Old Myths and New Realities (Original)

              United States of America

Congressional Record

PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE 88th CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION

Vol. 110
WASHINGTON, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 1964
No. 56

Senate


FOREIGN POLICY—OLD MYTHS AND 
NEW REALITIES

Mr. FULBRIGHT. Mr. President, 
there is an inevitable divergence, attributable 
to the imperfections of the human 
mind, between the world as it is and the 
world as men perceive it. As long as our 
perceptions are reasonably close to 
objective reality, it is possible for us to act 
upon our problems in a rational and 
appropriate manner. But when our 
perceptions fail to keep pace with events, 
when we refuse to believe something 
because it displeases or frightens us, or 
because it is simply startlingly unfamiliar, 
then the gap between fact and perception 
becomes a chasm, and action becomes 
irrelevant and irrational.
There has always—and inevitably—
 been some divergence between the 
realities of foreign policy and our ideas about 
it. This divergence has in certain 
respects been growing, rather than 
narrowing; and we are handicapped, 
accordingly, by policies based on old myths, 
rather than current realities. This 
divergence is, in my opinion, dangerous 
and unnecessary—dangerous, because 
it can reduce foreign policy to a fraudulent 
game of imagery and appearances; 
unnecessary, because it can be overcome 
by the determination of men in high 
office to dispel prevailing misconceptions 
by the candid dissemination of 
unpleasant, but inescapable, facts.
Before commenting on some of the 
specific areas where I believe our policies are 
at least partially based on cherished 
myths, rather than objective facts, 
I should like to suggest two possible 
reasons for the growing divergence between 
the realities and our perceptions of 
current world politics. The first is the 
radical change in relations between and 
within the Communist and the free 
world; and the second is the tendency 
of too many of us to confuse means with 
ends and, accordingly, to adhere to 
prevailing practices with a fervor befitting 
immutable principles.
Although it is too soon to render a 
definitive judgment, there is mounting 
evidence that events of recent years have 
wrought profound changes in the 
character of East-West relations. In the 
Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the 
United States proved to the Soviet Union 
that a policy of aggression and 
adventure involved unacceptable risks. In the 
signing of the test ban treaty, each side 
in effect assured the other that it was 
prepared to forego, at least for the 
present, any bid for a decisive military or 
political breakthrough. These occurrences, 
it should be added, took place against 
the background of the clearly understood 
strategic superiority—but not 
supremacy—of the United States.
It seems reasonable, therefore, to 
suggest that the character of the cold war 
has, for the present, at least, been 
profoundly altered: by the drawing back of 
the Soviet Union from extremely 
aggressive policies; by the implicit repudiation 
by both sides of a policy of "total 
victory"; and by the establishment of an 
American strategic superiority which the 
Soviet Union appears to have tactly 
accepted because it has been accompanied 
by assurances that it will be exercised by 
the United States with responsibility and
restraint. These enormously important 
changes may come to be regarded by 
historians as the foremost achievements of 
the Kennedy administration in the field 
of foreign policy. Their effect has been 
to commit us to a foreign policy which 
can accurately—though perhaps not 
prudently—be defined as one of "peaceful 
coexistence."
Another of the results of the lowering 
of tensions between East and West is 
that each is now free to enjoy the luxury 
of accelerated strife and squabbling 
within its own domain. The ideological 
thunderbolts between Washington and 
Moscow which until a few years ago 
seemed a permanent part of our daily 
lives have become a pale shadow of their 
former selves. Now instead the United 
States waits in fascinated apprehension 
for the Olympian pronouncements that 
issue from Paris at 6-month intervals 
while the Russians respond to the crude 
epithets of Peiping with almost  plaintive 
rejoinders about "those who want to start 
a war against everybody."
These astonishing changes in the 
configuration of the postwar world have had 
an unsettling effect on both public and 
official opinion in the United States. One r
eason for this, I believe, lies in the fact 
that we are a people used to looking at 
the world, and indeed at ourselves, in 
moralistic rather than empirical terms. 
We are predisposed to regard any 
conflict as a clash between good and evil 
rather than as simply a clash between 
conflicting interests. We are inclined 
to confuse freedom and democracy, 
which we regard as moral principles, 
