Even if we take the most jaundiced view of the sources of American foreign policy since 1945, or adopt a standpoint of fundamental criticism like Noam Chomsky, for instance, the Vietnam War did mark an important turning point in American public attitudes toward war. The US continued to operate on much the same assumptions that Commager was critizing in 1965, although Nixon's two-China policy and the later formal recognition of the People's Republic represented a major adjustment in that the US adopted a more practical stance toward the existence of China.
What hawkish politicians on "both sides of the aisle" but especially Republicans called "the Vietnam syndrome" did have a large effect on constraining policymakers from direct military interventions in other countries from the early seventies until the Gulf War of 1991. It didn't do away with the imperialist orientation of US policy. The military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were viewed favorably by the US, though Carter's human rights policy did reflect some real concern about political repression there. Chile and Argentina in particular became test cases for the "neoliberal" austerity economics that came to dominate much of the world in the 1980s and after, with the 2008 crash putting a huge crack in the consensus around it.
The significance of the anti-colonial movements after 1945 and well into the 1970s don't necessarily receive as much attention as it should these days. But Commager's speech reflects how central they were in practice in world politics at that time. Formal, official colonialism now survives only in spots, like Britain's control of Gibralter and the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. But with China moving quickly to be the leading economic power in the world, it would be easy to forget to what extent Commager's comments on the rise of what we tend to call the developing nations these days represented a sharp criticism of prevaling attitudes.
His speech was a criticism of American Exceptionalism with particular focus on how the Vietnam War illustrated its disastrous effects. Commager was articulating a left-liberal anti-imperialist criticism, not an Old Right isolationist one. Old Right isolationism, the foreign policy outlook of Trump's America First ideology, is actually a virulently nationalistic and imperialist attitude relying on a crude and authoritarian version of American Exceptionalism. (To what extent the chaos in the Trump foreign policy represents incompetence rather than the weaknesses of the America Firster position isn't something on which this post focuses.)
Commager described five assumptions of US Cold War foreign policy that had clearly shown them to be problematic by 1965.
The first of these assumptions was that the world was divided between two great powers or power complexes, the Russian and the American, the slave and the free, and that we and we alone were responsible for the free world. Actually, within a few years, we confronted a world of five or six great power complexes: China, and India, and Western Europe as well as Russia, and possibly others such as Japan, the British Commonwealth, the Latin American, the African, and the Arab worlds. No one nation is, or can be, responsible for the protection of freedom in such a world.But that was also to a large extent the assumption after 1989 and the so-called End of History. Both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists viewed the US as the hyperpower, the "indispensable nation" that was uniquely qualified to give political and economic directions to the rest of the world and morally obligated to do so. This wasn't simply a cynical propaganda justification for an imperial policy. Ideologies do matter, because they affect the way people interpret events in the world. But the more crudely cynical power motives and old-fashioned greed inevitably pushed the US to show that the Indespensable Nation didn't consider itself bound by the rules it expected lesser nations to follow, shown most dramatically by the Iraq War.
Second, we assumed that Communism was monolithic, fixed, and unchanging; that it was not a political system, or even a social or economic system, but a moral (or immoral) system, and that there was no compromise with it, for you do not compromise with sin except to strike it down. We assumed, too, that Communism was inherently aggressive and expansionist and we have continued to assert this in the face of a good deal of evidence to the contrary. [my emphasis]The intermixture of ideology, base motives, and typical great-power self-aggrandizement was present then, too. But the particularly dogmatic version of anti-Communism dominant in the US at the time was especially well-suited to drown out more practical considerations.
Third we assumed that there was only one China, that headed by Chiang Kai-shek which ended up in Taiwan, and we are still stuck with that assumption. We insisted that Communist China was not the real China, that it was on the contrary a usurper and an evil force, and was not therefore to be recognized. [my emphasis]This was the most dramatic case in which imminently practical realities were excluded from actual policymaking due to crackpot ideology. It's particularly striking that even in 1965, official government policy still relied on a concept of a unified and aggressive Soviet-Chinese bloc. In fact, the Chinese and Soviet governments were already having significant differences and disagreements in the mid-1950s, disagreements which had become public in 1960 and became increasingl virulent thereafter. (See the 2015 book Shadow Cold War: The Sino- Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman.)
