Our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is another—the tradition of democratic control. It has not begun to operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to clear our minds of some romantic illusions.
Our future lies balanced between Europe and Asia; the disagreeable certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that we cannot escape the world. We still think of participation in world affairs negatively as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined from our shores. The prospect is disagreeable because we, the people, have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. We have begun to send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we trust our ambassadors—because the journalists have begun to democratize diplomacy. They have told us more, they have often represented us more completely, and represented international business less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart European capitals. The correspondents have taken the characteristic American democratic way of altering an ancient European institution, by shrewdly publicised disrespect. Whenever we have had a strong Secretary of State, something further has been done; but the permanent officials of our State Department have completely accepted the European style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic sheets, that all the brash independence of America has been hushed; our leading career diplomats have never been Americanized by the middle west; they came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented the East, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent America.
On occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into the State Department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for the gaffes and gaucheries of American diplomacy. These awkward Americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the chancelleries of Europe; but they were not falling into the hands of the European diplomats.
Neither the fumbles of our occasional ignorant envoys nor the correct discretion of the career men gave us any habit of thinking about other countries. On the west coast there is a tradition of wariness about the Orient—but it rises from immigration, not international relations. We have no habit of hatred as the French had for Germany, no cultivated friendships except for the occasional visit of a prince. We are not susceptible to European flattery if we live beyond the Atlantic seaboard—or below the $50,000 income level; for crowds, a Hollywood star is at least as magnetic as a Balkan Queen; and it is not conceivable that we should ever treat the coming of a Russian ballet as a part of a political campaign, as the French, quite correctly, did in 1913.
We are now paying for our quiet unfortified borders, for the broad seas so suddenly narrowed. We have to learn about foreign affairs, about our own Empire (we hardly know that we have one). And this is the hardest thing of all: that while we move in ignorance, we have to re-work all the basic concepts of international affairs, or they will destroy us. We will have some support in the people of Great Britain, in the governments of Scandinavia, and in the diplomatic habits of the USSR; but for the most part we must make our way alone.
Debunking Protocol
Again, as in the case of military strategy, the average man must study the subject to protect himself. He can no longer risk his life, and the fortunes of his family, in the hands of a few career men in the State Department, working secretly, studying protocol, forgetting the people of the United States.
The amateur statesman is as laughable as the amateur strategist, but the laugh is not always going to be on us. We will popularize diplomacy or it will destroy us. We have first of all to destroy the myth of "high politics". We have to examine Macchiavelli and Talleyrand and Bismarck and Disraeli with as much realism as we examine Benedict Arnold and James J. Hill and Edison and Kruger. We need journalist-debunkers to do the work, a parallel, by the way, to the process of simplifying military discussion, which is being done by newspaper and radio experts. We have to learn that the great tricks, the great arrangements of power, have been as shady as horse-trades, as ruthless as robbery, and often as magnificent as building a railroad—but in all cases they have represented the desires of certain groups, powerful enough at any given time to impose their wishes on the people. War, business, patriotism, medicine, sociology, religion, and sex have all been re-examined and debunked in the past two generations; but diplomacy which can destroy our satisfaction in all of them, still parades as the perfect stuffed shirt, with a red ribbon across it. At the moment no one can say whether Hitler has blasted the Foreign Office and our State Department; if he has, it is an achievement equal to taking Crete; and we ought to thank him for it.
We should learn that diplomacy has swapped national honor, and betrayed it, and used it cynically for the advantage of a few—as well as protected it. We should examine the assertion of "national destiny" before the era of democracy, to see whether the private wealth of a prince and the starvation of a people actually are predestined, whether the mine-owners of France could have allowed German democracy to live, whether Locarno satisfied national honor less than Munich.
And, above all, we should know that this great "game" of European statesmanship, going on from the Renaissance to our own time, is a colossal and tragic failure. At times it has brought incalculable wealth to a thousand English families, to a few hundred Frenchmen, and power to some others. But it has always ended in the desolation of war—and the suspicion holds that to make war advantageously has been the aim of statesmanship, not to avoid it with honor.