with the way in which they are practiced 
in America—with capitalism, federalism, 
and the two-party system, which are not 
moral principles but simply the preferred 
and accepted practices of the American 
people. There is much cant in American 
moralism and not a little inconsistency. 
It resembles in some ways the religious 
faith of the many respectable people who, 
in Samuel Butler's words, "would be 
equally horrified to hear the Christian 
religion doubted or to see it practiced."
Our national vocabulary is full of 
"self-evident truths" not only about 
"life, liberty, and happiness," but about 
a vast number of personal and public 
issues, including the cold war. It has 
become one of the "self-evident truths" 
of the postwar era that just as the 
President resides in Washington and the 
Pope in Rome, the Devil resides 
immutably in Moscow. We have come to 
regard the Kremlin as the permanent seat 
of his power and we, have grown almost 
comfortable with a menace which, 
though unspeakably evil, has had the 
redeeming virtues of constancy, 
predictability, and familiarity. Now the Devil 
has betrayed us by traveling abroad and, 
worse still, by dispersing himself, 
turning up now here, now there, and in many 
places at once, with a devilish disregard 
for the laboriously constructed frontiers 
of ideology.
We are confronted with a complex and 
fluid world situation and we are not 
adapting ourselves to it. We are 
clinging to old myths in the face of new 
realities and we are seeking to escape the 
contradictions by narrowing the 
permissible bounds of public discussion, by 
relegating an increasing number of ideas 
and viewpoints to a growing category
of "unthinkable thoughts." I believe 
that this tendency can and should be
reversed, that it is within our ability, 
and unquestionably in our interests, to 
cut loose from established myths and 
to start thinking some "unthinkable 
thoughts"—about the cold war and 
East-West relations, about the 
underdeveloped countries and particularly 
those in Latin America, about the 
changing nature of the Chinese 
Communist threat in Asia and about the 
festering war in Vietnam.
The master myth of the cold war is 
that the Communist bloc is a monolith 
composed of governments which are not 
really governments at all but organized 
conspiracies, divided among themselves 
perhaps in certain matters of tactics, 
but all equally resolute and implacable 
in their determination to destroy the 
free world.
I believe that the Communist world 
is indeed hostile to the free world in its 
general and lone-term intentions but 
that the existence of this animosity in 
principle is far less important for our
 foreign policy than the great variations 
in its intensity and character both in 
time and among the individual members 
of the Communist bloc. Only if we 
rec¬ognize these variations, ranging from 
China, which poses immediate threats 
to the free world, to Poland and Yugoslavia, 
which pose none, can we hope to 
act effectively upon the bloc and to turn 
its internal differences to our own 
advantage and to the advantage of those 
bloc countries which wish to maximize 
their independence. It is the responsibility 
of our national leaders both in the 
executive branch and in Congress, to 
acknowledge and act upon these realities, 
even at the cost of saying things which 
will not win immediate widespread 
enthusiasm.
For a start, we can acknowledge the 
fact that the Soviet Union, though still 
a most formidable adversary, has ceased 
to be totally and implacably hostile to 
the West. It has shown a new willingness 
to enter mutually advantageous 
arrangements with the West and, thus 
far at least, to honor them. It has 
therefore become possible to divert some of 
our energies from the prosecution of the 
cold war to the relaxation of the cold war 
and to deal with the Soviet Union, 
for certain purposes, as a normal state 
with normal and traditional interests.
If we are to do these things effectively, 
we must distinguish between 
communism as an ideology and the power 
and policy of the Soviet state. It is not 
communism as a doctrine, or communism 
as it is practiced within the Soviet 
Union or within any other country, that 
threatens us. How the Soviet Union 
organizes its internal life, the gods and 
doctrines that it worships, are matters 
for the Soviet Union to determine. It is 
not Communist dogma as espoused 
within Russia but Communist imperialism
 that threatens us and other peoples of 
the non-Communist world. Insofar as 
a great nation mobilizes its power and 
resources for aggressive purposes, that 
nation, regardless of ideology, makes 
itself our enemy. Insofar as a nation is 
content to practice its doctrines within 
its own frontiers, that nation, however 
repugnant its ideology, is one with which 
we have no proper quarrel. We must 
deal with the Soviet Union as a great 
power, quite apart from differences of 
ideology. To the extent that the Soviet 
leaders abandon the global ambitions of