicts."

3. Finding more durable basis for U.S.-Soviet relations.

4. Bringing Communist China into the world community.

5. Adverting a worldwide racial conflict.

6. Developing a new relationship with Europe.

7. Progress toward transformation of international society
into true community.

8. Finding new strategies for modernization of the LDC's.

9. Capturing the technological revolution before it captures us.

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Others of the nine sound more modest than I would have phrased them a few years ago. Some seem to call above all for finding new understanding of a problem. For example, I do not think we truly understand the problem of revolutionary war or guerrilla warfare or subversion. I do not think that as a nation, or as a government, or as three armed services, or as the Department of State, or as an academic or intellectual community, we have grasped the deeper meaning, the contours, and the proper responses to what can be called sublimited, hostile, or disaffected activity. Even though we have it in our universities, in the city streets, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and before very long, probably Southern Africa, I do not think we truly comprehend this problem. Rather than pretending that we are very clear either about the nature of the problem or about what our goals are with respect to it, among American objectives for 1968 surely belongs the search for new understanding, and for new strategies to act on that understanding.

Objective Number One is *prevention of a general nuclear war*. To me this is what some systems analysts would call "a gating factor," It is a little like the role of the Soviet Union in Europe. If you think of Europe as a system, you come very quickly to the understanding that all else depends on Soviet policy. Predictions about the future of NATO, or Western Europe, or Eastern Europe must depend on one's evaluation of the Soviet Union. As a gating factor it either opens to permit certain things to happen, or closes to prevent them.

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If a thermonuclear war is not prevented, there is not much point
in listing a lot of other objectives. If it is averted, I think we have
done what Mahan once recommended when he said that the purpose of mili-
tary power is to give moral ideas time to take root. In my view, the
prime purpose of strategic military power during this period is to do
just that--to give time for other evolutions to take place. If that
time is not bought, all other goals, including "wimming over communism"
(whatever that means in 1968), may become meaningless. This is not a
pacifist recommendation, because to achieve it, military power is of
high importance.

The first sub-goal is maintenance of a deterrence to major aggression.

The maintenance of a credible deterrent to Soviet or Chinese miscalculation or adventure represents the highest call on strategic planning in support of what seems to me the most vital national objective. The maintenance of a reliable, hardened or hidden second-strike retaliatory capacity is something that under no circumstances, short of verifiable mutual arms reductions, can be tampered with.

I believe the nuclear deterrent has so far prevented World War III.

Surely the reasons for having a major war at some time over the last 20 years are more powerful than in any comparable period in history since the 16th and 17th century and their religious wars. The fact that we have not had one so far is persuasive. Actually, by preventing World War III it has also permitted us to get into World War IV, or III 1/2,

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where we seem to be at the moment. Nevertheless we are still here, and
able to plan. The Soviet Union seemed to come to a comparable conclusion
when, in 1961, after 15 years of saying the contrary, it adopted the
American position that some kind of minimum nuclear deterrent would need
to be maintained even through the processes preceding the final stage
of total and general disarmament.

But having accepted that, there remains the newly urgent question
of how much is enough, what is balance, what is parity, what is superiority,
in short what do these words describing the nuclear balance in fact
mean? Are 1,000 U.S. ICMB's plus 656 Polaris missiles plus 600 B-52's
equal to almost as many Soviet ICBM's plus their 750 or so IRBM's targeted
on Western Europe? What about the balance between MIRV's and ABM's? I
do not think the formulas we have worked with are good enough. I par-
ticularly do not think there are going to be any serious negotiations
on the subject of missiles so long as the United States is determined
to pursue what it believes to be clear superiority, and so long as
the Soviet Union is determined to achieve at least parity. These are
total contradictions in terms, and there can be no far-reaching agreements
reached so long as those two points of view are pressed.

What do we really mean by superiority? Can it be determined by
calculations about the predicted effects of weapons of the types and
numbers suggested above? Or is it primarily psychological--how "good"
we feel when we look at the columns of numbers, particularly a list that

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shows "two to one" in some category, even if the one is enough to offset
the two? Some efforts seem to be underway within and outside the
Government to reexamine these questions, and they desperately require
just that.

If we accept all this, we are still left with the incredible dilemma
that actually to launch our strategic nuclear forces in a kind of spasm
would likely defeat all the rest of our objectives. Prevention of a
general nuclear war in this age cannot imply the dismantling of the
strategic nuclear deterrent structure. But it certainly can imply some
limitations on it.

I myself had thought that over the last decade some hardheaded
people in and out of Government had come to the conclusion that it was
essential to build into the design of new weapons systems and new
strategic doctrines the crucial question of how these affected the arms
race.

