No More Learning

Sometimes we can get a little credit for not having everything quite under control, for being a little impulsive or unreliable. Teaming up with an impulsive ally may do it. There have been serioussuggestionsthatnuclearweaponsshouldbeputdirectly at the disposal of German troops, on the grounds that the Ger- mans would be less reluctant to use them- and that Soviet lead- ers know they would be less reluctant- than their American colleagues in the early stages of war or ambiguous aggression. And in part, the motive behind the proposals that authority to use nuclear weapons be delegated in peacetime to theater com- manders or even lower levels of command, as in the presidential campaign of 1964,is to substitute military boldness for civilian hesitancy in a crisis or at least to make it look that way to the enemy. Sending a high-ranking military officer to Berlin, Que- moy, or Saigon in a crisis carries a suggestion that authority has been delegated to someone beyond the reach of political inhibi- tion and bureaucratic delays, or even of presidential responsi- bility,Someonewhosepersonalreactionswillbeinaboldmilitary tradition. The intense dissatisfaction of many senators with President Kennedy's restraint over Cuba in early 1962, and
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 39
with the way matters were left at the close of the crisis in that November, though in many ways an embarrassment to the Pres- ident, may nevertheless have helped to convey to the Cubans and to the Soviets that, however peaceable the President might want to be, there were political limits to his patience.
A vivid exhibition of national impulsiveness at the highest level of government was described by Averell Harriman in his account of a meeting with Khrushchev in 1959. "Your gener- als," said Khrushchev, "talk of maintaining your position in Berlin with force. That is bluff. " With what Harriman describes as angry emphasis, Khrushchev went on, "If you send in tanks, they will burn and make no mistake about it. If you want war, you can have it, but remember it will be your war. Our rockets will fly automatically. " At this point, according to Harriman, Khrushchev's colleagues around the table chorused the word "automatically. " The title of Harriman's article in Life maga- zine was, "My Alarming Interview with Khrushchev. "z The premier's later desk-thumping with a shoe in the hall of the General Assembly was pictorial evidence that high-ranking Russians know how to put on a performance.
GeneralPierreGallois,anoutstandingFrenchcriticofAmeri-
can military policy, has credited Khrushchev with a "shrewd understanding of the politics of deterrence," evidenced by this "irrational outburst" in the presence of Secretary H a ~ ~ i r n a n . ~ Gallois "hardly sees Moscow launching its atomic missiles at Washington because of Berlin" (especially, I suppose, since Khrushchev may not have had any at the time), but apparently thinks nevertheless that the United States ought to appreciate,
as Khrushchev did, the need for a kind of irrational automaticity and a commitment to blind and total retaliation.
Even granting, however, that somebody important may be somewhat intimidated by the Russian responsive chorus on automaticity, I doubt whether we want the American govern- ment to rely, for the credibility of its deterrent threat, on a corresponding ritual. We ought to get something a little less
2. July 13, 1959, p. 33.
3. Revue de DCfense Nationale, October 1962.
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idiosyncratic for 50 billion dollars a year of defense expendi- ture. A government that is obliged to appear responsible in its foreign policy can hardly cultivate forever the appearance of impetuosity on the most important decisions in its care. Khru- shchev may have needed a short cut to deterrence, but the American government ought to be mature enough and rich enough to arrange a persuasive sequence of threatened re- sponses that are not wholly a matter of guessing a president's temper.
