AMERICA II
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of political sanity. We cannot liberate people against their will. When
Bertrand Russell, in urging a preventive atomic war against the Soviet
Union in 1948, declared "Communism must be wiped out and world–
government established," he was advocating a war on behalf of an idea
which, however valid, is certainly not worth the costs of its attempted
imposition.
The second principle is:
The doctrine of non-intervention, to be a legitimate principle
of morality, must be accepted by all governments. The despots
must consent to be bound by it as well as free states. Unless
they do, the profession of it by free countries comes but to
this miserable issue, that the wrong side may help the wrong
side but the right may not help the right.... Though it may
be a mistake to give freedom [or independence S.H.] to a
people who do not value the boon, it cannot but be right to
insist that if they do value it, they shall not be hindered from
the pursuit of it by foreign coercion.
It was the disregard of this principle which led to the victory of
Franco over democratic, Republican Spain. Fascist Italy and Germany
intervened massively, England and France did not, while the United
States adopted a neutrality resolution which was used as a pretext to
deny the sale of arms to the legal government of Spain.
The third principle is expressed in a sentence I omitted from the
paragraph above: "Intervention to enforce non-intervention is always
right, always moral, if not always prudent." No foreign policy devoid
of morality is worthy of the support of a free people, but sometimes
intelligent prudential considerations may enter into a larger moral view
of what is to be done. Even though in general intervention to enforce
nonintervention is right, a consideration of the likely consequences may
show the intervention to be unwise. I happen to believe that our inter–
vention in Hungary in 1955 would have led the Soviet Union to with–
draw its troops from Eastern Europe
without war.
But if those responsi–
ble for the decision were convinced that the consequences would have
been a World War, they were right
not
to intervene to prevent Soviet
intervention, for Hungary would have been destroyed in the process of
liberating it.
The original error in Vietnam was made in our postwar failure to
take the same attitude towards France's colonial empire in Asia as we
did to that of Holland. Edwin Reischauer's testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, especially in his exchanges with Fulbright,
Morse and others, inadequately and misleadingly reported in the press,
describes the entire Asian situation with balance, keen historical per–
ception and, that rarest of virtues these days, political common sense.
