Nation: The Mid East: Search for Stability

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The Nixon Doctrine, first enunciated in July of 1969 on Guam, warned that friends of the U.S. must wage their own local fights with their own manpower. In most cases, the U.S. will back them only with arms and money. Nixon's plan to channel most foreign aid through international agencies rather than as funds dangling at the end of U.S. -held strings, is a similarly realistic relinquishing of power. The Nixon Administration has also proposed a more drastic curtailment of its worldwide defense establishment than is generally realized. In addition to the substantial withdrawals from Viet Nam, it has already begun to cut one-third of its 64,000 troops in South Korea. Reductions in the 285,000-man force stationed with NATO, mainly in West Germany, are in the offing. In a concession to Japan, the U.S. decided last week to stop using Okinawa as a B-52 base. It is withdrawing about 10,000 of its 39,000 military personnel, mostly airmen, from Thailand. The active-duty strength of the U.S. Army will be reduced by three divisions next June. The Navy is in the process of decommissioning hundreds of ships.

There are, of course, risks—psychological and physical—in such retrenchment while the other superpower, Russia, and the budding power, Communist China, continue to build up. Yet if Nixon can be faulted, it is not for enunciating his much-needed and perhaps belated doctrine, but for his failure to heed it consistently. Though rationalized as a defensive measure, his decision to order U.S. troops into Cambodia seemed to violate his own policy. Whatever its limited military advantages to the U.S. in Viet Nam, the Cambodian intervention was billed by the President in apocalyptic terms. Almost always when he speaks of Southeast Asia, he seems to be defending an ideology, a way of life, or an almost mystical concept of na tional honor.

Rotten Apples

Those arguments had more validity in the two World Wars and in the darkest days of the cold war. The U.S. emerged in 1945 as the world's strongest power, both economically and militarily. It used its economic strength magnificently to help rebuild Western Europe, and idealistically hoped to forge another superpower out of a unification of much of that continent. Soon the State Department's Dean Acheson was pushing the decision to aid Greece and Turkey against Communist subversion as part of the Truman Doctrine. U.S. failure to combat Communism there, he proclaimed, could "open three continents to Soviet penetration—like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe."