Library:The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism/Chapter 10: The President’s Advisers

Institutional Policy-Making

Once the American electorate chooses a President how influential is he in formulating foreign policy? Who is it who dreams up the marauding, vandalizing military escapades which have so often characterized American policies since the end of the Second World War? Who is it who says crush any attempt anywhere to challenge US hegemony? Who says destabilize Chile, invade Grenada, intervene in the Lebanon, crush the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, support reaction in El Salvador, bomb Libya and assassinate Colonel Gadafi? Who, in much broader terms, sets the parameters for a policy of containment of the Soviet Union and within them decides to harbour pre-emptive strike intentions?

There is no doubt that the President of the USA is vested with sufficient formal political and military powers to make all these decisions himself. But he operates within a political context of control specified by the American Constitution. This inhibits certain acts of military aggression and imposes financial constraints on overseas military activities. The President has to carry the American Congress with him in general but in matters concerning the Soviet Union this has never been a problem. More often than not Congress has been a more willing Soviet hunter than the President. All proposals designed as responses to a Soviet threat and have sailed through Congress. A plan to give aid to a Western supported government in Greece in 1947 fell flat in Congress until the Under-Secretary, Dean Acheson, said it was in response to“an eager and ruthless opponent.”1 This scenario was repeated many times, resulting in the financing of NATO, SEATO, bilateral treaties with Japan, Korea and Taiwan at an annual cost of millions of dollars. The Federal coffers were generously open for military programmes and military allies. Congress responded most eagerly when it came to action against the Soviet Union or its allies. It supported constraints on East-West trade, the passing of the Export Control Act of 1949 to regulate American exports and the Battle Act of 1951 to discourage American allies from selling strategic goods. It has always quickly endorsed military action against allies of the Soviet Union, for instance, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Grenada. In recent years, since the Vietnam War experience, Congress has been more guarded in its anti-Soviet reflexes but the effect has been to scale down rather than stop action.

Given the willingness of Congress to pursue anti-Soviet policies the President has been given much freedom to develop initiatives without prior Congress approval. Indeed, one political commentator noted that such “a wealth of precedent has been established, through a dozen years of successive crises, that in the world-wide confrontation with communism it was for the president to set the policy, the Congress to support it.”2 How did he, therefore, go about setting the policy? Well, firstly, he did it within the very severe constraints set by the needs of American capitalism. It was never a case of collaborating with the Soviet Union but of altering the methods of containment, of shifting emphases. These emphases, of course, were important and ranged from detente to plain military pugnacity, from the negotiation of treaties to their abrogation, through degrees of Cold War. In the age of nuclear weapons where the President is the Chief of the American armed forces and controls the trigger, a difference in emphasis can mean the difference between a nuclear war or not.

Each of the eight American Presidents since 1945 have operated within an institutional policy-making framework which they have used, adopted or altered according to their own whims. Each President takes over the procedures of his predecessor and fits them for his own use. Within the field of foreign policy there are three sets of institutional interest. There is the Central Intelligence Agency with a high degree of autonomy to pursue peripheral issues; the State and Defense Departments, staffed by career officials with their own resource materials and bureaucratic interests; and the White House itself containing the President and his entourage of advisers. These agencies sometimes project different, contradictory policies, even to the point of cancelling each other’s effect. The CIA, of course, is a covert organization so that the public disagreements emanate from the State and Defense Departments and the Pentagon. The President has the last word in such cases but he may only be able to paper over the cracks. The eight Presidents have vacillated in their preferences.

In 1947 President Truman established the National Security Council, run by a National Security Assistant, in the White House. The contenders for the ear of the President have thus been the National Security Assistant, the Secretary of State and, to a lesser extent, the Secretary of Defense. The President, of course, appointed each one, but the National Security Assistant has become a pivotal position with a relatively easy access to the President, able to accumulate influence and to assume the role of the premier adviser. Henry Kissinger was the classic case of the premier adviser when he was the National Security Assistant to President Nixon. The changes in the relationships between policy-making agencies have largely involved reducing the status of the National Security Assistant in relation to the Secretary of State and then building it up again. Much then depended in this struggle upon the personalities involved and the advisers with whom each was able to surround himself.

The President chooses his Executive, or government, and all his principal advisers. Usually a new President replaces the whole upper layer of officials concerned with foreign affairs and defense, from members of the Cabinet, the National Security Assistant and his staff down to assistant secretaries and even lower in some instances. He is not constrained in his choice by political party affiliations. He can, and often does, go outside of political parties to industry, banks and universities for candidates. He may not have any particular source except his friends, as in the case of President Reagan. By and large Presidents have gone to manufacturing and finance institutions for people with executive talent and to universities for advisers. The universities, particularly the elite Ivy League ones, have served the Presidency well. The Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, the economic historian W W Rostow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Eugene Staley the Stanford University economist, McGeorge Bundy, the Dean of Humanities at Harvard University, Henry Kissinger, the specialist in international relations at Harvard University and the Soviet specialist Zbigniew Brzezinski have all achieved notoriety as advisers.

