the human reality of realpolitik

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The Human Reality of RealpolitikAuthor(s): Anthony Lake and Roger MorrisSource: Foreign Policy, No. 4 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 157-162Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147744 .

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Pentagon Papers (2)

THE HUMAN REALITY OF REALPOLITIK

by Anthony Lake and Roger Morris

I t would be easy, and somehow consoling, to see in the Pentagon Papers an unprecedented and singular tragedy of American foreign policy.

After all, the papers are unique. Not some distant historical still life, this is a rare look into contemporary government with live actors. The events appear exceptional, the men involved are distinctive in personality and setting. Then there are the peculiar intellectual failures of those particular years: the treatment of Vietnamese politics and nation- alism like a production problem in some automated plant; the doctrine of counter- insurgency and the policies of over-involve- ment which it reflected and supported. Finally, Vietnam itself is a defiantly unique problem, destined for its own special and bloody slot in the history of Western mis- adventures in Asia.

Once the shock of our experience in Viet- nam wears off, we might let ourselves believe that all this is too extraordinary to be any- thing but an aberration. But the hard truth about the making of our Vietnam policy is that it was not really so unique at all. Leslie Gelb has well described how Vietnam was the product of conscious choice rather than high level inadvertence. The system within the executive branch worked.

Another equally shattering point is that our policy was not only the product of specific mistakes and the normal mechanical per- versity of the system. It reflected a basic mental set-the way nearly all of us, in government and out, have been looking

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at international affairs and foreign policy. Some readers of the Papers have professed

shock that in all those words, in all those options weighed and calculations made, there was so little mention of the enormous human costs and consequences of the policy-either here at home or in Indochina. But such costs and consequences are far too rarely weighed formally in major foreign policy decisions.

The Papers reveal that human costs were almost invariably approached in terms of their effect on public opinion here, or in making tactical decisions (as in choosing bombing targets). They were not formally considered in making the strategic decisions which determined our course of action.

Whether in the State Department, the Defense Department or the White House, whether in Democratic or Republican admin- istrations, this same dehumanized pattern of decision-making on all foreign policy issues has been evident. It is the way nations tradi- tionally carry on their business in the world. Vietnam is only special for the United States in the sheer magnitude of wasted human suffering and the direct toll on our society.

Enthusiasm For Architects

The issue, then, is not the men or the particular period of this tragedy. We cannot forget our own enthusiasm when the architects of our foreign policies in the last decade came in to dispel the malaise of the Eisen- hower years. And even in retrospect they remain the epitome of what our society produces to manage its dealings with other nations. To blame the Presidents who heeded them is to dodge the harder question of why they (and so many of us at lower levels along with them) thought and acted as they did.

The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract con- cepts when making decisions about events

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Lake and Morris

beyond the water's edge. "Nations," "inter-

ests," "influence," "prestige"--all are dis- embodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end. This.conceptual approach is shared in our school classrooms no less than in our bureau- crats' offices.

Then, too, there is the important influence of bureaucratic rules of behavior. The same bureaucracy which thinks of the world in abstract images, and which prizes at least the illusion of pragmatic decision-making, im-

poses a style of behavior on its members which precludes open and forceful concern with human issues. The men involved in

making decisions on Vietnam in the early 1960's were aware of, and must have been

privately concerned with, the human dimen- sions of their decisions. But such concern as they felt was not allowed to be included in their formal, written recommendations and analyses. It simply is not done.

This produces an all too vivid and tangible method and behavior. We remember, more

clearly than we care to, the well carpeted stillness and isolation of those government offices where some of the Pentagon Papers were first written. The efficient staccato of the

typewriter, the antiseptic whiteness of nicely margined memoranda, the affable, authorita- tive and always urbane men who wrote them-all of it is a spiritual as well as geo- graphic world apart from piles of decompos- ing bodies in a ditch outside Hue or a village bombed in Laos, the burn ward of a children's

hospital in Saigon, or even a cemetery or veteran's hospital here. It was possible in that isolated atmosphere, and perhaps psycho- logically necessary, to dull one's awareness of the direct link between those memoranda and the human sufferings with which they were concerned.

Reasonable, decent men around tables in those quiet, carpeted rooms simply cannot imply that the other fellow, who supports a "tougher" policy, is a heartless murderer.

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Subordinates do not wish to tell superiors that they will be acting immorally if they choose the "tougher" option. Policy--good, steady policy-is made by the "tough- minded." To talk of suffering is to lose "effectiveness," almost to lose one's grip. It is seen as a sign that one's "rational" arguments are weak. So the human factor has been consigned, in the big decisions, to the column of other considerations-regrettably inapplicable because, as we are told so often, we are living in a tough, immoral world.

The implied choice is posed between "people" and the "effectiveness" of a policy. The imagined consequences in those abstract terms-prestige, interests, credibility-are un- failingly greater than the potential price people must pay.

This does not touch on the myriad of other influences that quarantine a decision from contact with the human consequences: the obsessive quality of bureaucratic infighting, the immersion in technical details, or the personal hesitations of men caught up in a career system.

The Human Price

How would a more humanistic foreign policy look? This obviously requires more study to see how specific policies would be affected. It would not necessarily always be more interventionist or isolationist or pacifist. It would have one essential element: it would require weighing human costs and benefits as one of the principal and unashamedly legit- imate considerations in any decision. This does not mean simply adding a section on "Human Factors" to National Security Coun- cil option papers, in the same way that there is occasionally a pro forma attachment on "Congressional Reaction." These considerations are not somehow external, separable from the substance of a decision. In reality, human beings are what foreign policy, no less than domestic policy decisions-and government itself-are all about. When men sit around a conference table in Washington, or

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draft options in their quiet offices, this reality must be no less in their minds than the abstract and often fuzzy notions of "national advantage" in which we are accustomed to deal. These abstractions can only have mean- ing when considered in human terms. Now, they seem to have some grotesque life of their own.

Weighing human considerations does not mean that human costs can be avoided. No policy-maker could freeze himself into auto- matic inaction whenever faced by a decision which would involve suffering or death.

But we must face the magnitude of the human costs involved in some exchange of short-run sacrifice for long-run advantage. And we must never overstate future fears in order to justify or minimize the horror already with us. For example, invoking the fear of nuclear war or Communist world domination cannot be used to justify the hideous casu- alties in Indochina unless a far better case can be made that Armageddon would have followed an American failure to fight in Vietnam.

In government today, the assumption is that these choices rarely need to be formally posed, if at all, until domestic political oppo- sition (and public opinion, informed by media coverage of the human tragedies involved) is stimulated to hinder or stop a particular policy. Even then, the question is how long the government can afford polit- ically to continue to pursue its course of action.

Thus the current administration believes that "interests" have amply justified the further death and suffering in Southeast Asia entailed in its plans for a slow and indefinite withdrawal from Vietnam. When the Presi- dent evokes the "pitiful, helpless giant," he reflects what has been a national inability to see the other pitiable, helpless human side of the equation. There is a tragic and perverse high-mindedness in the continuing appeal to American men to die for intangible and often transient notions of international balances of

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power. In the end, such arguments are in- finitely elastic. Since the methodology of thought is without humanistic restraints, there is no veto for human considerations anywhere along the way.

Yet marginal benefits of "interest" must yield at some point to human costs. That is the choice-the stopping point-we have never reached in Vietnam.

And so we face the prospect of a withdrawal which may substitute the dimly per- ceived horror of Laos-style bombing for the presence of American ground forces. We face the prospect of more soldiers, and many more innocent Asian civilians, dying to buy a "decent interval" which would partially preserve one notion of American prestige.

There are other examples outside Vietnam. This abstract approach accounts for raising the level of military aid to Latin American countries while economic aid and reforms for human welfare continue to languish. It also explains why we have sold civilian aircraft to Portugal and South Africa which will almost certainly be used to support their racial tyrannies. It was the reason why we could obscure to ourselves and others-and thus contribute to-the awful magnitude of suffering and death in Biafra after its collapse in the civil war with Nigeria. And we made bloodless yet bloody calculations of "national interest" in deciding to keep supplying the arms to Pakistan which had been agreed upon before it undertook the savage repression in East Bengal.

We will be compounding the tragedy of Vietnam if we conclude that our policies there were wrong simply because they didn't work. It would be equally myopic to see in the Pentagon Papers only a tale of blunders and deception. A final, crucial lesson is that American foreign-policy-makers must find the courage to face-formally and explicitly-the human consequences of their decisions.

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the human reality of realpolitik

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