Does Johnson Have a Foreign Policy?

Commentators both here and abroad —friends as well as critics of the Administration—have begun wondering aloud whether our new President has any foreign policy at all. Certainly there is a prima facie case that he does not and, moreover, doesn’t care much whether he has or hasn’t. His interest is focused on domestic affairs and partisan politics. He seems to find it hard to fix his attention on the foreign problems and crises that have been swarming since the first of the year.

In the muddled and inconclusive actions he does take, there seems to be no cohesive set of ideas, no direction. One day the Secretary of State threatens consumer boycotts of nations that trade with Cuba; three days later, his Department takes it all back. Zanzibar throws out our representatives, and we retaliate—by recognizing Zanzibar’s Communist government. To keep Soviet power out of the eastern Mediterranean we join with the British to settle the Cyprus problem on a NATO basis; and then turn the matter over to the anti-NATO UN, where the Soviet Union is imbedded. Nobody knows what Mr. Johnson thinks about the approaching Afro-Asian-Communist war against Angola and South Africa. Nobody knows whether the new Assistant Secretary Mann is supposed to bury or revive the Alliance for Progress. Mr. Johnson ships Bobby Kennedy to the South Seas, but declines to take sides between Malaysia and Indonesia. The grossest insults from a Ghana gone openly totalitarian bring no counter-action from the U.S. one way or another. On South Vietnam Mr. Johnson’s spokesmen talk simultaneously of getting the boys back home for Christmas and standing firm till doomsday.

JB

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James Burnham

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Commentators both here and abroad —friends as well as critics of the Administration—have begun wondering aloud whether our new President has any foreign policy at all. Certainly there is a prima facie case that he does not and, moreover, doesn’t care much whether he has or hasn’t. His interest is focused on domestic affairs and partisan politics. He seems to find it hard to fix his attention on the foreign problems and crises that have been swarming since the first of the year.

In the muddled and inconclusive actions he does take, there seems to be no cohesive set of ideas, no direction. One day the Secretary of State threatens consumer boycotts of nations that trade with Cuba; three days later, his Department takes it all back. Zanzibar throws out our representatives, and we retaliate—by recognizing Zanzibar’s Communist government. To keep Soviet power out of the eastern Mediterranean we join with the British to settle the Cyprus problem on a NATO basis; and then turn the matter over to the anti-NATO UN, where the Soviet Union is imbedded. Nobody knows what Mr. Johnson thinks about the approaching Afro-Asian-Communist war against Angola and South Africa. Nobody knows whether the new Assistant Secretary Mann is supposed to bury or revive the Alliance for Progress. Mr. Johnson ships Bobby Kennedy to the South Seas, but declines to take sides between Malaysia and Indonesia. The grossest insults from a Ghana gone openly totalitarian bring no counter-action from the U.S. one way or another. On South Vietnam Mr. Johnson’s spokesmen talk simultaneously of getting the boys back home for Christmas and standing firm till doomsday.