Still, impetuosity, irrationality, and automaticity are not en- tirely without substance. Displays can be effective, and when President Kennedy took his turn at it people were impressed, possibly even people in the Kremlin. President Kennedy chose a most impressive occasion for his declaration on "automatic- ity. " It was his address of October 22, 1962, launching the Cuban crisis. In an unusually deliberate and solemn statement he said, "Third: it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the So- viet Union. " Coming less than six months after Secretary Mc- Namara's official elucidation of the strategy of controlled and flexible response, the reaction implied in the President's state- ment would have been not only irrational but probably- depending on just what "full retaliatory response" meant to the President or to the Russians- inconsistent with one of the foundationsofthePresident'sownmilitarypolicy,afoundation that was laid as early as his first defense budget message of
196
1, which stressed the importance of proportioning the re-
sponse to the provocation, even in war i t ~ e l fN. ~evertheless, it
4. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter have evaluated this statement of Kennedy's in "Controlling the Risks in Cuba," Adelphi Papers, 17 (London, Institute for Strategic Studies, 1965). They agree that, "This does not sound like a controlled response. " They go on to say, "The attempt, it appears, was to say that the United States would respond to a missile against its neighbors as it would respond to one against itself. " And this policy, they say, would leave open the possibility of a controlled, or less than "full," reaction. Even if we disregard
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 41
was not entirely incredible; and, for all I know, the President meant it.
As a matter of fact it is most unlikely- actually it is incon- ceivable- that in preparing his address the President sent word to senior military and civilian officials that this particular paragraph of his speech was not to be construed as policy. Even if the paragraph was pure rhetoric, it would probably have been construed in the crisis atmosphere of that eventful Monday as an act of policy. Just affirming such a policy must have made it somewhat more likely that a single atomic explosion in this hemisphere would have been the signal for full-scale nuclear war.
Even if the President had said something quite contrary, had cautioned the Soviets that now was the time for them to take seriously Secretary McNamara's message and the President's own language about proportioning military response to the provocation; if he had served notice that the United States would not be panicked into all-out war by a single atomic event, particularly one that might not have been fully premeditated by the Soviet leadership; his remarks still would not have elimi- nated thepossibility that a single Cuban missile, if it contained a nuclear warhead and exploded on the North American conti- nent, could have triggered the full frantic fury of all-out war. While it is hard for a government, particularly a responsible government, to appear irrational whenever such an appearance is expedient, it is equally hard for a government, even a responsible one, to guarantee its own moderation in every circumstance.
the word "full," though, the threat is still one of nuclear war; and unless we qualify the words, "any nuclear missile," to mean enough to denote deliberate Soviet attack, the statement still has to be classed as akin to Khrushchev's rocket statement, with allowance for differences in style and circumstance. The point is not that the threat was necessarily either a mistake or a bluff, but that it did imply a reaction more readily taken on impulse than after reflection, a "disproportionate" act, one not necessarily serving the national interest if the contingency arose but nevertheless a possibly impressive threat if the government can be credited with that impulse.
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All of this may suggest that deterrent threats are a matter of resolve, impetuosity, plain obstinacy, or, as the anarchist put it, sheer character. It is not easy to change our character; and becoming fanatic or impetuous would be a high price to pay for making our threats convincing. We have not the character of fanatics and cannot scare countries the way Hitler could. We have to substitute brains and skill for obstinacy or insanity. (Even then we are at some disadvantage: Hitler had the skill and the character- of a sort. )
If we could really make it believed that we would launch gen- eral war for every minor infraction of any code of etiquette that we wanted to publish for the Soviet bloc, and if there were high probability that the leaders in the Kremlin knew where their interests lay and would not destroy their own country out of sheerobstinacy,wecouldthreatenanythingwewantedto. We could lay down the rules and announce that if they broke any one of them we would inflict the nuclear equivalent of the Wrath of God. The fact that the flood would engulf us, too, is relevant to whether or not the Russians would believe us; but ifwe could make them believe us, the fact that we would suffer too might providethemlittlecon~olationI. f~wecouldcrediblyarrangeit so that we had to carry out the threat, whether-we wished to or not, we would not even be crazy to arrange it so if we could be sure the Soviets understood the ineluctable consequences of infringing the rules and would have control over themselves. By
5. This is why Gandhi could stop trains by encouraging his followers to lie down on the tracks, and why construction-site integrationists could stop trucks and bulldozers by the same tactic; if a bulldozer can stop more quickly than a prostrate man can get out of its way, the threat becomes fully credible at the point when only the operator of the bulldozer can avert the bloodshed. The same principle is supposed to explain why a less-than-mortal attack on the Soviet Union by a French nuclear force, though exposing France to mortal attack in return, is a deterring prospect to the Soviet Union; credibility is the problem, and some French commentators have proposed legally arranging to put the French force beyond civilian control. American tanks in an anti-riot role may lack credibility, because they threaten too much, as the bulldozer does, even in the use of machine guns to protect each other; so a more credible-
a less drastic and fully automatic- device is used to protect the armed steel monsters: a mildly electric bumper,
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 43
arranging it so that we might have to blow up the world, we would not have to.
