BLUNDERS IN FOREIGN POLICY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301410014-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 14
• Publication Date: October 23, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO IV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
STATION CNN-TV
October 23, 1984 7:30 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Blunders in Foreign Policy
BERNARD SHAW: From Washington, Crossfire. Tonight,
blunders in foreign policy.
The hosts for Crossfire: on the left, Tom Braden; on
the right, in Chicago, Pat Buchanan. In the crossfire, Jonathan
Kwitny, author of Endless Enemies: The-Mak.ing-of-an'Unfriendly
World.
TOM BRADEN: Let's take a look tonight at the U.S.
foreign policy which Mondale and Reagan debated on Sunday. Why
do we always seem to intervene on the wrong side, the side the
people hate? The people hated the Shah. We supported him. The
people hate Marcos. We-support him. We sent our Marines into
Lebanon to aid a government the people would not sustain. Tonight
is the anniversary of the murder of those troops. And day after
tomorrow is another anniversary, the invasion of Grenada.
Our guest tonight, in his new book Endless-Enemies, says
Grenada was a unique success, but only becauses it was a mistake.
Pat, maybe you'll ask him to explain that.
PAT BUCHANAN:' Let me ask you this, Jonathan Kwitny,
first off. According to one review in a conservative publicat-
ion, you said American foreign policy is marked by lies, corrupt-
ion, murder, and support for oppressive policies. Do you think
the United States is a malevolent force in the world?
JONATHAN KWITNY: Well, sometimes it is, sometimes it
isn't. I think the United States has come up with the best way
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? . DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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of organizing an economy and a body politic, of developing a
wonderful system for our own people to live under. And to the
extent we can spread that, I think we're doing wonderful things.
The problem is...
BUCHANAN: We're talking about American foreign policy.
What do you think? Has it been a beneficent, a benevolent force
or a malevolent force in the world in the postwar era?
KWITNY: It's accomplished a lot of both. It hasn't
been nearly as benevolent as it could have been, and I wish it
was.
BUCHANAN: Well, let me ask you this. Fidel Castro.
You've compared him with Lech Walesa. You said both have faith
in a utopian society. They bring their people independence.
KWITNY: Utopian socialist society.
BUCHANAN: Socialism, right. "hey have staggering
physical and moral courage which allows them to wake up every day
staring at death and spitting at it in definance of principle."
Why don't you tell our audience what you find so
admirable about Fidel Castro? Especially our Miami audience.
KWITNY: The most important thing that I think they have
in common is that they're trying to lead a people who have been
dominated by a large power next to them into a truly independent
situation. Castro has accomplished that. Walesa has not yet.
BUCHANAN: Wait a minute. Let me contradict you. Fidel
Castro is far more dependent upon the Soviet Union, Cuba is now,
in terms of its oil supplies and the rest of it, than it ever was
upon the United States. Do you really think the Cubans have
achieved a measure of independence you would like to see other
countries achieve, under Castro?
KWITNY: Well, they certainly haven't achieved the form
of government that I'd like to see other countries achieve, but
they have achieved an independence. And the fact is that they're
using the Soviet Union tremendously for the benefit of the Cuban
people. They're getting $4 1/2 billion a year, or so, pumped
into that economy, which is $2500 for every Cuban family. This
is what the Cuban economy is depending on, and it's doing very
well with it, not the socialist system...
BUCHANAN: Well, how can you call it independence?
BRADEN: Pat, let me interject just a moment on this
same subject.
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You say the things that Mr. Buchanan says you say about
Cuba. And you point out that we have made a lot of mistakes.
We've made an enemy, and in a sense that helps Castro.
But listen to this. Wouldn't Cuba, under Castro, be an
enemy anyhow, no matter what we did?
KWITNY: Well, not an enemy. Not a threat, certainly
not to us. It's not strong enough to be a threat. I think he
would like to be a trading partner.
BRADEN: Wouldn't it be unfriendly to us? Given that
Castro is a communist, wouldn't it be unfriendly to us, no matter
what we did?
KWITNY: No. As a matter of fact, it's pure speculation
what would have happened if. But I think if we would have taken
a hands-off attitude toward Castro in the initial days and not
provided them with the enemy he needed and played us into being,
that he might not have survived at all the economic disasters of
the mid-1960s. And if he had survived them -- he might have been
clever enough to do it, but he would have had to change the
system there, and we would have had a government we would be much
more comfortable dealing with.
BUCHANAN: But Jonathan Kwitny, look, Castro has
provided his people what might be called kennel rights, the
rights you provide your pet. You feed it, you give it medical.
care, you make sure it's got a yard to run around in. He denies
it human rights, political rights, economic rights, and religious
freedom.
Why should we even want to be a friend of a creature
like that, who resembles, I guess, Mussolini as much as anybody
in the modern world?
