Nation: The Mid East: Search for Stability

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The Acheson rotten apples were converted to falling dominoes by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Dean Rusk embraced the theory throughout Kennedy and Johnson presidencies and Nixon dragged them forcefully to the fore when antiwar dissent rose. The rotten apple and domino visions of the world struggle could be defended in their time, but realities have changed, notably America's relative power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union's own role in the Communist movement. In the heady days after the war, Americans felt, as French Journalist André Fontaine says, "that they were the best, most capable and most qualified to act as disinterested policemen in a world destined to remain imperfect." Since then, the police metaphor has become a cliché and the feeling less valid than ever.

The trouble with much Nixonian rhetoric about Southeast Asia is that it portrays a challenge to the U.S. by anyone anywhere as a blow to America's vitals. Because it is an unfillable prescription for intervention anywhere, it invites charges of hypocrisy. No world diplomat, even in the U.S., really believes that South Viet Nam is as vital to world stability as is Berlin, or that Laos is as crucial as the Middle East. Observes a White House official: "Politicians go for the cosmic explanation. But they should have learned that the credibility gap follows the cosmic explanation like night follows day." To be credible, a superpower can only exercise its might when its survival or its stabilizing influence against an opposing superpower is really at stake, or when its action is clearly within the major nation's orbit. In short, the U.S. is faced with the increasingly difficult problem of how to use its power, and of knowing when not to use it.

The U.S. never had the stomach to be an empire—in fact, it can be argued that any democracy in which the voters must be sold periodically on the need to maintain a world role cannot possibly be an empire today. But the U.S. has legitimate quasi-imperial needs and obligations in the sense of helping to maintain (as distinct from dictating) stability in wide areas. How to do this in today's world is the dilemma behind the Middle East conflict.

The implied threat of nuclear superiority no longer works in most situations, because the Russians have achieved virtual nuclear parity with the U.S. The old way of achieving political goals through economic aid is still important but increasingly ineffective in countries stirred up to a new nationalist pitch. Precise and quick military intervention (as in Lebanon in 1958 and the Dominican Republic in 1965) can never be ruled out, but is much harder to bring off now largely because of the fears stirred by Viet Nam.

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