THE U.S. CANNOT LIVE IN ISOLATION

It was 14 years ago that a young John Kennedy made his famous inaugural pledge: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Even then, that stirring pledge was unrealistic, as the nation was soon to learn in Indochina. But today such a commitment would be unthinkable, and not only because of the enormous social and economic costs it would entail. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, there has been an erosion of the national consensus that made possible the costly, often creative world role that the U.S. has pursued for the past 30 years.

That erosion has never been more plain than in the current round of recriminations in Washington over Indochina and worry over the Middle East. Lashing out at what he considers a growing mood of isolationism in Congress, the President warns that the rest of the world is "losing faith in our agreements." The Secretary of Defense blames Saigon's agonies on recent "niggardly" appropriations by legislators who have voted $150 billion for South Viet Nam over the years. It is easy enough to refute such arguments as exaggerated, but they do point to a deep underlying confusion -- not only between Congress and the Executive but also in the country -- about what America can and should accomplish in the world.

How the U.S. reached this point is not difficult to trace.

Coming out of World War II, the U.S. found itself in an abnormal condition of near omnipotence. Alone among the major combatants, the country emerged from the fighting vastly strengthened. The U.S. held a nuclear monopoly and an industrial dominance so great that in 1950 America accounted for no less than 50% of the world's entire output of goods and services.

Psychologically, too, the U.S. was filled with extraordinary assurance. Having fought and vanquished two enemies about whose evil nature there was little doubt (the Nazis were perfect devils, and the Japanese of that era were quite satisfactory villains too), the U.S. was not accustomed to moral ambiguities. It was ready to take on another foe with global ambitions: international Communism. The Truman Administration launched a challenge to Communist expansion with a degree of bipartisan support that the nation had never before known in peacetime -- certainly not in the turbulent periods after World War I, when Senate leaders bitterly fought President Wood-row Wilson over U.S. membership in the League of Nations, and before World War II, when the country was deeply divided between isolationists and interventionists.

U.S. policy in the era 1945-65 made excellent sense for its time and accomplished a great deal, including the independence of Western Europe. But the world changed, and with it the euphoric American unity of the '40s and '50s. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger must deal with an immensely more difficult set of problems in a far more hostile atmosphere than their predecessors. By the late 1960s, the U.S. intervention in Viet Nam had turned into a bloody, bitterly learned lesson about the limits of American power. Above all, the simple, straightforward anti-Communist crusade that had been the mainspring of U.S. foreign policy was no longer very simple. Once in the White House, that ardent anti-Communist Richard Nixon began making approaches to Moscow and Peking, partly to disentangle the U.S. from Viet Nam and partly to build a new structure of peace based not on ideology but on pragmatic self-interest. The U.S. goal had always been to oppose Communism everywhere it was encountered, from the Congo to the Mekong Delta. But now Americans were asked to accept a baffling inconsistency in their nation's policy: to support and even applaud detente with the Communist superpowers on the one hand while continuing to fight Communist insurgencies in different parts of the world.

For all the emphasis on rapprochement and cooperation, the U.S. relationship with Moscow and (to a lesser extent) Peking still remains on an adversary basis. If the Soviets push us, we must push them. The very essence of detente is that it can advance only when the U.S. is strong -- a concept difficult to grasp.

In other respects too the world grew vastly more complex and economically interrelated. The underdeveloped countries kept making increasing demands on the industrialized countries for a greater share of the world's wealth. Power blocs loosened, and client states refused to remain clients. Harvard Professor of Government Stanley Hoffmann is only one of many critics who think that the U.S. too long ignored this changing world and is still too preoccupied with superpower diplomacy. Hoffmann believes that Kissinger "very cleverly and rightly tried to turn our

[Soviet] policy from an adversary relationship to one that is half adversary and half cooperative. Kissinger sensed that the old cold war conception was becoming frayed around the edges because it meant manning every corner of the globe and because Americans were getting fed up with that.

"Yet while he has tried to change this old conception," Hoffmann adds, "Kissinger has approached it with the notion that if he controlled this key relationship, everything else would fall into place. The problem with that is that the two superpowers control less and less of world politics. What we are seeing now is the revenge of every other party pursuing its own self-interest. All over the world there is a reassertion of the smaller powers. North Viet Nam was never stopped by detente. We have not been able to control events in Thailand or Portugal. We could not oblige Israel to make certain concessions." Hoffmann believes that the U.S. may have to give up trying to hold all the strings and accept a degree of decentralization of foreign policy.

