Possibly the most notable popular American reaction to our alliances with foreign countries is that we take them so much for granted. When a Secretary of State flies off to Paris for a NATO meeting or to Bangkok for one of SEATO, no newspaper bothers to tell its readers what the initials represent, for it assumes they know; a similar assumption is made regarding the purposes of the alliance. It is only in journals of the extreme right or the extreme left that the reasons for the existence of NATO are questioned, and that the public is warned about the dire consequences of thus interfering in those European affairs which are said not to be properly our concern. Yet this whole alliance development is scarcely more than a decade old, and many of the readers of this article—and by no means the oldest of them—can easily remember the days, only twenty years ago, when the typical American reaction was that no upright American statesman would have anything to do with Europeans, that the best thing to do when they fought another of the ever-recurring wars was to let them stew in their own juice, and that our misnamed “neutrality” laws would keep us from involvement. For Secretary of State Cordell Hull to have journeyed off to attend a meeting of peacetime allies was unthinkable until we stood on the brink of World War II—but now it is a subject of presumably witty comment when Secretary of State Dulles spends a few days in Washington between alliance meetings.
Alliances are so much a part of our contemporary international political scene that we tend to forget how really new they are, and how through most of our history we have regarded them with contempt or foreboding. We forget that between 1778 and 1800 we did have one alliance: the marriage of convenience with France, from which we extricated ourselves none too gracefully in 1800. It has a most distant sound to our ears when we recall that even as recently as World War I we refused, because of our anti-alliance posture, to ally ourselves with Britain and France; hence the term “Allied and Associated Powers” which described our relationship with them. We would associate, but not ally, ourselves with our friends. By now most of us have forgotten that in the early twenties we were so aggressively isolationist that our Department of State refused even to acknowledge receipt of letters from the League of Nations—so intense was our suspicion of the devious designs of the wily European diplomat. Dim is our recollection of the late thirties when thousands of American college students took the “Oxford Oath” en masse, thereby pledging themselves not to serve in any future war. We have forgotten the neutrality acts. We have little memory of the time when we were, personally and officially, isolationist and bitterly opposed even to “understandings” with European governments. It was all only a few years ago but, so greatly has our outlook changed, that all this seems to have occurred before the dawn of recorded history.
We now accept alliances for what they are: exceedingly useful—indeed essential—devices by which we enhance our own and our friends’ power position in a highly unstable world political order that lives under the threat of Soviet imperialism. On occasion, however, someone who learned his international relations at the knee of William Edgar Borah or the first Henry Cabot Lodge feels twinges of conscience for, as he may assert, we are, in following our present alliance policy, being false to the tradition of George Washington and are wilfully disregarding the sage advice of that wise man. We should, say these critics, withdraw from our “entangling alliances” (the phrase was Jefferson’s rather than Washington’s, though often wrongly attributed to the latter) and get back to first principles as enunciated in the Farewell Address of 1796. Now the Farewell Address, as has been aptly remarked by one of our foremost diplomatic historians, Thomas Bailey, is “one of the least read, most incorrectly quoted, and most widely misunderstood documents in American history.” This characterization is especially appropriate as applied to that person who appeals, as many isolationists do, to the Farewell Address to sustain them in their opposition to alliances.
As always in such cases it is a good idea to bypass the commentaries and to get back to the documents. Let us quote the precise words of the first President as he gave his fatherly admonitions to his fellow-countrymen. The portions of his speech most pertinent to this question of alliances are as follows:
“The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith:—Here let us stop.
“Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
“Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. . . .
“Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? . . .
“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world; . . .
“Taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies ...”
There are several noteworthy features about this Address. First, one is impressed by the sound common sense displayed by Washington here, as in so many other places. Surely one cannot dispute his suggestion that a young and struggling country should hoe its own row and not become involved in other peoples’ troubles, for it had enough and to spare of its own. Second, the advice relies on “our detached and distant situation” as enabling us to avoid unnecessary involvement. One needs no more than mention the letters ICBM to remind us that our situation is no longer detached and distant; as such conditions change, so must national policies. Third, and here we come close to the heart of the present matter: “it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world. . . . We may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” (Italics added.)
