The question of justice and war is precisely a question: Can war ever be the task of justice?

Pacifism is one clear response to this question. There are different pacifisms, certainly, but they seem to converge at the point of policy. There is a pacifism which may be called experiential, in the sense that one's reading of the history of armed conflict forces one to conclude that, on balance, war will never produce good fruit. There is another which may be intuitional or deontological, in that one somehow knows, independently of inductive, logical processes, that the life-taking which war is, is intolerable. Both positions yield a general policy posture: War may not be done.

“Henry Kissinger is without question the most brilliant American polemicist in the general area of foreign and national policy. He possesses an unusual ability to seize particular positions and publicize them in a compelling manner… .” So wrote Professor Morton Kaplan, a leading champion of a “scientific” approach to the study of international politics, in a review of the “traditionalist” Kissinger's The Necessity. for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy (1960). President Nixon's choice of Kissinger as his advisor on National Security Affairs marks the perpetuation of academies in that role, McGeorge Bundy of Harvard and Walt W. Rostow of M.I.T. having served as predecessors under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Since the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1968 hopes for détente between East and West have ebbed. The ruthless suppression of internal political autonomy in that often overrun nation seems to have given the lie to all those who have asserted that under the common pressures of modern industrialized society the social systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were becoming more and more alike. The use of the naked force of the Red Army to destroy the Czech road to socialism has left in ruin not only immediate aspirations for a reduction of international tensions in Central Europe but the broader faith in a future peace based on a convergence of the democratic and the Communist ways of life.

Some twenty years ago, when we found out that the Chinese could fight, American military and diplomatic officialdom discovered Sun Tzu. This discovery came about through emergency reading of Mao Tse-tung on strategy, which in turn revealed that Mao had drawn many of his ideas (and even plagiarized) from an obscure ancient called Sun Tzu. More recently, when we found out that the North Vietnamese could fight, Sun Tzu again, so I am told, came into vogue with our military and diplomatic thinkers.

Liddell Hart speaks of this fourth century B.C. military theorist as having had a “clear vision” and “more profound insight” than Clausewitz. But our leaders' acquaintance with that vision and insight seems to have availed us little. “Know the enemy and know yourself,” said Sun Tzu — not Confucius nor John F. Kennedy — “and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”

The belated dismissal of murder charges against the eight Special Forces personnel in Vietnam throws into glaring relief what has been the least noticed aspect of an utterly regrettable war — the general incompetence of those charged with achieving that fata morgana, victory, or even a tolerable peace.

The scandal itself will, no doubt, have been all but forgotten by the time these words appear, though leaving, to be sure, a residue of heightened mistrust of an Administration which could not foresee the public consequences of its actions, misjudged its own courage, and was guilty, moreover, of intolerable hypocrisy. Not to understand that the very climate of Vietnam, the violence, the suspicion, the tangled intrigues joining Americans to South Vietnamese, produced the casual murder of a double agent is to understand nothing at all of the consequences of the American intervention in this luckless corner of the world.

I claim no novelty for the following reflections on violence and coercion. Certainly there is no new data presented here. I offer, rather, simply a discussion of values and how to value certain things, and even in this sense I doubt that newness will appear. This, however, is no apology. For regarding value and how to value, I am increasingly convinced that much of our responsibility consists in rediscovery rather than discovery.

Early last December Dr. Tillman, a consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, set out on a trip to Asia to study the Peace Corps and the Fulbright program in that area, worldview is pleased to have been granted permission to publish portions of the diary he kept on his journey, printed for the use of the Foreign Relations Committee. (Excerpts from Dr. Tillman's "Latin American Diary," chronicling an earlier journey undertaken for a similar purpose, appeared in the Summer, 1967 issue.)

“Theologians, like metaphysicians,” an English friar observes in a recent treatise on political philosophy, “are particularly susceptible to the attractions of what has been called the linotype school of history. They can easily be found to argue … that if certain ideas are applied then they arc bound to produce certain results. If all men served justice there would be no social problems—if free trade were adopted the world would be economically balanced and stable—both arguments impose a hypothesis after much the same fashion.” This method, he continues, is legitimate but only within limits.

I have been out of the mainstream of American life for four years serving in an active, yet very remote, corner of Africa, I have decided however to make virtue of incompetence and —- like Rip van Winkle — present a kaleidoscope of impressions on my rediscovery of a deeply changed America.

When I left this country there had been no Watts, no Newark or Detroit, no fires ten blocks from the White House or machine guns on the Capitol steps. Berkeley was just Berkeley, not a harbinger of turmoil to come. We were about to pass our most important Civil Rights bill and Martin Luther King's impossible dream was perhaps possible after all. Vietnam was becoming more serious, though hardly a national trauma.

Since the second world war, tension has existed in this country between two schools of “internationalists.” One camp has concentrated on the necessity of building and maintaining “positions of strength” in order to deter and tu negotiate with the Soviet Union and Communist China. The second school has stressed the need for “constructive” policies such as foreign aid and liberalized trade in order to foster economic and social progress in the industrialized nations and to promote development in the Third World. Generally speaking, presidents from Truman through Nixon have combined the two approaches, although at various times more attention has been given to one or the other. Most students of American foreign policy would probably agree that power generally has been given priority over development politics since the Korean War.

One should not make too much of the fact that Karl Barth and Thomas Merton died on the same day. Barth was an old man, a Doctor of the Church in the highest tradition, and his historic task was surely accomplished. Merton was still “young,” a famous public and troubled seeker after God and man, and no one now will ever know what he might have become. Barth; one supposes, had not read Merton; and Merton, one suspects, had not read deeply in Barth. But the sadness and shock of reading their obituaries together in the New York Times last month brought to mind certain values to which they both bore witness—with whatever differences of temperament, generation and style.

Some time ago I did a series of articles for worldview, each concerned with some aspect of what I termed the “nuclear obsession.” I used the phrase to highlight an example of what seemed to me a tendency of the liberal community to become so preoccupied with a single issue, or value, as to lose sight of the damage done to other values held by the same community.

As one constantly fascinated with contradictions, I want now to examine the stunning and total contradictions of the two principal positions taken by some adherents of the “New Politics.”

George Kennan, architect of America's policy of containment adopted in 1946-47, said a decade later in his Reith Lectures over the B.B.C. (subsequently published as Russia, the Atom and the West), that the “moral example” of this country should be its primary instrument of foreign policy. In his words, this country could best “apply the hand” (to stem Communist challenges) to “our American failings— to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes: to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.“

The British Minister of Defense, Denis Healy, has informed us that within minutes of the outbreak of hostilities every Soviet fleet unit in the Mediterranean would be sunk. Let us hope that he has supplied us with a long-overdue corrective to the near-hysteria evident in the press about the Soviet naval presence in the area.

Presumably by citing the destruction of the Soviet fleet “within minutes” Mr. Healy is making reference to nuclear weapons—a most implausible scenario. But even in a limited encounter, held short of a nuclear exchange, it is hard to believe that the Soviet fleet would fare well in combat.

The passionate “Biafra Lobby” in the United States is a perfect example of the moral and political pitfalls of organized pleading and pressure on particular international problems The pro Biafra crusade is an improbable conglomeration of the New Left and old right idealists and hierlings American citizens and foreigners churchmen and secularists isolationists and interventionists. Though no clear common concern unites these diverse persons most of them agree that the United States Government should do more than it is now doing to feed starving Biafrans and many of them seem to believe that the U.S. hands-off policy toward the brutal civil war in Nigeria is immoral because it interferes with mercy measures and denies the Biafrans the “right of self-determination.”