Where Are We Headed?
by HENRY STEELE COMMAGER
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THE major issue confronting the American people today is not whether we should share the atomic bomb, or establish a Scientific Foundation under government auspices, or adopt conscription, or merge the Army and the Navy, or retain control of islands in the Pacific, or any one of the other particular problems that agitate our Congressmen and inspire our editorial writers. It is rather the great issue that underlies and controls all these particular issues: What kind of policy are we to have? Are we to have a war policy or a peace policy? Or are we to have a patch-quilt miscellany of policies without coherence or purpose?
On the grand ultimate objective of national policy all are agreed. That objective is, of course, national security. We want not only the elementary security against military attack, but the kind of world in which that security can be taken for granted. This is something more than peace. It is possible to have peace without security — we might have had it in 1941 had we been willing to pay the price of adjusting our way of life to a totalitarian world. It is something more than military invulnerability — an objective which looms so large on the horizon of our military advisers at the moment.
We do not want peace in an alien or a desolate world. We do not want the kind of security that is bought by the militarization of our own way of life, by the subordination of all those values which we cherish to the military values. We do not want to create or contribute to a situation where military security becomes an end rather than a means to more worthy ends. We decisively rejected the first of these alternatives — isolation and economic autarchy even before Pearl Harbor. The second — militarization — is hopelessly alien to our historical traditions and our national character. The kind of security we want and must have is the kind Woodrow Wilson envisioned when he called upon us to help make the world safe for democracy. It is security in a world in which our kind of democracy can prosper unaffrighted by military or economic or moral threats.
Assuredly this is the kind of security which commands the allegiance of all of us, and towards which we should direct all our energies. The realization of this security should control all the particular policies which we consider or adopt, and none should be considered or adopted that is not articulated to that ultimate objective. Every item of our policy should fit harmoniously into the pattern of the grand design.
Are the policies which we are now following, or which are being urged so insistently upon us, designed to achieve the objective of national security in a friendly and peaceful world? Is there in fact reason to believe that we can achieve this kind of security through the atomic bomb, universal military service, the world’s most powerful navy and air force, island outposts, and the trade and financial policies which we are pursuing?
Or in the heat and passion and excitement about particular items in our national program, are we in danger of losing sight of the ultimate objective? Are we permitting our program to be formulated for us, piece by piece, fortuitously and independently, by interested groups? Are we very shortly going to find ourselves committed, by a series of independent and incongruous enactments and engagements, to a broad policy which we have never deliberately accepted, which indeed we might prefer to reject? We must never forget that while ends may determine means, means may, and often do, determine ends. We must not lose sight of the principle, accepted in the law and pretty generally accepted in international relations, that if we will the act — large-scale military preparedness, for example — we also will the consequences of the act. Our intentions are going to be judged by our conduct, not our conduct by our intentions.
We know that our intentions are good and our purposes honorable. We know that we do not covet the territory or property of other nations. We know that we are not a militaristic people and that we can be trusted not to misuse the great power which we have accumulated. We are sure — though Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggest embarrassing reservations — that we can be trusted with the atomic bomb. But can we expect the rest of the world to accept our view of ourselves? Can we, for example, expect Russia and Britain to concede that their determination to hold or acquire territorial outposts is aggression, while ours is a manifestation of peaceful intentions? Can we, after our long record of isolationism, accept President Truman’s assurance that “no nation now doubts the good-will of the United States for the maintenance of a lasting peace in the world”?
It is always difficult for a people to look at themselves objectively, to see themselves through the eyes of others. If we are to allay the suspicions and enlist the coöperation of other peoples, however, we must try to understand how our conduct appears to them.
An objective observer would find the United States not only the greatest military power but one of the most ambitious. He would note that while we possess the strongest navy in the world, we plan to build one even stronger; that while we have the most powerful air force, we plan to create one even more powerful. He would point out that though we maintain the Monroe Doctrine as a hemispheric policy, we expect to make our voice heard in the affairs of Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Palestine, Iran, China, Siam, and Java as well as in Germany and Japan.
He would add that our power is economic as well as military — that we are not only the best-armed and best-equipped of nations, but the richest and soundest. Alone of the major powers we emerged from the war physically unscathed, and in a position to devote all our energies to normal peacetime pursuits. With the largest and most modern industrial plant, we are prepared to capture the markets of the world. With the largest merchant marine, we are in a position to dominate world trade. With the largest gold reserves and the strongest financial system in the world, we are going to be the world’s bankers.
