Foreign-Policy Myths

December 17, 1956

The possible consequences of the Middle East crisis now overshadow all other economic factors. Any discussion of the American business outlook that ignored this crisis would be fatuous. As long as the crisis lasts or grows, a world oil shortage, raw-material shortage, and shipping shortage will last or grow. And so will inflationary pressures.

We got into this crisis largely because our foreign “policy” since the second world war has been a mishmash of specious slogans, fallacious economic ideas, and pseudo-idealistic assumptions with no counterpart in reality. Among the pillars of this policy have been (1) the reiteration that every step we take must be “short of war”; (2) the program of giving away money and goods to foreign governments all over the globe almost regardless of their internal or external policies; and (3) an announced determination to “act” only through the United Nations.

The consequences of these policies are becoming appallingly clear. The gratuitous announcement by the President that he could not “conceive of military force being a good solution” to the Suez problem, and of Secretary Dulles that the U.S. did “not intend to shoot our way through” the Suez Canal, assured Nasser and the Russian leaders that they could commit any aggression or barbarity without fear of reprisal.

BLACKMAIL TO NASSER?

The foreign-aid program has violated every sound economic principle. It has drained America of more than $50 billion of resources. Abroad it has encouraged, subsidized, and prolonged every form of socialism, neutralism, and even anti-Americanism. The huge blackmail we offered to Nasser to help him build the grandiose Aswan Dam (which Egypt needed “as much as another pyramid”) is only one example of the fantastic lengths to which our foreign giveaway program has gone.

Finally, we come to the fetish we have made of the U.N. Here we have been like children bewitched by Tennyson’s vision of “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world.” We have acted as if such a dream could be realized merely by setting up machinery, erecting a plate-glass building, and calling the result the “United Nations.” The adjective has become a mockery.

What is no less ironic is that British and French statesmen (who spoke of our “saber rattling” and dangerous belligerency whenever Secretary Dulles used such phrases as “massive retaliation” or “brink of war”) are, now that they are faced with realities, appalled at their success in talking us into timorous appeasement and “action only through the United Nations.” British and French statesmen at last see with crystal clearness that to refer crucial problems to the U.N. is to evade responsibility and invite paralysis. As Anthony Eden has put it: “If we renounce the use of force when law cannot command order, then we are in fact undermining the rule of law. We are leaving the world open to the lawbreakers.”

‘EVERYONE OR NO ONE’

Supplementing this, Christian Pineau, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a speech before the U.N. on Nov. 22, presented a devastating history of the paralysis of the U.N. “each time there has been opposition between the Soviet Union and the West.” Contrasting the U.N.’s intervention in Egypt with its military and moral impotence in Hungary, Pineau declared that if “the democracies alone must bow before the recommendations or the decisions” of the U.N., “the time would soon come when public opinion in those countries, would no longer agree to participation under such conditions. The U.N. must decide to impose its decisions on everyone, or resign itself to impose them on no one.” Its “very existence,” he warned, may be at stake.

Before irreparable harm has been done, let us hope that we in America will stop putting our conscience and decisions in the hands of other nations, and stop throwing away American principles and Western civilization by turning every critical problem over to the hazards of a vote by African, Asian, and Communist blocs.

Until we have steered our way out of the present world crisis, our economic outlook will remain obscure.