OPINION: Policy Without Purpose?

Into the ranks of dissenters to U.S. foreign policy steps a new recruit this week, armed with an old-fashioned philosophy and a newsman's restless mind. He is Max Ways, 54, longtime TIME senior editor (FOREIGN NEWS, NATIONAL AFFAIRS) and foreign correspondent. U.S. foreign policy, writes Ways in Beyond Survival (Harper; $4), is headed for a dead end. It is probably doomed to lose ground to the Communists in the realms of politics, economics and military affairs. The fault lies not with the policymakers but with the American people, because the U.S. has no wide-ranging sense of purpose.

Since the end of World War I, the principal aim of U.S. foreign policy, says Ways, has been to ensure the nation's survival. This limiting policy kept Franklin Roosevelt from moving ships and planes on Pearl Harbor eve because he thought the people would not understand warlike actions until "the aggressor" had struck the first blow. It led the U.S. to fight World War II under "the shamefully aimless policy banner of unconditional surrender,'' without any postwar aims. Today, as in Hitler's day. the U.S. is up against an enemy with a purpose, plan and even a sort of public philosophy that aims far beyond the mere survival to the kind of world the enemy wants. Meanwhile, Ways thinks that preoccupation with survival is preventing the U.S. from explaining its positive assets to the world, crippling thinking about what to do next, and straitjacketing U.S. policies in key areas, to wit:

MILITARY: U.S. military planners are forced to assume that the U.S. must suffer the first blow in any future war. This is basically a defensive strategy, keyed to what a lover of Westerns would recognize as the "virtue [of] drawing second and killing your man." It rests on a massive atomic counterblow—"one of the most unlimited and inhumane strategies ever devised by man." The ultimate peril of "massive retaliation," says Ways, is that the U.S. will become more and more reluctant to apply it to small incursions, be crowded more and more into a corner where nothing else is left. Ways, who wants no part of preventive war, would keep the strong forces of planes and missiles, but hope for military thinking that does not shrink from applying varying degrees of force to widely understood political objectives.

POLITICAL: Survival, as an end, confuses political purpose. For example, U.S. leaders had to try to explain the Korean war as a challenge to U.S. survival, with the result, says Ways, that "the public had no image of what the U.S. was trying to win," was thoroughly confused about objectives once the Reds were driven back across the 38th parallel. The Russians start with objectives that link both military and political planning and keep them closely coordinated. "We have whole categoric? of political objectives which our disordered ethics forbids us to defend by force."

ECONOMIC: The U.S. holds all the high cards in the world economic battle but loses too many tricks because it has no policy objectives beyond survival. One of capitalism's proudest achievements, foreign aid. should be building the foundations of the kind of orderly economic world that the U.S. wants, instead has lost its effect because it is understood as being essentially antiCommunist.