However innocent our motives, however logical our conduct, however imperative our program may appear to ourselves, they do not necessarily appear innocent or logical or imperative to other peoples. And if we start an armament race, we cannot blame other nations if they choose to enter that race. If we continue to make atom bombs, we cannot be surprised if other nations undertake to make bigger and more effective bombs. If we try to seize the markets of the world, or dominate its airways, we must expect a trade war and an air war. However pure our motives or irreproachable our purposes, we cannot maintain a double standard of international morality for ourselves and other countries.
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SUCH, to be sure, is not our intention. Our policy is not one of aggression. We are not planning permanent possession of atomic secrets. We do not propose to use our newly acquired island bases for imperialistic purposes. We are not really prepared to enter an armaments race. We do not wish to ruin the trade or steal the markets of our former allies. Any such program might fairly be interpreted as a conspiracy. And there is no conspiracy. There is not even a policy. And that, in fact, is the heart of the difficulty.
We do not have a policy, but we are in process of formulating one. It is not coherent or logical or comprehensive. It is not deliberate or formal or official. It is, rather, fortuitous, opportunistic, fragmentary, and almost accidental. It is not a policy endorsed by public opinion, as far as public opinion has been consulted. It is not a policy formulated by the policymaking department — the executive. It is rather a program that is emerging, piece by piece, in response to the demands or fears or opportunities of the moment.
Issues profoundly affecting national security and international relations are being discussed and decided not as they affect those matters but on their own merits. The atomic bomb, conscription, the size and character of our navy and our air force, the future of our intelligence service, trade and fiscal policies, and a dozen other matters flit across the legislative consciousness as separate and independent items. But all these items are parts of a single whole that makes up our security policy, and no one of them can be decided without reference to all the others and to that policy. It is as if we should plan the furnishings and decorations of a house before deciding on the house; in the end we should discover that the furnishings and decorations would determine the kind of house we could have. So in the end we may discover that our particular commitments may determine the kind of security we are to have, instead of our policy controlling our commitments.
We did not fight — and win — the war that way. In that crisis we did not permit scattered authorities to decide on the size of the army, the number of fighter and bomber and transport planes, priorities for the various types of naval construction, without an overall plan of global strategy. We did not permit pressure from the Air Forces to persuade us that the war could be won by air power, or from the Navy to canalize our productive capacity into the making of carriers or battleships, or from public opinion to deflect our major energies from the Atlantic to the Pacific or stampede us into a premature crossChannel invasion. We decided first on our global strategy, and fitted all our plans to that strategy.
In planning for peace and security, however, we are letting tactics determine strategy, rather than strategy tactics. Not only this. In war we did not permit civilian considerations to override military, but now, in peace, we are in danger of permitting military considerations to override civilian — or political.
No one example of piecemeal commitments, of the tendency to yield to the military in matters that concern broad national policy, is as illuminating as the whole body of them, for only when we view the miscellany of proposals and programs can we fully appreciate their incoherence. But let us look at some of the particular proposals now urged upon us.
First there is the demand for universal military service. That demand is voiced by the most impressive and most respectable authorities. General Marshall recommends it; General Eisenhower urges it; Admiral Nimitz favors it. Its desirability, nay its imperative necessity, is argued upon the most varied and comprehensive grounds. It is essential, we are told, to national defense. It will permit us to relieve war-weary veterans in Germany and Japan with fresh young soldiers. It will enable us to prevent war. It will help us to fulfill our obligations under the United Nations charter. It will improve the health, the discipline, the character, of American youth.
This is not the place to analyze these arguments, to accept or reject them. But it is proper to note that they are not advanced as part of any larger plan either for military security or for the ultimate objective of world order and peace. They are, for the most part, advanced in a vacuum. For the immediate purpose of relieving our forces in Germany and Japan-and in the event of the failure of the voluntary enlistment program — conscription is clearly justified.
But those who urge the necessity of peacetime conscription as a permanent policy have failed wholly to show where this particular instrument fits into the larger picture. General Marshall, for instance, on the same page of his notable Report, suggests that the next war will be an atomic war that may be over in a few days, and urges conscription so that, in the event of war, we can count on a well-trained army of four million within one year. If the next war is to be an atomic war, what good will an army of four million be to us after one year?
