Black Sheep A Nation of Sheep. By William J. Lederer.
(Cassell, 16s.) FOREIGN policy is seldom conducted by any State in strict accordance with any high-minded for- mulae. But this is not only a matter of wicked politicians, which would instantly be corrected if their places were taken by the Hampstead Peace Corps. Even free-lance commentators, with less excuse than the working diplomat, are extremely shaky in their application of general principles. It would be a rare intellectual who did not proclaim devotion to the principle of self-determination; it would be a rarer one still who applied it equally and equitably to Angola, Katanga, Algeria, Kashmir, West New Guinea, Basutoland and Berlin.
The American people have always wanted to feel that their foreign policy is highly realistic, and 100 per cent. idealistic too. It should always, they would like to hope, be defending the best against the worst. In reality, like any foreign policy, it often has to make do with defending the bad against the worse, and, owing to human fallibility, occasionally gets even these mixed up. Meanwhile the public at home clings rather touchingly to a fairy-story version in which hard-faced or corrupt rulers who seem to be, on the whole, serving the interests of inter- national democracy better than any possible al- ternative, figure as milk-white Galahads. Or, when this unlikely vision is proved false, they go to the other extreme and insist on purification beyond what is feasible.
Mr. Lederer puts a strictly argued case against American policies in Laos, Formosa and Korea. Puts it, rather than proves it—the book con- sists almost entirely of assertions rather than demonstrations—so that it does not gain greatly over the fictional technique he used in The Ugly American on the same theme. He sees the eco- nomic, propagandist and political errors made by the West in Asia. Yet errors on at least this scale are also made by the Communists. The current situation in South Vietnam makes one sympathise with Mr. Kennedy, who seems to ap- preciate that the one area in which we are at a really important disadvantage is military infil- tration. The basic advantage of the Communists certainly lies in their techniques of seizing and holding such power. Mr. Lederer is not much interested in this.
He outlines various ways of securing a better- informed and more active public opinion in his country. Few of his ideas are new and they have not had much success previously. The best way to influence opinion (and the Americans are much readier to listen than most people) is by books like the one under review. It is an interesting refutation of one of our ideas of the American Establishment, and a credit to all concerned, that Mr. Lederer writes this powerful stuff while remaining (as the blurb freely concedes) Far East editorial representa- tive of the Reader's Digest. He is in the finest tradition of the career journalist who exposes the errors which officialdom is trying to hush up. We cannot have too much of that, and the fact that he grossly overstates his points is one of the inevitable conditions of his trade.
The political mishandling of Laos is an easy target, and one which has lost its immediacy. Mr. Lederer has no difficulty in showing that American-supported regimes in South-East Asia are often undemocratic and sometimes corrupt. title does not, perhaps, see that there are worse things than corruption. Our own liberties on this island derive from a conspiracy of corrupt short- view politicians who delivered us from the second of two batches of high-minded idealists. The Korean farmers preferred paying bribes to Syngman Rhee's officials to the alternative of paying much larger taxes and confiscations to North Korean commissars—the move south even before the Korean War by one-fifth of the Communist sector's population was surely an adequate plebiscite. Nevertheless, American officialdom's tendency to stand pat on such argu- ments got a striking rebuttal last year. It was shown—in the short run at least—that improve- ments in democratisation do not necessarily play into the hands of the Communists even in such front-line zones.
Not that the record of successive American governments is anything like so bad as Mr. Lederer makes out. Some of the faults he finds are the sort more or less inevitable in these com- plicated manoeuvres. He does not give enough weight to such things as the agrarian reforms associated with Ladejinsky. But with all its exaggerations this is the sort of book necessary in America as a corrective to inertias and dis- tortions in the other direction.
In America, yes. In this country it does some- thing different—it reinforces the pervasive mis- judgments of American policy which poison our atmosphere. It is no reflection at all on Lederer, but as a recruit to the ranks of what might be called American anti-American books published in Britain, and quite inadequately balanced by the countervailing literature against which they can be properly read as they are in their own country, its tendency may rather be to help turn readers here into a small community of sheep stampeding in the opposite direction.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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