84
DENNIS H. WRONG
revolutionary nationalist movements at opposite ends of the world
and to different groups, from Westernized intellectuals to racially
proud tribal leaders, within emerging nations. Errors of American
policy have certainly compounded these advantages. New policies
are likely to have the greatest effect in Latin America. The United
States can afford no more Guatemalas, no more Cuban invasions, no
more open or tacit support of unpopular dictators. Since the Cuban
blunder, American help in forestalling a return to power of the
Trujillo family and readiness to consider economic aid to the Jagan
government in British Guiana suggest that some lessons have been
learned. Perhaps we shall never fully know whether Cuba willingly
joined the Communist bloc, using various hostile but by no means
consistent American actions as a pretext, or whether these actions
in
light of America's discreditable past record led Castro to believe he
had no alternative. The United States has much to live down
in
South America, particularly in the Caribbean area, but the very
economic and political power so long exercised there, linking Latin
American societies to the United States by multiple ties, makes
it
possible for changed policies to have a real impact.
I have never been persuaded that altered American policies
would have as great an effect elsewhere in the underdeveloped world
as their advocates have suggested.
If
the United States devoted a
sum comparable to its present defense budget to capital transfers to
underdeveloped areas, no doubt American popularity would greatly
increase, but such a policy almost presupposes disarmament and the
end of the military phase of the cold war. The withdrawal of Ameri-
can support from elderly dictators and ancient traditional autocracies
might induce some of the new neutral nations to become a little
t'
more neutral in spirit. But the wistful insistence of some liberals that
the American revolutionary past and our traditional anti-colonialism
would enable us to compete successfully with the Communists if only
we changed our clients and our rhetoric is hardly convincing. SeIf–
determination is no longer a goal but an achievement in most of the
non-Soviet world, and individual liberty and institutional, as distinct
from populist, democracy mean as little to the new nations at this
stage as free enterprise or opposition to "Godlessness."
Is this really a cause for agonized concern? The notion that the
cold war creates an American interest in every sparrow that falls
