THE U.S. & WORLD OPINION

PUBLIC OPINION, said Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, "is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs." If Peel had such low regard for public opinion, it is easy to imagine how he would have felt about "world opinion." He would have denied that any such thing existed, or, if it did exist, that it had any business interfering with the sovereign actions of the British Empire.

That was a century and a half ago. Since then, the British Empire has expired (whether it could have prolonged its life by a slightly higher regard for world opinion is debatable), and the U.S. has assumed the place of leadership in the West. Yet the U.S. is far more concerned about how the world judges its actions than was Britain, or indeed any other nation in history.

A significant part of the U.S. Government's time is taken up with assessing, answering and trying to influence world opinion. Whether he likes it or not--and there are signs that Lyndon Johnson likes it less and less--the President of the U.S. finds himself engaged in an almost constant dialogue not only with domestic but also with foreign opinion. American columnists, editorialists, professors and pulpiteers tirelessly invoke world opinion as if it were a faceless, raceless, nationless judge brooding over every action of mankind. Officials keep worrying about how any given U.S. move might be regarded "in the light of world opinion . . . in the struggle for men's minds."

This U.S. concern springs from various causes. It is not merely that, as the cliche has it, "Americans want to be loved"; deeply accustomed at home to government by consent, the U.S. cannot quite visualize international leadership without consent. During the Age of Reason, when humanity at large was deemed capable of holding a collective view, the Declaration of Independence pledged a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." At the time, this meant not merely listening but telling--giving the world a forthright, stirring statement of the American purpose.

In the 19th century this attitude was tempered by a nagging sense of social and cultural inferiority to Europe, which caused Americans to proclaim their indifference to foreign judgments while in fact they were listening for them all the time. Although this uncertainty gradually faded (not that it has totally disappeared yet), the U.S. after World War II still felt uneasy as a world power and was sensitive to the charge that it had "less experience" than older nations. The cold war often seemed like a contest for the allegiance of the uncommitted, and in the '50s and '60s, the U.S. anxiously waited to hear what the "emerging nations" wanted done on the international scene. World opinion could become a domestic political issue; in the 1960 campaign, John Kennedy managed to get political mileage out of the hard-to-prove charge that during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration, U.S. prestige abroad had reached a new low. Americans still seem to agree with Woodrow Wilson's dictum that "opinion ultimately governs the world."

Information & Impulses

Americans know that their own public opinion, free and relatively well-informed, is a vital and valid part of the American system; they often mistakenly assume that this quality of public opinion exists everywhere else.

Men and women the world over share certain fears, feelings and aspirations--the urge for survival, for a better standard of living, for racial, national and individual equality and freedom. Such impulses play no mean part, and can be played upon in no mean way, in international disputes--but they do not constitute opinion. The vast majority of the world's peoples are too engrossed in workaday pursuits, too illiterate or ill informed, to have a specific view, or any view at all, on the rights and wrongs of Viet Nam, or Santo Domingo, or Cyprus, or Berlin.

In Communist countries, audible opinion is still almost entirely party and state opinion. In much of Asia and Africa, the level of information and independent thought is no higher. Indians, for example, have an almost superstitious respect for anything they see in print. In Japan, the largely anti-Western intellectuals are deferred to like a priestly caste. In Africa, informed opinion hardly exists; it is made by a handful of educated or semi-educated officials and chiefs talking loudly to each other. Competent observers noted that crowds parading in one East African city last winter against the Stanleyville rescue operation had no firm idea of what their demonstration was all about; they could as easily have been paraded by their leaders against importing pineapples or votes for women.

Thus, most of what passes for world opinion is created by governments, frequently by a controlled press, and by small, more or less intellectual elites. Even in Western Europe, many of the most quoted views do not represent responsible officials. Often they are merely Peel's "newspaper paragraphs" amplified by modern communications, involving instant judgments that are all too often frozen into permanent attitudes.

