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The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
American Foreign Policy: The Containment of Communism
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- [00:09]
Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:13]
Juan Davalos
And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with American Foreign Policy, lecture number six today, the containment of Communism.
- [00:19]
Jeremiah Regan
Professor Anton starts with an explanation of NSC 68, which is an order that President Truman signed in 1950 which laid out American policy with regards to communism. America won with its allies, won World War II, but then it turned out not all of our allies were actually our friends, and the Soviets became our great enemy. For the remainder of the 20th century, Americans debated how to handle the threat of communism. Do we try to roll back the Soviet gains during the war and after? Do we try to isolate ourselves and allow the Soviets to expand, or do we attempt to contain them, which means prevent the Soviet Union from further expansions through reasonable means, avoiding war when possible? And this policy of containment manifests itself in embargoes, the space race, and then a few breakouts of active conflict, though usually through proxies. You can see this in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, which did have Americans engaged in actual combat, but generally not against Soviet Communists, against the Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese and Viet Cong, while at home continuing to strengthen the American military by continuing the draft, maintaining high levels of military spending, and the creation of peacetime civilian intelligence services that ran those clandestine operations in South Central America and in Afghanistan.
- [01:43]
Juan Davalos
The subject of communism, it's a huge subject and we cover it briefly here in a couple of lectures, but we have a whole course dedicated to this ideology. The course is Marxism, Socialism and Communism. And it's actually a documentary course. We film the course in a documentary style and it looks at the political roots in Marxism and that ideology, where it comes from. It takes a look at it from the economic side and the ideas of Marx there, but it also looks at the Soviet Union and some of the writings of Solzhenitsyn. And so I definitely encourage you to take that course. You can go to Hillsdale Edu course to enroll in Marxism, but we also have it in the podcast. We've done that in the past. So if you hit that follow button, you can go back and look at our previous episodes on Marxism, Socialism and Communism and listen to the podcast there.
- [02:41]
Jeremiah Regan
Now let's turn to Professor Anton once more with Lecture 6 of American Foreign Policy, the Containment of Communism.
- [02:53]
Professor Anton
We left off talking about the beginning of the Cold War and how in the beginning of the Cold War, a lot of people didn't realize there was a Cold War. If we want to pick a date, I'm going to choose 1950. And that's when President Harry Truman signed a document known as NSC 68. It is considered the most important and famous American strategy document of all time. At the time, however, it was top secret and would remain top secret for 25 years. That is to say, the American people wouldn't even know of its existence, much less get a chance to read it. And what that document does is lay out the American strategy for the emerging Cold War. If we had to sum up that strategy in one word, the one word would be containment. Now we have to think back to those tumultuous late 40s years. The Soviet Union, under the guise of liberating Eastern and Central Europe, had in fact occupied it and were holding it hostage. They had placed Communist loyal governments in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and elsewhere. These were governments made up ostensibly of citizens of their countries. The people ruling in Poland were Polish, but they were loyal first and foremost to the ideology of Communism and to the USSR as the leading Communist state. We mentioned some of the other great events of the late 1940s that alerted Americans and others in the west to a Soviet the attempts to destabilize and foment revolutions in Greece and Turkey, the siege of West Berlin that was relieved by the Berlin airlift. One other event that I haven't mentioned but that's relevant, is the Communist revolution in China in 1949. Now, China was an American ally in World War II, but China was a divided country. It had been undergoing a civil war since the 1930s between communist insurgents from the interior, rural, more agricultural provinces, and between Nationalists who were dominant in the coastal, industrial and more economically prosperous parts of the country. I say industrial, take that with a grain of salt. As China's industrialization was well behind the United States and even Asian countries nearby Asian countries such as Japan. Well, that war raged on in the 1930s, was intermittently stopped by the Japanese invasion of China, in which the Communists and the Nationalists ostensibly agreed to join together and fight the Japanese. It's an open question to what extent the Communists kept their side of the agreement. Many historians argue that they didn't and kept on fighting a Communist insurgency while supposedly at truce with the Nationalists in order to fight their common enemy. In any event, Nationalist China was allied with the United States throughout this period and received much United States aid during the war. And some American troops even fought in China on the Chinese side. In particular, American air units. With the Japanese defeated in 1945, the Chinese Civil War, assuming it had ever really paused, definitely got going again in earnest. And four years later, the Communists won it, taking over the entire country, with the Nationalists escaping to their redoubt on the island of Formosa, now known today as Taiwan. The cry in 1949 went up across the United States among elites and the general public alike