The Classic Role of Academics

But what exactly do they contribute? Firstly, the majority of American Presidents have been virtually ignorant of foreign affairs. Only Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon had any prior experience of international affairs. Eisenhower’s experience came as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War and as head of NATO in 1951-52. Nixon acquired experience during his eight years as Vice- President to Eisenhower. The rest had been either Senators or State Governors. They desperately needed advice in wellpackaged briefings or, as with President Reagan, in easily understood video recordings. The nature of the advice varied with the personality of the President. Three Presidents, Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon each wanted a clearly articulated general policy towards the Soviet Union which would provide answers to ad hoc issues. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter pursued pragmatic policies and therefore required detailed assessments of issues as they arose. Kennedy, for example, modified his position after the Cuban missile crisis as Carter did after Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. President Reagan, mistaking a “rhetorical stance for strategy”3 is more dependent upon script-writers than advisers.

But whether they provided the broad sweep policy, packaged like the Truman Doctrine, or, for example, a highly detailed assessment of Soviet influence in Mozambique, the academic advisers gave theoretical legitimation for the dominant ideas in American capitalist society. They added different glosses to the same product. The slogans and clichés which rolled off the tongues of Presidents and their Press Secretaries, the slick public relations expressions of foreign policy, the justifications for foraging into some foreign country such as ‘defending the free world’, ‘protecting democracy’ and ‘preserving the American way of life’, all have had their bases in the theorizing of foreign policy specialists in universities and research institutes.

The classical role of academics is to serve the status quo through formulating complex erudite theories and explanations no matter how cruel and oppressive the system might be. The killings in Chile, the mining of Nicaraguan harbours, the genocidal attacks on Vietnam, the bombing of Libya all have their theoretical justification in the theses of American academics.4 This point was made more explicitly by André Gunder Frank in his article “The Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology”.5 He wrote: “Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s brains trusts co-opted all sorts of American social scientists. Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s aid to the development of underdeveloped countries has so far consisted in writing the now famous White Paper on Cuba which was intended to justify the coming invasion of that country at the Bay of Pigs. He later admitted lying about the invasion in the “national interest”. Stanford economist Eugene Staley wrote The Future of Underdeveloped Countries and then planned it in the renowned Staley - (General Maxwell) Taylor Plan to put 15 million Vietnamese in the concentration camps they euphemistically christened “strategic hamlets”. Since the failure of that effort at development planning, MIT economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow has escalated the effort by writing The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. He wrote of these stages at the CIA - financed Center for International Studies on the Charles River and has been operationalizing them on the Potomac as President Johnson’s chief adviser on Vietnam. It is on behalf of economic growth that Rostow has become the principal architect of escalation, from napaiming the South to bombing the North and beyond . . . Meanwhile, after performing his role as Dean of Humanities at Harvard University, McGeorge Bundy becomes W W Rostow’s superior in Washington, and goes on television to explain to the misguided and incredulous why this economic development theory and policy is humanitarian ...” Gunder Frank, whose concern is with developing countries, stated that “the American social scientific way of life . . . has its own essential role in the imperialist exploitation, oppression, and underdevelopment of the majority of mankind.”6 He was, in fact, writing about academics in general. Rarely do they bite the hand that feeds them. They endorse the legitimacy of free, private enterprise and facilitate its survival. They damn as unworthy, oppressive, brutal, anything which gets in its way. And they do it all so cleverly, in moderated tones and footnoted texts. And in case their readers begin to ask disturbing questions they avoid the sticky ones, like the parts played by military-industrial complexes and the social consequences of their actions. Somewhere in the Pentagon Files there must be a memorandum explaining the effectiveness of theatre nuclear war as a means of dampening the ardour of the Soviet Union.

Detente or Containment

The President’s advisers on Soviet policy base their analyses, and therefore their advice, on assumptions about the Soviet Union. They would claim, of course, that whatever they assume is derived from the behaviour of the Soviet Union and does not need to be verified. Indeed the time has long since past when statements about the Soviet Union have to be substantiated by empirical evidence. The assumptions they make are consistent with the dominant capitalist view of communism and, therefore, endorse the contention that the Soviet Union is the enemy of the USA. The policy options which follow from this are limited and obvious.

