Books in Brief: Retreat from Victory

Retreat from Victory: A Critical Appraisal of American Foreign and Military Policy from 1920 to the 1970s, by Drew Middleton (Hawthorn, 250 pp., $7.95).

New York Timesman Drew Middleton can write about our foreign and military policy with some authority. He has reported from the Soviet Union, Great Britain, West Germany, the United Nations, and currently is the paper’s military correspondent. (He doesn’t, however, have anything in common with the isolationists on the Times’s editorial page.) At the end of WW II, Mr. Middleton reminds us, America was the “mightiest power in history,” and it was her responsibility to hold “the frontiers of the rule of law against the barbarians.” Soon after the war, however, we demobilized most of our forces and withdrew behind our own borders. When we ventured outside, as in Vietnam, civilian “amateurs” and a military that didn’t understand the nature of the war combined to insure our failure. There have been some successes, the Marshall Plan and NATO being two of them, but there have been mostly defeats. The Soviet Union is the master of Eastern Europe and is moving in on the Mideast. But perhaps the most important casualty of all, Mr. Middleton feels, has been the will of the American people. With our failure in Vietnam many Middle Americans joined the “liberal elite” in the ranks of the isolationists. He expects the Soviet Union to initiate other “peripheral pressures” on the free world and it will be the responsibility of the United States, the only one able to uphold the “rule of law,” to respond. We have the power; he’s doubtful we have the will.

KL

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K. Lynch

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Retreat from Victory: A Critical Appraisal of American Foreign and Military Policy from 1920 to the 1970s, by Drew Middleton (Hawthorn, 250 pp., $7.95).

New York Timesman Drew Middleton can write about our foreign and military policy with some authority. He has reported from the Soviet Union, Great Britain, West Germany, the United Nations, and currently is the paper’s military correspondent. (He doesn’t, however, have anything in common with the isolationists on the Times’s editorial page.) At the end of WW II, Mr. Middleton reminds us, America was the “mightiest power in history,” and it was her responsibility to hold “the frontiers of the rule of law against the barbarians.” Soon after the war, however, we demobilized most of our forces and withdrew behind our own borders. When we ventured outside, as in Vietnam, civilian “amateurs” and a military that didn’t understand the nature of the war combined to insure our failure. There have been some successes, the Marshall Plan and NATO being two of them, but there have been mostly defeats. The Soviet Union is the master of Eastern Europe and is moving in on the Mideast. But perhaps the most important casualty of all, Mr. Middleton feels, has been the will of the American people. With our failure in Vietnam many Middle Americans joined the “liberal elite” in the ranks of the isolationists. He expects the Soviet Union to initiate other “peripheral pressures” on the free world and it will be the responsibility of the United States, the only one able to uphold the “rule of law,” to respond. We have the power; he’s doubtful we have the will.