Power, Principles & Policy

AMERICA THE VINCIBLE (306 pp.)--Emmet John Hughes--Doubleday ($3.95).

Is the stance of the U.S. in world affairs merely that of preserver of the status quo? Is U.S. foreign policy enmeshed in illusion, maladroit in method and impotent to achieve its stated ends?

Poised between exhortation and rebuke, America the Vincible offers unflattering answers to these and other significant questions. Author Emmet John Hughes, chief of correspondents in Time Inc.'s Foreign News Service, and sometime (1952 campaign, 1953, and 1956 campaign) speechwriter for Dwight Eisenhower, clearly hopes to get his fellow citizens to face the errors of the past so that they may grapple more knowingly with the realities of the future. Paradoxically, the book's existence seems to refute some of its charges. If the great debate on America's international aims had sunk to "a stammering of scarcely sensible noises," as Author Hughes asserts, he would have no audience to address. If latter-day U.S. foreign policy had failed as persistently as Author Hughes argues it has. there would be no great expectations to invoke or disappoint, either at home or abroad.

Waves of Myth. As Hughes sees it. American diplomacy, especially under the late John Foster Dulles, failed in three major ways: 1) Pursuing desirable but impracticable aims. Example: advocating "liberation" of the Eastern Europe satellites. 2) Pursuing contradictory aims. Example: aiding rebel Indonesian army officers while maintaining ostensibly amicable relations with President Sukarno. 3) Equating mere proclamation with policy. Example: the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Middle East, an attempt to scare off Soviet infiltration that, in Author Hughes's opinion, failed.

Too often, as Hughes sees it, waves of popular illusion have swamped U.S. statecraft. For example, since war is linked with force. U.S. folklore arbitrarily divorces the reality of power from the politics of peace. Yet, Hughes argues: "Power plus principles equals policy." Other "myths" Author Hughes finds damaging: the notion that a free society is intrinsically strong, a tyranny intrinsically weak; that economic progress assures political stability; that any division of nations is between good and evil.

Peter Piperisms. The national fear of secret diplomacy has become "suspicion of any diplomacy." This, in turn, lies at the core of what Hughes regards as the greatest U.S. diplomatic shortcoming of the past decade, the "evading" of direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. Author Hughes seems to find Soviet diplomatic maneuvers venturesome, flexible and imaginative, however brutal, and American diplomacy uninventive. bumbling and myopic, however decent. He pays ungrudging respect to the Marshall Plan and U.S. intervention in Korea and Lebanon, but he dismisses the concepts of "liberation." "containment" and "massive retaliation" as semantic pacifiers.

America the Vincible couches its philippics in an aphoristic style of baroque density, alliteratively peppered with Peter Piperisms, e.g., "Many myths thus made the marvelous mirage." But its basic message is simple and fervent: the U.S. must think its way through to the right answers, for "our nation lives under no benign dispensation from such tragedy as has tormented and broken empires of past ages."

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