PARTISAN REVIEW
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that one cannot entrust the welfare of the country to the conservative poli–
ticians, who have talked themselves into believing in laissez-faire thinking,
which boils down to a mad scramble for profits , votes , and popularity . The
great irony is that they have created the very kind of society which they
thrive on excoriating, a truly anarchist society.
2. What are the alternatives? Aside from competing and paralyzing
financial interests , our political ineptness is too well known to require fur ·
ther proof. When politicians do become aware that Communists exploit
naive discontent, they make a futile gesture of support for backward na–
tions or radical movements . But clearly a business-oriented government,
even with occasional gifts of arms and money, cannot compete with the left,
which is usually able to capture those forces that naturally gravitate toward
radical parties and governments . And even those peoples whose security de–
pends on the United States often keep their political distance from us to be
free of the taint of American support . Perhaps the basic dilemma of the
United States is that, unlike the Communists, it cannot combine its power
politics with an appeal to morality.
In the past, our overwhelming military strength compensated for our
political backwardness. But the conservatives seem unwilling to draw the
necessary conclusions from the new balance of power between the Societ
Union and the United States . If we cannot rely on force , we are reduced to
the use of politics-and what kind of politics can the Ford administration,
for instance, conjure up to persuade the Italian or French or Portuguese peo–
ple not to vote Communist? We have already seen the results of our political
intelligence in Viernam.
This is not to advocate despair , though no sane person can be an opti–
mist in this period . Nor am I saying that nothing should be done . I am
merely suggesting that fantasies of toughness do not constitute a concrete or
viable course of action . And it is certainly not clear just what the hard-liners
would have us do-other than to help Israel.
3.Perhaps the basic question raised by Podhoretz is that of national in–
terest. His assumption is that an aggressive stand against Communists every–
where serves both the national interest and a broader human
inter~st,
an
assumption that runs counter to the views of many liberals and radicals. It is
true that it is mostly out-and-out Marxists who maintain openly that a mili–
tant anti-Communism serves only reactionary and imperialist interests , and,
therefore, divorce themselves completely from American foreign politics.
But there is a general tendency now on the left to oppose the kind of inter–
vention we have engaged in, usually on moral or political grounds, without
suggesting that the proper kind of intervention might be acceptable .
Now, the issue of national interest is too complex to be resolved by
