Essay: THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSCURITY

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"I HAVE lived 78 years without hearing of bloody places 1 like Cambodia," said Winston Churchill some years before his death. "They have never worried me and I haven't worried them." This remark, recalled by the great man's physician, Lord Moran, was very Churchillian and very 19th century. It was the remark of a man who, despite a keen global vision, still thought it easy for the West to regard itself as the center of the world. To many of his era the periphery of that world lay somewhere in the jungle, well beyond the enclave of civilization. But yesterday's jungle is often today's battlefield. Nowadays, few sophisticated liberal experts on international affairs would regard any nation, even those known only to stamp collectors, as too distant or too obscure to matter.

Yet last week a sophisticated, liberal expert on international affairs came remarkably close to resuscitating the Churchillian view that distance lends disinterest. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kenneth Galbraith, the former U.S. Ambassador to India, was asked about Viet Nam. Said Galbraith: "I have said many times that if we were not involved there, I think that all of that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity that it richly deserves."

A New Principle

That remark might well be dismissed as an attempt at wit by a literate and witty professor. Galbraith, however, certainly did not consider it so. Later he added that—although he does not advocate direct U.S. withdrawal—Viet Nam is "a country which has not the slightest strategic importance." His neo-isolationism is less significant as a personal viewpoint than as a measure of a growing tendency among academics and other critics of U.S. policy to believe that Viet Nam is simply not very important to the U,S. It also reflects the feelings of a great many other Americans, who devoutly wish that Viet Nam were really unimportant, a place that need not be worried about.

Galbraith's remark evoked a time when the U.S. still spoke of "dark" corners in the world and even of entire "dark" continents. In fact, he seemed to suggest a new principle for evaluating countries or regions—a sort of sliding obscurity scale—without making it clear how it would be applied. The standards of obscurity are historically fickle. Czechoslovakia and Poland seemed fairly obscure to many Americans in the 1930s, but events there led to World War II. Greece was an off-Broadway tragedy after World War II until Harry Truman decided to commit U.S. power there to stop a Communist takeover. Today, obscurity may be gently, even favorably, applied to such non-countries as Andorra, such splinter countries as Sikkim. But Galbraith is breathtaking in classifying as obscure all of Southeast Asia, an area of nearly 1,500,000 square miles and 200 million people.