KWITNY: Why should we want to be a friend of the
governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, that have provided a
lot less for their people and have provided -- I've been through
Cuba and I've been through El Salvador. I've spent several weeks
in those countries. And I agree with everything you said in your
description of Cuba. And yet if I had to choose, and I think if
most Americans had to choose, whether to be an average Cuban or
an average Salvadoran right now, they'd prefer to be an average
Cuban, simply because you can go to bed at night and have some
trust you're going to be able to wake up in the morning in one
piece.
BUCHANAN: How can you make a statement like that, Mr.
Kwitny, when for three days Castro opened up his country and
120,000 people, one percent of his country, fled in three days 20
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years after his revolution succeeded?
KWITNY: If you opened up the borders of El Salvador or
Guatemala right now, or most countries of Central or South
America, you'd see a desertion that would dwarf that.
BUCHANAN: Well, come on. Guatemala's borders are not
all shut with Mexico.
KWITNY: Well, because we don't open our borders. We're
not taking those people in, as we did with the Cubans. If we
gave passports, if we gave visas, gee whiz...
BRADEN: Let me get back to this debate for a moment.
And it seems to me on target with what you're asking Mr. Kwitny.
The President said in Sunday's debate that there is
every indication, Mr. Kwitny, every indication that if Marcos
were to fall in the Philippines, there would be a communist
government. Now, should we all believe this?
KWITNY: Well, you're asking me to be a prophet.
BRADEN: Well, I know. But it's part -- you say that we
are conducting a foreign policy where we support these tinhorn
dictators because we're afraid that we'll get communism if they
fall.
KWITNY: Well, but exactly the opposite takes place. I
was just going to say that if they wind up with a communist
government, it will be directly because of the actions the United
States has been taking for the past 20 years, when we have given
them a socialist dictatorship and helped take away the free
enterprise and democratic society we helped give them in previous
years.
BUCHANAN: Mr. Kwitny, wait a minute now, please. Look,
the Philippines. We did not call Marcos on the phone and say,
"Cease being a democratically-elected president and establish
yourself as a dictator for life." These things occur all over
the Third World. The United States, as a great power, has got to
deal with the reality that Marcos, dictator, controls the
Philippines.
Now, what bothers a lot of conservatives is this: that
liberals will say, look, the Shah is a bad man, the Shah is
repressive, the Shah is this and that. So the United States
pulls the rug out from under him. The situation is far worse
when somebody else takes over. Then the liberals wipe their
hands of the situation and move on with their human rights
program toward Guatemala or El Salvador, never taking
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responsibility for what they helped accomplish.
KWITNY: But why does the other side take over? Marcos
-- surely, we didn't ask Marcos to create this kind of society.
But we allowed it and enabled it in order to get his cooperation,
basically, with the Vietnam War, and continuing on with the bases
we have over there, although there's no reason to believe that we
couldn't have maintained that relationship without supporting the
socialization of the Philippine economy and the making of a
military dictatorship out of what had been a democracy.
BUCHANAN: Jonathan Kwitny, look, let's take World War
II. Now, Americans didn't like Stalin. We were in a very
serious war at that time. So the United States said, look, this
is one enemy we've got in Germany. And the Soviet Union is a
system we despise. They're fighting, they're providing millions
of troops. We're going to give them all the help we can, no
strings attached, no conditions, don't open up your labor camps.
We have to deal, in other words, with the world as you
find it. The United States finds all over the Third World
dictators, right-wing, left-wing. We've got...
KWITNY: Why are we only concerned with some of them? I
mean we quite agree. The problem in World War II -- I mean in
World War II we were faced with one threat to us, a country that
had attacked our most important trading partners, was stealing
the trading wealth of them, that was sinking our ships and bombed
our territory in the Far East. Russia was not doing that.
BUCHANAN: Here's what the operative principle is to me.
Why are we against Castro and in favor of El Salvador? Why are
we [unintelligible] constructive engagement with South Africa and
hostile toward Ethiopia? The reason is Castro and Ethiopia have
aligned themselves with our major enemy, the Soviet Union. El
Salvador and South Africa have aligned themselves with us. The
same reason we supported Stalin in World War II with Lend-Lease.
In other words, the operative principle in foreign
policy has got to be: Our friends might be bad, but we have to
stay with our friends if we're going to survive in a hostile
world.
Is that not a good principle to operate on?
KWITNY: No, it's certainly not. I mean, in the first
place, the fact that they have allied with the Soviet Union is
really in response to what would benefit them by creating an
enemy in the United States and by attracting wealth from the
Soviet Union.
As long as they're not a threat to us, to our free
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trade, I think countries that we leave alone will tend to
gravitate toward the productive economy...
