Many misinterpreted the announcement of the Nixon Doctrine as a decision by the United States to withdraw into isolation, leaving the countries of Asia and the rest of the world to fend for themselves. That was not the case. The Nixon Doctrine was not a formula for getting America out of the Third World, but for providing the only sound basis for America to stay in the Third World. I knew that after the Vietnam War it was going to be impossible to involve American forces in a war against guerrilla forces. The Nixon Doctrine made it possible for the United States to continue to play a responsible role in helping our friends and allies defend their independence against communist aggression. American aid to the government of El Salvador is an example of the Nixon Doctrine. We provide arms, economic aid, and training, but El Salvador provides the combat forces.
When a Third World government is under attack by communist guerrillas, the task of pacifying the country is extremely difficult. But the United States has had enough experience with this problem that we can avoid mistakes of the past by following seven basic guidelines:
First, we must not destabilize the leadership of our ally. Unless this leadership is hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly incompetent, or both, the United States should exercise great caution before tampering with it—and should act only if a better alternative exists. Strong leadership is essential in counterinsurgency. If our ally has strong leaders with a degree of popular support, we should give them great latitude for action in dealing with the insurgency. They usually understand better than we do what needs to be done in their country. The worst mistake we made in Vietnam was to instigate the coup against President Diem in 1963. While his government had serious flaws, his removal produced political instability, which in turn undermined South Vietnam’s military capability. As a direct result, we had to assume the primary burden for fighting the war. If someone depends on us to put him in power, he will continue to depend on us after he is in power.
Second, we must seek to cut off supplies to the insurgents coming from outside sources. Unless an insurgency enjoys the total support of the people or the government is inept and weak, it is impossible for its troops to keep up the fight without outside aid. Captured weapons and ammunition can give the guerrillas the capability for hit-and-run raids or to defend a few rural strongholds. But a sustained offensive campaign requires the logistical support of an external power. We must therefore make it a military priority to cut off those outside supplies before they reach the insurgents.
Third, we must supply whatever amount of military aid is needed to defeat the insurgents. We must not skimp on a country’s survival. We should adopt the principle of doing at least as much for our friends and allies as the Soviets do for theirs.
Fourth, we must require our ally to reform its armed forces, if necessary, to command the support of the people. Counterinsurgency is a political war as much as a military one. A political victory is a precondition for a military one. We must not allow the communists to gain popular support because of brutalities committed against the civilian population by the military. That will lead to a political defeat and, in turn, to a military defeat. Not only will the communists gain recruits and support, but also the United States will find it politically impossible at home to continue to back its ally. But we must pursue military reform with flexibility and patience. A difficult task in the best of circumstances, overhauling the armed forces in wartime without undercutting their effectiveness is a tightrope act which risks a fall to defeat.
Fifth, we must encourage our ally to adopt a strategy to defend the country at the village level. U.S. military-training programs should avoid the mistake of restructuring our ally’s forces on the American model. Armies need to be equipped to fight the guerrilla threat they face. Our military is well suited to fight conventional wars but not unconventional guerrilla wars. It has too much confidence in devising technological solutions to military problems and, left to itself, will soon equip our Third World allies with high-performance fighter-bombers and heliborne assault teams. We must remember that in a guerrilla war an infantry platoon in each village will defend the people better than a mechanized battalion in each province.
Sixth, we must promote economic progress at the same time as we pursue military victory. Communism attracts few supporters on its own. Its appeal stems from the way communists exploit the sufferings of a people. We can argue that communist promises of a better life are deceitful and that a communist government will be still more oppressive than the present one, but that will have little effect on people locked in the debasing poverty of the Third World. We must look at the world from their perspective. For them, the status quo is indefensible. If the communists talk about their problems while we talk only about the communists, they will opt for the communists. We must wage a campaign to create economic progress as part of a political offensive to help achieve a military victory.
Seventh, we must be prepared to sustain our support over the long haul. Few guerrilla wars last less than a decade, and many have been fought for over a generation. Americans are an impatient people. We expect results quickly. But it is unreasonable to expect a government to defeat a guerrilla force overnight. If our friends and allies cannot count on us to stay the course, we will soon have none left.
When a friendly noncommunist Third World government faces no guerrilla threat, the United States should not assume all is well. The quiet could be the calm before the storm. In these cases, our strategy must be preemptive. We must defuse the issues of poverty and oppression which give communism its superficial appeal. We should seize the opportunity to make a peaceful revolution in the Third World now or confront the necessity of dealing with violent ones later. While we have learned to project power around the world better than any other nation in history, we must now learn to project progress just as dramatically.