who lost China. It was considered another blow in America's budding new Cold War against international communism. For the new Communist China was assumed to be a natural ally of the ussr, and for more than a decade they were. Anyway, it's against this backdrop that you have to understand NSC 68, but also the documents I talked about in the prior lecture, the Long Telegram and the X article. But Kennan came to regret his part in coining the phrase containment and even his his role in sketching the outlines of the strategy, and was highly critical of America's conduct in the Cold War, even at times when the statesmen conducting the American side of the Cold War thought they were following Kennan's principles. That, I suppose, is a footnote to history, but I thought it's worth mentioning just for the sake of completeness, if nothing else. NSC68 formally doesn't have an author. It's a product of a new system of the new national security bureaucracy. And I'm gonna talk about that system in a moment. In reality, we know that the principal drafter was a man named Paul Nitze, who today we might refer to as a prototype member of the deep state, a term that didn't exist back then. At the time, what Nitze looked like is what he was. An upper class American who went to elite schools, had elite private sector jobs in banking and elsewhere, and rotated in and out of government as his country or his president needed him. In fact, he served presidents and administrations of both parties. Many years later, after serving the Truman administration, he was Ronald Reagan's chief arms control negotiator with the Soviets, and one of the architects behind one of the most important arms control treaties of all time, the INF Treaty or Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which pulled an entire class of nuclear weapons on both sides, the Russian and the American side, out of Europe in 1987. But in 1950, Nitze was a much younger man, up and coming, on the rise, and he made his fame within the national security bureaucracy as the author of this document, again, top secret. So only a handful of people knew who he was, but they were all very important people, and it outlines the strategy of containment. That is to say, in the parlance of those times, the three options considered on the table were one, rollback. Now, what was rollback? Rollback was essentially starting a war with the Soviet Union to roll back its gains in World War II and whatever subsequent gains it had accomplished since. Starting a war is risky for any number of reasons, not all of which I have to outline to you. You never know where a war might go, who might win it, how it might end, what you might lose in the process. Also, being the first to start a war carries with it enormous costs in domestic public opinion and international public opinion. You could argue that Japan really took decades to get over the surprise attack on Pearl harbor. The amount of resentment, outright hatred and mistrust those kinds of things caused. The US was very reluctant to embark on such a. Such an endeavor. At the other end of the extreme, which can't be summed up by a single phrase, unlike rollback, which was a word much on everyone's lips at the time, would have been something we might call acquiescence, acceptance, or even isolationism. That is to say, this is no longer our problem. We fought World War II, we got unconditional surrender. Yes, it's true that the Russians have half of Europe now, but it's a continental way. We're not doing this for a third time. We're coming home, we're investing in America, and we're going to let what happens in the world happen, come what may. Now, both of these options are explored in NSC 68, which I want to point out. As I said, it was declassified in 1975 and you can find copies of it on the web and read it for yourself. Both of these options were explored and rejected in favor of a kind of middle ground, which is containment. That is to say, don't let the Soviet Union, if you can, prevent it through reasonable measures short of all out war, expand beyond its current borders, prevent that kind of expansion, counteract its subversion, fight its propaganda with a war of ideas, and maintain a strong enough defense to deter a real Soviet attempt at expansionism, especially in areas of core US vital interest. NSC 68 in a way is the culmination of several years of effort. And the phrase one often hears was also the title of the memoirs of Dean Acheson, who was most famous for being Harry Truman's Secretary of State. And the title of his book is called Present at the Creation, by which he means present at the creation of this new post World War II order. Now I've read a lot of Washington D.C. memoirs, that is, memoirs of former Cabinet secretaries and senior White House aides and so on and so forth. It's a pretty dismal Library of Books I have to tell you, this one I can actually heartily recommend. Present at the Creation is extremely informative, extremely well written and Acheson himself comes off as an appealing man. The sort of urbane, witty, knowledgeable, yes, a bit superior and a bit arrogant, but. But in a way deservedly so. The type of person you actually want running large agencies of your government and looking after your interests as a statesman. Well, that liberal international order consists of a number of institutions. And again, I apologize for having to speak out of chronology, but we have to go back a little bit because the liberal international order began being created in even before World War II ended, granted, on a completely different set of assumptions. Franklin Roosevelt believed that there would be no Cold War. The Cold War wasn't even a glint in his eye. He thought that the Allies who won World War II would be allies after the war and would form the nucleus of an international order that would keep the peace for generations, if not in perpetuity. And under his administration, the United States began building the institutions that would undergird that order. The first notable endeavor along these lines is the so called Bretton Woods Agreement.
