Angola: The National Disinterest

Tom Wicker, Mary McGrory, Anthony Lewis, a majority of the U.S. Senate, Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, and many another are telling us that the “national interest” is not involved in the current Angolan troubles and that we therefore should not get ourselves mixed up in the squabble —should not “intervene.” Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Drew Middleton, Elmo Zumwalt, Daniel Moynihan, and a few others are insisting, contrariwise, that the national interest is unavoidably at stake in Angola and that therefore—though the specifics are herein blurred—we ought to do something about it. Either one side or the other is wrong about the facts in the Angolan case, or the two have differing meanings for “national interest.”

Nothing could be more familiar than the form of this debate over Angola. Vietnam, Chile, Hungary, Cuba, Israel, Panama, Taiwan, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Russia: is it any of our nation’s business what happens in foreign parts? Do we have the duty or need or right to intervene? This is the classic debate that has set the framework for the discussion of American foreign policy: the dream of New World innocence preserved inviolate by “the jealousy of a free people constantly awake” (I use Washington’s terminology) confronting the nightmare of Old World “entanglements” and “insidious wiles” beyond the sea.

JB

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James Burnham

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Tom Wicker, Mary McGrory, Anthony Lewis, a majority of the U.S. Senate, Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, and many another are telling us that the “national interest” is not involved in the current Angolan troubles and that we therefore should not get ourselves mixed up in the squabble —should not “intervene.” Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Drew Middleton, Elmo Zumwalt, Daniel Moynihan, and a few others are insisting, contrariwise, that the national interest is unavoidably at stake in Angola and that therefore—though the specifics are herein blurred—we ought to do something about it. Either one side or the other is wrong about the facts in the Angolan case, or the two have differing meanings for “national interest.”

Nothing could be more familiar than the form of this debate over Angola. Vietnam, Chile, Hungary, Cuba, Israel, Panama, Taiwan, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Russia: is it any of our nation’s business what happens in foreign parts? Do we have the duty or need or right to intervene? This is the classic debate that has set the framework for the discussion of American foreign policy: the dream of New World innocence preserved inviolate by “the jealousy of a free people constantly awake” (I use Washington’s terminology) confronting the nightmare of Old World “entanglements” and “insidious wiles” beyond the sea.