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draft. Early on, the U.S. expressed its objections to such a treaty on
the grounds that the Soviet Union had consistently refused indepen–
dent U.N. verification of the proposed ban. The Soviets, again,
remained silent, raising no objections while the U.S. played the fall
guy and was roundly criticized for obstructing agreement on the test
ban section.
We lose more than we should at the U.N. simply on the basis of
style. In an arena where words are the accredited currency, silence is
often golden, as the Soviets know very well. They play their cards
well and close to the chest, exercising restraint, speaking in slow,
somber tones. The Americans are almost always too loud, too blunt,
too quick on the trigger-"a bunch of amateurs," as Jeane
Kirkpatrick rightly calls them.
But we lose for reasons that go beyond style, as Senator Moynihan
realized when he served at the U. N. Shortly after assuming his
post, Moyn ihan requested that all U. S. Mission staff prepare
descriptions of "America's ideology," arguing that those who did
not realize the importance of such ideology, and could not articulate
it, had no hope of succeeding at the U. N.
Moynihan was right. The problem is that, for all practical pur–
poses, America is inherently anti-ideological. Only when the role of
the individual has been usurped by subservience to the State, to an
institution, to a religious hierarchy, or to some other form of mass
movement, can ideology be clearly articulated-and, indeed, must
it be articulated to fill the vacuum. In a country where the pursuit of
self-interest and fears of "big government" run so deep, where the
executive, legislative, and diplomatic branches of government are
prone to dramatic, short-term reversals, where businessmen engage
in foreign policy of their own that often contradicts the expressed
policy of their government-in a country like this, ideology simply
has no foothold , vague references to "liberty" and "freedom of
expression" notwithstanding.
Yet without it we are doomed to fail again and again at the
U.N. The Soviet Union and its satellites have an elegant, powerfully
idealistic ideology that masks the realities of their regimes. The
developing countries excuse their gross violations of human rights
and corrupt economic systems by reconstructing history so that colo–
nialism, old and neo-, becomes both alpha and omega. They suc–
ceed in this deceit because they understand the persuasiveness of
manufactured idealism, and the fact that even otherwise intelligent