- [12:31]
Narrator/Archive Voice
At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, delegates from 44 Allied and Associate countries arrive for the opening of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Invited by President Roosevelt to the first major world financial meeting since the London Conference of 1933. They will work in the seclusion of this White Mountains resort.
- [12:52]
Professor Anton
What the Bretton Woods Agreement in effect did is made the dollar the standard for global currencies and fixed other currencies value based on the value of the dollar. At Bretton woods also, the seeds of the institutions which would become the World bank and the International Monetary Fund, were also formed also in late 1944 in San Francisco. I happen to think that's appropriate, but I leave this judgment to you. The United nations was formed at the Opera House. Now we know the United nations is now headquartered in New York, but it was formed then as a replacement in a way for the League of Nations. Well, the United nations is a kind of halfway institution, both in its conception and in its reality. It's not really a one World government, but it kind of purports to be. It says it alone has the legitimacy, has the power to legitimize the use of force or not, but it also doesn't have the forces to back them up. So the idea is that if some country, a if Gilder does something bad to Florin, Florin goes to the UN Security Council and complains, the United nations will Then if it's sympathetic to Florin's complaint, pass some resolution ordering a restitution, or if it thinks Florin isn't correct, it will decline to act. The basic problem is that for the United nations to do anything, it can only do so through the power of sovereign states. Now I'm going to leave this point here for a moment because we will illustrate it shortly when I talk about the Korean War. But that's the vision behind the United nations, is that it will be a mechanism by which this state of nature between one sovereign power and all the others can be overcome. I don't think it works in theory. I'm certain it hasn't worked in practice. But at any rate that was the idea at the time. Among other institutions present at the creation era are gatt, the so called General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, intended to liberalize world trade. Remember the theory that we talked about earlier, that free trade will increase commerce and friendship and good relations between nations and thereby lessen or even eliminate war? Well, that's the idea behind gatt. And GATT went away eventually, but it's still with us because it morphed into what we still have today. The institution known as the World Trade Organization or the wto. Similarly, at this time is born the nucleus of what later became the eu, the European Union. At first it has the very modest name of the coal and steel community. Again it's a tariff reduction body. The idea is that coal and steel, coal in those days being even more important for energy production than it is today, and steel being the number one commodity necessary for industrial product production and expansion, that these are the two most important commodities and the more we can reduce trade barriers on coal and steel, the more we can integrate the European economies and lessen the chance of war. And the final present at the creation and the most important of all, really, arguably even more important than the United nations of these institutions is of course NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949 as a way to formalize the alliance of the Western non communist powers, hold them together, demonstrate resolve and deter Soviet aggression into Western Europe. Now all of these present at the creation institutions, as I said, were intended for a different post war scenario for the envisioned post war scenario where all of the victors in the allied cause were still allies and getting along and that didn't happen. But these institutions took on a slightly different life, in some cases a dramatically different life in the Cold War, the post Cold war context, and became the nucleus of this liberal international order or rules based international order. Now those are two phrases you're going to want to remember because you hear them often today. Much of American foreign policy today is justified on the grounds that what we are doing is necessary to preserving the liberal international order. Well, as it happens, less than three months after NSC 68 was designed, the most serious crisis of the Young Cold War was born when North Korea invaded South Korea, June 25, 1950. Now, the Korean peninsula had been occupied by the Japanese in World War II. Obviously it's 1950. The war has been over for five years. The Japanese are no longer in Korea. Instead, the country is divided between a communist north whose dictator is allied with and loyal to Stalin in Moscow, and a non communist, although not democratic, authoritarian South. And there are US Forces on the Korean peninsula when the invasion happens. And those U.S. forces, the U.S. 8th army is pushed southward and backed into a corner in the southern tip of the country and surrounded and looks to be facing imminent destruction. Well, it also happens that in Japan sits Douglas MacArthur. The great American five star general is one of the key victors of World War II. Why is he there? Well, remember unconditional surrender. He is there essentially as the American Viceroy, the American emperor or emperor stand in in charge of the Japanese government. He is the administrator of the country. He is helping the Japanese write a new constitution and I use that word help somewhat elastically because the United States has quite a lot of authority over what the Japanese Constitution would eventually say.