But it is hard to make it believed. It would be hard to keep the Soviets from expecting that we would think it over once more and find a way to give them what my children call "one more chance. " Just saying so won't do it. Mossadegh or the anarchist might succeed, but not the American government. What we have to do is to get ourselves into a position where we cannot fail to react as we said we would- where we just cannot help it- or where we would be obliged by some overwhelming cost of not reacting in the manner we had declared.
Coupling Capabilities to Objectives: Relinquishing the Initiative
Often we must maneuver into a position where we no longer have much choice left. This is the old business of burning bridges. If you are faced with an enemy who thinks you would turn and run if he kept advancing, and if the bridge is there to run across, he may keep advancing. He may advance to the point where, if you do not run, a clash is automatic. Calculating what is in your long-run interest, you may turn and cross the bridge. At least, he may expect you to. But if you burn the bridge so that you cannot retreat, and in sheer desperation there is nothing you can do but defend yourself, he has a new calculation to make. He cannot count on what you would prefer to do if he were advancing irresistibly; he must decide instead what he ought to do if you were incapable of anything but resisting him.
This is the position that Chiang Kai-shekgot himself into, and us with him, when he moved a large portion of his best troops to Quemoy. Evacuation under fire would be exceedingly diffi- cult; if attacked, his troops had no choice but to fight, and we probably had no choice but to assist them. It was undoubtedly a shrewd move from Chiang's point of view-coupling himself, and the United States with him, to Quemoy- and in fact if we had wanted to make clear to the Chinese Communists that Quemoy had to be defended if they attacked it, it would even have been a shrewd move also from our point of view.
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Thisideaofburningbridges- of maneuveringintoaposition where one clearly cannot yield- conflicts somewhat, at least semantically, with the notion that what we want in our foreign policy is "the initiative. " Initiative is good if it means imagina- tiveness, boldness, new ideas. But the term somewhat disguises the fact that deterrence, particularly deterrence of anything less than mortal assault on the United States, often depends on get- ting into a position where the initiative is up to the enemy and it is he who has to make the awful decision to proceed to a clash.
In recent years it has become something of a principle in the Department of Defense that the country should have abundant "options" in its choice of response to enemy moves. The prin- ciple is a good one, but so is a contrary principle- that certain op- tions are an embarrassment. The United States government goes to great lengths to reassure allies and to warn Russians that it has eschewed certain options altogether, or to demonstrate that it could not afford them or has placed them out of reach. The commitment process on which alAmerican overseas deterrence depends- and on which all confidence within the alliance depends- is a process of surrendering and destroying options that we might have been expected to find too attractive in an emergency. Wenotonlygivethemupinexchangeforcommit- ments to us by our allies; we give them up on our own account to make our intentions clear to potential enemies. In fact, we do it not just to display our intentions but to adopt those inten- tions. If deterrence fails it is usually because someone thought he saw an "option" that the American government had failed to dispose of, a loophole that it hadn't closed against itself.