BRADEN: Pat, we have to take a break. When we come
back I'll explain to you that we have not allied ourselves with
the majority of people in South Africa. But that will come right
after this.
BUCHANAN: Welcome back to Crossfire, where Tom Braden
and I -- I'm in Chicago -- are interviewing, back in Washington,
Jonathan Kwitny. He's a writer and a reporter and a correspond-
ent for the Wall Street Journal. He's traveled all over the
world. He's written a book called Endless-Enemies, the thesis of
which is that the United States has pretty much gone around the
world making enemies for itself and we've been making enemies of
people we didn't have to and we've been befriending the wrong
people.
Jonathan Kwitny, not only does your editorial page think
that Jonathan Kwitny is somewhat off the wall, from what it's
written, but I guess Presidents from Roosevelt -- or Truman to
Ike to Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Lyndon Johnson, Jack Kennedy all
have pursued pretty much the same policy of containment of
communist expansion. What makes them wrong and you right?
KWITNY: Well, look where the policy has led for the
past 35 years. We have wound up facing a constant flow of
enemies. We're at war one day in Chad, the next day in Zaire,
the next day in Lebanon, and never successfully, never defending
the things we should and could stand for to help make this a
better world, and in our own self-interest.
BRADEN: Pat, let me call your attention to the fact
that within the next couple of days we're going to -- the
Republican Party, chiefly, is going to put on a massive celebrat-
ion of what happened in Grenada. Now, Mr. Kwitny says in his
book that that was -- that the Grenada invasion was a success
because it was a mistake.
Will you explain that?
KWITNY: I'm not sure I said exactly that. But I think
it was an anomaly. It was a unique situation, maybe the first
time since D-Day, or since Korea where we went into a country on
the side of -- in a way that the people in that country would
have supported, because we were opposing a terrible government
that had the population in terror. But I don't think -- obvi-
ously, there are a lot of other terrible governments in the
world, and we can't go around overthrowing them all. We could in
this case because it's a tiny island.
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BRADEN: Do you think President Reagan is putting on,
that the Administration is putting on this celebration, and do
you think the invaded Grenada because they needed a foreign
policy victory?
KWITNY: Oh, yeah. I think, very clearly. They had
promised some kind of victory against communism four years ago.
I think they thought they were going to win it in Central
America. I think they thought that was going to be easy. It
didn't turn out to be. And this was something they could do.
BUCHANAN: Let me ask Jonathan Kwitny, and let me
preface it with this. Do you think communism is an evil system?
And the reason I ask that question is the United States fought,
between Korea and now, in Vietnam. Now, whether you agree with
the wisdom of going in, the United States lost 50,000 lives
trying to preven the kind of horror that was produced in Cambodia
and the kind of all-out oppression and denial of rights that now
exists in South Vietnam. Now, let's not argue about the merits
of whether we should have gone in. But was that...
KWITNY: Why not? \
BUCHANAN: ...not noble in purpose? I mean the purpose
of it seems to be noble. Whether you could have succeeded or not
is one thing or another.
All right. Go ahead and talk about...
KWITNY: Communism certainly is an evil system. But I
think the example you just chose, Vietnam, is as good an example
as you can find of what's been wrong with our policy. Here, for
all these years we've lost all these lives, we spent billions and
billions of dollars, which I think is still affecting our
economy. And what was the reason for this? We were told over
and over that it was in order not to save Vietnam, which was a
small and not-that-significant a country, not to save democracy
in any of the Indochinese countries, because they were all run
miserably. It was to stop the falling dominoes. It was to
protect Indonesia. It was to protect Thailand and Burma,
ultimately Australia and Japan and Taiwan.
And what happened? As soon as we lose that war, as soon
as we go home, pull up stakes, the very countries that supposedly
were going to fall like dominoes -- and I left out Malaysia,
Singapore -- all these countries were within two years labeled by
the World Bank the leading economic growth area in the world.
They were...
BUCHANAN: Mr. Kwitny.
KWITNY: They were stronger, more free enterprise, more
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BUCHANAN: You're getting at the point. Was the right
side to be on the communist side in Vietnam? You keep saying
we're on the wrong side.
BUCHANAN: Should we have been on Ho Chi Minh's side?
KWITNY: The point is to change that paradigm. Not to
say which side should we be on, but should we back factions in
local disputes? The answer is no. We should support...
BRADEN: What should we do today at the United Nations,
Pat? Today at the United Nations the Security Council voted
unanimously, except for one vote -- the United States abstained
in a demand that South Africa end apartheid. Where does that put
us?
BUCHANAN: Are you asking me? I'd tell the U.N. --well,
I would use impolite language and tell the U.N. the United States
should not interfere in the internal affairs of the South African
government in concert with the United Nations. We should deal
with them the same way we've been dealing with them.
