PAX AMERICANA
By GUNTHER STEIN
IT was to be an age of peace and plenty and unprecedented pro- gress, Americans had hoped ; but overnight, to their bewilder- ment, it was proclaimed the new "age of American responsibility." Heavy taxes and the vast national debt were to have been drastically cut year after year ; but now the cost of policing and subsidising an ever-increasing part of the world would grow to large proportions and military expenditures would soon rise again. Prices were at last to have fallen into line with lagging purchasing-power, and remain- ing war-time scarcities were to have disappeared ; but now the American world-policeman would have to carry free goods in one hand and weapons in the other while going about his formidable task along the fringes of the Soviet Union, so that prices would remain high in the United States and scarcities continue. Returning normalcy was to have taken the poison out of the post-war labour- management conflict, and quickly-rising prosperity for all classes was to have taken the wind out of the sails of domestic radicalism ; but now the scene was suddenly set for fresh economic difficulties and friction, for long-term policies stressing national preparedness rather than plenty and social security, and for a suspicious and militant anti-radicalism at home, parallel to the active anti-Communism of America's new foreign policy. The world was to have been helped toward more democracy and prosperity through constructive Ameri- can co-operation in the various United Nations organisations, with- out unilateral foreign entanglements ; but now it was, to be a lonely and risky American struggle for balance of power on far-flung, unfamiliar borders, at the side of Near- and Middle- and Far- Eastern regimes which nobody regards as democratic.
These seem to be the thoughts of most Americans today, the reasons for their bewilderment and apprehension at the consequences of the new Truman doctrine. They were the immediate reactions of countless families as they tried to evaluate the revolutionary change of their country's foreign policy in simple terms of their hopes of yesterday. The agitation of the Left and the quickly reviving isolationist Right in the United States, suddenly allied in their use of the same critical arguments against the Truman doctrine, probably matter less in influencing the daily growth of popular apprehension than do the warning voices of middle-of-the-road individuals that are increasingly heard in radio debates and corres- pondence columns even of pro-Government newspapers, in business
circles and in the lobbies of Congress. Never in peace-time has foreign policy been discussed as-much as now on the air, in print and in private.
There is, however, a remarkable contradiction in the present American majority mind. In spite of its gnawing uneasiness, it seems united behind President Truman's demands for a positive "Stop-the-Soviet" policy. For the American fear of Communism is as genuine as it is vague, and many Americans seem to feel that to rebuff the President, now that he has virtually created a fait accompli toward the outside world, might do even greater harm by giving world Communism the, go-ahead signal. Faced with this unpleasant alternative, the broad middle strata of the United States are sub- mitting to national discipline and reluctantly supporting the new foreign-policy doctrine as the lesser evil. But elation and jingoism would seem never to have been as negligible, nor scepticism and foreboding so strong, in the mind of a young and powerful nation launched for the first time on a career of shaping the course of world- history.
It is in this reluctant and uncertain state of mind of the American people that the more thoughtful foreign-policy experts in the United States see the main dangers to the eventual success of the new Truman doctrine. What gives us a/guarantee, they ask, that the American people will have the necessary determination to see this risky policy through when its cost rises to the large proportions that the initiated predict as inevitable, and once that cost drastically affects their daily lives? The cost of " international affairs and finance" (loans, relief, etc.), estimated at $2,82o,000,000 in the budget for 1948, is now expected to rise to an average of at least $5,000,000p00 in future years. The cost of national defence, budgeted at $ir,587,000,000 for the next year and under attack from an economy-minded Congress, may well rise again, and that of servicing the war-swollen national debt will remain at abort $5,000,000,000 annually. These three items, dwarfing all other Government expenditures, are already three times as high as *he entire federal budget was before the war. They amount to a round sixteen per cent. of the national income. Any increase of this price of world-power may soon be considered an unbearable burden by American voters who criticise the lack of funds for veterans' housing and other urgent social tasks, especially when the expected business recession reduces the already slightly-falling national income.
What gives future American administrations a guarantee, the sceptics continue, that the American people may not decide to abandon or weaken this new foreign policy when it would be most dangerous to do so? Such a situation might easily arise at a time when it became apparent that American support of unpopular regimes actually fostered, instead of weakened, the attraction of Communism in endangered countries, as it has so clearly been doing in China. The intricate, system of American democracy, those sceptics go on, has always made for frequent vacillation in foreign policy. The resultant potential danger to the long-term execution of the Truman doctrine, however, cannot be avoided as long as the operation of checks and balances in the constitution of the United States remains as free and unchanged as the American people want it to be.
Finally, there is a good deal of doubt among those judges of the long-term prospects of the Truman doctrine about the future atti- tudes of Britain and France and the main Latin-American countries. The United States must rely on their wholehearted co-operation inside and outside the United Nations if it is to maintain its costly and risky stand against the Soviet Union and against the forces in favour of radical social changes the world over. May not oon- siderations of immediate security and trade advantages weaken the elements in those countries which now approve the Truman doctrine, while strengthening not only their Left wings but also their Right wings, which already prove distrustful of the rising world pre- dominance and the stronger language of the United States?
Or was the President's pronouncement, in its extraordinary setting of one of those rare and always crucial joint meetings of Congress, merely an attempt to test Russian strength and to help Secretary of State Marshall at the Moscow Conference, rather than the proclama- tion of the definite, new foreign policy it appears to be? Some of those who hold this view and derive comfort from it even go so far as to connect President Truman's speech with the developing campaign for the Presidential elections in 1948, for which he is now considered the likeliest Democratic candidate. With his strong anti- Soviet stand, as with his firmness against labour in recent months, Mr. Truman has no doubt stolen most of the Republican thunder. The embarrassment of the Republican Party leadership about the election prospects is cited as proof for this argument, but the most ardent defenders of the new Truman doctrine in both political parries regard it as groundless and cynical.
Hoping against hope, however, an encouragingly large section of Americans maintain their belief in, and their fight for, a stronger United Nations. Many still think it possible to create a multi- lateral basis for really constructive help to socially and politically endangered nations in the vacuum areas between East and West, and to oppose Communism not with force, which may prove ineffec- tive, but with the alternative of showing the way to a better- functioning political and economic democracy.
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