Dr. Kissinger’s Asia

Abstract

CURRENT United States policy in Asia, in the large view, appears relatively simple in its ideological origins. It is an attempt to limit the American commitment by creating an equilibrium based on a balance of forces within the area itself and among the superpowers (and emerging superpowers). Were this to be successful, it would lead to a new stability one, it might be argued, that World War II and the Korean War could not guarantee for even a decade. At the moment, the sought-for balance is extremely precarious. In fact, the attempt to create it by the aggressive and what might almost be called revolutionary diplomacy of the Nixon Administration presumably to a major extent the product of the fertile and innovative mind of Dr. Henry Kissinger has produced a massive discombobulation in Asia. To understand the present situation, and the prospects for an interplay of forces that might produce stability, requires some analysis of conditions in the various countries of the area. Such an analysis must be prefaced with some fairly obvious but important comments on the state of current historical investigation. In another time and place, they would seem not only perfunctory but condescending. They are made necessary here by the orgy of pseudocriticism now being indulged in both by the popular press and by some of the most respected spokesmen of the US foreign policy establishment. It goes without saying that all history writing is revisionist. But it has now become a fad to try to discredit what one of the major figures of the movement, John Kenneth Galbraith, calls traditional wisdom for its own sake. In many cases, it just may be that the main currents of opinion in recent decades, even official opinion, were justified; and that some of the revisionist historians are simply panderers to the continual demands for novelty by the mass media. Thus one finds, for example, distinguished journals of foreign policy opinion publishing articles on what might have happened had