The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2019 41 diplomatic relations. The press often advises our Government to break relations with this government or that government. I am very, very leery of the breaking of diplomatic relations as a means of getting anywhere in international affairs. Severing relations is like playing the Ace of Spades in bridge. You can only use it once. When you play it, you haven’t got any more, so your hand is considerably weakened. …We ought to make plain to the world from now on that no American recognition—no Ameri- can diplomatic relations with any regime—bears any thought of U.S. approval or disapproval; we are not committing ourselves, when we deal with anyone, on the legitimacy of their power. We would deal with the devil himself if he held enough of the earth’s surface to make it worthwhile for us to do so. … A few other measures which democratic states can take involve control of territory in one’s own country, namely the facilities granted to a foreign government. We can limit the num- ber of representatives of a foreign government in this country. We can deny its citizens the right to sojourn here for purposes of business or pleasure. We can deny them our collaboration in cul- tural or technical matters. They do these things to us all the time; and we can do them ourselves, although these measures are more difficult for us because our controls are not so complete. These are, in general, the categories and measures I think we have at our disposal. Two Main Conditions for Effectiveness Now comes the real question. To what extent are these measures adequate to our purposes in the world today? Are they enough to get us what we want without going to war? My own belief is that they are, depending on two main conditions. The first of these conditions is that we keep up at all times a preponderance of strength in the world. …It is not by any means a question of military strength alone. National strength is a question of political, economic, and moral strength. Above all it is a question of our internal strength; of the health and sanity of our own society. For that reason, none of us can afford to be indifferent to internal disharmony, dissension, intolerance, and the things that break up the moral and political structure of our society at home. Another characteristic of strength is that it depends for its effectiveness not only on its existence, but on our readiness to use it at any time if we are pushed beyond certain limits. This does not mean we have to be trigger-happy. It does not mean there is any point in our going around blustering, threatening, waving clubs at people, and telling them if they don’t do this or that we are going to drop a bomb on them. Threatening in inter- national affairs is about the most stupid and unnecessary thing I can think of. It is stupid because it very often disrupts the whole logic of our own diplomacy; brings in an element that didn’t need to be there; causes the other fellow to adopt an attitude which he needn’t adopt; and defeats your own purposes. … Strength overshadows any other measure short of war that anybody can take. We can have the best intelligence, the most brilliant strategy, but if we speak from weakness, from indeci- sion, and from the hope and prayer that the other fellow won’t force the issue, we just cannot expect to be successful. This thought is a hard point to get across with many Ameri- cans. A lot of Americans have it firmly ingrained in their psychol- ogy that if you maintain your strength and keep it in the imme- diate background of your diplomatic action, you are courting further trouble and provoking hostilities. They insist it is the actual maintenance of armaments that leads to their use. Our pacifists are incapable of understanding that the maintenance of strength in the democratic nations is actually the most peaceful of all the measures we can take short of war, because the greater your strength, the less likely you are ever going to use it. They fail to understand that in the world we know today, the question is never whether you are going to take a stand; the question is when and where you are going to take that stand. … What this boils down to, I am afraid, is that for great nations, as for individuals today, there is no real security and there is no alternative to living dangerously. And when people say, “My God, we might get into a war?” the only thing I know to say is, “Exactly so.” The price of peace has become the willingness to sacrifice it to a good cause and that is all there is to it. A second condition must be met if our measures short of war are going to be effective: we must select measures and use them not hit-or-miss as the moment may seem to demand, but in accordance with a pattern of grand strategy no less concrete and no less consistent than that which governs our actions in war. It is my own conviction that we must go even further than that and must cease to have separate patterns of measures—one pattern for peace and one pattern for war. We must work out a general plan of what the United States wants in this world and pursue that plan with all the measures at our disposal, depending on what is indicated by the circumstances. … My personal conviction is that if we keep up our strength, if we are ready to use it, and if we select the measures short of war with the necessary wisdom and coordination, then these measures short of war will be all the ones that we will ever have to use to secure the prosperous and safe future of the people of this country. n