The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

20 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 50 Years Ago An American Foreign Policy Imperative: Responsible Restraint I submit that there is now in our national psyche a set of general convictions that make a deemphasis of our international role as much a certainty in the decade ahead as was its expansion in the aftermath of World War II. Those convictions are: • At home, we face an urgent and imminent threat to our national well-being. Our domestic crisis probably transcends in seriousness and is in any event more immedi- ate in its impact than the dangers which face us in the international arena. The first order of American business is to come to grips with our domestic problems. • The operations of the United States Government in the field of national security have got somewhat out of hand. Our expenditures for the defense establishment, our maintenance of military forces abroad, our commitments to the defense of other countries, all seem out of proportion either to the need for or the benefits which accrue from such operations. • Our impact on world affairs is no longer as effective and as decisive as it once was. It is a mistake to consider these attitudes as the result of the Vietnam war. For that implies that the attitudes are transitory, and will change once the Vietnam trauma is behind us. Such a reversion is highly unlikely. Indeed, without some unifying event of transcendent importance, such a reversion is inconceivable. … In any event, we have come as a nation to a point where it is inevitable that we shall have a change of emphasis in our national policy. For good or ill, the United States is in for a period of restraint in international affairs, and of concentra- tion upon our domestic problems. It is incumbent upon the internationalists among us to accept and preside over this process with the courage which Hemingway defined as grace under pressure. For it is essential to our national security and well-being that the process of restructuring our international role be performed with a delicate instrument and with a wise discrimination between the necessary and the merely desirable. Surgery is inevitable—and surely it is better that it be performed by professionals with a scalpel rather than by amateurs with a hatchet. —Former FSO Marshall Wright, excerpted from his article with the same title in the July 1970 FSJ . conduct reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory to monitor military activ- ity and arms control compliance. “Russia didn’t adhere to the treaty, so until they adhere, we will pull out,” President Trump told reporters outside the White House on May 21, adding: “There’s a chance we may make a new agreement or do something to put that agreement back together. I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to pull out, and they’re going to come back and want to make a deal.” Russia, meanwhile, vowed to main- tain the treaty, the Financial Times reported on May 22. Russian Deput y Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that the United States withdrawal from the pact “would undermine global security” and means that there is little hope that the last remaining defense pact between the United States and Russia, New START, would survive. If not extended, New START will expire on Feb. 5. In a joint statement released May 22, foreign ministers from 10 European countries said that while they regret Washington’s decision, they shared American “concerns about implementa- tion of the Treaty clauses by Russia,” the Financial Times reported. “You reach a point at which you need to say enough is enough,” Special Presi- dential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea told The New York Times . “The United States cannot keep participating in this treaty if Russia is going to violate it with impunity.” Several Democratic lawmakers criti- cized the United States’ withdrawal from the pact.