- [18:23]
Mark Levin
Hello America. I'm thrilled, thrilled to announce my new 10 part podcast series, Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arne. Join me and my dear friend Dr. Larry Arne, President of Hillsdale College, as we dive deep into the founding principles of our great nation. And in these challenging times, understanding our history and the ideals of self government is more crucial than ever. We'll explore the core of America's current crises, the changes in our government and what it means for our lives and liberties. From education to borders, citizenship to the separation of powers, we'll cover it all. Tune in to Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arne of Hillsdale College. So subscribe now and join us on this wonderful journey to rediscover the principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history. Don't miss it.
- [19:11]
Scott Bertram
Listen right now to Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arn at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio. Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this week's program we talk with Mark Krikorian, executive director at the center for Immigration Studies, and he's written an essay about how America makes assimilation more difficult than it has to be for immigrants. Christina Lambert from Hillsdale's English department starts a short series on the works of T.S. eliot. And John Seifert, associate professor of computer science here at Hillsdale, tells us about the unique way that Hillsdale teaches computer science and the resurrection of our computer science program. All that this week on the Radio Free Hill Hillsdale Hour. Find it at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio.
- [20:19]
Professor Anton
Now. Exactly why the North Korean invasion of South Korea happened remains somewhat contentious. It is, however, known that the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, I want to make this clear in advance, if I haven't already. A man I actually admire gave a speech in which he described the US Defensive position in East Asia. And in the speech, he effectively drew a line down the Western Pacific around the Korean Peninsula, leading the tyrant of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. I point out, grandfather of the present tyrant of North Korea, to believe that the United States didn't care about the fate of Korea and wouldn't defend it. Kim Il Sung flew to Moscow, explained the situation to Stalin, and essentially asked Stalin's permission to launch the invasion, which Stalin granted. Acheson always denied responsibility, and I don't want to take any cheap shots at him because it was formally US Policy at that time that Japan was a vital interest and Korea wasn't. But somehow your vital interests maybe snap into a different focus when a country you didn't think was under threat suddenly gets invaded. At any rate, the Truman administration decided that this was not a thing they could let stand in the context of the times. And they went to the un, the brand new or relatively new United nations, and asked for a resolution condemning the invasion and authorizing the use of force. Now, the way the United nations works is in accordance with FDR's original vision for the United Nations. That is to say, there was to be a Security Council. The Security council today has 15 members, but there are five permanent members that are always members. The other 10 rotate, and those five permanent members always have a veto. That is to say, they can veto any resolution they want. Now, in FDR's understanding, there were to be four permanent members. He called them the four policemen, and they would be the United States, an allied nationalist China, the USSR and Britain, basically the four great powers that won World War II. Well, in a way, he got his wish. And in a way, things changed. First of all, the French finagled a seat on the Security Council. Again, I'm not a frog basher. I tend not to be a frog basher. There are those who would say, well, they lost in 1940, and so they can't be considered among the victors. On the other hand, you could say they were a victim and not an aggressor state, and they did contribute Free French forces to the war in Europe and keep up a resistance against Nazi rule. So I can sort of see this one both ways. At any rate, as a historical fact, the French gained a seat, a fifth seat, on the Security Council that was not contemplated in the original design. China does hold a seat on the UN Security Council, but its Nationalist China, that is to say, Chiang Kai Shek's government in Taiwan, not the government that controls mainland China from Peking, as the city was then known and as FDR envisioned. The USSR holds a seat on the Security Council, but the USSR is not, as FDR envisioned, still a US ally, but has become an adversary nevertheless. The United States manages to get a resolution condemning the invasion and authorizing the use of force through the UN for the simple reason that at that time the USSR was boycotting the Security Council and so wasn't there to exercise its veto. So this is the first great challenge that the United nations faces, and it's seen to be a success. It condemns the invasion, it authorizes the use of force, but what in fact ensues is a counter offensive led by the United States against the North Korean army. That is to say, there are no UN forces to put into Korea to solve this problem. The UN has to rely on sovereign states to commit its own forces and its own money and ultimately its own soldiers lives to enforce its edicts. And to this day, that's the way the UN always operates. That's why I say it's a sort of halfway house between its aspirations and its