Foreign Affairs at 70

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

William G. Hyland leaves the editorship of Foreign Affairs with this issue.

Bundy supported the U.S. "moral commitment" to Israel, and saw U.S. policy aimed at "getting Israel accepted, settled down and at peace with the Arab world." This was a bipartisan objective that successive presidential administrations pursued with only "minor and tactical" disagreements. It was not U.S. policy, but Arab rejectionism and Israel?s resolve to retain the West Bank and Gaza, that obstructed peace: "The tragedy all along has been that at times when one side might have been ready to compromise, the other was not."

Bundy felt that the fall of the shah and the rise of the Islamic republic was "the greatest single setback for U.S. policy and for stability in the Middle East of these dozen years." A related issue was the oil embargo in 1973: the subsequent quadrupling of oil prices made U.S. energy policy a major issue in the pages of Foreign Affairs. In 1978 Walter J. Levy wrote that oil?consuming nations needed to develop alternate energy sources, and that the United States needed to discourage often wasteful spending by OPEC members on rapid development and military buildups:

We cannot much longer afford a situation in which the importing countries waste a substantial part of their energy while the producing countries waste a substantial part of their oil revenues. In the past we have too often been stymied in our efforts to cope with these problems by entrenched national or private interests on all sides. If we should ultimately fail, this period in our history could truly be characterized as ?the years that the locust hath eaten.?

The failure of the United States not only to lead the industrialized nations out of the oil crisis, but even to design an effective national energy policy, was a major factor in the "renewed decline of respect abroad for U.S. policy," Bundy concluded.

Also during Bundy?s tenure détente between Moscow and Washington began to die. The coup de grace was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. While he had been skeptical that the Soviets would pass up regional advantages or cancel significant military programs, Bundy argued that congressional opposition had blocked Nixon?s and Kissinger?s détente strategy. The Jackson and Stevenson amendments to the trade act in 1974, linking trade arrangements to Soviet immigration, were "extraordinarily unwise." Forcing the Soviet Union to make internal changes was likely to meet firm resistance.

While the immediate prospects for arms control seemed poor, Bundy argued for seizing the initiative, to avoid destabilizing technological changes and to abandon chimerical searches for strategic advantage, such as the then recently proposed Strategic Defense Initiative. Bundy summed up: "All postwar experience . . . points to the wisdom of a steady intermediate policy that on the one hand recognizes the depth and reality of the rivalry and on the other seeks always to keep the lines of communication open and to negotiate wherever possible."

Another Foreign Affairs author, John Lewis Gaddis, deplored the lack of strategic thinking in U.S. policy, and its harmful effect on containment of the Soviet Union.

We really ought not to go on framing long?term national security policy in response to short?term domestic political expedients, crossing our fingers each time in the hope that the result will relate, in some way, to the external realities we confront, and to our own long?term interests. We ought not to neglect, to the extent that we do, the relationship between national security and the national economy.

The persistence of tension and danger in Third World conflicts prompted considerations of parallels to the Balkans prior to World War I. Miles Kahler?s "Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy" outlined the perils of minor conflicts accidentally escalating into major wars. The two superpowers, wading warily together into the turbulent political waters of the Third World, risked being washed unintentionally into one another with violent consequences.

Bundy saw the Third World conflicts arising from nationalism and the rejection of colonial rule, and the United States, he wrote, also was going against the nationalist trend, intervening in ignorance of the regional source of troubles, in Panama and Nicaragua. He called for a more historically sensitive approach to regional issues, a forward?looking strategic goal of "regions taking responsibility for their own security. . . . In our hearts we know, especially since Vietnam, that the United States cannot be the world?s policeman or even that of a given region." And he concluded with remarkable prescience: