The Arrogance of Power

by Senator J. William Fulbright

Written in 1966 by former Arkansas Senator, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Vietnam War and US foreign policy critic J. William Fulbright, I came upon this treasure because Robert Reich, in his book Reason, identified it as one of half a dozen or so golden oldies that people do not read these days, but should.

I was not disappointed and can recommend it without reservation as an example of a way of thinking about US foreign policy which is as out of fashion today as it is sorely needed in public debate.

Some of my favorite passages:

pp. 7-8: "...if there is a root cause of human conflict and of the power drive of nations, it lies not in economic aspirations, historical forces, or the workings of the balance of power, but in the ordinary hopes and fears of the human mind.

It has been said that buried in every woman's secret soul is a drum majorette; it might also be said that in all of our own souls there is a bit of the missionary. We all like telling people what to do, which is perfectly all right except that most people do not like being told what to do. I have given my wife some splendid suggestions on household management but she has been so consistently ungrateful for my advice that I have stopped offering it. The phenomenon is explained by the Canadian psychiatrist and former Director-General of the World Health Organization, Brock Chisholm, who writes:

...Man's method of dealing with difficulties in the past has always been to tell everyone else how they should behave. We've all been doing that for centuries. It should be clear by now that this no longer does any good. Everybody has by now been told by everybody else how he should behave...The criticism is not effective; it never has been, and it never is going to be..."

p. 9: "The attitude above all others which I feel is no longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission."

pp. 11-12: "It is said that the first missionaries to Hawaii went for the purpose of explaining to the Polynesians that it was sinful to work on Sunday, only to discover that in those beautiful islands nobody worked on any day."

pp. 12-13: "The missionary instinct seems to run deep in human nature, and the bigger and stronger and richer we are, the more we feel suited to the missionary task, the more indeed we consider it our duty. Dr. Chisholm relates the story of an eminent cleric who had been proselytizing the Eskimos and said: 'You know, for years we couldn't do anything with those Eskimos at all; they didn't have any sin. We had to teach them sin for years before we could do anything with them.' I am reminded of the three Boy Scouts who reported to their scoutmaster that as their good deed for the day they had helped an old lady to cross the street. 'That's fine', said the scoutmaster, 'but why did it take three of you?' 'Well', they explained, 'she didn't want to go.' The good deed above all others that Americans feel qualified to perform is the teaching of democracy..."

pp. 13-14: "Maybe...it is time for us to reconsider our teaching methods. Maybe we are are not really cut out for the job of spreading the gospel of democracy. Maybe it would profit us to concentrate on our own democracy instead of trying to inflict our particular version of it on all those ungrateful Latin Americans who stubbornly oppose their North American benefactors instead of the 'real' enemies whom we have so graciously chosen for them..."

p. 15: "...What I do question is the ability of the United States or any other Western nation to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life."

pp. 17-18: (quoting George Kennan): "there is more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than in the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives."

p. 18: "We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders. The objective may be desirable, but it is not feasible. As Shaw said: 'Religion is a great force--the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.'"

p. 27: "My question is whether America can close the gap between her capacity and performance. My hope and my belief are that she can, that she has the human resources to conduct her affairs with a maturity which few if any great nations have ever achieved: to be confident but also tolerant, to be rich but also generous, to be willing to teach but also willing to learn, and to be powerful but also wise. I believe that America is capable of all of these things; I also believe she is falling short of them. If one honestly thought that America was doing the best she is capable of doing at home and abroad, then there would be no reason for criticism. But if one feels certain that she has the capacity to be doing very much better, that she is falling short of her promise for reasons that can and should be overcome, then approbation is a disservice and dissent the higher patriotism."

p. 32: "I do suggest the desirability of an atmosphere in which unorthodox ideas would arouse interest rather than anger, reflection rather than emotion. As likely as not, new proposals carefully examined would be found wanting and old policies judged sound; what is wanted is not change itself but the capacity for change. Consider the idea of 'appeasement': in a free and healthy political atmosphere it would elicit neither horror nor enthusiasm but only interest in what precisely its proponent had in mind. As Winston Churchill once said: 'Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances...Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.'"

pp. 137-138: Check out Mark Twain's obscene "war prayer", taken from his Europe and Elsewhere (1923), a bit too lengthy to quote in this post.

pp. 245-246: "The inconstancy of American foreign policy is not an accident but an expression of two distinct sides of the American character. Both are characterized by a kind of moralism, but one is the morality of decent instincts tempered by knowledge of human imperfection and the other is the morality of absolute self-assurance fired by the crusading spirit. The one is exemplified by Lincoln, who found it strange, in the words of his second Inaugural Address, 'that any man should dare to ask for a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces', but then added: 'let us judge not, that we be not judged.' The other is exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt, who in his December 6, 1904, Annual Message to Congress, without question as to his own and his country's capacity to judge right and wrong, proclaimed the duty of the United States to exercise an 'internal police power' in the hemisphere on the ground that 'Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America...ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation...'...The current tendency is toward a more strident and aggressive American foreign policy, which is to say, toward a policy closer to the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt than of Lincoln..."

pp. 250-251: Regarding the "lesser but durable strand of intolerant puritanism" that has coexisted uneasily with a "dominant strand of democratic humanism" in the US, he says he is "...reminded of 'Mr. Dooley's words about the observance of Thanksgiving: ''Twas founded by th' Puritans to give thanks f'r bein' presarved fr'm th'Indyans, an'...we keep it to give thanks we are presarved fr'm th' Puritans.'

p. 255: "The kind of foreign policy I have been talking about is, in the true sense of the term, a conservative policy. It is intended quite literally to conserve the world--a world whose civilizations can be destroyed at any time if either of the great powers should choose or feel driven to do so. It is an approach that accepts the world as it is, with all its existing nations and ideologies, with all its existing qualities and shortcomings. It is an approach that purports to change things in ways that are compatible with the continuity of history and within the limits imposed by a fragile human nature. I think that if the great conservatives of the past, such as Burke and Metternich and Castlereagh, were alive today, they would not be true believers or relentless crusaders against communism. They would wish to come to terms with the world as it is, not because our world would be pleasing to them--almost certainly it would not be--but because they believed in the preservation of indissoluble links between the past and the future, because they profoundly mistrusted abstract ideas, and because they did not think themselves or any other men qualified to play God."

p. 256: "All that I have proposed in these pages...that we...has been based on two major premises: first, that, at this moment in history at which the human race has become capable of destroying itself, it is not merely desirable but essential that the competitive instinct of nations be brought under control..."

Fulbright was an evolutionary pragmatist in international affairs. In his case, that meant that, like many of us Americans he was an idealist and a visionary, he was a practical one who believed in humility and building upon the success of doable baby steps rather than seeking to impose a revolutionary grand vision justified with ideological certitudes.