reality, between one world government and the reality that sovereign states are in the state of nature vis a vis one another. I'm not going to go into a detailed history of the Korean War here. Suffice it to say that MacArthur pulls off what is by all accounts the greatest military victory of his career. Amphibious landings at Incheon in the northern part of South Korea that completely routes the North Korean army and relieves the beleaguered U.S. 8th army, quickly liberates South Korea and chases the North Korean army mostly out of North Korea. So much to the point where China is alarmed at the prospect of a unified Korea as a U.S. ally on its border and begins fighting back. Well, MacArthur has his own ideas about how he wants to deal with this situation, which the White House doesn't agree with. President Truman doesn't agree with. MacArthur complains, is rebuffed, finally starts writing letters to Congress. One of them to the Republican leader, Joe Martin, is leaked to the New York Times, and very frankly makes MacArthur look completely insubordinate to the Commander in chief who fires him. The rest of the war is a kind of stalemate war which comes to an end after the election of Dwight Eisenhower and an armistice is signed in 1953. Essentially, the Korean peninsula goes right back to the status quo ante. A communist north and a non communist south at more or less their same territorial extent that they were before. And to some, the outcome of the Korean War was controversial even then and remains controversial today. It was certainly controversial to MacArthur. Just an interesting historical note that when MacArthur returned to the United States after being fired by Truman in 1951, he had been out of his native country for 17 years. He had not set foot in the United States for 17 years, and he was treated as a hero, given a ticker tape parade in lower Manhattan. And the highly unusual, if not unprecedented honor for an American citizen, an honor usually reserved to foreign heads of state or heads of government, of addressing a joint session of Congress in which he uttered the famous words, in war there is no substitute for victory. In other words, victory would have meant the complete defeat of North Korea and the reunification of the Korean peninsula. But you have to ask, put yourself in the President's position. At what cost would you risk war with China, not yet a superpower, but still a country of some 500 million, a communist nation that was at least ostensibly allied with the ussr, which was now a nuclear power. Would you risk using nuclear weapons in this conflict with China and risk a wider war with the USSR that might use nuclear weapons in return? All of these were very dangerous possibilities that the Truman administration had to think through. And there was no guarantee of what the outcome might be. So I think it's at least reasonable to say that as unsatisfying as the outcome of the Korean War was that the status quo ante was not the worst of all possible outcomes, that it did demonstrate resolve that the free world, the west, would resist further communist expansionism. And it gave some teeth to the idea of containment. We're not going to start wars or prosecute wars for rollback, but we are going to hold you where you are.
- [27:34]
Narrator/Archive Voice
50 nations, great and small, stand shoulder to shoulder to meet the threat of an aggressive ideology that can engulf them. The democratic peoples must fight and continue to fight until the grim red shadow that shrouds the world is dispelled. They cannot afford to lose.
- [27:54]
Professor Anton
Another thing that's characteristic of this period is the most sweeping reorganization of the United States government's national security apparatus, perhaps in history or since the founding era, with the original creation of the Department of War and a couple of decades after that, the Department of the Navy. Now those are important. Let's think about that for a second. There still is a Department of the Navy. There is no longer a Department of War. Well, what do those mean? The original Department of War was what we would call today the Department of the Army. It was a cabinet agency that was responsible for the United States Army. The Navy Department was established in 1798, so slightly after the Revolution. And it was a separate and equal cabinet department that administered the United States Navy. And those two cabinet departments ran the United States military for the entirety of the 19th century and through the Second World War. But in the experience of any country with more than one military service, you're always competing over budgets, over personnel, over programs, over facilities, over priorities, over who gets to take the lead in what operation, who gets promoted. The list of things to focus on fight over is just endless. Any of you who've ever had to endure bureaucratic warfare in any context know what I'm talking about. But imagine bureaucratic warfare. When the context is warfare, it's just worse. This exasperated FDR and the members of his administration, and they vowed to do something to fix it, but not right away, because they had the war to fight. Well, one of the major Results was the 1947 National Security Act. Obviously, FDR has died at this point and been succeeded by his Vice President, Harry Truman. They get this legislation and it does a number of things. Creates the Department of the Air Force, so the Air Force becomes a separate service. CO equal with the Navy and the Army. Creates the CIA, the first permanent peacetime intelligence service the United States has ever had. It creates the national security council. The 1947 National Security act also created the