Academic advisers are invariably specialists in one aspect or other of foreign relations who have written extensively on their subjects. It is possible, therefore, to discover their attitudes and, within them, to identify their biases. But this would be an arduous and rather tedious process. Professor Joseph S Nye Jnr, professor of government at Harvard University has simplified the task by putting together the views of 13 advisers about different aspects of US relations with the Soviet Union in a single volume. In a book called The Making of America’s Soviet Policy7 13 high ranking academics who have served as advisers covering the period from 1945 till 1984 explain their views succinctly and to the point. Eight of the essayists are from Harvard University. American Presidents, despite their own origins, seem to hold a common view about the source of intellectual excellence. All of the contributors deal with American-Soviet relationships from the point of view of American policy-making institutions. Each one postulates the Soviet Union as an enemy. The task of American foreign policy then has to be to disarm, contain, weaken and, maybe, as a last resort, to destroy the Soviet Union. The advice is always concerned, therefore, with deterring, destabilizing and direct confrontation.

The advisers thus limit themselves, in effect, to two options; either to seek accommodation through detente or to contain the Soviet Union through military superiority. The essays are pervaded by a suspicion of detente. One contributor, Robert R Bowie, a scholar with an illustrious record as an adviser, formerly Director of the Harvard Center for International Affairs, described the “Nixon detente” as the most costly mistake in postwar American strategy, along with the Vietnam War.8 Another contributor, Stanley Hoffmann, chairman of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University put the issue more explicitly. “But once detente is”, he wrote, “so to speak, in orbit, the issue becomes one of preventing the Soviets from, or punishing them for, doing hostile things, and the tools first used as goads must now be used as possible sanctions, the carrots must become sticks . . .”9 Detente, Hoffmann argued, began to be seen as appeasement. He added: “What made this view fashionable way beyond the conservative and neo conservative fringes was a combination of three factors. One was the worry about the changes in the strategic balance ... A second factor was growing indignation at Soviet human rights violations ... A third one was the evidence of fiascos abroad: in South East Asia, in southern Africa . . ,”10 One of the lessons Hoffmann drew from an analysis of detente, and presumably this would be listed as a policy recommendation, was to “be modest in our expectation about Soviet behaviour ... It is not in our interest to make of the Soviet Union a partner in the settlement of conflict far removed from its area of vital interests. It is not in our interest to sign vague statements of principle. It is not likely that trade can ever become a major factor in Soviet-American relations . . ”11 And so the recommendations were handed from one adviser to another.

If this is the view about detente, then what about the alternative option: containment through strength? The logic of this option means not simply nuclear superiority but destroying every visible evidence of the spread of Soviet influence, wherever it is found - in other words, repressing progressive movements. And just as attempts to quell domestic communism spill over to become generally repressive of progressive movements because of the difficulty of identifying communism as a social force, so international anti-communism becomes general and indiscriminate repression. Any country which attempts to distance itself from the hegemony of American capitalism becomes a target. Libya has suffered largely for this reason. Nicaragua, Mozambique and Angola are other targets of US hostility. Tiny Grenada was invaded for its affront to the USA. Ordinary people suffer; they may be killed; their environments are shattered. The costs can be horrendous as the millions of dead and injured Vietnamese testify. Seen in this light the alternative to detente has no moral basis: it is plainly evil.

The academic advisers who wend their way through the leafy suburbs of bourgeois America, with their briefcases containing their precious Soviet policy memoranda, are not paid to count social costs. Their task is to provide options. It is governments which choose. They would, in any event, be abhorred by the suggestion that they were in any sense responsible for devastating ordinary people's lives, for underpinning the script of ‘Rambo’ as single-handedly he rampages against communists. But that is precisely what they are doing. Not, of course, on their own. The basis of American foreign policy, is to protect the international rights of private capital, which, in effect, means the interests of multi-national companies. The President's advisers compound the pressures which those interests generate and which comprise the military-industrial complex. They provide respectable cover. The origin of international tyranny, however, is not wholly institutional. Many individuals, whose lives may seemingly be otherwise unblameworthy contribute to it. They, as well as vast institutions, have a moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

FOOTNOTES

1. Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department by Dean Acheson, 1969, p. 219.
2. The Decline and Resurgence of Congress by James L Sundquist, 1981. p 118.
3. "The President and the Executive Branch” by Robert R Bowie, in The Making of America’s Soviet Policy, ed by Joseph S Nye Jr. 1984, p. 67. This is an informative if biased account.
4. I am not suggesting that only American academics engage in this practice. No matter what the society, academics generally, though not invariably, engage in it though most do not really know that they are doing it.
5. First published in the Summer, 1967 issue of Catalyst and reprinted numerously. It is taken here from Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution by André Gunder Frank, 1969, p. 28.
6. Critique and Anti-Critique. Essays on Dependence and Reformism by André Gunder Frank, 1984, p. 19.
7. The Making of America’s Soviet Policy edited by Joseph S Nye Jr, A Council on Foreign Relations Book, Yale University Press, 1984.
8. ibid, p. 91.
9. ibid, p 248.
10. ibid, pp. 256-7.
11. ibid, p. 260.