At law there is a doctrine of the "last clear chance. " It recog- nizes that, in the events leading up to an accident, there was some point prior to which either party could avert collision, some point after which neither could, and very likely a period between when one party could still control events but the other was helpless to turn aside or stop. The one that had the "last clear chance" to avert collision is held responsible. In strategy when both parties abhor collision the advantage goes often to the one who arranges the status quo in his favor and leaves to
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 45
the other the "last clear chance" to stop or turn aside. Xenophon understood the principle when, threatened by an attack he had not sought, he placed his Greeks with their backs against an impassable ravine. "I should like the enemy to think it is easy-going in every direction for him to retreat. " And when he had to charge a hill occupied by aliens, he "did not attack from every direction but left the enemy a way of escape, if he wanted to run away. " The "last chance" to clear out was left to the enemy when Xenophon had to take the initiative, but de- nied to himself when he wanted to deter attack, leaving his enemy the choice to attack or retire. 6
? ? ? ? ? ? An illustration of this principle- that deterrence often de- pends on relinquishing the initiative to the other side- may be found in a comparison of two articles that Secretary Dulles wrotein the 1950s. His articleinForeign AfSairs in 1954(based on the speech in which he introduced "massive retaliation") proposed that we should not let the enemy know in advancejust when and where and how we would react to aggression, but reserve for ourselves the decision on whether to act and the time, place, and scope of our action. In 1957 the Secretary
? ? wrote another article in Foreign Aflairs,this one oriented mainly toward Europe, in which he properly chose to reserve for the Soviets the final decision on all-out war. He discussed the need for more powerful NATO forces, especially "tactical" nuclear forces that could resist a non-nuclear Soviet onslaught at a level short of all-out war. He said:
In the future it may thus be feasible to place less reliance upon deterrence of vast retaliatory power. . . . Thus, in
6. The Persian Expedition, pp. 136-37, 236. The principle was expressed by Sun Tzu in China, around 500 B. C. in his Art of Wart "When you surround an army leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. " Ptolemy, serving under Alexander in the fourth century B. C. , surrounded a hill, "leaving a gap in his line for the enemy to get through, should they wish to make their escape. " Vegetius, writing in the fourth century A. D. , had a section headed, "The flight of an enemy should not be prevented, but facilitated," and commends a maxim of Scipio "that a golden bridge should be made for a flying enemy. " It is, of course, a fundamental principle of riot control and has its counterparts in diplomacy and other negotiations.
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contrast to the 1950decade, it may be that by the 1960decade the nations which are around the Sino-Soviet perimeter can possess an effective defense against full-scale conventional attack and thus confront any aggressor with the choice between failing or himself initiating nuclear war against the defending country. Thus the tables may be turned, in the sense that instead of those who are non-aggressive having to rely upon all-out nuclear retaliatory power for their protec- tion, would-be aggressors will be unable to count on a successful conventional aggression, but must themselves weigh the consequences of invoking nuclear war. 7
Former Secretary Dean Acheson was proposing the same principle (but attached to conventional forces, not tactical nuclear weapons) in remarkably similar language at about the same time in his book, Power and Diplomacy:
Suppose, now, that a major attack is mounted against a Western Europe defended by substantial and spirited forces including American troops. . . . Here, in effect, he (our potential enemy) would be making the decision for us, by compelling evidence that he had determined to run all risks and force matters to a final showdown, including (if it had not already occurred) a nuclear attack upon us. . . .
A de- fense in Europe of this magnitude will pass the decision to risk everything from the defense to the offense. *
The same principle on the Eastern side was reflected in a remark often attributed to Khrushchev. It was typically agreed, especially at summit meetings, that nobody wanted a war. Khrushchev's complacent remark, based on Berlin's being on his side of the border, was that Berlin was not worth a war. As thestorygoes,hewasremindedthatBerlinwasnot worthawar to him either. "No," he replied, "but you are the ones that have
7. "Challenge and Response in U. S. Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs,36 (1957), 25-43. It is interesting that Secretary Dulles used "nuclear war" to mean something that had not yet been invoked when "tactical" nuclear weapons were already being used in local defense of Europe.
8. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 87-88.
46
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 47
to cross a frontier. " The implication, I take it, was that neither of us wanted to cross that threshold just for Berlin, and if Berlin's location makes us the ones who have to cross the border, we are the ones who let it go though both of us are similarly fearful of War.