Thus it is apparent that Washington, far from being a doctrinaire isolationist as he is sometimes portrayed, actually occupied a far more moderate position, taking his stand on the firm ground of national self-interest and maintaining that although he could not favor permanent alliances, temporary ones might be very useful and altogether desirable. In other words, when we now practice an alliance policy, we are by no means being false to the memory of the revered Washington.
For that matter, one aspect of our policy which has been fairly consistently ignored by the isolationists among us is that, although they claim that our policy was isolationist until recent years, in fact it never has been. As has just been shown, Washington was no hundred percenter in this matter, and we have surely not been consistently isolationist with regard to Europe, as the dates 1917-1918 and 1941-1945 should recall to our minds. Furthermore, although we have (with considerable inaccuracy) described our European policy as isolationist, this has not been applied elsewhere. With regard to our other two areas of traditional major interest, our policies have customarily been described in terms of the Monroe Doctrine, applied mainly to Latin America, and the Open Door, applied to the Far East. Both cases have involved large elements of interventionism; no one claims we have been isolationist with regard to the Caribbean or the Pacific. Let us therefore have no more of this loose talk about our present alliance policy being false to the ideals of our heroes and our history.
In any case, any wise policy is properly based on as accurate as possible an appraisal of the appropriate manner of serving the national interest today and in the foreseeable future, regardless of what was done or said a century or two ago. Washington spoke in 1796, and we may assume that his humility was active enough to have impelled him to agree with the sense of Thomas Jefferson’s remarks about the Constitution of the United States:
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant—too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of the country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.”
Such observations can be generalized to apply to policies as well as to constitutions.
By way of contrast with the situation of not too many years ago, we now have eight formal alliances with a total of 42 different nations—to say nothing of the understandings that go with military aid and advisory groups or with our membership in various committees of the Baghdad Pact organization. At Rio de Janeiro in 1947 we started the present ball rolling by signing, along with twenty Latin American states, the Inter- American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance; in 1949 came the North Atlantic Treaty which now binds us to Canada and to thirteen European states; in 1951 the ANZUS pact allied us with Australia and New Zealand, and other treaties of the same year linked us with the Philippine Republic and with Japan; in 1953 we made a mutual defense treaty with Korea, which in 1954 we followed with one with Nationalist China and with the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty which added a partnership with Thailand and Pakistan, with which we had not previously been allied, and with France, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, with which we already had various other arrangements. All together, we are allied with twenty-one states in this hemisphere, thirteen in Europe, and eight in the Pacific-Asian area, and all of these alliances were concluded between the years 1947 and 1954.
An analysis of these eight treaties reveals several features held in common; there are pledges of consultation in times of emergency, and understandings to settle disputes peaceably; there are guarantees of mutual aid and self-help in all cases except the Japanese; there are stipulated geographic limitations on treaty application; and there are agreements to report action taken to the UN Security Council, and to cease as soon as that Council has itself acted successfully.
On the basis of their operative clauses, three types of treaties may be distinguished, varying from one another in the degree of mutual-assistance obligation assumed. One group includes only the Japanese treaty, which is fundamentally simply a bases and stationing of forces agreement, with mutual defense only implied; this is understandably a special case inasmuch as under the terms of the MacArthur constitution, Japan has no significant armed forces. The second group involves a somewhat stronger commitment, typified by Article IV of the Philippines treaty: “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its own constitutional processes.” The ANZUS, Korean, Chinese, and SEATO treaties are virtually identical to this in wording and in obligation assumed, with the exception that the last-named was subjected to an “Understanding of the United States of America” to the effect that the guarantee against aggression was understood to “apply only to communist aggression.”
The third type involves the most binding obligation, and is found in both the Rio and NATO pacts. The famed Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty provides that “the Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, . . . such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” But even this is not a thorough-going “Three Musketeers” type of engagement, for each party reserves the right to take “such action as it deems necessary” to repel or punish aggression; there is no hard-and-fast military guarantee.
