Most people would agree that the two most vital issues in American foreign policy today are the Central American crisis and arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.
In assessing American policy on these two issues, most politicians and opinion leaders-and thus most of the public-focus on our communist
adversaries. Can we trust the Soviets? Will the Sandinistas live up to their pledges?
That these questions, though clearly pertinent, should dominate our thinking reflects a disturbing tendency among many Americans to assume that the United States pursues noble and worthy objectives while its adversaries-particularly the ”communists”-embody all that is evil and are not to be trusted.
Underlying these assumptions, as historians have long recognized, is a widespread faith in American ”exceptionalism”-the belief that the United States is a ”chosen” nation whose values and democratic institutions represent the best hopes for humankind.
Unfortunately, the great national myth of American exceptionalism is rooted in a widespread ignorance of history, and this ignorance breeds intolerance and hypocrisy in our approach to Central America, arms control and foreign affairs in general.
The first ingredient of a more effective foreign policy might be a willingness to look more critically at ourselves. Despite the recent bicentennial of the Constitution, too few Americans are willing to recognize that the United States has been an imperfect democracy. It was initially governed by a privileged elite of white propertied males; women were nonvoting and (as they remain today) nonpersons under the Constitution; a cruel enslavement of blacks was sanctioned; and Native Americans were to be all but exterminated.
The point is not that the United States is more or less evil than other peoples of the world but that we are not as exceptional as some, including Ronald Reagan and most of the 1988 presidential candidates, would have us believe.
Greater recognition of our own failures and limitations would make us, not a weaker power, but a stronger and wiser one. For example, if more Americans were aware of our own early national struggle and halting approach to democracy, they would be less likely to demand that Nicaragua-a country wracked by war and deprivation and having little or no democratic political tradition-promptly assume all the trappings of a pluralistic democracy or once again face the wrath of our refinanced covert armies.
After first adopting greater patience and humility, we could then apply some lessons from the history of postwar international relations to our approach to the problems of Central America. The 1948 Soviet-Yugoslav rift, the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s and contemporary disputes within the communist world, for example, all suggest that nationalism and local cultural tradition tend to override loose alliances based on ideology. Yet too many Americans glibly assume that a Sandinista regime will serve as a Soviet
”beachhead” in Central America.
Those who point to Cuba as an example of Soviet intentions invariably oversimplify the complex course of Cuban-American (and Cuban-Soviet) relations and ignore the extent to which our own hostile response to Fidel Castro encouraged Cuba`s close ties with the Soviet Union.
Faith in American exceptionalism and historical blinders also undermine our efforts to mold a more constructive relationship with the Soviet Union. Like our forebears who reassured themselves of their own virtues by depicting the Old World as a den of corruption and iniquity, Americans persist in seeing the darkest motives behind virtually all Soviet behavior.
The most obvious example is our unrealistic 40-year obsession with the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe; there is no reason to believe the Kremlin has ever considered launching an invasion. Another is arms control; some Americans still oppose arms accords, or favor ”killer amendments,” on grounds that the Kremlin leaders enter into such negotiations disingenuously and that they ”cheat.”
This argument not only falsely implies that the Soviets have no real stake in arms control but also constitutes a double standard insofar as it ignores our own violations of agreements, such as the unilateral repudiation of SALT II and the current call for a broad interpretation of the 1972 ABM agreement. The broad interpretation, as Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and others have pointed out, actually constitutes a repudiation of the ABM accord in order to pave the way for ”Star Wars,” which, incidentally, finds America once again in the familiar position of escalating the arms race while couching its actions under the benign rubric of ”deterring aggression.”
Again, the point is not that the Soviets are actually ”good” while we persist in seeing them as ”bad.” It would be naive to suggest that the Soviet Union does not pose problems for American diplomacy.
Our concerns over the longstanding pattern of Soviet intervention along its borders are legitimate, and we have every right to press for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the same time, however, our faith in American exceptionalism should not blind us to our own history of hegemony in Central America and the Caribbean as well as our own tortured withdrawal from a similarly losing proposition in Vietnam.
On the issue of human rights, Americans cannot be expected to be indifferent to Soviet repression, but our criticism should once again be tempered by the knowledge of America`s own history of human rights abuses as well as that of our allies, including Israel and South Africa.
If we were more sensitive to the lessons of history and not obsessed with viewing ourselve as exceptional, we might even find it possible to express sympathy for the Soviets as they attempt to overcome a legacy of Stalinist terror and stagnant bureaucratic rule. We would certainly do all we could to encourage the unprecedented reforms of the Gorbachev regime rather than dismissing them as ”just propaganda” and thereby encouraging his domestic opponents.
The recent failures of our foreign policy-from the lost crusade in Vietnam to the current crisis in Central America-offer clear signals of the need to rethink some of the myths underlying American diplomacy. The House vote rejecting contra aid and the willingness of the conservative Reagan administration to negotiate meaningful arms control agreements with the Soviet Union are steps in the right direction.
But we Americans still need to challenge many of our perceptions about the world and, perhaps most of all, about ourselves.
