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Overriding all others is the new fact that leadership of the free world has thrust upon the U.S. responsibilities and commitments that neither Roosevelt nor Wilson ever confronted. Ten years ago most U.S. citizens could share the traditional American concept of colonialism as unrelieved oppression and exploitation. Today's U.S. leaders are aware that colonialism has often been an instrument of progress, that the world's problems cannot be solved by simply taking an anticolonial stand in every circumstance.
If Britain subjugated the Gold Coast, it was also Britain that transformed the Gold Coast from a geographical expression into a nation; if Englishmen grew rich off Malaya, they also introduced to Malaya the rubber and tin industries that lifted it out of a feudal economy, gave its inhabitants their first glimpses of the economic well-being they are now demanding as an underdeveloped nation.
Nor has Wilson's appealing formula—self-determination for everybody—proved the magic wand that it once appeared. The cry of self-determination offers no solution to the problem of West Irian, where Indonesia and The Netherlands are disputing the mastery of savage peoples who have no ties with either the Javanese or the Dutch, yet are incapable of developing and ruling a nation in the modern world. It is scarcely any more helpful in Cyprus, where straightforward recourse to a plebiscite might well bring Greece and Turkey into an armed conflict that would destroy NATO's Eastern wing.
Here, as in many another area, U.S. idealism has been brought face to face with an unpalatable truth: when self-determination conflicts with the overriding U.S. objective of preserving the free world from Communist conquest, both expediency and good conscience dictate that self-determination must take second place. For unless the tide of Communism is contained, the world's dependent peoples will lose even the freedom to cry for freedom.
PAEANS & PAINS
Responsible for the free world as it is and not as the U.S. would like it to be, the U.S. cannot indulge in the slogans or the ringing declarations that are possible to those who can demand what is desirable only because they are not charged with doing what is possible. That possibility was best formulated more than a year and a half ago by John Foster Dulles: "I believe that the role of the U.S. is to try to see that that [anticolonial] process moves forward in a constructive, evolutionary way, and does not either come to a halt or take a violent revolutionary turn ... I suspect that the U.S. will find that its role . . . will be to try to aid that process without identifying itself 100% either with the so-called colonial powers or with the powers which are primarily and uniquely concerned with the problem of getting their independence as rapidly as possible."
Such a policy will earn few paeans of gratitude, will expose the U.S. to an incessant and painful barrage of criticism from both Europe and Afro-Asian countries. But in the long sweep of history, it may be the best hope of building a world order based on freedom and justice.