With the advent of MIRV's, and the ABM decision, I am not so sure
those notions are built in, although I am aware of the arguments on both
sides. It is not entirely certain to the observer that the tradeoffs
were correctly calculated between political considerations, military
considerations, and arms race considerations. Thus the second sub-
objective is **Moderation of the Strategic Arms Race**. We may not always
have had an arms race, strictly speaking. But on the evidence we are
now back in one, and it is going to be very expensive. Respectable

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calculations suggest that after an expenditure of another $40 billion or $50 billion we are not going to advance our net security at all and indeed, by going for what may look like a reliable first-strike force, which the other side will also work to acquire, possibly lose such security as now exists.

To me this does not mean anything as frankly nonsensical as general and complete disarmament, particularly in four years, which was the bad joke advanced by Mr. Khrushchev in New York in 1959. It means to me regulation, limitation, balanced reductions of armaments, and a wide variety of measures, many of which we are taking or have taken to stimulate reciprocal action. So far as the spread of nuclear weapons is concerned, this belongs in the same subcategory. If the achievement of our strategic goal does call for limiting the spread of nuclear weapons--and I think it does--we may have to pay some higher costs than we are now prepared to pay, such as enforcing agreements that are reached on countries that go ahead to build nuclear weapons anyway; giving guarantees where we do not want to give guarantees; or finding agencies such as the UN to act as umbrellas or fig leaves for American and Soviet power. Here we add a fundamental political axiom that alone gives meaning and legitimacy to any external use of U.S. military power in this age, short of acting for sheer survival. One rule survives the Munichs, the Cubas, the Vietnams: if the world balance of power is overturned, the chances will increase substantially for a great war to right it. If a regional balance is overturned, vital U.S. interests may or may not be involved. This moves us to the second broad mid-term objective.

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The second prime objective is to prevent, contain, or terminate what we at M.I.T. have christened "local conflicts." This has to do not with the war that we have been planning against and have been successful in forbending for 20 years, but with the wars that do get fought. Our local conflict study at M.I.T. counts 54 conflicts where military force was a significant element, and which were often quite bloody, since World War II. United States military power has been involved, directly or indirectly, in a quarter of these. Over 90 percent have taken place not in Europe, the central place d'armes, the strategic center of our confrontation, but out in the periphery and the boondocks --in the developing regions. A final statistic of interest: less than 50 percent of the insurgencies among those 54 conflicts have been primarily communist.

There is an increasing question in this country about how automatic our intervention should be in these local conflicts. Alongside our continuing feeling of "no more Munichs" and "no more Cubas," there is the feeling of "no more Vietnams." At the same time, there is a lot of planning on counterinsurgency doctrines, mobility, and hardware--plus new commitments under the nonproliferation treaty. I see all this as calling for redefined U.S. objectives resting upon re-defined interests. From these should come more coherent American strategies. They may not be so much military as political, economic, cultural. They may be more multilateral than unilateral. They may come to embody what my associates and I have recommended as a new and purposeful "Strategy of Conflict Control," alongside any strategy of planned intervention, resting on a

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(vi)

fresh appraisal of the vital interests of the U.S. region by region.
The relevant questions are "how much do we care?" "How much should we
care?" "Why do we care?" "Do the Russians care?" and "Do we have to
care because the Russians care?"

This moves us inevitably to relationships with the Soviet Union.
The unspeakable Soviet action in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 should
not have come as a surprise to anyone who has done his homework about
Russian national interests combined with the requirement of Soviet
Communism to ensure itself in power by means of tyranny. But neverthe-
less the achievement of objectives number one and two may depend on
success in achieving objective number three: *Finding a more durable
basis for U.S.-Soviet relations.* The contours of the problem are
summed up by the fact that the Soviet Union has, as Bertram Wolfe once
put it, two things it tries with all its might to avoid: all-out war
and all-out peace. This is likely to continue to be the climate in
which we try to negotiate our way through a dangerous period in history.

If the U.S. is unable or unwilling to crush the physical power of
the Soviet Union, there is, of course, no rational alternative but to
work out arrangements for living with them, arrangements which are more
advantageous to both. This means a number of specific things: encour-
aging the process of change in the Communist world, while being damned
sure not to offer new opportunities they cannot resist. It means arms
control understandings, and preferably agreements. It means increasing

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efforts to block out of the conflict-zone new dimensions such as outer
space and the sea-bed. It means patient and serious efforts to move the
Soviets toward agreements on spheres, not of influence but of abstinence.
It means policies designed to bring Russia out of Asia and into Europe,
particularly as the Chinese supply the momentum with a kick from the rear.

