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Preventive War. One of the toughest minds on this American dilemma is that of the University of Chicago's Hans Morgenthau, who declares that the U.S. must decide whether its basic aim is the containment of Red China. If so, this cannot be done by such peripheral actions as the Viet Nam war, he says, unless the U.S. is willing to risk a direct clash with China. Also, "you have to recognize that once China becomes a modern industrial nation, she will have become the most powerful nation on earth. Faced with that, the question is whether we should wage preventive war." While he is "not prepared to answer" that fateful question, he feels that the U.S. is right in not trading with China, and condemns other nations for doing so. Says Morgenthau: "It is certainly a paradox that the U.S.S.R. so feared the Chinese that they came to break with their fellow Communists rather than continue to supply them with goods that would make them an industrial power, while Western industrial nations—through their blindness and greed—substituted their goods for what the Russians have cut off."
Fulbright disagrees. While he does not advocate recognition of Red China, he favors probing "for areas of peaceful contact" and hopes, like onetime Ambassador to Russia George Kennan and others, that as a new generation of Chinese leaders comes to the fore, Peking will grow more tractable.
But Not in the Congo. What about the rest of the world? There are no other Viet Nams, but there are plenty of other areas of concern.
The Congo is temporarily quiescent after its recent outburst of savagery, but the rebels are still strong, and the U.S. has only limited hopes of stopping the flow of arms to them from Communist and African nationalist countries.
Fulbright recently told Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "For God's sake, let's not get involved in the Congo as we did in South Viet Nam." Perhaps not, but total noninvolvement could also lead to later disasters.
In general, it is a rare week when some U.S. embassy in Africa or Asia is not surrounded by demonstrators hurling rocks or at least carrying anti-American placards, with the tacit approval of the local government. This suggests to many people that the U.S. ought to worry a lot less about the "neutrals." There is considerable sentiment in Congress to amend the President's foreign-aid requests (see box) to cut off funds for such countries as Egypt, which is funneling arms to the Congo rebels, and Indonesia, which keeps harassing pro-Western Malaysia.
Sharing in this sentiment, but also for other reasons (he wants foreign-aid appropriations to be split into separate and more manageable packages), Fulbright himself this year refused to act as manager for the foreign-aid bill when it comes to the floor of the Senate.
Says Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to India: "We are badly out of date and still behave as though the neutral nations were major considerations in the cold war." Galbraith characterizes U.S. foreign policy in general as overly cautious and boring. "It seems that our policy is in the hands of men whose mothers were frightened by John W. Bricker," he says. No one knows for sure just what that sentence means, but it sounds great on the playing fields of academe.