Lessons of Diplomacy, Containment

"When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk."

"There are some experiments in diplomacy which cannot be tried because failure invites irreversible risk."

Adenauer: "Never confuse energy with strength."

"When Stalin miscalculated...it was because he assumed that his counterparts were also conducting Realpolitik, and in the same cold-blooded fashion as he. These assumptions turned out to be grievously wrong. The United States was not conducting Realpolitik -- at least not as Stalin understood it. To American leaders, moral maxims were real, and legal obligations were meaningful...America resisted these acts of aggression in the name of principle, not in defense of a sphere of interest; America had exerted itself in order to remedy an insult to a universal cause, not over a challenge to the local status quo."

"But Americans perceived it quite differently, as a conflict between good and evil, and as a struggle on behalf of the free world. That interpretation endowed american actions with an enormous drive and dedication. It also caused containment to oscillate from the technical to the apocalyptic. Issues capable of being encapsulated in moral or legal formulae were well and thoughtfully handled; but there was also a tendency to concentrate on the formula rather than on the purpose it was supposed to serve."

"The biggest loser in Korea turned out to be the Soviet Union, the country which American leaders thought had masterminded the whole enterprise. Within two years of the invasion of Korea, America had mobilized its side ofthe global dividing line. The United States tripled its defense expenditures and transformed the Atlantic Alliance from a political coalition into an integrated military organization headed by an American Supreme Commander."

Because of their conviction that peace is normal and goodwill natural, American leaders have generally sought to encourage negotiations by removing elements of coercion and by unilateral demonstrations of goodwill. In fact, in most negotiations, unilateral gestures remove a key negotiating asset. In general, diplomats rarely pay for services already rendered--especially in wartime."

"If the United States dared not win but could not afford to lose, what were its options? When all the general phrases were reduced to specifics, it was stalemate on the battefront and, therefore, at the negotiating table as well."

"In the American government, option papers nearly always urge the middle among three options. Because the foreign policy establishment tends to position its recommendations between the course of doing nothing and the course of general war, experienced bureaucrats know that the morale of their subordinates is enhanced if they pick the middle road."

"America's leaders believed that they had learned the dangers of escalation, but they failed to consider the penalties of stalemate."

"The art of policy is to create a calculation of the risks and rewards that affect the adversary's calculations."

"American leaders have traditionally viewed diplomacy and strategy as being separate activities. In a limited war, if military and political goals are not synchronized from the very beginning, there is always a danger of doing either too much or too little. Doing to much and allowing the military element to predominate erodes the dividing line to all-out war and tempts the adversary to raise the stakes. Doing too little and allowing the diplomatic side to dominate risks submerging the purpose of the war in negotiating tactics and a proclivity to settle for a stalemate."

"That America defends principle, not interests, law, and not power, has been a nearly sacrosanct tenet of America's rationale in committing its military forces, from the time of the two world wars through the escalation of its involvement in Vietnam in 1965 and the Gulf War in 1991. Both Moscow and Pyongyang had failed to understand the role of values in America's approach to international relations. They had obviously failed to understand that repeated American declarations proclaiming resistance to communist aggression as a moral duty carried far more weight with American policymakers than strategic analysis."

"Only a society with enormous confidence in its achievements and in its future could have mustered the dedication and the resources to strive for a world order in which defeated enemies would be conciliated, stricken allies restored, and adversaries converted. Great enterprises are often driven by a touch of naivete."

"In the 1920's, isolationism had caused America to withdraw on the ground that it was too good for the world; in the [Henry] Wallace Movement, it revived itself in the proposition that America should withdraw because it was not good enough for the world. According to Wallace, America had no right to intervene unilaterally around the globe. Defense was legitimate only with the approval of the United Nations. Wallace manaaged to develop themes which would remain staples of the American radical critique throughout the Cold War, and move to center stage during the Vietnam War. These emphasized America's moral inadequacies, and htose of the friends it was supporting; a basic moral equivalence between America and its communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. The new radicalism reaffirmed the historic vision of America as a beacon of liberty, but, in the process, turned it against itself. The very idea of America's having international responsibilities was, in Wallace's eyes, an example of the arrogance of power. Since prejudice, hatred, and fear were the root causes of international conflict, the United States had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had banished these scourges from its own society."

"In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence on practical grounds, while the Administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds."

"A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security."

"Once vital interests had been equated with moral principle, America's strategic objectives were cast in terms of worthiness rather than of power. Ever since, American foreign policy has been obliged to navigate between those who assail it for being amoral and those who criticize it for going beyond the national interest through crusading moralism."

"Only a country as idealistic, as pioneering, and as relatively inexperienced as the United States could have advanced a plan for global economic recovery based solely on its own resources. And yet the very sweep of that vision elicited a national commitment which would sustain the generation of the Cold War through its final victory."