PARTISAN REVIEW
149
the weakness of the politicians they made use of in Spain
than
does
Chomsky.
Similarly, Chomsky's discussion of American and Japanese Pacific
policy before 1941 in the Muste piece is almost breathtakingly over–
simplified. With his main thrust I have no quarrel. Indeed, his in–
genious comparison of the Japanese in Manchuria and the Americans
in Vietnam is chillingly appropriate. But his implicit assumption of
consistent and coherent economic and strategic purposes behind Amer–
ican policy, while it has been shared by economic determinists and
devil theorists, hardly squares with the documentary materials increas–
ingly becoming available. An examination of the three volumes on
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs
recently published by the
Harvard University Press from the presidential papers in the Roosevelt
Library at Hyde Park shows, I think, how confused, vague and un–
focused American policy really was before 1941. (Why, incidentally,
should a private university press have been permitted to publish these
materials edited by a government archivist as part of his official duties
before various scholars presumably may have seen them? The administra–
tion of our presidential libraries is puzzling to say the least.)
It
is both le–
gitimate and revealing for Chomsky to attack American policy by taking
the terms upon which American foreign policy has been defended and
argue the Japanese case from that standpoint. But for him to pre–
sent a caricature, often by implication, of American policy seriously
distorts the important argument he is making. In any case, the revolu–
tionary pacifism of Muste, with which the argument begins and ends, is
almost lost among the impassioned paragraphs of this methodologically
disturbing essay.
It is with some relief, then, that I turn to Hans Morgenthau's new
book. And Morgenthau, who continues to be a tough realist in inter–
national affairs while increasingly accepting the central significance of
moral issues, does not in the end disappoint. Unfortunately, like so
many political scientists, he here takes the meaning of the "national
interest" virtually for granted. Is it military security? Prestige? Amer–
ican credibility among other nations? Influence over the course of events
elsewhere? And what proportions of the various factors make up the
amalgam? Morgenthau has himself discussed those questions elsewhere,
but in this volume he assumes agreement on their answers. Yet if this
normative analysis is understandably vague on definition, its prescrip–
tions for action (except in the case of the United Nations) are not.
Morgenthau's plea is essentially for national self-knowledge and
governmental self-control. Limitations of commitments in Asia, caution
in Europe, restraint in nuclear competition, these recommendations go
