America, the Global Balance, and Asia

Abstract

NO ASPECT of the Carter administration's foreign policy has been more distinctive than its attempt to combine a diminution of direct external responsibilities with a maintenance of Henry Kissinger's Concert of Powers and a restoration of traditional, pre-1965 domestic support for external action. The tensions caused by this imaginative attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable have obscured the distinction between changes caused by the flow of events and those brought about by American exertions. In Asia, the decade 1965-1975 saw the devastating failure in Vietnam in spite of an outpouring of American effort, skill, and intelligence as well as of life and treasure. It saw, too, a reconciliation with China made possible by internal developments in the Peoples Republic and Soviet political failure as much as by the imagination and elan of the Nixon administration. In the 1976-1979 period, on the other hand, events in Asia moved in directions broadly favorable to U.S. interests in spite of substantial confusion in Washington's policies. For President Carter, as for his predecessors, America is a nation unlike any other. It is not a nation state in the same sense as Japan or France. Ethnic and racial matters are important as reflections of more fundamental values rather than as issues in their own right. America's primary obligation is the domestic cultivation and elaboration of that value system, which is the very cement of U.S. society. American leaders since George Washington have tended to think that this concentration on domestic affairs permits or requires abstention from foreign entanglements. Involvement with foreign causes would confuse and distort the effort required at home. It could even involve Americans with all the evils of the old European system from which they had once sought to escape, including the search for a balance of power through secret diplomacy, a process that usually led to wars.