How do we maneuver into aposition so it is the other side that hastomakethatdecision? Wordsrarelydoit. Tohavetoldthe Soviets in the late 1940sthat, if they attacked, we were obliged to defend Europe might not have been wholly convincing. When the Administration asked Congress for authority to station Army divisions in Europe in peacetime, the argument was explicitly made that these troops were there not to defend against a superior Soviet army but to leave the Soviet Union in no doubt that the United States would be automatically in- volved in the event of any attack on Europe. The implicit argument was not that since we obviously would defend Europe we should demonstrate the fact by putting troops there. The reasoning was probably that, whether we wished to be or not, we could not fail to be involved if we had more troops being run over by the Soviet Army than we could afford to see defeated. Notions like "trip wire" or "plate glass window," though oversimplified, were attempts to express this role. And while "trip wire" is a belittling term to describe an army, the role is not a demeaning one. The garrison in Berlin is as fine a collection of soldiers as has ever been assembled, but excruciatingly small. What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops? Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, dramati- cally,andinamannerthatguaranteesthattheactioncannotstop there. They represent the pride, the honor, and the reputation of the United States government and its armed forces; and they can apparently hold the entire Red Army at bay. Precisely because there is no graceful way out if we wished our troops to yield ground,andbecauseWestBerlinistoosmallanareainwhichto ignoresmallencroachments,WestBerlinanditsmilitaryforces constitute one of the most impregnable military outposts of modemtimes. TheSovietshavenotdaredtocrossthatfrontier.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Berlinillustratestwocommoncharacteristics ofthesecom-
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mitments. The first is that if the commitment is ill defined and ambiguous- if we leave ourselves loopholes through which to exit- our opponent will expect us to be under strong temptation to make a graceful exit (or even a somewhat graceless one) and he may be right. The western sector of Berlin is a tightly defined piece of earth, physically occupied by Western troops: our com- mitmentiscrediblebecauseitisinescapable. (Thelittleenclave of Steinstucken is physically separate, surrounded by East Ger- man territory outside city limits, and there has been a certain amount of jockeying to determine how credible our commit- ment is to stay there and whether it applies to a corridor con- necting the enclave to the city proper. ) But our commitment to the integrity of Berlin itself, the entire city, was apparently weak or ambiguous. When the Wall went up the West was able to construe its obligation as not obliging forceful opposition. The Soviets probably anticipated that, if the West had a choice be- tween interpreting its obligation to demand forceful opposition
and interpreting the obligation more leniently, there would be a temptationtoelectthelenientinterpretation. Ifwecouldhave made ourselves obliged to knock down the wall with military force, the wall might not have gone up; not being obliged, we could be expected to elect the less dangerous course.
The second thing that Berlin illustrates is that, however precisely defined is the issue about which we are committed, it is oftenuncertainjustwhatwe are committed to do. The commit- ment is open-ended. Our military reaction to an assault on West Berlin is really not specified. We are apparently committed to holding the western sector of the city if we can; if we are pushed back, we are presumably committed to repelling the intruders and restoring the original boundary. If we lose the city, we are perhaps committed to reconquering it. But somewhere in this sequence of events things get out of hand, and the matter ceases to be purely one of restoring the status quo in Berlin. Military instabilities may arise that make the earlier status quo meaning- less. A costly reestablishment of the status quo might call for some sort of reprisal, obliging some counteraction in return. Just what would happen is a matter of prediction, or guess.
What we seem to be committed to is action of some sort com- mensurate with the provocation. Military resistance tends to de- velop a momentum of its own. It is dynamic and uncertain. What we threaten in Berlin is to initiate a process that may quickly get out of hand.
ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 49
? The maneuver in Lebanon in 1958- the landing of troops in a developing crisis- though not one of the neatest political- military operations of recent times, represented a similar strat- egy. Whatever the military potential of the ten or twelve thousand troops that we landed in Lebanon- and it would de- pend on who might have engaged them, where, over what issue - they had the advantage that they got on the ground before any Soviet adventure or movement was under way. The landing might be described as a "preemptive maneuver. " From then on, any significant Soviet intervention in the affairs of Lebanon, Jordan, or even Iraq, would have substantially raised the likeli- hood that American and Soviet forces, or American and Soviet- supported forces, would be directly engaged.
? ? In effect, it was Khrushchev's turn to cross a border. Iraq or Jordan might not have been worth a war to either of us but by getting troops on the soil- or, as we used to say, the American
? flag -
we probably made it clear to the Kremlin that we could not gracefully retreat under duress. It is harder to retreat than not to land in the first place; the landing helped to put the next step up to the Russians.
Coupling Capabilities to Objectives: TheProcess of "Commitment"
In addition to getting yourself where you cannot retreat, there is a more common way of making a threat. That is to incur a political involvement, to get a nation's honor, obligation, and diplomatic reputation committed to a response. The Formosa resolutionof 1955,alongwith the military assistance agreement then signed by the United States and the National Government of the Republic of China, should probably be interpreted that way. It was not mainly a technique for reassuring Chiang Kai-shek that we would defend him, and it was not mainly a
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THE ART OF COMMITMENT 51
quid pro quo for something he did for us. It was chiefly important as a move to impress a third party. The primary audience for the congressional action was inside the Soviet bloc. The resolution, together with the treaty, was a ceremony to leave the Chinese and the Russians under no doubt that we could not back down from the defense of Formosa without intolerable loss of prestige, reputation, and leadership. We were not merely communicating an intention or obligation we already had, but actually enhancing the obligation in the pro- cess. Thecongressionalmessagewasnot,"Sinceweareobliged to defend Formosa, we may as well show it. " Rather: "In case we were not sufficiently committed to impress you, now we are. We hereby oblige ourselves. Behold us in the public ritual of getting ourselvesgenuinelycommitted. "
9. There is also sometimes available an internal technique of commitment. It is, in the words of Roger Fisher, "to weave international obligations into the domestic law of each country, so that by and large each government enforces the obligation against itself. " Fisher discussed it in relation to disarmament commitments; but it may apply to the use of force as well as to the renunciation of it. A Norwegian directive (Kgl res 10 Juni 1949) stipulates that, in event of armed attack, military officers are to mobilize whether or not the government issues the order, that orders for discontinuance issued in the name of the government shall be assumed false, and that resistance is to continue irrespective of enemy threats of retaliatory bombing. Similarly a Swiss order of April 1940, distributed to every soldier in his livret de service, declared that in event of attack the Swiss would fight and that any order or indication to the contrary, from any source, was to be considered enemy propaganda. The purposes appear to have been internal discipline and morale; but the possible contribution of such internal arrangements to deterrence, to the credibility of resistance, is worth considering. Many governments have had constitutional or informal provisions for increasing the authority of the armed forces in time of emergency, thus possibly shifting government authority in the direction of individuals and organizations whose motives to resist were less doubtful. As mentioned in an earlier footnote, legal automaticity has sometimes been proposed for the French nuclear force. Internal public opinion can be similarly manipulated to make accommodation unpopular. All of these techniques, if appreciated by the enemy to be deterred, are relevant to the process of commitment. They canalso,ofcourse,bequitedangerous. Fisher'sdiscussionisinhischapter,"Internal Enforcement of International Rules," Disarmament: Its Politics and Economics, Seymour Melman, ed. (Boston, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1962).
That kind of commitment is not to be had cheaply. If Con- gress passed such a resolution for every small piece of the world that it would like the Soviets to leave alone, it would cheapen the currency. A nation has limited resources, so to speak, in the things that it can get exceptionally concerned about. Political involvement within a country is not something that can be had for the price of a casual vote or a signature on a piece of paper.