Conscription may be both necessary and desirable. But it is neither necessary nor desirable in and of itself, but only as part of some larger program for national security. Yet we are urged to adopt a policy affecting the lives of millions of young men, requiring the expenditure of billions of dollars, and involving most profoundly the whole issue of national security, as if it were an isolated matter. How can we know what kind of army we shall need before we know what we need it for? How can we decide on the size of our army before we have an over-all program that will fix the relative roles of Army, Navy, and Air Force? How can we know what training our army must have before we know the kind of war it is to be trained for? If science — as seems highly probable — has revolutionized the nature of war and the role of the soldier, what are the merits of the kind of training which will be available to one-year conscripts? If the next war is to be fought with the weapons of science, why should our energies and our money go into the training of soldiers rather than of scientists?
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THE major objection, then, at this stage, to the adoption of universal military service is that the relation of such a program to the larger objectives of national security has not been made clear. Until it has been made clear, until it has justified itself as a necessary and logical part of our entire national policy, we should not adopt a program so ambitious. And we may go further. Until it has been made clear that conscription is the very basis and core of our security, we should not adopt a program so expensive as to imperil appropriations for other essential parts of our security system.
The numerous incidental arguments for conscription scarcely deserve consideration except in so far as they illustrate the confusion that befogs the American mind. These arguments emphasize the value of training and of discipline, the beneficial effect of military service on public health, the educational and other opportunities available to soldiers. If these incidental benefits are desirable, they can be attained more effectively and more economically by direct governmental action than as by-products of military service. We do not, after all, have military service in order to have good public health; we maintain public health in order to have — among other things — a strong national defense. We do not have conscription in order to inculcate the virtues of discipline or coöperation; we inculcate these virtues in order to make our military — as well as our social — machine work. A straight line is still the shortest distance between two points, even in matters of national policy.
If we turn to plans and proposals for army, navy, and air forces, we find the same confusion, the same evidence of fractional thinking. Questions of carriers versus battleships, of air power versus sea power, of the strength of the Navy and the Air Force, of a permanent intelligence service, and of the Army-Navy merger, are agitated in a vacuum. The answers to these questions are not to be found in the arguments advanced by most of the military and naval experts. They are to be found only when those arguments are tested by the standards of a basic security policy.
How can we tell what kind of warships we should build, until we know whether we are building for a repetition of World War II or for an atomic war? How can we tell what kind of air force we should have until we have planned on land and naval forces and until we know the potentialities of the flying bomb? How can we make plans involving flying bombs, pilotless planes, jet propulsion, radar, the atomic bomb, until we have agreed with other powers upon an atomic bomb policy? And how can we work out our general military program until we know more clearly the nature of our obligations as a member of the United Nations and the extent to which we shall be required to articulate our military plans with those of Britain and Russia?
In the absence of any basic policy for peace and security, shall we fall back upon the advice of military and naval experts? It is not disparaging the wisdom or integrity of these experts to point out that their field of inquiry is necessarily circumscribed and that they labor under the inevitable limitations of their position. It is not, after all, their function to formulate national policy, and we have no right to expect them to do it. It is their function to advise on specific aspects of military and naval policy. Here their advice is authoritative. We may, to be sure, find it a bit disconcerting that practically every Army and Air Force expert advises a merger of the services and practically every Naval expert opposes such a merger, and we may wonder whether their views are as dispassionate and objective as they should be.
In their own field — which is military — the men who planned the strategy and employed the tactics of victory deserve our fullest confidence. Outside that field they deserve only such consideration as would oe accorded any judicious observer. As a recent witness before the House Committee on Military Affairs, J. H. Scattergood, pointed out: —
These gentlemen speak as military experts, but primarily as military experts. It is their duty to look forward to the possibility of war and to tell you and all of us how to be prepared for war if it comes. It has become clear, however, that this is not the main issue — that if war comes, there is not going to be any real security for anyone. The main issue is what President Truman and Prime Ministers Attlee and King recently said it was — the prevention of war. This is a problem beyond the field of our military leaders. This is a problem with which Congress must deal.
