Word: morgenthau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...April 3, 1965 issue of The New Republic, Professor Morgenthau entered the Vietnam debate in earnest with an article on "Why U.S. Policy in Asia is Wrong." An admirer of Richelieu, Talleyrand, and Bismark, he could hardly be accused of starry-eyed idealism, and his name had been associated for many years with the power-conscious realist school of international relations. His central argument was that we were on the verge of entering a global anti-Communist crusade which would inevitably involve us in a disastrous war with China. In contrast to the doctrinaire emotionalism of a crusade, Morgenthau pleaded...
...July 1965, Morgenthau was more pessimistic and more critical. In another New Republic article he castigated President Johnson for a simple-minded "globalism" which sought to protect the entire "free world" from Communist contamination. Arguing that revolutionary situations in undeveloped countries are inevitable, Morgenthau advised that the United States should attempt to sponsor the revolutions, rather than oppose them, in hopes of preventing them from becoming subservient to the U.S.S.R. or China. He further criticized the policy of military containment of Communism as eventually ineffective and perhaps ultimately fatal. Armed American repression would create "too much dread" and engender...
...article in The New York Review of Books of September 16, 1965, Morgenthau brought his criticism closer to home. He argued that our foreign policy was based on a series of myths about Vietnam and misunderstandings about the nature of national interest, power, and prestige. He showed how an incorrect policy is self-sustaining: the policymakers, fearful of being proven fundamentally wrong, identify the problem of American prestige with their personal political prestige and redouble their efforts to formulate a victorious strategy from their mythical conceptions. Finally, he argued that our practice of terror and destruction in Vietnam was brutalizing...
...Morgenthau's speech at Lowell Lecture Hall tied together many of these arguments and added another specific condemnation. Our basic misunderstanding of contemporary revolutions and our related myths about Vietnam, he said, were resulting in a policy which worked against our national interest. By failing to grapple realistically with the revolution in Southeast Asia, and by destroying the political and social fabric of South Vietnam, we were unconsciously establishing the preconditions for successful Chinese domination...
...tone of Morgenthau's speech was rational and analytical, and contained some irony born of disappointment. He spoke to the absent government as if to a simple child, explaining that if you want to end a war by negotiation, you have to negotiate with your opponents, even if they are "rebels". But it is his values, as much as his rational analysis, which separates Morgenthau from the strategists in Washington on the perception of Vietnam and the general disease of American foreign policy...