Whenever a crisis breaks out in the Third World, we can almost always in retrospect see scores of warning signs of trouble ahead. We need to develop an early-warning system to detect hot spots before the fires of revolution break out. We should then offer an active, workable alternative to the status quo at one extreme and to communism at the other. We need to practice preventive political medicine before the patient is infected with an incurable revolutionary virus.
It is tempting for many in the West to push for instant democracy as a solution to all Third World problems. Their answer calls for pressuring governments to meet our own strict standards for human rights and for breaking ties with regimes which fail to measure up. After the United States helped to ease out President Duvalier in Haiti and President Marcos in the Philippines, they advocated applying the same formula to Pakistan and South Korea.
Their argument is right in identifying part of the problem but wrong in prescribing the solution. An authoritarian government is seldom popular, but in the Third World a democratic government is seldom possible. A democratic system is like a complicated timepiece. Just as the clock needs both its mainspring and its system of interconnected gears to keep time, a democratic system needs not only a popular desire for self-government but also the political, economic, and cultural institutions which make a democracy work. Those institutions took hundreds of years to evolve in the West. We should not expect them to take root overnight in the Third World.
We should always encourage progress toward democratic government and greater respect for human rights. That policy is in the interest not only of the peoples of the Third World. It is also in the interest of the United States, because a freely elected government is a stronger and more reliable ally. But we have to recognize that democracy by our standards is seldom possible in the Third World. When that is the case, we must apply a pragmatic formula in deciding which governments to support.
To qualify for our support, a nondemocratic government must meet four conditions. First, it must grant at least some human and political rights and must provide some prospect for peaceful change through the political system. Authoritarian governments allow some rights, like freedom of
religion, while communist totalitarian regimes prohibit all rights. If we break relations with all the countries which fail to measure up to American standards of freedom and justice, we will have to cut ourselves off from two thirds of the world. Rather than isolating ourselves from the world, we should use whatever influence we have with these governments to improve their respect for human rights, while exercising care to distance ourselves from truly onerous regimes to avoid becoming tainted in the eyes of their peoples by our association with their oppressors. For example, applying economic sanctions as some advocated would have destroyed our ability to influence the government of South Korea to move toward greater democracy through the adoption of electoral reforms. Heavy-handed attempts to impose on other countries may be good politics in the United States, but they usually make bad policy abroad.
Second, it must provide competent leadership, especially in economic matters. A people will accept a temporary curtailment of political rights as the price of economic progress. But it will not quietly endure the twin burdens of political repression and economic stagnation. If our strategic interests require close ties with authoritarian governments, we should use our influence to get them to adopt the kind of economic policies that will produce genuine progress for the people. We must also recognize that economic progress alone is not enough. Economic progress without freedom, like freedom without economic progress, can survive in the short run. But in the long run neither can survive without the other. We should use our influence to ensure that both go forward together.
Third, it must have a competent military establishment capable of maintaining internal order and preventing the rise of a communist insurgency. We sometimes must support an unpopular government, but we should not link ourselves too closely with one which cannot defend itself should a communist movement take hold. If we do so, we will be sitting on a powder keg with a fuse running into the Soviet Politburo. We will find ourselves at the mercy of Moscow, and Kremlin leaders are not notable for their mercy.
Fourth, we should support an authoritarian government only if there is no viable democratic opposition leadership available. Wedding ourselves too closely to an authoritarian regime polarizes the political setting against the United States. We force moderate political figures who want to open up the political system to ally themselves with the extreme left and to attack the United States. If we need to work with authoritarians, we must at least keep up contacts with the opposition, while at the same time quietly but firmly pressing the government to adopt political reforms which will protect human rights and expand freedom.
Those four criteria should govern our relations with noncommunist authoritarian governments in the Third World. But our policies in the Third World must reach beyond our political ties. While we should seek to prevent communist expansion in the Third World, our policies also seek to expand freedom.
One of our problems is that we have created the impression that the United States becomes actively involved in the Third World only when our interests are threatened by communist aggression. We must now develop policies that address their interests. We should demonstrate that even if there were no communist threat we would actively seek to lessen the burdens of poverty, injustice, and corruption that have been their lot for generations. In addressing these concerns, we will serve not only the interests of the people of the developing world but also our own. We will deprive Moscow and its clients of the issues they seek to exploit in their competition against the United States.
When the people of a communist-ruled country rise up to overthrow their oppressors, the United States faces the difficult question of whether to send them support or not. Some say it would be immoral to sit on the sidelines. Others say it would be immoral to get involved in a civil war. Both are partially right. Our choices must be the product of a hardheaded, pragmatic understanding of whom we should help.