Facts & Myths

A prime example of the hasty and hysteric quality that sometimes infects world opinion is provided by the recent "poison gas" furor. A misleading news-agency dispatch was picked up and escalated by left-wing propaganda into a lurid charge of atrocity by the U.S. against an Asian people. Supposed experts, from chemistry professors to the British Foreign Secretary, condemned the U.S. without checking the evidence; in fact, the "poison" was a harmless tear gas widely used by other countries, including Britain, for riot control. Yet weeks and months after this was made clear, critics were still berating the U.S. for using "outlawed" chemical warfare. During the Korean War, the Red Chinese perpetrated a similar falsehood by accusing the U.S. of using bacteriological warfare. More recently, after the Stanleyville parachute drop, stories were spread that the white rescuers had massacred large numbers of blacks--actually, it was the Congolese rebels who killed about 200 whites and thousands of fellow blacks.

Right now, world opinion is particularly agitated about U.S. bombers over North Viet Nam and U.S. Marines in Santo Domingo. The outcry naturally is led by the Communists in their press and in the U.N. There are strident echoes from most of the neutralists, and even among allies, the doubters of American action occasionally seem noisier than its defenders. Playing to the opinion of the "third world," Charles de Gaulle attacks U.S. intervention in the Caribbean--conveniently forgetting that he himself sent paratroopers to Gabon last year when anarchy threatened in the former French colony. President Johnson's domestic critics cite foreign critics in order to bolster their case; foreign critics in turn cite the domestic critics, a practice that opinion analysts call "incestuous interquote."

Such tribulations are not new. Ever since World War II, the U.S. has had to contend with certain immutable facts and myths. The most basic fact is that the U.S. is the world's richest and most powerful nation and is therefore automatically blamed for almost anything it does. Another fact is that the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb; as a result it has been constantly attacked by Communists and neutralists as the world's foremost nuclear menace, although it is the Russians who for years blocked any system of nuclear inspection. Even after the partial test-ban treaty, which Red China and France refuse to sign, a double standard remains; there is precious little neutralist disapproval today of Chinese nuclear tests.

Among the great myths is the idea--discredited but not eradicated--that Communism is somehow progressive and the champion of the colonial underdog, while the U.S. is ranked with the "imperialists." Among the subsidiary myths is the notion that U.S. prosperity depends on the continuance of the cold war.

Propaganda & Illusion

Not that Americans are without their own myths and delusions about the rest of the world; these have ranged from isolationism in the '30s to naive global hopes during World War II, from a false distrust of democratic socialism to alternately overdramatizing and underestimating the Communist threat. Within the framework of facts and figments, the U.S. has used world opinion over the past decade to support both sound and unsound policies. Leading examples:

sb SUEZ. The sudden attack by British, French and Israeli forces on Egypt in 1956 had been triggered by Nasser's highhanded seizure of the Suez Canal. But the Communists, the Arabs and other Afro-Asian anticolonialists, even Britain's Commonwealth partners assailed "aggression," no matter how Nasser might have provoked it. The U.S. sided with the anti-Suez forces in the name of world opinion, but perhaps also fearing Russian military intervention. In the end, the attack was called off, the embittered Anglo-French-Israeli forces were pulled back, and Nasser retrieved all he had lost. The credit the U.S. earned from the Afro-Asians, however, was quickly exhausted.

sb IKE'S U2. After the Russians captured Gary Powers and his wrecked U-2 plane in 1960, skillful Soviet dribbling of information led the U.S. from clumsy denial of the aerial surveillance to an awkward admission by President Eisenhower. As a result, Ike's summit with Khrushchev fell through; Moscow parlayed the incident into a propaganda spectacular by putting Powers on public trial. The U.S. called off further U-2 flights over Russia as a concession to disapproving opinions, although all major powers would use the same kind of airborne espionage if they had the means, and could get away with it.

sb BAY OF PIGS. This fiasco of the new Kennedy Administration in April 1961 is blamed in retrospect by State Department officials on a storm of "angry world opinion" that scared off the U.S. Government from carrying through the overthrow of Castro it had secretly planned. Yet some of the U.S.'s staunchest allies were (unofficially) more appalled by the U.S.'s display of faint heart.

sb SOVIET MISSILES IN CUBA. Hardly 18 months later, and certainly as a consequence of U.S. indecision at the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy Administration again faced the problem of the Sovietization of Cuba, this time in infinitely more dangerous circumstances. Having learned a lesson about opinion, Kennedy did not hesitate to go to the brink to get the Russian missiles out of Cuba; but he gave Khrushchev a face-saving exit through the U.N. decompression chamber. The onlooking world, though nervous, on the whole approved the U.S. action. Kennedy passed up the opportunity of invading Cuba and destroying the Castro regime--not primarily because of world opinion but because of his calculation of the risks.

