POINTS AFTER .
..
HARDHEADS AND
SOFfHEADS. Norman Podhoretz's call for a stronger
anti-Communist foreign policy in the April issue of
Commentary.
which
Norman Birnbaum comments on in the following piece in this issue of
PRo
strikes me as an unusual combination of
rea/politic
and ideology. Some of
what he says is true. some untrue. some beside the point . But he does have a
sense of the central issues . Hence he raises the fundamental questions about
the future of the United States, and he must be commended for being so
forthright in expressing views that many liberal conservatives have learned to
hedge on or to conceal. In any case, I take Podhoretz's conservative mani–
festo
to
represent the opinions, overt or covert, of all those who feel that the
United States is betraying its role as the guardian of freedom and retreating
to a new isolationism. But he does not make the causes of this turn very
clear, and so far as I can make out he attributes it mostly to a failure of will
on the part of the ruling elites of the country . The most telling evidence of
our defeatism, Podhoretz concludes, is the widespread acceptance of the
idea that we are doomed to a world of accommodation instead of confron–
tation .
As Birnbaum very persuasively indicates, Podhoretz is wide open to cri–
ticism from the left . But I want to take another tack: rather than punch
holes in Podhoretz's arguments, which still leaves unanswered the questions
he raises, I would like to consider the questions themselves .
To begin with, let me say that so far as anyone can claim to know the
mood of the country Norman Podhoretz is obviously correct in observing
that anti-Communist intervention is not very popular these days . And he is
probably also correct in predicting the loss of power and influence of the
United States
if
it should go isolationist, that is,
if
it should commit itself
to
defending only its own borders. I stress these political realities here because
the liberal and radical left have usually pretended they do not exist, or that
the anti-Communists have invented them solely
to
scare the country into
supporting a large military budget at home and an adventurous policy abroad.