Although it is nowadays generally assumed without much question that alliances are necessary under the strenuous conditions of modern international competition, it may be well to construct something in the nature of a bill of particulars. Why, indeed, does the most powerful nation on the face of the earth need allies? The short and incomplete answer is that, strong as we are, we still need help in important areas.
For one thing, we want allied manpower on our side and denied to our potential opponents. And as far as concerns military uses of that manpower, it is to be remembered (though often overlooked) that foreign manpower is far cheaper than American. Indeed, one principal argument for the granting of United States military assistance to other countries lies in the comparison between the costs to pay, feed, house, and clothe one military man for one year in various countries. In France the figure is $1,440; in Greece, $424; in Korea, $302; in Thailand, $245; and in Turkey, $240. These figures are to be contrasted with the cost in the United States: the relatively immense sum of $3,515, to which should be added a further sum of at least $3,000 to defray the costs of sending and maintaining a man overseas. Stated thus in merely dollars-and-cents terms, it is far cheaper, and thus far more considerate of the American taxpayer, to train allied manpower rather than our own.
In addition to manpower, we want allied geography on our side; we have A-bombs and H-bombs, and the planes to deliver them, but it is our allies who have most of the bases from which to launch them. The strength of the Strategic Air Command derives not alone from its mighty B-52’s and its highly skilled crews, but also from the large number of bases which not only facilitate counterattacks against any Soviet thrust, but by their very number and dispersal make far more difficult the task of any aggressor who might wish to knock them out in one fell swoop. The simple facts of physical geography dictate that as many as possible of these bases be scattered around in non-American territory.
The same principle applies to launching pads for IRBM’s, especially in the critical interval while the United States lacks adequate numbers of operational ICBM’s. This need was most graphically demonstrated in December, 1957, when we sought from our NATO partners the right to station IRBM’s on NATO territory; as yet we lacked the long-range missiles, but while the 1,500-mile type were in exceedingly short supply, those available were strategically of the utmost importance since their range allowed them to hit prime Soviet targets from launching sites in Western Europe—but not from the United States. Our utter dependence upon allies could hardly have been more graphically demonstrated than it was then; there arose the somewhat novel circumstance that instead of our protecting our allies incidentally to our own defense, as had previously been the case, here we were humbly begging our friends to allow us to protect ourselves by making use of their territory, and some of them flatly refused to have any part of it, largely out of fear that these launching platforms would be magnets attracting Soviet attacks and entailing possible nuclear obliteration. But in our view the point was simple and direct: we felt it essential, in our own immediate self-interest, to have bases on foreign soil, and this necessarily implied the possession of close allies. Even that possession did not guarantee bases, but most assuredly the bases would never be forthcoming in the absence of alliances.
Apart from the need for bases is our dependence on strategic raw materials. We have heard so much about the mineral wealth of the United States that we have dozed off and overlooked the fact that in numerous important respects we are in very fact a “have- not” nation. True, we have all the coal we can burn for hundreds of years to come. But the Mesabi range is not what it used to be, and we are importing steadily increasing amounts of iron ore from Canada and Venezuela. We have vast petroleum fields, but we are importing around fifteen percent of our requirements. The length of the federal government’s list of stockpiled materials is an index of the volume and intensity of our demand for minerals and raw materials which we must have but do not produce domestically in sufficient quantity.
Sometimes one is given the impression that we depend upon foreign sources only for coffee, cocoa, bananas, and other delectable but non-essential commodities. The lie is easily given to such an outlandish notion. In 1951, for instance, it was officially computed that the following were required in the production of one M-47 tank:
1,915 lbs. of chromium, of which 100% is imported
100 lbs. of tin, of which 100& is imported
520 lbs. of nickel, of which 99% is imported
950 lbs. of manganese, of which 93% is imported
6,512 lbs. of bauxite, of which 65% is imported
1 ,418 lbs. of copper, of which 42% is imported
Seven years later, similar figures coming from the Department of Defense pointed out that one jet plane required 3,659 pounds of chromium, 2,117 of nickel, 46,831 of bauxite, 2,309 of copper, and 436 of cobalt. No one in his right mind puts such imports in the same category of defense essentiality as coffee or bananas. Nor should we forget that, at least until very recently, we have been heavily dependent upon the Belgian Congo as our prime source of uranium ore and therefore of an essential ingredient of atomic armaments. The moral of these facts is clear: if we want such materials for ourselves and want also to deny them to a potential opponent, we must make political as well as economic arrangements with the countries within whose jurisdiction they are found, and in a large proportion of cases this involves a definite alliance.
