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As for the nation's military presence, there is no question that the U.S. today has too many troops scattered about in too many places. Even apart from the dollar drain, it is hard to justify the 375 major foreign military bases and 3,000 minor military facilities that the U.S. has positioned all over the globe in recent years. The White House has talked about "reducing our presence," while maintaining our commitments abroad—and Congress should be clued in more to discussions of how this can be done. One specific proposal: Congress could establish a small, select "National Security Committee," composed of members with expertise in military and foreign affairs, that would periodically discuss diplomatic problems with the President on a secret but utterly frank basis. Both Congress and the President can move away from an inflationary, supercostly military procurement policy that seems, at times, aimed more at breaking the Soviets by outspending them than by providing the U.S. with what it really needs for deterrence and defense. Unless this is done, says former Under Secretary of State George Ball, the U.S. economy is in danger of becoming "a Strasbourg goose with an overdeveloped liver."
These problems, as well as such lesser matters as reorganizing foreign aid and restoring the stature and influence of the State Department, require creativity on the part of Congress and the President. The prickly members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are not alone in thinking that the balance in U.S. diplomatic decision making has tilted too far in the direction of the Chief Executive. Fortunately, there is a fairly recent example of the kind of cooperation needed: the historic postwar collaboration between President and Congress that established the policy of containment against Soviet aggression, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Then, as now, the White House and the Congress were controlled by opposing parties. Nonetheless, an exceptionally fruitful relationship developed between Democratic President Harry Truman and a Republican-controlled Congress in which Arthur Vandenberg was the foreign relations leader. Why should any less be expected from a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress?
Isolationism carried into the 20th century is essentially a flight from reality. To label the critics and reappraisers of U.S. foreign policy neo-isolationists is equally escapist. Few things threaten U.S. power more seriously than excessive or misguided intervention; the Viet Nam War has done more than any other factor in recent years to reduce U.S. global influence. Seeking to rationalize U.S. commitments abroad is the very opposite of isolationism, because only such rationalization can restore and maintain the U.S. position in the world.
John L. Steele