Sometimes it comes about by a long process that may not even have been deliberately conceived. As far as I can tell, we had only the slightest commitment, if any, to assist India in case of attack by the Chinese or the Russians, if only because over the years the Indians did not let us incur a formal commitment. One of the lessons of November 1962may be that, in the face of anything quite as adventuresome as an effort to take over a country the size of India, we may be virtually as committed as if we had a mutual assistance treaty. We cannot afford to let the Soviets or Communist Chinese learn by experience that they can grab large chunks of the earth and its population without a genuine risk of violent Western reaction.
Our commitment to Quemoy, which gave us concern in 1955 and especially in 1958, had not been deliberately conceived; and it appeared at the time to be a genuine embarrassment. For reasons that had nothing to do with American policy, Quemoy hadbeensuccessfullydefendedbytheNationalistswhenChiang Kai-shek evacuated the mainland, and it remained in National- ist hands. By the time the United States assumed the Commit- ment to Formosa, the island of Quemoy stood as a ragged edge about which our intentions were ambiguous. Secretary Dulles in 1958 expressed the official view that we could not afford to vacate Quemoy under duress. The implication seemed to be that we had no genuine desire to take risks for Quemoy and mighthavepreferreditifQuemoyhadfallentotheCommunists in 1949;but our relations with Communist China were at stake once Quemoy became an issue. So we had a commitment that we might have preferred not to have. And in case that commit- ment did not appear firm enough, Chiang Kai-shek increased it
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THE ART OF COMMITMENT 53
for us by moving enough of his best troops to that island, under conditions in which evacuation under attack would have been difficult, to make clear that he had to defend it or suffer military disaster,leavingituptotheUnitedStatestobailhimout.
Some of our strongest commitments may be quite implicit, though ritual and diplomacy can enhance or erode them. Com- mitments can even exist when we deny them. There is a lot of conjecture about what would happen if the NATO treaty lapsed after its initial twenty years. There has recently been some conjecture whether the developing community of Western Europe might be inconsistent with the Atlantic Alliance. It is sometimes argued that the Soviet Union would like Europe so self-reliant that the United States could ease itself out of its commitments to the present NATO countries. I think there is something in this- our commitment to Europe probably dimin- ishes somewhat if the NATO treaty legally goes out of force- but not much. Most of the commitment will still be there. We cannot afford to let the Soviets overrun West Germany or Greece, irrespective of our treaty commitments to Germany or to the rest of Western Europe.
I suspect that we might even recognize an implicit obligation to support Yugoslavia, perhaps Finland, in a military crisis. Any commitment we may have had toward Hungary was apparently not much. But Yugoslavia and Finland have not quite the status that Hungary had. (Conceivably we might cross the border first, under invitation, and leave it up to the Soviets to decide whether to incur the risk of engaging us. ) I wonder whether the Kremlin thinks that, if it should get genuinely impatient with Tito or if there were some kind of crisis of succession upon Tito's death, the Red Army could simply invade Yugoslavia or the Kremlin present an ultimatum to the country without any danger of a counter-ultimatum from us or another preemptive landing of troops as in Lebanon. I can only wonder; these are all matters of interpretation, both as to what our commitments really would prove to be and what the Soviets would believe them to be.
Actually, our commitment is not so much a policy as a prediction. We cannot have a clear policy for every con- tingency; there are too many contingencies and not enough hoursinthedaytoworkthemalloutinadvance. Ifonehad asked in October 1962 what American policy was for the contingency of a Communist Chinese effort to destroy the Indian Army, the only answer could have been aprediction of what the American government would decide to do in a contin- gency that probably had not been "staffed out" in advance. Policy is usually not a prefabricated decision; it is the whole set of motives and constraints that make a government's actions somewhat predictable.