These ideas can be put in yet another way, as illustrated by the following table, with its indications of population, area, and production of key commodities for the industrial age. Little study of it is necessary to convince ourselves that so long as we are united to the free world, we have the preponderance of the types of economic power here indicated, and that they are basic to military power. Conversely, if these resources of the free world were to be added, even in part, to those of the Soviet bloc, the United States would find itself in mortal danger. This is the basic reason why those people are so far off base who contend that it would be a matter of no concern to the United States even if the Soviet Union were to overrun Western Europe right up to the Atlantic Ocean. No concern to us? It would be the beginning of our end. Strong and wealthy as we are, we never dare forget that we have only six percent of the world’s population and land area, and that we are heavily dependent upon all manner of imported materials, not simply for luxuries, but for absolute minimal essentials. It is an unadorned fact of economic geography that the United States cannot live unto itself alone, however tantalizing the idea often is in view of the complications of contemporary international relations.
But while on the one hand alliances add to our strength and fill out our places of weakness, they also impose obligations and entail shortcomings. These are numerous, and often aggravating and frustrating, but it is essential that we behave like mature people and realize that roses have thorns and that not all days are sunny.
While the price of power is the leadership which we must supply, leadership cannot mean dictation—not in a world of sovereign states, some of which possess bases and minerals for which we may bargain but which we cannot command. Politically this implies a recognition that alliances involve diplomatic give-and-take, compromise, co-operation, and occasional yielding of stoutly-held points of view. Not all our allies share our political outlook. In our estimation, Nikita Khrushchev is Public Enemy Number One. But to many statesmen elsewhere he appears by no means so dangerous as Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Kai-shek, David Ben-Gurion, or Jawaharlal Nehru. Whose estimate is right and whose is wrong in such matters no one this side of the Pearly Gates can certainly judge; the point is that there are and presumably always will be honest differences of opinion between allies, and that no one of them can expect always to have his way. This we can with great facility admit as an abstract principle; it is obviously far more difficult when applied to concrete instances where, in our view, the right is all on our side, and to yield to a mulish ally is to jeopardize the security of all of us. Yet there is no escape from this situation, and we might as well reconcile ourselves to it.
There has been a real fear in recent years in some quarters that the United States was succumbing to what C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times has called “pactomania,” which is that aberration which drives a country into the negotiation of more and ever more alliances in the search for that elusive quality we call security. There is indeed a danger of overcommitting ourselves. Walter Lippmann and George Kennan have often warned against pursuing our national tendency to bite off more than we can chew, that is, to undertake more commitments around the world than we can hope to back up with our available economic and military power.
We must more closely gauge than in past the international obligations we assume, and match them up with the armed might presumptively available to guarantee them. Gone is the time when bravado or recklessness could permit us to tell Spain to stay out of this hemisphere as we did in 1823—when as a matter of fact our minuscule army and bath-tub navy could never, by themselves, have prevented such a reconquest. We who have so often chattered superficially about pulling British chestnuts out of the fire have not appreciated how many times Britain saved our chestnuts for us, as might well have been the case with the Monroe Doctrine. We are now preeminent in power, and can no longer lean so heavily on the British. And so it will be necessary in the future, far more than ever before, to curb our tendency to speak sternly while carrying a tiny stick. We must not wallow in what Denis Brogan—that wise, witty, and friendly Briton who knows more about America than most Americans do—has called “the illusion of American omnipotence.”
Gone also are the days when short-term, vacillating policies would suffice to protect our interests. On this point the public and Congress alike need a good deal of educating. We are coming to realize that a foreign aid policy which progresses by annual fits and starts is exceedingly inefficient and wasteful, though President Eisenhower has not yet been able sufficiently to overcome the traditional Congressional fear of executive power to permit the legislators to authorize and appropriate for a long-range aid program. One is reluctant to admit that the Russians are more efficient than we are, but we must concede that in the years since 1955 their foreign assistance programs have gained for them an immense amount of good will among the uncommitted countries and that if we are to compete successfully with them we will have to improve both the quality of our performance and the propaganda with which we publicize it.
