Birds of a feather.

• Author: Codevilla, Angelo M.
• Position: U.S. foreign policy

BOSNIA AND HAITI, Somalia and North Korea...The failure of the Clinton administration's foreign policy becomes ever more clear, even as the menacing reality of a Russia that Washington has indulged and deferred to becomes more difficult to deny. That failure, it can be argued, is the direct result of a certain cast of mind.

Today the foreign policy of the United States is well-nigh controlled by that wing of the establishment that worked to defeat the U.S. in Vietnam, championed lower U.S. defense spending and arms control, favored concessions to the Soviet Union and its surrogates, and imposed a variety of restrictions on the use of U.S. power in the world. Their performance is best understood in terms of a syndrome which is the logical result of a mentality acquired over decades--a mentality that impairs understanding of America's place in the world and makes it nearly impossible to make policy in America's interest.

What is this mentality? To answer that we have to look back to the debates of the Cold War, debates as fundamental as any in our history. Today, those debates survive as ideas embodied in people. People do not spring up new, Minerva-like, in middle age. So, whereas terms like "nationalist" and "internationalist," "isolationist" and "realist," can be stuffed with anyone's favorite meanings, decades of struggles over real issues--Vietnam, the Soviet Union, armaments, and the rest have fashioned real mental capacities and incapacities in real people. These mentalities, rather than nebulous new concepts, are affecting reactions to post-Cold War challenges.

Some argue that the "wise men" of the Eastern establishment who ran America's foreign affairs from the 1920s through the Cold War have given way to geographic and ethnic diversity.(1) But this is wrong. Those who are responsible for national security today are surely more narrowly homogeneous than ever in what matters most--their ideas and experiences. It would be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye than for someone to enter the senior ranks at State, Defense, or NSG who favored a U.S. victory in Vietnam, who had cheered Ronald Reagan's call in 1982 to cast communism on the scrap heap of history, or who had favored building an antimissile defense for the United States. Anthony Lake, Madeleine Albright, Strobe Talbott, Morton Halperin, Peter Tarnoff, Les Aspin, Dennis Ross, to name but a few, never were outsiders who stormed the ramparts of the U.S. government.(2) Nor did they infiltrate. Rather they came through government's front door from Hotchkiss, Harvard, and Yale, and enjoyed the best patronage government can give, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Their rise, then, is best understood as a gradual change in the collective mentality of the establishment, a change that is now complete.

Throughout their thirty-year march to the conquest of virtually all positions of prominence, this remarkably like-minded middle-aged group have described themselves at various times as partisans of peace and morality against those insufficiently sensitive to the evils of war; as practical idealists who have outgrown excessive preoccupation with narrow national interests and elusive "victories"; as multi-nationalists, to be distinguished both from isolationists and unilateralists; and as "owls," to be distinguished from doves, and very much in opposition to hawks.

Members of today's foreign policy establishment did not spend their formative years worrying about how to maximize their country's power or studying the principles of international statecraft. After opposing the United States in Vietnam, they made their careers restraining, diminishing, denigrating American power, and arguing that power is not fundamental to world affairs. Their favorite image of the world was that of their forefathers in the Roosevelt administration: partnership between a reformed Soviet Union and an America which had abandoned its Western triumphalism. While they championed arms control agreements, they never got excited when the Soviet Union violated them. With few exceptions, they did not serve in the armed forces, and have scarce social contact and sympathy with those Americans who do. Hence neither in mind nor heart nor habit are they comfortable managing America's power for the sake of its interests, or calling forth the nation's martial instincts to defends its sacred values.

Lessons of Vietnam

WILLIAM APPLEMAN Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) contained, in principle, all the complaints expressed by Senator J.W. Fulbright in The Arrogance of Power (1967), the primer for Americans who wanted to see America lose in Vietnam. These books taught those who came of age during that war the same lessons: Americans were so cocksure of the superiority of their own way of life, so obsessed with the evil of communism, that they violated the peace and integrity of gentler peoples who were trying to improve their lives in their own way. If the Soviet menace had not existed, America would have invented it, and to a considerable extent that menace was our own invention. Americans thought they were saving Vietnam and other places, but instead brought death and corruption. The "other side" were not really communists, but even if they were, they were closer to the people than we, and our violent opposition to them was immoral. America's anticommunism was the original sin of contemporary international life. The evil that others did, from Stalin to Castro to Ho Chi Minh, was...