On the one hand, President Reagan is right in arguing that as a matter of principle we should always support those fighting against communist aggression. When the thirteen American colonies broke with Britain, George III held no political prisoners in a Gulag. Moscow’s clients in the Third World have made this their specialty. If France was justified in helping the American Revolution out of the most cynical motivations, the United States is justified in helping anticommunist revolutions out of the most altruistic motives.
On the other hand, the opponents of the Reagan Doctrine correctly point out that the call to “support any friend and oppose any foe in defense of freedom” is good rhetoric but poor policy. It would involve the United States in every corner of the world opposing anyone who infringed on human rights, regardless of American interests or American capabilities. As painful as this may be for Americans who understand the suffering imposed by totalitarian tyranny, we must recognize that we cannot support every anticommunist revolutionary movement which appeals for our help.
These two points of view can be reconciled if we make a calculated appraisal of when we should apply the Reagan Doctrine. A careful application of the doctrine makes strategic sense. It is a logical extension of the idea of self-defense because, at minimum, it will hinder further Soviet aggression from those Third World countries it gained in the 1970s. It could reverse those gains because they lie on the periphery of the Soviet empire—where vital Soviet interests are not at stake. It does not involve our own forces. The Reagan Doctrine is a low-risk, low-cost policy.
Conservatives and liberals concur on supporting anticommunist forces when the communist government took power after an overt invasion by a foreign power. Just as the French resistance in World War II had the sympathy of the American people, the Afghan resistance and Cambodia’s noncommunist forces fighting Vietnamese occupying armies have near-universal support.
But sharp disagreements arise when anticommunist revolutionaries seek to bring down a government which took power through the victory of a Soviet-supported insurgency. Some argue that in these cases the Reagan Doctrine constitutes interference in the internal affairs of another country and therefore violates international law. That argument rests on legalisms. Since no world government enforces it, international law must be founded on reciprocity. As soon as one side’s actions depart from the norm, the other is no longer bound to it. Moscow has been supporting what it calls “wars of national liberation” since the end of World War II. We are therefore free to do the same, whatever the advocates of international law might argue. We cannot abide by Marquis of Queensberry rules when Moscow is hitting us below the belt.
To qualify for our help, an anticommunist revolutionary movement should meet three conditions: 1. It must be in the interest of people of the country involved. 2. It must be in the interest of the United States. In general, this is the case, for to deny help to our friends fighting for freedom while accepting the fact that the Soviets aid their comrades fighting for tyranny is strategically indefensible. 3. It must have a reasonable chance of success. If an anticommunist revolution cannot possibly prevail, we must not encourage freedom fighters in effect to commit suicide.
The fact that a country has a communist government does not by itself justify American support for an anticommunist rebellion against it. China is an obvious example. Beijing denies its people many freedoms we cherish, and a noncommunist government would clearly be in the interest of the Chinese people. But the government of China does not today threaten the United States, its friends, or its interests. On the contrary, China provides an indispensable counterweight to the Soviet Union. In addition, as the suppression of recent student protests showed, not even demonstrators, much less freedom fighters, have a chance to succeed against China’s firmly established communist government.
Poland is another example. Few nations have suffered as tragic a history as the Polish people over the last two centuries, and no country deserves its freedom more than Poland. It would be in the interest of the Polish people and of the United States to support an anticommunist insurgency. But the sad fact is that it would stand no cha
nce of success. As we learned in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1981, the Soviet Union will do whatever is necessary—including a brutal military invasion—to suppress an insurgency seeking to liberate one of its satellites in Eastern Europe. It would be a moral and strategic mistake to help a revolution against a tyrannical communist regime and then stand helplessly by as it is crushed by Moscow.
We should decide whether to help anticommunist revolutions on a case-by-case basis. We cannot support all the world’s freedom fighters, but we must not turn our backs on any of them. If we casually dismiss those who oppose the totalitarians of the world, we will have lost our soul as a nation.
Once we decide to support an anticommunist cause, we cannot do so halfheartedly. We must not supply freedom fighters with enough arms and ammunition to fight and die for their country but not enough for them to liberate it. That would be the height of immorality. They are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of freedom. We should give them the tools so they can finish the job. If we do not, we will be short-changing not only our friends but also ourselves.
While we must accept the fact that a great power does not always win, we must understand that if we take no risks we will never win. Victories require risks. At the same time, we must recognize that there are no permanent victories in the American–Soviet struggle. If they lose a battle, communists do not quit, but fall back to regroup for another day. Too often, after a defeat, Americans assume that the game is over, when in reality it has just moved into a different phase.
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