THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSCURITY

"I HAVE lived 78 years without hearing of bloody places 1 like Cambodia," said Winston Churchill some years before his death. "They have never worried me and I haven't worried them." This remark, recalled by the great man's physician, Lord Moran, was very Churchillian and very 19th century. It was the remark of a man who, despite a keen global vision, still thought it easy for the West to regard itself as the center of the world. To many of his era the periphery of that world lay somewhere in the jungle, well beyond the enclave of civilization. But yesterday's jungle is often today's battlefield. Nowadays, few sophisticated liberal experts on international affairs would regard any nation, even those known only to stamp collectors, as too distant or too obscure to matter.

Yet last week a sophisticated, liberal expert on international affairs came remarkably close to resuscitating the Churchillian view that distance lends disinterest. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kenneth Galbraith, the former U.S. Ambassador to India, was asked about Viet Nam. Said Galbraith: "I have said many times that if we were not involved there, I think that all of that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity that it richly deserves."

A New Principle

That remark might well be dismissed as an attempt at wit by a literate and witty professor. Galbraith, however, certainly did not consider it so. Later he added that--although he does not advocate direct U.S. withdrawal--Viet Nam is "a country which has not the slightest strategic importance." His neo-isolationism is less significant as a personal viewpoint than as a measure of a growing tendency among academics and other critics of U.S. policy to believe that Viet Nam is simply not very important to the U,S. It also reflects the feelings of a great many other Americans, who devoutly wish that Viet Nam were really unimportant, a place that need not be worried about.

Galbraith's remark evoked a time when the U.S. still spoke of "dark" corners in the world and even of entire "dark" continents. In fact, he seemed to suggest a new principle for evaluating countries or regions--a sort of sliding obscurity scale--without making it clear how it would be applied. The standards of obscurity are historically fickle. Czechoslovakia and Poland seemed fairly obscure to many Americans in the 1930s, but events there led to World War II. Greece was an off-Broadway tragedy after World War II until Harry Truman decided to commit U.S. power there to stop a Communist takeover. Today, obscurity may be gently, even favorably, applied to such non-countries as Andorra, such splinter countries as Sikkim. But Galbraith is breathtaking in classifying as obscure all of Southeast Asia, an area of nearly 1,500,000 square miles and 200 million people.

The unkindest critics have suggested that he basically considers only Americans and Europeans as non-obscure, yet criteria of skin or distance from the U.S. are obviously not on his mind; he admits, for example, that India should be defended by the U.S. if it were attacked. If, on the other hand, obscurity were to be defined by military or economic weakness, or by the lack of a stable government, most of Latin America and Africa would be very obscure indeed. Presumably they would not be worth serious U.S. attention. In hard fact, it is precisely the very weakness, instability or confusion in "obscure" nations that frequently requires involvement by a world power. Says Brandeis Professor John Roche: "Galbraith reminds me of the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado. He's got them on his list, and they'll none of them be missed--Viet Nam, Thailand, you name it. I guess what makes a country obscure is whether Ken Galbraith likes it or not."

Galbraith is not, of course, alone in the job of relegating nations to obscurity. Walter Lippmann believes that the U.S.'s principal spheres of influence are the Western Hemisphere and Europe, and suggests that the U.S. has no business on the mainland of Asia. Senator William Fulbright thinks much the same way; last week he generalized his sentiments into a wildly imprecise comparison, in which he bracketed American policy with the "overextension of power and mission" that brought about the fall of Athens, Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany.

Whatever the fallacies in such arguments, they do raise a serious question of priorities for the use of American power. Obviously, not all parts of the world are equally important to the U.S. Despite charges from the critics that Washington is indiscriminately anti-Communist and militaristic, the U.S. has in fact learned all about the new, different strains of Communism, and it has used a great variety of nonmilitary means against the methods of conspiracy, infiltration and revolutionary organization that Communism still commands. Sometimes, indeed, the U.S. seems to do best by doing nothing (although few ever know how much might have been done under cover). In the Middle East, for instance, relative U.S. aloofness in recent years may have actually helped local anti-Communist forces because the Communists could no longer claim that their opponents were American puppets or use U.S. intervention as an excuse to intervene themselves. Indonesia, a year after U.S. aid was cut off, seems to have moved on its own against Communism. But this is no argument for U.S. inaction. On the contrary: Indonesia began to right itself almost certainly because the U.S. moved firmly and decisively to stop the expansion of Communism in Southeast Asia.

On to Space

The nature and extent of each U.S. involvement must be determined separately. From World War I on, the U.S. has felt threatened when a hostile power established a hold on the western or eastern edge of Eurasia. "This is the instinctive reaction of this country," says a high Administration official. "This is what the country has in its gut." Adds Chicago University Professor Herman Finer: "The rule of foreign policy has always been that you move most firmly toward the nation which is potentially strongest and at present most hostile."

Today the U.S. is deeply involved in that principle in Viet Nam. It is not necessary to believe in the automatic working of the "domino theory" to conclude that the loss of Viet Nam would bring nearly intolerable Communist pressure on the whole of Southeast Asia. All serious strategists, including the Japanese before World War II, have realized that Southeast Asia is the hinge between India and the Far East. It is also at the moment the point of greatest tension between the U.S. and its principal--if divided-adversaries, Russia and China, and in that sense the most strategic place to confront them. The U.S. is in Viet Nam not only because any aggression that succeeds there is likely to be repeated elsewhere, but also because it has formal and moral commitments there.

The U.S. cannot and does not want to "police the world." On the other hand, it cannot afford to say that there is any place on the globe that it will not defend against aggression, as the U.S. learned to its sorrow after publicly downplaying the strategic importance of South Korea just before the Communists attacked in 1950. Says Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "Today no part of this tiny planet is more than a few minutes away. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere on earth--or even in adjacent areas of space." Some of these areas, as scientists well know, are still obscure. None of them is unimportant or unknowable.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.