More important than any of these decisions in the purely military realm are the decisions which we have made or are making with respect to the atomic bomb and the role of science in war. The Moscow Conference recommended the creation of a United Nations atomic energy commission, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of our support for this recommendation. The specific proposals which the commission is to be required to make are far-reaching and, if adopted and faithfully observed, would largely eliminate the danger of the misuse of atomic energy.
It is relevant to note, however, that Secretary Byrnes, in explaining the Moscow agreements, was careful to point out that “neither the Security Council nor the commission has authority to bind any government to act on its recommendations.” We have, in short, no intention of surrendering our monopoly of the manufacture of atomic bombs now, and the extent to which we will coöperate with a United Nations commission later is reserved to our judgment.
Meantime we are not only proceeding with research and manufacture, but seriously considering the creation of government monopolies in these fields.
The May-Johnson bill, in its original form, proposed to concentrate not only all research in atomic physics, but control of all raw material and all industrial facilities useful for its manufacture, under the Federal government. The Kilgore and Magnuson bills propose large-scale government aid to scientific research, more specifically research connected with national defense. If our government is to monopolize atomic research, there is no logical reason why it should not similarly monopolize electronic, chemical, medical, aeronautical, and metallurgical research. After all, in war all the sciences are enlisted and all are equally military instruments.
Reliance upon the atomic bomb is a confession of the bankruptcy of statesmanship. There is no secret about the manufacture of the bomb that is not already known to the physicists of other countries or will not shortly be disclosed to them. Already Britain is in command of every detail, scientific and industrial, of the process of making the bomb. Russian scientists, if they do not already have the bomb, will have it in a few years. The ingredients, as well as the processes, of manufacture are available to most countries. The cost is not prohibitive: any nation that can afford an army and an air force can afford to make atomic bombs. And once we enter upon an atomic race we are courting catastrophe. Attack is easy, defense impossible. An atomic bomb race between nations cannot end otherwise than fatally for the whole world.
Nor is the policy of regimentation of scientific knowledge and skill to lethal purposes congenial to the American temperament or to the spirit of free inquiry. Already, even before the enactment of any legislation extending government controls over science, the effort of the War Department to recruit scientists has broken down. The cost of concentration on atomic and electronic research for military purposes and under government control will be far higher than anything that appears in the tax bill: it will be science itself.
Our response to the atomic bomb has, heretofore, been sensational rather than intelligent. We were awe-struck and even a bit humbled by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we readily agreed that Modern Man Is Obsolete. But as far as our policy goes, we still appear to regard the atomic bomb as merely another and more powerful instrument of war, rather than as an instrument which has outmoded our old concepts of war, and indeed war itself. We have not yet adjusted ourselves to the fact that if the atomic bomb is going to be used at all, it must be the point of departure in all discussions of national security and of world order. We still fail to realize that it has done away with old-fashioned notions of war, of security, and of sovereignty.
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WHAT does all this mean — our effort to keep the atomic secret and to organize scientific research for military purposes, our agitation for universal military service, our rearmament program, our retention of a perimeter of air and naval bases in the Atlantic and Pacific, our psychological conditioning for war? It means that though we have abandoned isolationism intellectually, we have not yet abandoned it emotionally, or adjusted ourselves to the reality of One World. It means that though we know an atomic war would be fatal to every country involved in it, we still prefer to act as if our first duty were to prepare for war rather than to prevent war. It means that though we have formally committed ourselves to the United Nations Organization and are active in its deliberations, we prefer to conduct our security policy as if that organization did not exist or were condemned in advance to impotence. It means that we are using our position as the leading nation in the world to inspire fear rather than confidence. And this mischievous course of conduct has not even the dignity of an official program. It is one to which we are committing ourselves haphazardly and almost absent-mindedly.
Perhaps the worst thing about this program is that even on its own terms it is foredoomed to failure. In the first place the American people are not, and should not be, willing to pay the price for its implementation. It is not merely that an armaments race would impose an intolerable burden upon a nation already heavily in debt. Money is, after all, an expendable factor in the search for national security. It is rather that such a race would require, to be effective, the rigorous control of every feature of the scientific and industrial life of the nation for military purposes. It would require the subordination of all those values which we cherish to the values which we have heretofore held hateful. It would set us on the road which, as Germany and Japan have proved, leads to social, economic, and moral ruin.
