Policy Without Purpose?

Into the ranks of dissenters to U.S. foreign policy steps a new recruit this week, armed with an old-fashioned philosophy and a newsman's restless mind. He is Max Ways, 54, longtime TIME senior editor (FOREIGN NEWS, NATIONAL AFFAIRS) and foreign correspondent. U.S. foreign policy, writes Ways in Beyond Survival (Harper; $4), is headed for a dead end. It is probably doomed to lose ground to the Communists in the realms of politics, economics and military affairs. The fault lies not with the policymakers but with the American people, because the U.S. has no wide-ranging sense of purpose.

Since the end of World War I, the principal aim of U.S. foreign policy, says Ways, has been to ensure the nation's survival. This limiting policy kept Franklin Roosevelt from moving ships and planes on Pearl Harbor eve because he thought the people would not understand warlike actions until "the aggressor" had struck the first blow. It led the U.S. to fight World War II under "the shamefully aimless policy banner of unconditional surrender,'' without any postwar aims. Today, as in Hitler's day. the U.S. is up against an enemy with a purpose, plan and even a sort of public philosophy that aims far beyond the mere survival to the kind of world the enemy wants. Meanwhile, Ways thinks that preoccupation with survival is preventing the U.S. from explaining its positive assets to the world, crippling thinking about what to do next, and straitjacketing U.S. policies in key areas, to wit:

MILITARY: U.S. military planners are forced to assume that the U.S. must suffer the first blow in any future war. This is basically a defensive strategy, keyed to what a lover of Westerns would recognize as the "virtue [of] drawing second and killing your man." It rests on a massive atomic counterblow--"one of the most unlimited and inhumane strategies ever devised by man." The ultimate peril of "massive retaliation," says Ways, is that the U.S. will become more and more reluctant to apply it to small incursions, be crowded more and more into a corner where nothing else is left. Ways, who wants no part of preventive war, would keep the strong forces of planes and missiles, but hope for military thinking that does not shrink from applying varying degrees of force to widely understood political objectives.

POLITICAL: Survival, as an end, confuses political purpose. For example, U.S. leaders had to try to explain the Korean war as a challenge to U.S. survival, with the result, says Ways, that "the public had no image of what the U.S. was trying to win," was thoroughly confused about objectives once the Reds were driven back across the 38th parallel. The Russians start with objectives that link both military and political planning and keep them closely coordinated. "We have whole categoric? of political objectives which our disordered ethics forbids us to defend by force."

ECONOMIC: The U.S. holds all the high cards in the world economic battle but loses too many tricks because it has no policy objectives beyond survival. One of capitalism's proudest achievements, foreign aid. should be building the foundations of the kind of orderly economic world that the U.S. wants, instead has lost its effect because it is understood as being essentially antiCommunist.

Trouble Without Communists. The greatest fault of survival as a basis for policy, Ways holds, is that it is helpless before a world crisis more basic than Communism. That crisis: disruption of world order by the explosive effects of technology. From atomic bombs to insect killers, technology's products and prospects--along with population growth--have produced expectations and excitements that are straining old political structures everywhere. "If Communism disappeared tomorrow, the world situation would still be one of great disorder," Ways writes. In this general seething, many a society "unable to deal with the fragmented chaos of disorder," turns toward Communism, which appears to be "a self-confident system with a plausible promise of coherence."

Ironically, if the U.S. would learn to understand its own achievements it would find that it knows more about a world in technological upheaval than any other nation. Ways believes. Its political system is based on limitation of governmental power and the acceptance of individual rights and responsibilities under the "Laws of Nature and Nature's God." This system has survived more violent technological changes than any other in the world. Projected internationally, the doctrine of strong but restrained power could be a base for a far-reaching U.S. foreign policy. Its core: construction of institutions of political order to further the rule of law in the world.

Ways acknowledges considerable U.S. achievement in postwar foreign policy--reviving Western Europe, backing Europe's Common Market, rebuilding Japan from an unrestrained technological juggernaut into a "truly constitutional government." But, he writes, "we will not be able to export [properly] the central American Proposition of strong but limited government until we recapture for ourselves a greater measure of its full and intense meaning. We cannot carry a message that we have forgotten."

Facts Without Knowledge. No political leader can propose any major change in policy, Ways writes, unless he recognizes a strong sense of purpose in the people. Leaders and people are--or should be--in a continual dialogue, says Ways. The people cannot be expected to make technical decisions (e.g., Is Polaris a better missile than Minuteman?), but they must make the broad moral judgments on which a nation's policy and purpose rest (e.g., Are there political objectives worth fighting for?). The people of the U.S.--and Western Europe as well--have precious little to say at this point of history because of the low state of the public philosophy, that pattern of "coherent thought connecting individual beliefs with political action." Without an operative public philosophy, "the top political leaders themselves will get detached from the central problem and lost in a jungle of unjudgeable means."

The Western public philosophy is a. shambles. Ways believes, for two principal reasons. First, modern thought has lost the sense of whole truths in a passion for fragmentation and the claim of science to a custody of "the only valid paths to knowledge." Secondly, the nation's intellectuals have lost touch with the magnificent heritage of Christian civilization that the founding fathers understood very well. The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to their new nation. They evidently foresaw a national purpose beyond survival ("lives'"), beyond mere national interest ("fortunes"), to an assumption by the nation and its citizens of moral restraint and responsibility under an immutable higher law ("sacred honor"). "We live or die as a society, we succeed or fail, with the idea of order and the idea of freedom and the idea of God intertwined," writes Ways. Unless this is recognized in a public philosophy, "we will be sleepwalking with instruments of destruction in our hands."

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