PARTISAN REVIEW
179
horetz 's account of things is plausible , on the surface, but what about the
explanations he attaches to it?
It is true that some liberals turned away from global intervention after
the loss of the war in Vietnam. Others, however, turned away from the war
when militarily it still might have been won . They were repelled by its
brutality and callousness , its destructive frenzy, the chauvinistic pathology
it uncovered in our national life . Not all of these liberals were radicalized in
the process by any means, although the attendant decomposition of the
American political consensus accomplished that for no small number. Mr.
Podhoretz describes the current liberal perspective on the world, after our
supposed turn inward, as follows:
Of course there would still be foreign affairs even in this scheme of
things, but they would now be based on cooperation rather than power
and conflict and competition . Our new role would be governed by an
understanding , in another favorite liberal phrase of the day, of the
growing " interdependence" of the countries. The world was becoming
a place in which-as a prominent exponent of this view would later put
it-' ' nobody was in charge ." The United States could no longer control
its allies and clients , and the Societ Union was having similar troubles ,
as witness the break-up of the Communist world into opposing camps
and the growing independence of national Communist parties in
Europe and elsewhere of Russian conuo!. Nor could the United States or
the Soviet Union any longer throw its weight around with impunity.
Sadat could expel Soviet technicians from Egypt without fear of
military reprisal and the once mighty United States (as would soon be
demonstrated in irrefutable terms) could be helplessly at the mercy of a
few otherwise impotent oil sheikhdoms. Given all this , a kind of peace–
ful collective bargaining on a planetary scale must inevitably be the
order of the future .
Mr. Podhoretz seems
to
dislike the idea of "cooperation" and "peace–
ful collective bargaining" as modes of world political behavior and es–
pecially as relationships this country will be obliged, increasingly, to enter.
He prefers, quite explicitly, that we continue
to
throw our weight around .
For several reasons , his anxiety is premature. The desperate opportunism of
our foreign policy for the past five years does not suggest that we have em–
braced either "cooperation" or "peaceful collective bargaining." (Recall
Henry Kissinger's threats of military action to guarantee our sources of oil in
the Mideast, and his Lear-like performance , now, with respect
to
Western
European Communism. "I shall do such things . . .. ") Our elites have
adopted different tactics . The remarks addressed by Kissinger and Sonnen–
feldt to our diplomats recently show that they interpret
detente
as an
American-Soviet condominium-at everyone else's expense . That, surely,