sb THE CONGO. When Patrice Lumumba was murdered by his own native political enemies, a worldwide propaganda drive turned the unstable and squalid rabble-rouser into a martyr and tried to pin the deed on the CIA. Attempting to woo the Afro-Asian segment of world opinion, the Kennedy Administration joined the clamor against Lumumba's former enemies and supported the U.N. war against Moise Tshombe's Katanga province. Since then the U.S. has switched, is supporting Tshombe as the man who can conceivably avert chaos in the Congo and who so far has been successful in suppressing the Red-backed rebels. While nationalist African opinion still fulminates against this U.S. policy, a great many African leaders have quietly begun to accept it.

From such examples certain axioms emerge: 1) there is no single world opinion, but many different ones, conditioned by blocs, regions, self-interest and shibboleths; 2) all sides use world opinion to bolster their own preconceived ideas; 3) while some memories linger longer than others, world opinion subsides quickly in the face of accomplished fact, and it does not argue indefinitely with success; 4) the free world, because it is free, is more sensitive to adverse opinion than the Communists.

While the Russians obviously prefer favorable opinion when they can get it, and on one or two occasions have been swayed by overwhelming opposition in the U.N., they are massively indifferent to criticism, as they have shown when they put up the Berlin Wall and suppressed the Hungarian revolution. The Chinese demonstrated an even greater indifference when they conquered Tibet and invaded India.

The Communist propaganda apparatus is busy nowadays with intramural squabbling between the Russians and Chinese, but its main purpose remains: to discredit the free world, through ideological friends and dupes as well as through agents. It enlists a network of ostensibly independent papers, stoops to clumsy but temporarily harassing forgeries usually purported to be U.S. documents showing American diplomats engaged in subversion of neutralist governments. It can spark ventures like the protest movement against the execution in 1953 of the convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were able to claim in one of their last petitions that "never have more people, in all lands and all walks of life, been so shaken as by our imminent fate."

The greatest danger lies not in outright propaganda but in the power of illusion. A large part of world opinion still insists that John Kennedy was the victim of an extremist plot. Again and again, with or without help from Red propaganda, such terms as "imperialism," "intervention," "exploitation" and "fallout" produce outbursts of unreasoning prejudice. Semantics run wild, or merely sloppy. Such labels as "mercenaries" for the government soldiers in the Congo and "constitutionalists" for the rebels in the present Dominican crisis, are picked up and repeated, subtly changing the climate of opinion.

Listening & Leading

"A great country worthy of the name," De Gaulle is said to have remarked recently, "does not have any friends." That is not the American definition of greatness. The State Department's Harlan Cleveland makes a shrewd and significant distinction between popularity and public support: the U.S. does not need to court popularity, but it wants and often needs support. It is easy to become cynical about world opinion and to conclude that it should be ignored completely. But to do so implies that world opinion is always against the U.S. and that the U.S. can do nothing about it--which is false.

The U.S. itself is certainly a leading maker of world opinion. Other nations knowingly accept American techniques and, sometimes unwittingly, American values. The U.S. can and does argue its case with the force of freedom's reason. Yet U.S. institutions can also be baffling to international opinion, and U.S. policies are often inconsistent. In the spirit of a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," the U.S. perhaps needs to announce its purposes more clearly and then act on them fearlessly. In influencing the minds of men, it is more important to state than to reply, to proclaim the truth than to refute accusations. The U.S. should not be afraid to seem to bend with world opinion if doing so is in its pragmatic interest. But above all, the U.S. should never truckle to adverse opinion, or use it as an excuse to pursue bad policies, or be untrue to itself in order to gain approval.

The essence of leadership is to know when to ignore opinion, when to accede to it--and when to try to marshal it. In his extremely earthy style--which at times still shocks world opinion--Lyndon Johnson expressed this idea recently as he was sitting through a Viet Nam briefing by State Department experts. Persistent, fretful warnings cropped up concerning a better image for the U.S. and its Chief Executive in the eyes of the world. The President took it for a while, then blurted out: "You guys are so busy saving my face, you're going to lose me my pants!"

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