Tom, take a look at...
BRADEN: We should deal with them the same way Mr.
Kwitny suggests you deal with them: Stay out of it.
KWITNY: No, not stay out of it morally. Stay out of it
militarily. And those are two very different things. I think we
need to use our moral force. And by going in militarily, we
expend and waste and lose that moral force.
In South Africa, what we're doing is the only thing we
could do that would sabotage our true interest there, which is to
be able to trade with those people, to be able to buy the goods
we need and sell the products we make on the free market, and, in
addition, to try to promote the ideals we have. We're losing our
ability to do that by creating enemies out of the people who will
inevitably run that country, the majority of that country, just
as we did in Iran and cost ourselves Iranian oil.
BUCHANAN: Let me respond to that, Tom. Look, Bishop
Tutu got the Nobel Prize. He flew to South Africa. He got off
the plane. Thousands greeted him. They were protected by South
African police. He endorsed the African National Congress call
to overthrow the government. He went back to a church, he
preached, denounced the government.
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Solzhenitsyn could not get the Nobel Prize and go back
to the Soviet Union and do that. You couldn't go back to Cuba
and do something like that.
South Africa is not the best situation in the world. It
is one of the better ones in Africa. And all I suggest is, in
part, that the United States should work with them because they
are not hostile to the United States.
BRADEN: They are not hostile. You mean the government.
BUCHANAN: The government. The government is not
hostile. The people are not.
BRADEN: But we are making the people hostile.
BUCHANAN: Well, I disagree with you.
KWITNY: Wait a minute. You disagree that our actions
are creating -- making us an enemy of the majority of people in
South Africa who want to, and someday will, rule their own
country?
BUCHANAN: You know, I'm surprised Mr. Kwitny. You're
tremendously concerned about the political rights of blacks in
South Africa. But the political rights of Cubans in Cuba are of
no interest to you.
KWITNY: That's nonsense. And I've written extensively
about the political -- the political repression in Cuba.
BUCHANAN: How could you deliver that kind of tribute to
Fidel Castro if you're concerned about political and human rights
in Cuba? Even your own newspaper said that Jonathan Kwitny might
be a bit naive, in so many words. Is that not correct?
KWITNY: I don't know what article you're talking about.
BUCHANAN: Editorial, on the editorial page of the Wall
Street Journal.
KWITNY: There was a book review. I don't remember that
it said that. It may have.
BUCHANAN: When you went down to Cuba, I'm referring to,
and came back and wrote a report. Did not an editorial in the
Wall Street Journal say you might learn by reading our letters to
the editor?
KWITNY: No, I don't remember reading an editorial like
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BRADEN: Well, let's not dispute a disputable point.
Let me go back to Iran for just a minute. Granted that
we -- and you describe in your book in great detail the graft
that was in Iran, the amount of dough that the Shah was putting
in his pockets, and his family, and the U.S. contractors were
putting money in their pockets. But even with all this, why did
.we have to wind up with the Ayatollah?
KWITNY: Well, I think that was because we had made
ourselves the great enemy of the Iranian people by bringing the
Shah in in the first place. And that's a fascinating story and
one to which I devote a couple of chapters in Endless Enemies.
Because what happened was that a couple of major oil companies
got ahold of their former lawyers, who happened to be running the
State Department and the CIA at the time, and arranged for us to
overthrow the only democratically-elected, or close to it, prime
minister, leader in the history of Iran, Mossadegh, who merely
wanted to open the oil market to price competition, something
that would have been greatly in the interests of the American
public. It would have lowered oil prices here. In order to
protect a cartel, a monopoly that Exxon and Mobil had on rights
to buy and market that oil, we went in, we overthrew their
democratically-chosen government, which was anti-communist. He
had chased the Soviets out of that country.
BRADEN: Okay.
KWITNY: And brought in a repressive Shah and gave him
the tools he needed to repress the population. Now we're
supposed to...
BRADEN: All right, Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street
Journal. I'm sorry, we're out of time.
BRADEN: Okay, Patrick. Why is it that you constantly
defend every dictatorship you can find around the world, and why
is it that you constantly say that if we don't defend them, we'll
have communism?
BUCHANAN: I don't defend dictators, Tom. I'd like to
see the Chinese dictatorship overthrown on the mainland of China.
If it's a choice between democracy and dictatorship, it
is democracy every time, as Jack Kennedy said. But our choice is
often between a right-wing dictator and a communist regime, which
is far worse for its people, far worse for us. In that case,
we've got to take the lesser of two evils. It's the real world.
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point?
11
BRADEN: So three cheers for Mr. Marcos. Is that your
BUCHANAN: No. One cheer for Mr. Marcos, in preference
to what's the alternative.
BRADEN: Okay.
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