CONCLUSION: THE WISDOM OF AN OPEN DOOR FOR REVOLUTIONS
The tradition of all past generations weighs like an Alp upon the brain of the living.
KARL MARX
It is not my duty as a historian to predict the future, only to observe and interpret the past. But its lesson is clear enough; we have lived too long out of contact with reality, and now the time has come to rebuild our lives.
CALLITRAX, HISTORIAN OF LYS, In the City and
the Stars, BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Yes, strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
MARLOW TO STEIN, IN Lord Jim,
BY JOSEPH CONRAD
The students, teachers, and other dissenters who initiated and led the movement to end the war in Vietnam understood that the pattern of intervention was ineradicably entwined with other inequitable and destructive aspects of American society. Many had been early foot soldiers in the on-going battle to end racism and discrimination against Black Americans. Others had concentrated on the problem of poverty, or on the stultification of high school and college education. A few were dedicated pacifists, and some had given much effort to help workers improve their lives. Most of them had become aware, whatever their age, of three other deeply disturbing developments in America: the steady loss by the individual of his ability to self-determine himself in postwar society; the loss of almost all sense—as well as the reality—of a community in an increasingly managed and manipulated system; and the decline of a commitment to being moral (or, conversely, the increasing hypocrisy).
The recognition of those failures gradually created, during the long and difficult struggle to end the war, a conviction that existing American society had to be changed. Otherwise there would be more interventions and more deterioration at home. Not all of the millions who came to oppose the war in Vietnam developed that kind of understanding or commitment. But many did come to sense the necessity of going beyond the question of ending the war. As a result, the beginnings of a true social movement appeared for the first time since the turn of the twentieth century.
Much of that process was reinforced by the continuing success of revolutionary movements throughout the world. The dedication and determination of the Vietnamese to truly self-determine their own lives forced many Americans to confront the implications of trying to sustain traditional American foreign policy. They sensed, even if they did not fully understand, that such a course would involve its own kind of drastic changes in the United States. It would mean ever less freedom and ever more enforced work and privation. It would mean living with the death of friends and loved ones as a routine experience. And it might well mean the death of all.
Even in its existing unfocused and unorganized state, that awareness among the citizens first forced the elite to manifest a new degree of caution and circumspection. During that phase of its response, the elite clothed its maneuvers and manipulations in the traditional rhetoric of victory for a free and peaceful world. Then the reality of massive death-counts in Vietnam and the increasing strength of the opposition in the United States forced President Johnson to withdraw from the election of 1968. Finally, the growing recognition of the true nature of the terror began to affect the thinking of some erstwhile imperial-minded leaders (like Robert F. Kennedy) and led others (like President Richard M. Nixon) to attempt to stabilize the existing empire by cutting losses in Vietnam and by negotiating an interim modus vivendi with Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and various other revolutionary governments.
Hence the meaning of the title of this chapter has changed since I wrote it in December 1961. Then I was primarily concerned, having tried to show how History offers a way of learning, to do what I could to break the terrifying momentum toward disaster that ultimately carried us into Vietnam. Thus I emphasized the methods by which we could change our traditional ways of dealing with other peoples. I see no reason to alter anything in the list of suggestions I offered at that time, except to drop the device of the rhetorical question.*
It is time to stop defining trade as the control of markets for our surplus products and control of raw materials for our factories. It is time to stop depending so narrowly—in our thinking as well as in our practice—upon an informal empire for our well-being and welfare.
It is time to ask ourselves if we are really so unimaginative that we have to have a frontier in the form of an informal empire in order to have democracy and prosperity at home. It is time to say that we can make American society function even better on the basis of equitable relationships with other people.
It is time to stop defining trade as a weapon against other people with whom we have disagreements. It is time to start thinking of trade as a means to moderate and alleviate those tensions—and to improve the life of the other people.
It is time to stop trying to expand our exports on the grounds that such a campaign will make foreigners foot the bill for our military security. It is time instead to concern ourselves with a concerted effort to halt and then cancel the armaments race.
It is time to stop saying that all the evil in the world resides in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. It is time to admit that there is good as well as evil in those societies, and set about to help increase the amount of good.
It is time to admit that our own intelligence reports mean that the Russians have been following a defensive policy in nuclear weapons. It is time to take advantage of that attitude on their part, break out of our neurosis about a Pearl Harbor attack, and go on to negotiate an arms control measure.
It is time to admit, in short, that we can avoid living with communist countries only by embarking upon a program that will kill millions of human beings. It is time, therefore, to evolve and adopt a program that will encourage and enable the communist countries to move in the direction of their own Utopian vision of the good society as we endeavor to move in accordance with our own ideals.