Objective number four is _to bring Communist China into the world community; What this involves is finding carrots and sticks to discourage, in the first instance, Chinese truculence which makes her an unsettling force on the periphery of Asia. Insofar as China becomes expansionist in pursuit of territories formerly under Chinese control, this too must be discouraged. More positively, deliberate American moves are necessary to demonstrate that tolerable relations with us do not involve dismantling the Communist regime, and that there is a role for China in the UN and in arms negotiations._

But most of all to be kept in mind is China as a catalyst for some-
thing to be feared more than China lobbing nuclear weapons into San
Francisco, that is, China as a catalyst for a fundamental conflict between
the races. The awakening of non-white races to all the implications of
power and affluence which have long been the monopoly of white Western
European man is an enormously potent force in the world, one which China
hopes to use as a lever by which to convert great weakness to great strength.

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(d

The U.S. must assign a high priority to efforts aimed at preventing this massive crystallization of latent racial antagonism from ever taking place. This means above all resolving our racial problems at home. It also bears directly on the related problem of racism and colonialism in the southern half of Africa.

There probably would be little argument with the overall U.S. objective here of averting a worldwide racial conflict. But when it comes to specifics, South Africa bores American planners these days. American investors are still receiving substantial returns on their investments in South Africa, and American industry is building up there. South African armed forces look very efficient. All in all, it looks pretty secure.

It is true that the fuse on South Africa is probably not a very short one. But it is instructive to go back to predictions made about other racial-colonial type problems over the last two decades. To give just one example, in 1958 I was told by a high official of the Belgium Foreign Office that his government had a 75-year plan for the independence of the Congo. He was persuaded that if the UN and the U.S. would just leave Brussels alone, it would all go swimmingly. Within 24 months a dangerous local conflict was taking place in the Congo that in important ways involved the United States and the Soviet Union, with a direct clash averted largely because UN peacekeeping was used.

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I myself cannot give serious credence to predictions that assume
continuingly stable situations where large majorities are suppressed,
and racial minorities run the show; I just do not think the rest of the
20th century is going to look like that. Thus, I see a powder train
burning in the southern half of Africa, starting with Rhodesia, running
through Angola down to Monzambique, through Southwest Africa into South
Africa. At the end of that powder train, if present conditions continue,
one can picture a cataclysmic do-or-die stand by the white man in Southern
Africa as his only remaining alternative, accompanied by a blood bath,
and grim choices indeed for the United States of America to have to face.
The objective of policy must be to see that it never comes to that, which
means working out our own preferred alternative for solutions. I do
not see the alternatives coming from either extreme as of any value, and
I do not think there is much choice but to develop something which will
appeal to moderate white men and indeed to all reasonable men.

Developing a new relationship with Europe is number six on my list,
which would no doubt horrify those fixated on Europe. U.S. planners
and doctrine-makers are invariably torn between looking East and looking
West. Some Asia-firsters like to quote Secretary Seward's predictions
that the Pacific region would become the great theatre of events in the
world, or Henry Adams' statements that the control of the world would
depend on what he called the inevitable struggle for the control of

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China. Europe-firsters, on the other hand, can profitably quote George Ball, who writes in his book that a sense of priority dictates that we regard our vital interests as most heavily concentrated in the world's North Temperate Zone.

I believe that the boundaries of future U.S. relationships with Europe are determined, not by the seventh floor of the State Department, or the White House basement, or ISA, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, but first and foremost by the Soviets, and secondly by the changing European picture of the world. I happen to think that a massive rebirth of NATO represents a basic misreading of the meaning of Soviet intentions in invading Czechoslovakia. The larger trends at work can be summed up as: growing Western European independence of the United States; growing-but limited-Eastern European efforts to become part of Europe once again; and growing Soviet confusion and ambivalence as between conflicting Russian objectives. If there ever were internal contradictions, they are in the Soviet Union, and they bid fair to generate a decade-long series of collisions, revolutions, and power struggles within Russia's European empire. We can influence all these processes only marginally. But our first order of business is to understand them better than our NATO-expanders, our Congress, and both our leftists and rightists appear to.

Surely related to this process is our major middle-range objective of *progress toward the long-range goal of transforming international society into true community*. It is significant that the talk about

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world government does not just come from the peace camp. I hear much
the same utopian propositions from some of my friends in uniform. They
often say "Of course I'm for world government--if we had a different
kind of world, if it weren't for the Russians, if it weren't for the
Chinese, etc." I think that for some doves and some hawks, it is the
same dream or myth that they tend to escape into. It is a particu-
larly safe dream to escape into since you know you can wake up from it
and do not have to do anything about it. As for me, the more I think
about a unitary world government in any kind of world, the less I like
it.

I think that John F. Kennedy's rhetoric of "making the world safe for diversity" might be a more appropriate statement of the American goal than making the world safe for any kind of uniformity, even our own. I recognize that, even as many Americans wish us to appear much smaller than we are, our influence is spreading. Senator Fulbright (who says a number of things I do not like), correctly points out that one reason Americans around the world act as though they own the place is that they practically do. It would be possible someday to have what some people talk about as a Pax Americana. But it does not look good to me. There are problems of tyranny and civil war on a world scale, and above all the suppression of diversity for the sake of uniformity, that I do not like.

