Paul M. Kattenburg
on What It Means to Be An American and the future of Foreign Policy
Paul M. Kattenburg was Indochina Research
Analyst and Vietnam Desk Officer in the State Department in 1952-56. He was
Director of Vietnam Affairs in 1963-64 and, along with George Ball, was one of
the few government officials who fought against America's deepening involvement
in Vietnam.
In 1980, Kattenburg wrote The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign
Policy, 1945-75. The following paragraphs about what it means to be an
American and the future of foreign policy are taken from his book. That Kattenburg
was right about Vietnam and his predictions of the future made forty years ago
are accurate make them worth heeding.
American
Values and The World
"The one certainly salient and distinctive trait
of the United States is that its people are of many and highly diverse
traditions and racial and ethnic origins, who have lived together on the
American land for only a very short period of time as history goes. Today's
Britons, though also of diverse origins, have people the United Kingdom for at
least 1,000 years; French, though equally diverse, have been on the soil of
France even longer; and soon their lands have lived Italians, Iberians, Greeks,
the Slavic, and many other people of Russia, the Han Chinese, or the
ethno-linguistically diverse people of India. But not over a tiny fraction of
'American people' descend from those who have been on this continent only some
three hundred years; a few look back to families that have been on this soil
two hundred years. The overwhelming majority of those who form the American
nation today have been here a mere one hundred years or less. A hundred years
or less is a very short time to form mutual bonds between diverse peoples, and
bonds between peoples and their land. The United States is not a generic
'people-land' country in the sense that England, France, China or Japan are; or
even in the sense that England, France, China, or Japan are; or even in the
sense that the Soviet Union, through its dominant White Russian people, is.
U.W. people are not yet held together predominantly by a sense of belonging
together as descendants of generational patrimony, by a bond to land. What
holds the United States together is saliently a set of principles and ideals.
Thus, the United States is an 'idea' country, rather than a 'people-land' one.
"Accordingly, principles and
ideals hold a cardinal place in the U.S. national ethos and crucially
distinguish U.S. performance in the superpower role. The American principles
and ideas, the 'value structure' to use more refined language, were in part:
(1) inherited from an Anglo-Saxon tradition and adopted; (2) inherited from a
continental, including French, German and Hispanic, tradition and incorporated;
(3) laid down by the founding fathers, those pure geniuses of detached
contemplation; (4) refined by subsequent leading figures of thought and action,
among whom John and John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt are just a very few among the many who
stand out; and (5) tested and retested in the process of settling the
continent, healing the North-South breach, developing the economy from the
wilderness in the spirit of free enterprise, and fighting World Wars I and II,
not so much for interest as for the survival of the very principles by which
most Americans were guiding their lives....
"Values and principles, beliefs and ideology, came
not only to occupy a central place in the American popular psyche; but in fact
to symbolize it altogether. To be American meant to be free, to see the world
as open and progressive, to be optimistic as to the future and the fate of man.
And to be optimistic, progressive and free meant to be 'American.' In the
isolated confines of the American continent, these values quickly came to be
seen as virtually the only ones worthy of pursuit by mankind. By a strange
psychological twist, those excluded from the pursuit and achievement of such
values, that is, most of the world outside America, came in the eyes of many
Americans to be regarded as deprived of genuine humanity. In a very real sense, Americans began to
equate America with the world much as out grunts in Vietnam during the 1960s
spoke of two universes, 'Nam' and 'the world.' Hence, Texas building were not
just the tallest in the United States but 'in the world'; the American baseball
championships were 'World Series'; good American things were, in general, 'the
finest in the world,' 'richest in the world,' etc." (p. 69-71)
Future American Foreign Policy
"We can tentatively discern
four emerging trends in world politics to which it will be the task of American
foreign policy to adapt slowly and prudently over the next two decades. The
first of these is a worldwide process of fragmentation, demonstrated in the
assertion of an ever-increasing number of smaller and smaller units seeking
recognition of their identity and legitimation of
their authority as new decision-making centers. While predominantly
national-ethnic in character, such units also include other groups seeking
identity recognition. Contrary to the dreams and hopes of federalists and
integrationists, the world in its currently high phase of transnational
business and functional activity is not drawing closer together but, in terms
of politics, pulling further apart. The process of fragmentation involves
virtually all states, in their domestic structures as well as in their
international relations. It is a problem which will tax the imagination of
future generations of policy-makers throughout the globe.
"Second, global managerialism by leader of multinationals whose strongly
developed effective motivational and recreational sets determine their
incessant quest for adventure, profit and action challenges the traditional
authority structures of states in all world areas. It will not be easy over the
next twenty years to accommodate the power and ruthlessness of multinational
corporations to the requirements of traditional state units. This will demand
new solutions and new forms of diplomacy on the part of the United States as of
all other major powers.
"Third, the world will face continued
global irresolution by governments in the face of mounting transnational problems
of the greatest difficulty. There are as yet no obvious solutions on the
horizon for such complex issues as international monetary and financial
relationships, the development of poor countries, technology and population
transfers, competitive trade and investment policies by the advanced industrial
states, energy-producing resources, availability and distribution of other
scarce resources, environment, population control and Law of the Seas.
"Finally, the United States and other major powers
will continue to face both at home and abroad the reassertion of the type of
terrorism, symbolic violence, and low-level warfare which is symptomatic of
popular anomie and the rebellion of youth in all ages of transition from one
historic period to another. It accompanies the ushering in of the age of
industrialism as it now attends the dawn of the post-industrial age."
(p.323-324)