the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a formal mechanism which did not exist during World War II and had to be done on a kind of improvised ad hoc basis. Now, it was hoped and expected that a lot of this coordinating mechanism would smooth over intra service rivalries and also that the end of the war would help smooth over intra service rivalries. But the reality was, as the United States found itself the preeminent Western power with an exhausted and all but Bankrupt Britain on the one side and countries defeated in war on another side and newly hostile Soviet Union on the other side, the United States found itself alone in a leadership position and therefore having to bear the almost not the entire burden, that would be much too much, but the largest share of the burden of the defense and leadership of the West. And the United States came out of the war in a very advantageous position, commanding literally 50, that is 5 0, not 1 5, but 5 0% of global GDP. So the country was doing well, flush with cash, you might say, and willing to spend big on defense. In fact, the intra service rivalries only intensified as the services increasingly competed over who got what share of the defense budget. Well, in order to make this problem go away or at least get better, the Department of Defense was formally created and that's the department that we know of today. Within the Department of Defense, the departments of the Army, Air Force and Navy still exist, but they all report to one Secretary of Defense under the principle of unity of command. Now, I'm not going to tell you that inter service rivalries have gone away, but they no longer have to be resolved only by the President among equal cabinet departments fighting it out amongst themselves. The Department of Defense instead presents a single budget request to the President and omb. And much of this internal fighting has, if not gone away. There are now mechanisms to tamp it down and resolve disputes. But at any rate, the point is this major reorganization of national security bureaucracy and the way we conduct our foreign policy was accomplished at this time and we largely still live with it today. Now, As I said, NSC 68 poses the three basic rollback, isolation or acquiescence, and containment, and recommends containment. It goes on to say, in order to fulfill the strategy of containment, we're going to have to ask the American people to do in a time of nominal peace, that is in the time of the absence of a hot shooting war, things that they've never done before in peacetime. We're going to have to ask that we continue a peacetime draft to maintain a force sufficient to deter Soviet aggression. We're going to have to maintain a much higher level of strength spending on defense, which means there's going to be a higher level of taxation than they're used to in peacetime. To support the military. We are establishing the first ever peacetime civilian intelligence service. And the American people are going to think that that's a threat to their civil liberties and they're not going to like it. We're going to have to maintain a much greater level of engagement with the rest of the world, a much more robust diplomatic presence than we ever have in peacetime. We're going to be giving away money and foreign aid and an economic development in ways that the American people are going to think are perhaps wasteful or could be better used at home. And we're going to need to do those things in order to keep our alliance together, to prevent struggling nations from falling behind and becoming prey to Communist subversion. And these are all going to be things that the American people are going to think are unnecessary and will think rightly are unprecedented. Now, what I just said is the argument made in that document, and then it's the argument that the authors, deliberators, and signatories of that document, although technically there's only one signatory, and that's the President. But they were like many great endeavors. NSC 68 had many fathers. They went out and they made this case publicly to the American people. And the American people essentially agreed and agreed to pay the price that was demanded of them. And I would say that everything hinges on whether you accept the assessment of the threat as outlined in NSC 68. If you think that that threat is overstated, and many did, and not just on the left, but many on the right, this was not necessarily an ideological or partisan issue. If you thought the threat was overstated, then you would have a hard time accepting the measures being advocated to deal with the threat. Everything hinges on that. And I'm going to leave that to you, the viewer, to decide for yourself whether you think the threat warranted the genuinely unprecedented steps that were recommended and eventually adopted to meet it. There's no question that the Founders would have to say that the measures recommended in NSC 68 and the measures taken during this whole period, this whole present at the Creation era, were a departure from American foreign policy's original principles and historic practice. The question is, were they a warranted departure? Because the Founders themselves would have been the first to tell you. We don't expect the conditions of 1783 or 1800 or 1823 or even 1890 to prevail forever. We know the world changes. The United States will eventually face threats that we haven't foreseen. And we're not trying to tie the hands in advance of statesmen who are going to be tasked with dealing with those threats. But I think it's still an open question what the Founders would have said about America's new posture in the early Cold War.
- [35:49]
Juan Davalos
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