The fact that several lesser powers are acquiring nuclear weapons makes decentralization all the more inevitable -- and hardly reassuring. But it is obvious that the U.S. must scale down its enormous and costly worldwide commitments, many of them undertaken at that time of abnormal American predominance. The U.S. has realized that it does not have unlimited economic strength to "pay any price, bear any burden" and that even if it did, the effort would eventually be self-defeating. At his press conference last week, Henry Kissinger asserted that the U.S. "cannot pursue a policy of selective reliability," suggesting that all commitments are equally imperative (later in the conference he conceded that not "every part of the world is strategically as important to the U.S. as any other part of the world"). The U.S. must indeed live up to commitments once made -- although there can be legitimate argument as to when a commitment has been adequately fulfilled. Precisely because of this, the U.S. must be careful where and how it does commit itself. In short, while the U.S. line cannot be "selective reliability," it should be "selective responsibility."

here and for what reasons, then, should the U.S. be prepared to commit itself? The nation's fundamental foreign policy interest is of course survival as a free society. This means avoiding nuclear war, through 1) maintaining adequate U.S. armaments, 2) pursuing detente and its arms-limiting efforts like the SALT negotiations, and 3) as part of the foregoing, trying to avert local conflicts that could turn into nuclear war. A second fundamental U.S. foreign policy interest is to bolster allies and friends who share America's strategic, economic and (ideally) political goals. Obviously, in furthering these interests, some nations or groups of nations are far more important to the U.S. than others. Apart from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and perhaps parts of Latin America, as America's closest neighbors, the top priorities are:

-- WESTERN EUROPE, with which the U.S. has powerful economic, cultural and ethnic ties; if Western Europe were to fall under hostile control, it would pose a grave threat to American interests.

-- JAPAN, which, along with Australia and New Zealand, has close economic links with the U.S. Tokyo is as essential to U.S. security in the Pacific as Western Europe is in the Atlantic area.

-- THE MIDDLE EAST, which is a source of oil that is vital to the U.S. and its trading partners and also, because of Israel, the locus of a powerful, if unwritten U.S. defense commitment.

What should a top-priority commitment mean? For one thing, that the U.S. would be prepared to provide military aid in case of a serious outside threat. In some circumstances, Washington might be justified in using covert operations. Finally, the U.S. would be prepared to commit troops if American security was seriously menaced militarily.

The U.S. will have to accept the fact that there are many situations it cannot control and many others that do not matter. Moreover, the U.S. has learned that not all anti-Communist governments are favorable to its interest, and not all Communist governments necessarily unfavorable. Communism has evolved into a variety of different models, and the U.S. will have to live with many of them. In many cases, Communism is seen by people as a means to social and economic justice or as an expression of nationalism--a factor the U.S. cannot ignore. On the other hand, the U.S. must not ignore--as so many liberal and radical critics of U.S. policy do--the fact that many Communist regimes are still heavily backed from the outside and serve Soviet interests. In none of the top-priority regions can the U.S. be indifferent to a Communist takeover. The response would have to vary greatly depending on circumstances; but despite and even because of detente the U.S. has a right to fight Communism in the areas of its prime concern.

Determining that certain areas are more essential to the U.S. than others does not mean that countries elsewhere are cast into outer darkness as far as the U.S. is concerned. There are many kinds of relations short of serious commitment and many degrees of importance. In general, the U.S. should stop regarding the world in domino terms, not only because the image implies an automatic chain of cause and effect that is unreal but also because it poses a simplistic choice between a country that "stands" and a country that "falls." The real world is far more complex than that.

Even on a pared-down scale, such U.S. foreign policy commitments will still require quite a high price and quite a heavy burden in the form of sizable defense budgets and aid appropriations. There will be a great deal of resistance to these, both on the left, which feels that the U.S. should not "intervene" anywhere, and on the right, which is rediscovering its old opposition to foreign aid. But the U.S. cannot live in isolation. Not only must the U.S. be able to defend itself but it must have a world--or at least some regions of the world--congenial to its system and its goals.

However, remaining a great power is not essentially defensive. Security for the U.S. is not enough. In recent years a new set of global problems has arisen--hunger, the population explosion, energy--of whose implications Americans are still only partly aware. To help solve these, as the world's strongest economic power and technological leader, the U.S. must make major contributions. Moreover, this effort, like all foreign policy efforts, must begin at home. It will require the gradual rebuilding of a national consensus and perhaps the rediscovery of economic growth. This is not easy to ask at a time of domestic recession and at the moment when so many other countries suspect any American motive. But it must be done, for America's own sake and that of others. In the past, the U.S. has committed sins of pride by believing that it can export its political and economic system and its culture to almost any country in the world and be thanked for it. America has learned better. Still, the U.S. cannot be truly itself unless it has a sense of being able to give something to the world and being relevant to the world's needs.

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