One of the effects of McCarthyism in the 1950s had been to basically drive a lot of the most qualified China experts out of the State Department. Because anyone with actual knowledge and expertise in the area had at one time or another made a factual observation or policy recommendation not consistent with simplistic anti-Communist assumptions. The Trump Administration was not the first time that militant ignorance gained undue influence in American foreign policy.
[Fourth] Because in 1945 we were the most powerful nation on the globe we assumed that our power was and would continue to be limitless, and that we could impose our will upon the rest of the world. We knew that we were virtuous and our will righteous and we were not therefore worried about the moral implications of this kind of arrogance, though history teaches that there is something corrupting in assumptions of this kind. [my emphasis]Whatever measure of moderation of this dominant attitude that came into play in the 1970s and 1980s was largely swept away with the End of History in 1989. Remember when Shrub Bush declared that the war against terrorism aimed at the end of evil? David Frum, one of his speechwriters and now a prominent Nevertrumper, co-authored a book with the neoconservative Richard Perle, who his admirers referred to as the "Prince of Darkness", An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (2003), a prime example of the fanaticism and arrogance that led to the Iraq War. (Note: Sixteen years later, we still seem to be quite far removed from ending Evil.)
Fifth, because we meant well, because the American way of life was part of freedom and progress, and was even identified with the cosmic system, we assumed that those who opposed us were either misguided or wicked or both, and many of us still cherish this assumption, though no longer with the confidence with which we entertained it in the past.Today's Republican Party has made Christian Right fundamentalism so integral a part of its ideology that that identification "with the cosmic system" applies even more strongly to the Republican Party today than it did to either party in 1965. Although secularizing trends have continued and outside the Republican Party religious pluralism is a more rubust sentiment today.
Commager added what he saw as a fundamental miscalculation in relation to the anti-colonial liberation movements and the aspirations of new nations that had emerged from colonialism:
Along with these misguided assumptions, we made a great miscalculation of a negative character. We failed to understand the nature of what is doubtless the greatest revolution of modern times, the greatest and most far-reaching since the shift in the center of gravity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the revolt of Asia and Africa against the West, the emergence into modernity of two-thirds of the peoples of the globe. ... We allowed ourselves to be maneuvered into the position that Britain had occupied throughout much of the 19th century and France in the 20th - that of the stalwart defender of the status quo, of the West, and of the white peoples, as over against the underprivileged, the black and yellow and brown peoples of the world. [my emphasis]And he pointed out how the preference for stability along with anti-Communist ideology led to a thoroughly unpragmatic phobia against revolutions everywhere (although that bias for stability didn't hold the US back from counter-revolutionary regime change operations):
Once again, too, we are failing to recognize and cooperate with revolution - revolution in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and elsewhere; that is one reason we have lost the support and confidence of the spokesmen of these peoples. Here as elsewhere on the globe - Cuba, Santo Domingo, Brazil, Guatemala, we have maneuvered ourselves into the position of being the enemy of change and of what the peoples of these countries think is freedom. In the eyes of Asians we are the protagonist of the West against the East, of white people against yellow and brown people, of power against the weak people who are always the victims of power. [my emphasis]The social character of the various revolutions he mentions tvaried greatly, from a Communist-led revolution in Vietnam to a liberal democratic reform government in Guatemala. He was calling here for a more realistic and less militarized approach to countries in the world system of nations who might be annoying to the US government, as in accepting military support from Communist China or development aid from the Soviet Union, or to particular lobbies in America like United Fruit Company with Guatemala.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1967, Commager stated his perspective this way (Changing American Attitudes Toward Foreign Policy 02/20/1967):
What I am suggesting is that, we need to cultivate patience, tolerance, the long view, and even sympathy with the new nationa of the globe, even if their emergence onto the crowded stage of history is turbulent and dangerous. We would do well to recover something of Jefferson's penpective on the French Revolution - which horrilied most Wstern peoples just as communism does today. It was, he said, "the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long lost liberties." "Long-lost liberties" is, to be sure, not the phrase we instictively apply to either the Russian or the Chinese revolutions, for they did not, alas, enjoy liberty in their historical past, but that they are seeking to throw off what they assume to be tyranny and exploitation - in the case of the Soviet, a homegrown brand of tyranny; in the case of China, foreign and achieve independence and progress in their way, is, I think, beyond dispute. [my emphasis]Commager there wasn't advocating indifference to human rights abuses. He was arguing for a pragmatic and less militarized foreign policy in place of one by ideology, arrogance, and ignorance.
