The Foreign Service Journal, February 2005

months before the fall of Saigon), Graham Martin, the U.S. ambas- sador to Saigon, came to Jakarta to brief Indonesians. He painted a rosy picture of progress and denigrated U.S. critics of the war. One of the Indonesian observers later said to an American embassy officer: “We were most interested in what Ambassador Martin had to say. He must be working in a different country than we are.” Available information on the growth of al-Qaida in Afghanistan contains little evidence that doubts were raised about the possible long- term risks of assisting militant Islamic groups to oppose the Soviets. Debates during the muja- hedeen period seemed to revolve mostly around doubts about collabo- ration with Pakistani intelligence and with various possible radical ele- ments among the Afghan warlords. It was only after three major terror- ist attacks on U.S. targets — the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000 — that the full extent of bin Laden’s role and of the al-Qaida threat became known. But, even then, the worst consequences of the unintended results of the U.S. war against the Soviets in Afghani- stan still lay ahead. This pattern of U.S. ambassadors faithfully pursuing policies devised in the political and strategic arena of Washington in the face of contrary assessments by others has been repeated in every one of the U.S. Cold War crises in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Road Not Taken Should the United States, then, have been inactive in the face of threats to pro-Western, anti-commu- nist governments beyond Europe? Would the U.S. position be better today if it had not intervened in the countries of the Middle East, Indonesia, Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua? Would the Soviet Union have collapsed without the U.S. chal- lenges in the Third World? Certainly many of the long-range assessments that drove U.S. policy were off the mark. The dominoes did not fall in Southeast Asia. The U.S. today has friendly relations with Vietnam. Indonesia has had two consecutive directly elected presidents. The perceived threat to U.S. interests in Latin America has faded. Information on the origins of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan sug- gest the action was less part of a drive to the oil-rich Persian Gulf than an effort to curb the influence of Islamic militants on Soviet Central Asia. It is tempting to won- der whether recent history, includ- ing the 9/11 attacks, would have been different if the U.S. had not supported the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a fight against a weakening USSR that was ultimately forced by its own weak- ness to withdraw from its Asian satellites. It is difficult to predict what might have happened in Iran and Iraq. It is hard to imagine that, under a continuation of the Mossa- deq government in Tehran, the U.S. position today would be any worse. Clearly, the end result of the expen- diture of U.S. lives and resources in Iraq is yet to be determined, but the American dream of a pro-American, democratic Iraq is still far from real- ization. The fall of the Soviet Union demonstrated the inherent weak- ness of that nation and certainly rais- es questions about its long-range capacity to alter societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The end- less hours spent by U.S. officials seeking to counter Soviet and Chinese offers of aid to these conti- nents seemed essential at the time, but, in retrospect seem less justified. U.S. interventions beyond Europe during the Cold War did not create the current terrorist threat. They did create fears of Western intervention and emotions against the West in areas that had experienced colonial- ism and European domination in other forms. Such fears of renewed occupation lie dormant throughout the region, subject to exploitation by dema- gogues and autocrats. In the Middle East, the continuing U.S. identifica- tion with the unresolved Israeli- Palestinian issue makes the exploita- tion possibility especially real. The clash between Washington’s perceptions of an issue, created by the inevitable interplay of politics, pressures and interests that charac- terize U.S. foreign policy-making, and a different reality seen by observers on the ground will never end. The results of Cold War poli- cies cannot be reversed, but setting forth the consequences can, per- haps, lead to a better understanding of the limitations of a superpower’s ability to control global events today. That understanding can also demon- strate how difficult it is, under the pressures of immediate action, to foresee the longer-term conse- quences of that action. n 64 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Non-alignment was not, in the view of John Foster Dulles, an option for free nations.