In the Indian case, it turns out that we had a latent or implicit policy. For all I know, Mr. Nehru anticipated it for ten years. It is conceivable- though I doubt it- that one of the reasons Nehru was so contemptuous of the kinds of treaties that the Thai and Pakistani signed with us was that he felt that his own involvement with the West in a real emergency might be about as strong without the treaty as with it. It is interesting that any "commitment" we had to keep India from being conquered or destroyed by Communist China was not mainly a commitment totheIndiansortheirgovernment. We wanted to restrainCom- munist China generally; we wanted to give confidence to other governments in Asia; and we wanted to preserve confidence in our deterrent role all the way around the world to Europe. Military support to India would be a way of keeping an implicit pledge but the pledge was a general one, not a debt owed to the Indians. When a disciplinarian- police or other- intervenes toresistorpunishsomeone'sforbiddenintrusionorassault,any benefit to the victim of the intrusion or assault may be inciden- tal. He could even prefer not to be fought over; but if the issue is maintenance of discipline, he may not have much say in the matter.
This matter of prediction may have been crucial at the start of the Korean War. There has been a lot of discussion about whether we were or were not "committed" to the defense of South Korea. From what I have seen of the way the decision to
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intervene was taken, first by participation of American military assistance forces, then by bombing, then with reinforcements, and finally with a major war effort, one could not confidently have guessed in May 1950 what the United States would do. One could only try to estimate the probable decision that the President would take, depending on what it looked like in Korea, who was advising him, and what else was going on in the world.
You will recall discussion about the importance of a particu- lar speech by Secretary of State Acheson in suggesting to the Soviets that South Korea was outside our defense perimeter. (As far as I know, there is no decisive evidence that the Russians, Chinese, or Koreans were particularly motivated by that statement. ) His stated position was essentially that we had a defense perimeter that excluded South Korea, that we had various other obligations, especially to the United Nations, that would cover acountry like South Korea. Apparently the Soviets (or Chinese, or whoever made the decision) miscalculated; they may have thought we were damning our commitment with faint praise. They got into an expensive war and a risky one and one that might have been even more dangerous than it was. They may have miscalculated because the language of deterrence, and an understanding of the commitment process in the nuclear era, had not had much time to develop yet. They may interpret better now- although the missile adventure in Cuba shows that the Soviets could still misread the signals (or the Americans
could still fail to transmit them clearly) a decade later.
And we seem to have misread the Chinese warnings during our advance toward the Yalu River. Allen Whiting has docu- mented a serious Chinese Communist attempt to warn the Americans that they would engage us militarily rather than let us occupy all of North Korea. l o Whatever we might have done had we understood them, we manifestly did not understand. The one thing we would not have done, had we received their warnings correctly, was to extend our forces as vulnerably as we did. We either did not get their message, did not comprehend it, or
10. China Crosses the Yalu (New York, Macmillan, 1960).
did not find it credible, though the Chinese Communists may have been doing the best they could to get the message to us and to make it credible. When communication fails, it is not easy to decide whether the transmitter is too weak for the receiver or the receiver too weak for the transmitter, whether the sender speaks the receiver' s language badly or the receiver misunderstands the sender's. Between the two of us, Americans and Commu- nist China, we appear to have suffered at least one communica- tion failure in each direction in 1950. "
The Interdependence of Commitments
The main reason why we are committed in many of these places is that our threats are interdependent. Essentially we tell the Soviets that we have to react here because, if we did not, they would not believe us when we say that we will react there.
By now our commitment to Berlin has become so deep and diffuse that most of us do not often have to think about whom our commitment is to. The reason we got committed to the de- fense of Berlin, and stayed committed, is that if we let the So- viets scare us out of Berlin we would lose face with the Soviets themselves. The reputation that most matters to us is our repu- tation with the Soviet (and Communist Chinese) leaders. It would be bad enough to have Europeans, Latin Americans, or Asians think that we are immoral or cowardly. It would be far worse to lose our reputation with the Soviets. When we talk about the loss of face that would occur if we backed out of For-
11. It is not easy to explain why the Chinese entered North Korea so secretly and so suddenly. Had they wanted to stop the United Nations forces at the level, say, of Pyongyang, to protect their own border and territory, a conspicuous early entry in force might have found the U. N.