In the second place, even if we were prepared to pay this price, the program would still give us no consoling assurance of security. Even with the atomic bomb, with controlled scientific research, with conscription, with an Air Force and a Navy built to the specifications of our military advisers, with island bases ringing us east and west, we should still be vulnerable. Tt is doubtful whether, with all our wealth and ingenuity, we could win an armaments race.
Russia, certainly, can maintain a larger army and — if she chooses — can build a more powerful air force than we can. Nor is there any reason to disparage British strength in the air or on the sea. It is sobering to remember that the British have been, and still are, ahead of us in some departments of aeronautics and that the strength of the RAF, at the close of the war, was not far behind that of the USAAF; that the British Navy is still a force to be reckoned with; and that Britain has, in her Empire, the wideflung bases which we now seek. And we have no monopoly on scientific brains or on laboratories. The scientific contributions of the British to the war were not inferior to the American, and most of the ideas our scientists were working on originated abroad. Certainly there is no reason to believe that we could withstand a combination of all major powers against us. And unless we are prepared to withstand such a combination — or ourselves to engineer a military combination — an armaments race is futile.
It seems clear, then, that we are in danger of following not so much a misguided as an unguided policy. At best that policy may commit us to a program of militarism which we have not approved, which is uncongenial to the American character, and which will not in any event assure us the kind of security we want and need. At worst it may lead to a futile armaments race, impair national and world economy, exacerbate our relations with our former allies, and frustrate the grand purposes of the United Nations Organization.
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WHAT we should do is equally clear. We should formulate a policy — peace, security, international, call it what you will. It must be formulated by the civilian, not the military, authorities. It must adjust our military to our scientific and industrial potentialities, and all these to the temper and character of the American people. It must be logical and coherent. It must be directed primarily to the prevention of war, not to the waging of war. It must square with realities and aim towards ideals. It must, in the words of President Truman, “be completely consistent with our foreign policy . . . designed to support and reflect our commitments to the United Nations Organization.”
To make that organization prosperous and effective should be the object of all our plans. There is no national security divorced from international security, no assurance of peace except a peaceful world, and little likelihood that democracy and freedom can flourish except in an order where peace and security can be taken for granted.
Nor is there any reason to suppose that we cannot make the United Nations Organization an instrument for securing these ends. The Americans, the British, and the Russians are, of all nations, best equipped by experience to be the architects of international order. Ours is the oldest and most successful federal system iu the world, and a century and a half of history has taught us the techniques of interstate coöperation for common ends. The British Empire is the greatest and most successful international organization in history, and the practices of peaceful and voluntary coöperation developed by that Empire can be of inestimable value in the construction of a world order. The experience of the U.S.S.R. with federalism is more recent, but the welding together of so vast a territory, of so many peoples with different languages and different social characteristics, is one of the notable achievements of modern history.
International coöperation — as our own and British history reveals —is not something that can be conjured up from a blueprint. It cannot be prefabricated, but has to grow; and it grows from habits, practices, and precedents. It is important, therefore, that we start with the right habits and create the right precedents. There are obvious things which we could and should do now. As we cannot nationalize the atomic bomb, we must internationalize it, and we should proceed at once with the creation of the atomic commission recommended by the Moscow Conference. We should suspend our more elaborate military plans until it is possible to work out our obligations as a member of the Security Council and then adjust them to those obligations.
We should abandon unilateral and informal meddling in the affairs of other nations or regions and await the creation of appropriate machinery for the solution of problems that distress or vex us. Our own experience here is illuminating. New York criticism of Alabama justice, for example, merely irritates the people of Alabama, but Supreme Court decisions are accepted as a matter of course. Thus while irresponsible declamations of Congressmen or publicists on Palestine, Java, India, Poland, and a host of other countries tend to exasperate, coöperation in their solution through appropriate machinery will educate us and other nations to the principles of internationalism.
During the last quarter century and especially during the iron years of war the United States has achieved, or had thrust upon it, primary responsibility for world leadership. Rich, powerful, progressive, enlightened, relatively unscathed by war, the oldest republic, the oldest democracy, with long traditions of peace, federalism, and international morality, we, better than any other nation, are in a position to furnish that leadership. It is a responsibility we cannot evade. Let us recall now, and take to heart, Lincoln’s admonition in an earlier crisis: —
We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. . . . We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. . . . The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.