Nor do I see any reason to modify the following passages:
Once freed from its myopic concentration on the cold war, the United States could come to grips with the central problem of reordering its own society so that it functions through such a balanced relationship with the rest of the world, and so that the labor and leisure of its own citizens are invested with creative meaning and purpose. A new debate over the first principles and practices of government and economics is long overdue, and a statement of a twentieth-century political economy comparable to The Federalist papers would do more to enhance America’s role in the world than any number of rockets and satellites. The configuration of the world of outer space will be decided on the cool green hills of earth long before the first colonizing spaceships blast free of the atmosphere.
Having structured a creative response to the issue of democracy and prosperity at home, the United States could again devote a greater share of its attention and energy to the world scene. Its revamped foreign policy would be geared to helping other peoples achieve their own aspirations in their own way. The essence of such a foreign policy would be an open door for revolutions. Having come to terms with themselves—having achieved maturity—Americans could exhibit the self-discipline necessary to let other peoples come to terms with themselves. Having realized that “self-righteousness is the hallmark of inner guilt,” Americans would no longer find it necessary to embark upon crusades to save others.
In this fashion, and through a policy of an open door for revolutions, Americans would be able to cope with the many as yet unknown revolutions that are dependent upon peace for their conception and maturation. Only in this way can either the general or the specific tragedy of American diplomacy be transcended in a creative, peaceful manner.
To transcend tragedy requires the nerve to fail. But a positive effort to transcend the cold war would very probably carry the United States and the world on into an era of peace and creative human endeavor. For the nerve to fail has nothing at all to do with blustering and self-righteous crusades up to or past the edge of violence. It is instead the kind of quiet confidence that comes with and from accepting limits, and a concurrent understanding that accepting limits does not mean the end of existence itself or of the possibility of a creative life. For Americans, the nerve to fail is in a real sense the nerve to say—and mean—that we no longer need what Turner called “the gate of escape” provided by the frontier. It is only in adolescence or senility that human beings manifest a compulsive drive to play to win. The one does not yet know, and the other has forgotten, that what counts is how the game is played. It would actually be pathetic rather than tragic if the United States jumped from childhood to old age without ever having matured. Yet that is precisely what it will do unless it sloughs off the ideology of the Open Door Policy and steps forth to open the door to the revolutions that can transform the material world and the quality of human relationships.
Perhaps it is by now apparent to the reader that there is a basic irony involved in this conception and interpretation of American foreign policy as tragedy. This irony arises from, and is in that sense caused by, the truth that this essay is in two respects written from a radical point of view.
First, it is radical in that it seeks to uncover, describe, and analyze the character and logic of American foreign policy since the 1890s. It is therefore critical in the intellectual sense of not being content with rhetoric and other appearances, and of seeking instead to establish by research and analysis a fuller, more accurate picture of reality.
Second, it is radical in that it concludes from the research and reflection, that American foreign policy must be changed fundamentally in order to sustain the wealth and welfare of the United States on into the future. This essay recommends that the frontier-expansionist explanation of American democracy and prosperity, and the strategy of the Open Door Policy, be abandoned on the grounds that neither any longer bears any significant relation to reality.
This essay also points toward a radical but noncommunist reconstruction of American society in domestic affairs. And it is at this point that the irony appears: there is at the present time no radicalism in the United States strong enough to win power, or even a very significant influence, through the processes of representative government—and this essay rests on the axiom of representative government. Hence, ironically, the radical analysis leads finally to a conservative conclusion. The well-being of the United States depends—in the short-run but only in the short-run—upon the extent to which calm and confident and enlightened conservatives can see and bring themselves to act upon the validity of a radical analysis. In a very real sense, therefore, democracy and prosperity depend upon whether the New Frontier is defined in practice to mean merely a vigorous reassertion of the ideology and the policies of the past or to mean an acceptance of limits upon America’s freedom of action.
The issue can be stated as a very direct proposition. If the United States cannot accept the existence of such limits without giving up democracy and cannot proceed to enhance and extend democracy within such limits, then the traditional effort to sustain democracy by expansion will lead to the destruction of democracy.
We now know that the conservatives did not act upon a radical analysis. Yet the proposition remains true: that was the only way the disaster in Vietnam could have been avoided. And it remains true in the deeper sense that short-term palliatives devised from selected portions of the radical critique will serve at most to postpone—not avoid—further such terrors.
And so now we confront another irony. There is today the beginning of a social movement that could change America in a radical way, and thereby realize our most cherished ideals and aspirations. Hence we must recognize the wisdom of including in our outlook the idea of an open door for such a revolution in America.
Chile has demonstrated the possibility of choosing that course in a democratic election. Perhaps we Americans, whose votes have mattered increasingly less in recent decades, can restore the integrity of our own franchise through a similar display of self-determination.
* Which I used, despite my strong dislike of the form, in the hope of giving the general reader a sense of the relevance of History, and of engaging him in a serious reevaluation of his existing outlook.