There is in most of us a tendency to do a job, then wash our hands and retire to easy chair, pipe, and slippers. In the realm of military, as well as of foreign, policy, this is a luxury in which we cannot indulge ourselves. We may disagree with Secretary Dulles’ talk of “massive retaliation,” we may or may not go along with Henry Kissinger in the criticisms and proposals he made in his widely-discussed Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and we may not be at one regarding the long-range implications of rockets, guided missiles, and atomic arms. The one thing on which it is imperative that we do agree is on the necessity of subjecting all these and other developments and ideas to close and rational scrutiny.
We could save ourselves a vast amount of nervous energy by ceasing to be so disappointed at the evident meagerness or total lack of foreign gratitude for our aid programs. After all, the purpose of our foreign aid programs is not, as is so often alleged, to “win friends”; the Mutual Security Act states the aim simply and directly: “to promote the security of the United States.” If in the process of promoting our security we do good deeds for others, we can congratulate ourselves on our good fortune in being able to kill two birds with one stone, for as President Eisenhower has so often said, our policy should be one of enlightened self-interest. But our primary motive is the protection of our own security. If that end is served, we can “take the cash and let the credit go”; we should not really expect gratitude (however pleasant it might be) for doing good turns which were in fact mainly incidental to taking care of our own interests. Here again let us heed George Washington; he said in his Farewell Address:
“ ... it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another. . . . There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. ...”
The apparent success of the Soviet government with its economic aid programs of the last few years should impel us, if for no other reason, to rethink the problem of the relative proportions of military and economic aid. We must be aware that military aid, though highly acceptable to the recipient, may greatly antagonize another nation. An excellent illustration is aid to Pakistan: every rifle and every round of ammunition sent there is, in official Indian eyes, that much more assistance in a future campaign of Pakistani aggression against India over Kashmir; and aid sent to India would doubtless elicit a similar reaction in Pakistan. It is in part on such grounds as these that more than one critic has wondered whether SEATO’s gains outweighed its losses. This is of course in addition to the practical problem that as soon as we give one unit of aid to one country, its neighbors become disgruntled if they are not immediately given what they conceive to be their due; for documentation on this point, consult the complaints often uttered by Latin Americans that they are given far less than their fair share of United States largesse. The logical answer, of course, is that distribution of our aid is our business, and that we place it where we deem the need to be greatest; but this does not still emotional outcries and it ignores the nationalistic feelings which, however irrational, do in fact have major influence on international politics.
Because of problems of definition and of bookkeeping it is impossible to state accurately the proportions of our appropriations that go for military as contrasted with economic aid, but the official statement that they are in the ratio of three or four to one is good enough for our purposes. One can make a powerful argument to the effect that the ratio should be reversed, and economic aid given the lion’s share. For one thing, an effective Soviet propaganda point, incessantly repeated, is that the United States is an imperialistic warmonger propelled by Wall Street into violent conquest of other nations. We know that this is utter nonsense, but the important point is that illiterate and unsophisticated Arabs, Asians, and Africans do not.
Since late 1955 the Soviet Union has made immense political gains in the underdeveloped countries with its very attractive program of grants or low-interest loans for a wide variety of economic rather than military projects, and none of us has been able to think out a manner of countering the Soviet thrust more effectively than by beating the Kremlin at its own game. After all, at this point the Russians are apparently beating us at ours, for they are applying the economic-aid principles of our Marshall Plan with which we had such success in Western Europe and which we relegated to a poor second place under the impetus of Korean-war rearmament.
While much of the foregoing is critical of recent policy, it is intended to be constructively so. This is no time to take it easy and tell ourselves how great we are; neither is it safe to crack wise about “sputnik go home,” nor to moralize about the untrustworthiness and Machiavellian chicanery practiced by the Russians. We are playing for high stakes.