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DENNIS H. WRON6
Dennis H. Wrong
1. Where foreign policy is concerned it makes a lot of dif–
ference who is President, as most of your respondents in the Winter
issue recognize. With the decline of immigrant groups emotionally in–
volved in the affairs of their homelands, there are few domestic con–
stituencies on foreign policy issues that national politicians have to take
into account. I agree with Michael Harrington that a popular President
can lead the country and create rather than merely reflect a consensus
on foreign affairs, although he may fritter away his opportunities to do
so, as Johnson perhaps has already done. Only big wars, actual or
threatening, bite deeply enough into the consciousness of the electorate
to limit sharply the President's freedom of action. With regard to Viet–
nam, the evidence from the past is conflicting.
Several of your respondents are fearful that continuing frustrations
in Vietnam and even possible defeat will lead to further American
military commitments in Asia and an upsurge of superpatriotism and
suppression of dissent at home which will increase the risk of nuclear
war with Russia or China or both. Certainly this is a real and terrifying
possibility. When mobilized against a foreign enemy, Americans become
belligerently overcommitted to the struggle and a mood of "getting it
over with for once and all" takes hold in a country that has never ex–
perienced direct military attack or invasion and cannot seem to grasp
the irrelevance of all past wars to a war with nuclear weapons (Susan
Sontag's taxi-driver is altogether representative here). Twenty years of
Cold War have forged a link between patriotism and the anti-Com–
munist rhetoric our leaders regularly trot out to defend their question–
able actions in Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic or wherever.
But what about Korea? Is it not the best precedent for the probable
outcome of the war in Vietnam? The Korean War was a bigger war,
it occurred when Cold War passions were at a peak, with Stalin and
McCarthy both in business, and the chief critics of the Truman Ad–
ministration's conduct of the war were hawks eager to escalate it. Yet
in two years it became an unpopular war and Eisenhower was able to
end it although the military outcome was ambiguous. Fifteen years later,
the Munich analogy that had seemed relevant to Korea has become
threadbare in light of the detente with Russia and the internal upheaval
in China. Influential national politicians oppose the Vietnamese war
and their number is bound to increase as the 1968 elections approach.
Larger casualty lists and expanded troop commitments are deepening