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What we should be seeking is progress toward a transformation into community. This is a long road, constructed of some inexorable political logic. One cannot have enforceable international law without some form of government. One cannot have even limited world order without consensus. One cannot have genuine consensus without something more fundamental than an agreement that you do not all want to be blown up, which at times is the only consensus that seems to have existed between us and some others. By this logic you cannot have world peace forces, which we called for in our early disarmament proposals in a rather extreme way, without a whole elaborate political structure on which to rest, without so to speak ascending the escalation ladder of political truth and reality. For our times, I see this process as one of purposeful search in order to identify and work with what I would call "fragments of true community," in order that we may pass safely through a period without institutions it normally takes centuries to evolve.

This task cannot be allowed to remain in the category of safe long-term rhetoric. It is a tired cliché that political wisdom runs well behind the pace of technological change. Are we totally at the mercy of that process? We may all be saved by technology; but we may all be killed by technology. I think we can be saved by technology if we turn the relationship on its head and see the space dimension, the oceans, the communications revolution, the pollution problem--if we see all of these as opportunities to build sound, functional, international

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structures. That is the kind of planning I like. It is precisely the
reverse of the usual justification for, say, the space program: "We
must do something new because we have a big organization already created;"
or "We must keep INTELSAT the way it is because of the big American
investment"--or "because we like to run it." I do not think this is a
very intelligent way to match up vital national objectives to opportunity
areas. The problem of uses of the deep seas and sea-beds represents to
me a new opportunity both to implement our objective of not spreading
the arms race, and our objective to use new areas purposefully for
cooperation to achieve consensus, and thus a piece of community.

My economist friends would be, I think, unhappy to see so far down
the list the objective of *finding new strategies for modernization for
the LDC's*. But something has happened. It has now become fashionable
to say that the process has failed. Some planning circles seem to
believe that the Third World does not matter as much as we thought it
did, particularly since it is not likely to make it in a big way. As
Herman Kahn implies in his projections to the year 2000, "White gets
richer, and black gets relatively poorer." The gap is opening rather
than closing. And the U.S. constituency for foreign aid has virtually
disappeared.

We have to start from scratch again on this matter. We must ask
why the United States cares anyway, and how much. The reasons for
caring are deeply rooted in self-interest. They specifically refer right
back to my objective number two concerning "small wars." That is,

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I suggest, where one finds the rationale for mounting generous aid programs; for patterns of transferring technology; and for strategies of building up balanced military defense structures in those countries. I think in doing this we must not "waffle" from year to year because they like us or they do not like us. I think we have been immature, even childish in our approach to the development process. I think we ought to act the way the French acted toward us when we were being thorny, difficult, resentful, poor, and demanding in the first quarter of the 19th century.

The reason for this nation to care is of course more than that. It was La Rochefoucault who coined that marvelous aphorism which says, "We are all strong enough to bear the suffering of others." But for the richest nation in the world there is a humanitarian charge which I have never heard an American deny.

Finally, we need to capture the technological revolution before it captures us. Maybe just because I work at M.I.T., I feel in constant danger of being captured. I feel it is time to look again at the relationship between science and society. I remind you that we have become more mature and sophisticated about the balance between military and political, and have moved away from the self-defeating American war-time view that only military objectives were important, while "politics"

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was somehow a dirty word and diplomacy irrelevant. I think we have
learned a lot about this, but we are now at a place where the scientists
say, "Politics is dirty. Hands off. Science for its own sake." This
will not do for the kind of technological society we are becoming, even
apart from the possibility that scientific inventions may kill us all.

I have already suggested a new possible relationship between the
space program and U.S. international political objectives. There is a
range of other action areas where the purposeful application of techno-
logy can help us to achieve our goal of survival in a form in which we
can enjoy some of our values. I think the mobilization of science and
technology to deal with city problems is one of the most promising
interfaces that has been devised. Other areas are population, food
supply, air, power, and water. Mind you, I do not want to see us turn
our scientists into a group of political finks: we do not want Lysenkos
who are going to corrupt science. But it simply will not do anymore to
be told that we must chronically be the victims of politically mindless
choices that were made 10 years ago in the laboratory or on the drawing
board.

How do we do all these things? Happily, my time is up. Happily
too, I was just given a very broad bursh to paint with here. The details,
tactics, and the implementation are left to you who will carry important
official responsibilities.

But the best tactical advice I know is that summed up by C. L. Sualzberger. I am sure you remember his four cardinal rules for policymaking. The first is, always keep the initiative. The second is, always exploit the inevitable. The third is, always stay in with the outs. The fourth is, never get caught between a dog and a lamp post.

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