Whose Myth? Whose Reality?

It requires very little inside knowledge or expertise to realize that the world situation is not what it was a little while ago.

In the wake of the 1962 Cuba missile crisis and the nuclear test ban treaty, the war that really could end war (along with almost everything else) seems fairly improbable. With the removal of that imminent threat, old alliances have fallen apart, and new, relatively minor crises have popped out like the measles.

Just how the U.S. should adapt its foreign policies to meet the changed situation has not yet become the subject of a Great Debate. But it has stirred up a lot of talk, and one who had his say last week, in the nearly empty chamber of the U.S. Senate, was Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright.

"Unthinkable Thoughts." As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright is a man whose opinion carries some weight, and in his 70-minute speech he offered some weighty opinions. "We are confronted with a complex and fluid world situation, and we are not adapting ourselves to it," he said. "We are clinging to old myths in the face of new realities." The rules of the game have changed, Fulbright was saying, and the U.S. will be outscored unless it starts doing some hard thinking about "a growing category of 'unthinkable thoughts.'"

" There certainly are policies that are encased in frozen attitudes, and Fulbright performed a worthwhile service in making a move to unthaw them. The trouble is, one man's myth can be another's reality, and Fulbright may yet find that some of his own "realities" are themselves dangerous myths. In any case, the chief realities as perceived by the Senator from Arkansas are:

>That the Communist bloc is no longer a monolith, but has wide variations "ranging from China, which poses immediate threats to the free world, to Poland and Yugoslavia, which pose none." Only if the U.S. recognizes the existence of these variations "can we hope to act effectively upon the bloc and to turn its internal differences to our own advantage."

>That Russia, while it is still "a most formidable adversary, has ceased to be totally and implacably hostile to the West." Therefore it is now possible for the U.S. to ease up in its approach to Moscow, and to deal with it, in some cases, "as a normal state with normal and traditional interests."

>That "it is not Communism as a doctrine, or Communism as it is practiced within the Soviet Union or within any other country, that threatens us." Said Fulbright: "It is not Communist dogma as espoused within Russia but Communist imperialism that threatens us."

"Distasteful Conclusions." Getting down to cases, Fulbright said that it was' "silly" for the U.S. to treat its dispute with tiny Panama as "a test of our courage and resolve." He suggested that the U.S. might be generous enough "to go a little farther than halfway in the search for a fair settlement."

On Cuba, he insisted that "the time is overdue for a candid re-evaluation of our policy, even though it may lead to distasteful conclusions." Since the U.S. trade boycott has been at least a partial flop and Washington is unwilling to pursue the harsher alternative of a military invasion, he said, "we are compelled to consider the third of the three options open to us with respect to Cuba: the acceptance of the continued existence of the Castro regime as a distasteful nuisance but not an intolerable danger so long as the nations of the hemisphere are prepared to meet their obligations of collective defense."

Another area of policy befogged by "an aura of mystical sanctity," said Fulbright, is Red China. He said that the U.S. should not recognize Peking or condone its admission to the United Nations, at least "under present circumstances." But, he argued, "we must jar open our minds to certain realities about China, of which the foremost is that there are not really two Chinas but only one, mainland China, and that it is ruled by Communists and likely to remain so for the indefinite future." The U.S., he said, ought to explore ways of establishing relations with this regime.

Limited Peace. Earlier in the week, before Fulbright spoke his piece, two other top Democrats ventilated their views about foreign policy. In a lecture at Princeton University, Adlai Stevenson noted that the rigid bifurcation of the world into opposing cold war camps was not a permanent state but "a transitory and unhealthy condition." The policy of containment, he said, has given way to "a policy of cease-fire and peaceful change." And if the policy of containment "stands for 'limited war,' then the policy of cease-fire perhaps stands for 'limited peace.' " He urged that the U.N. expand its peace-keeping machinery.

The next day President Johnson tacked a ten-minute appraisal of foreign-policy problems on the end of a bread-and-butter talk to labor leaders in Washington. "Once upon a time even large-scale wars could be waged without risking the end of civilization," he said, but nowadays "general war is impossible, and some alternatives are essential." Said Johnson: "The people of this country and the world expect more from their leaders than just a show of brute force. And so our hope and our purpose is to employ reasoned agreement instead of ready aggression, to preserve our honor without a world in ruins, to substitute, if we can, understanding for retaliation."

Some Were Sorry. Stevenson and Johnson stirred considerable interest with their talks, but scarcely a ripple of controversy. Fulbright's speech was another matter. Earlier in the week he had had dinner at the White House with the President, spoke with him about Viet Nam, but never touched on Panama and Cuba. "I am sorry we didn't," said Johnson in a weekend press conference at the L.B.J. ranch, "because we might have been able to clear up a few things."

Another who was sorry was Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who spent a good deal of time assuring foreign ambassadors that Fulbright's speech was not an Administration trial balloon.

Rusk took sharp exception to the Senator's views on Cuba, declared that Fidel Castro "is more than a nuisance--he is a threat to this hemisphere." As an example, he cited Cuba's subversion and arms-smuggling in an attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government.

But Cuba was not the only area where Senator Fulbright's "reality" sounded more like a myth to others.

Also open to serious dispute was his assertion that Communist ideology, as it is practiced inside a country, is of no concern to the U.S. Surely, if half a dozen Latin American countries were to go Communist in the next few months, the U.S. would be more than a little concerned--and rightly so. For Communist ideology remains implacably opposed to the ideology of freedom and is committed to its ultimate destruction. The great cleavage in the Sino-Soviet bloc did not develop because Nikita Khrushchev had renounced his goal of destroying the West, but because he disagreed with Mao Tse-tung about the best way to do it.

And as far as myths go, there was something else for Fulbright to keep in mind. When John F. Kennedy forced Khrushchev to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba, he in effect invoked what is sometimes scorned as the hoariest of myths--the Monroe Doctrine.

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