Isolationism in the Senate
Aram Bakshian, Jr
Washington, DC There was irony in it. At .about the same time that the House of Commons was taking the preliminary steps to integrate Britain into the Common Market, amidst fulsome talk of "bringing England into Europe," the United States Senate was voting to abolish the financial arm of America's international relations in what some have described as the strongest isolationist surge in the post-war era.
It has been a long time coming and not a few observers had predicted it, but the Nixon administration was still taken off balance when the Senate voted to kill off the entire foreign aid programme. The curious thing about it is that the defeat was quite accidental — the result of several chance conjunctions that found conservative Republican backbenchers and the liberal wing of the Democratic party clinging •together in an uneasy, and very likely temporary, embrace.
Foreign aid has never been popular with the general electorate, especially in recent years. Much of the money has gone to Asian and African regimes that specialise in reviling American intentions while pocketing American subsidies. Little is left of the benevolent if misguided spirit that tolerated massive infusion of American aid to western powers after the war, and denouncing foreign aid has become standard procedure for politicians of both parties during election campaigns. Until now, however, most of the opposition was rhetorical — hot talk, but nothing more. No one could muster a majority vote against the overall programme until now.
What changed things this year? To begin with, President Nixon is a Repub. lican chief executive with Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Many of these Democrats were reluctant to fight foreign aid while their fellow Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, was in the White House. Now they feel free to make a partisan issue of it. Secondly, many conservative Republicans, though generally voting their party line, have begun to balk at Nixon's new China policy, especially after the ejection of Chiang's Taiwan regime from the United Nations, to the accompaniment of cheers and jeers from many Asian and African countries on the aid list (and the wrong side of the China roll call).
Thus the bizarre coalition of Republican backbenchers and left-wing Democrats is gunning for the same legislation for entirely different reasons. Neither faction was really aware of the collective strength of the opposition and so the defeat of the bill came as quite a shock to victors as well as vanquished. One Republican Senator, whose name begins with an 'A,' characterised the farce. As an old ' econ
omy in goverment' man, he cast his usual (and heretofore futile) vote against foreign aid at the beginning of the alphabetic roll call and retired for the day. Driving home, he heard on his car radio that the bill had been soundly defeated. Had he suspected that this would have happened, he and a number of other Republicans would probably have foregone their symbolic protest votes to line up behind the Nixon administration and the result would have been altered.
Already the coalition of opposites is showing signs of breaking up. At heart, they dislike each other more than they dislike foreign aid. Richard Nixon, who was rumoured to be displeased with some of the tampering done with the original bill in committee, may now be able to get through legislation more precisely to his liking, at least on a temporary footing.
In moments of pique (as followed the UN's expulsion of Taiwan), and when the failures of past foreign policy are painfully in evidence (as in the Vietnam war), the Senate may indulge its emotions, trying to vote away American involvement around the world. But, as a majority of that body usually realises the morning after, it takes more than votes to do that, and there is also the nagging question of who is in line to pick up the pieces in the wake of an American retreat, world-wide. Certainly not England in her present state, and after the anti-colonialist frenzy that the US was instrumental in whipping up in the first place; certainly not the ' new' Western Europe with its preoccupation with commercialism, fat but militarily impotent; and, certainly not Japan, which was all too successfully de-militarised during the American occupation after World War II.
That leaves the ursine gents in the Kremlin, whose recent tours of world capitals have underscored their desire to fill the power vacuum they already see forming as NATO crumbles and a Europe led by pallid moneymen like Monsieur Pompidou and neutralist-socialists like Herr Brandt, totters towards a one-sided entente with the Soviet Union. In Asia and Africa, add China and the picture is complete.
However, all this depends on the continued erosion of American foreign policy, and there are some indications that the Senate vote on foreign aid is not the harbinger of further reverses, but, rather, the highwater mark of the opposition. Yes, America probably will adjust its absurdly large subsidy to the United Nations. It never has made and never will make sense for the US or any other single nation to foot a third of the international's body's bill for a quarter of a century, all the while watching an idealistic vision degenerating into a squabbling rabble of third-rate mentalities representing third-rate nations, out of all proportion to population, and turning the General Assembly into a debating society for buffoons.
On the other hand foreign aid to individual nations will very likely be patched up within a matter of weeks and, come 1973, there will either be a new Democratic president with majorities in both Houses of the Congress, or a re-elected Richard Nixon with a strengthened hand in the Congress and a more resounding public mandate. Either way, the crisis will be past.
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