After the First World War, we were able to retire into the dreary isolationism of the 1920's. After World War II, however, this was not possible. The Russian Communists now suddenly were recognized as a hostile and expansionist force.

Policy Planning

It was in these circumstances that the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State, of which I was the first director, was established exactly twenty years ago this month; and it was to the filling of this need for a new rationale of foreign policy that the Staff directed its efforts over the three years that I held the position. What came out of it was something that came to be popularly talked about as the "doctrine of containment"; but that was the inclination to look at things carefully. What we really tried to do in the Policy Planning Staff was to evolve a workable concept of American foreign policy in the given conditions.

Let me emphasize that in opposing this sort of communist expansionism we did not take appeal to moral or legal norms. What interested us was not whether these communist political efforts in western Europe were moral or immoral, not whether they were legal or illegal. It was enough for us that they existed, and that they were dangerous to American interests.

Legal, Moral

Precisely because we did not attempt to judge these things on the basis of legal or moral principle, we were in a position to discriminate geographically in assessing the degree of danger these communist efforts presented for us. We were at liberty to regard the possibility of a communist take-over in one of the world's great industrial countries as more dangerous to us than a similar take-over in a small weak country whose resources could scarcely play an important part in the power balance, regardless of whose grounds they were. We were at liberty to concentrate on the Communist threat in areas that seemed to us important, to ignore it, or react less decisively, in areas that did not.

And just as we did not see the danger of the spread of communism as a military attack across borders, so we did not see the answer to it in military intervention on our part. What seemed to us desirable was to stimulate and encourage the rise of indigenous political resistance to communist pressures in the threatened countries.

I believed that the United States could stimulate effective resistance to communist pressures elsewhere only to the extent that it observed a certain prudent detachement, endeavoring to release useful energies and impulses in others, not trying to create them or to insert our own in their place.

It seemed, furthermore, to us in the Planning Staff, that if our efforts of assistance to others, particularly economic assistance, were to be effective, they must not be directed, or appear to be directed--only or even primarily to the negative objective of resisting communism. This would merely give the recipient peoples the impression that they were being made pawns in a great-power rivalry, and it would undermine their sense of self-interest.

Never Understood

Needless to say, this concept was never fully understood by those who had the power of decision in matters of American policy. One by one, its essential elements were abanonded over the coming years. Some remain casualties to a more military concept of the cold war; some--to a degree on the part of leading political figures for more pretentious and impressive formulas of American objectives; some to a sentimental belief in the great destiny of American on the mainland of Asia; some to the domestic-political interests of favored allies.

The Vietnam involvement, as you know, marches under the same semantic banner as that under which our Planning Staff marched just twenty years ago this spring, when it faced the problems I have been discussing: namely, the banner of the containment of communism. So similar is the stated purpose that I sometimes a find myself being asked the puzzled question: "But you are the author of the doctrine of containment; why are you not enthusiastic about Vietnam?"

Our action in Vietnam today is justified precisely on the grounds of legal and moral principles for which a universal validity is bespoken. What we are fighting in Vietnam is, we are told, a reprehensible mode of behavior known as "aggression," contrasting with something else, which we are defending, known as "freedom." We would presumably be morally obliged to oppose "aggression" by force of arms wherever it raised its ugly head. The specifics of the situation, geographic, political or otherwise, are irrelevant. This commits us to action on the Asiastic mainland as much as in any other part of the globe.

Administration's View

Now there might be those among you who would argue that the...Administration's view might be the right one, and our view of 1947 a wrong one. Theoretically this is quite possible. Actually, I think it is not the case. In the first place, everyone knows that our entry into the Vietnam involvement did not come as a result of rational reflection -- that it was rather the result of a long exercise in national inadvertence--of a long series of partial decisions, none of them taken with any clear comprehension of the depths of involvement to which they were bringing us.