AMERICANS COULD HAVE hoped that the defeat of an interventionist U.S. by the Vietnamese would at last put an end to a long tradition of foreign policy megalomania--the idea that the nation was embarking on a crusade for world-wide "democracy" and that we should somehow want or be entitled to "raise Manila, up, up, up, until it is just like Kansas City." The U.S. ambassador to Saigon departed Viet Nam the way he would have entered 20 years before, in a helicopter from the embassy roof between rounds of NLF artillery fire. The image of a fleeing Graham Martin should have taught us a hard truth: that no matter how much we talked about indigenous liberal "democratic" elements in underdeveloped countries, and regardless of how much our bombadeers tried to convey the superiority of the free enterprise system, the people of one nation, and probably others, weren't convinced. In the aftermath, President Ford called for a defeat without recrimination, which meant that the best the responsible elites could hope for was to escape the "tragic error" without blame.

An ideological crisis, not quite capable of suppression, thus haunts our polity. Even if the U.S. can force the rest of the world to love our brand of democracy--dubious after Viet Nam--do our people have the stomach to support terrorist means to achieve libertarian ends? If not, those who have made foreign policy uninterruptedly since the Second World War seem to fear, then we will be reduced to a role versus the Soviets and Chinese of a "helpless, pitiful giant." Nixon, the author of that phase, and the nation's best pro football fan, would know better than anyone that we need a political Vince Lombardi to alternately stir up our people's prejudices and whip us for our cowardice.

SO INTO THIS crisis comes Daniel Patrick Moynihan with gung-ho junior officer's rhetoric couched in references to Yeats and Locke. On the one hand he claims, we are the world's greatest democracy in terms of liberties and affluence--"find its equal," he has written. But Americans are also in a dangerous time, paralyzed by failure of nerve; we are threatened with our foreign policy "elites" making "an accommodation to totalitarianism without precedent in our history." Perhaps Nixon made his peace with Mao and Brezhnev, and detente was the order of election year 1972--but this has changed; Moynihan sees the world divided between the party of liberty and that of totalitarianism.

The misconceptions Moynihan has foisted on an anomic public desperately wanting to believe in an American "purpose" are incredible. He claimed last October 3 at an AFL-CIO convention, that Israel is hated by the third world because it is a democracy. Moynihan did not mention the question of Palestinian refugees, the economic inequities visited on underdeveloped nations by Israel's chief backer, U.S. policy in Chile and Indo-China or the consistent support of the American government for South Africa and Rhodesia. Moynihan's reason for third world hostility toward this country sounds like something from the American right's glory days of the early 50s: "Such has been the success of Communist arms, Communist intrigue, Communist treachery in Asia and Africa that the reputation of democracy in those regions has all but collapsed."

Since assuming the ambassadorship to the United Nations, Moynihan has discarded the sophisticated--and more moderate--husk of his polemic, leaving the simplistic fruit intact. In an article in the March, 1975 Commentary Moynihan classed the underdeveloped nations as a true third force in world politics: They were democratic socialist, in line with a West European colonial experience. He described these nations as by and large anti-American and redistributionist (rather than production-oriented, since he says socialism cannot be productive. Here Moynihan forgets the Soviet Union, which is unusual if only because it seems to dominate all his other thoughts). But these nations, according to the early Moynihan, could be wooed away from authoritarianism. Independence from Moscow and Peking was only possible however, through the dismantling of inefficient state-managed economies and their replacement by capitalism, with plenty of opportunity--Moynihan implies--for U.S. investment. Strangely, this is the same type of strings-attached investment that the underdeveloped world has recently claimed to distrust.

IT WASN'T NECESSARY to be a Harvard Professor of Government to develop this analysis. Moynihan's suggested methods for implementation, also spelled out in the Commentary article, possibly impressed Kissinger; at any rate, Kissinger reportedly hired Moynihan on the basis of the piece. Moynihan there proposed to aggressively defend the U.S. from third world attack, centering on Great Achievements of international liberalism--like the multinational corporation, he wrote--and blaming third world government for their own economic troubles and lack of freedoms. We should chide those in Africa and Asia, Moynihan wrote, reminding them in a tried-and-true American way that putting liberty before equality is the way to do best by the latter.

Faced with intransigent natives at the U.N., the great hunter must have smelled blood, his rhetoric growing increasingly incendiary and his suspicion apparently growing that every word the delegate from say, Burundi, was speaking was dictated from Moscow. This has come to be his present stance, one which it would be wrong to take as something paralleling Kissinger's foreign policy, which is more flexible, but no less conservative in basis. Moynihan's practice, at the UN and in the media, made and makes a difference to American foreign policy, only to the extent that it restores popular confidence in an aggressive American imperium. The Moynihan blasts at third world despots were never designed to win over the underdeveloped countries--a few words from Moynihan would hardly send them scurrying except in the expectations of a lunatic, to sing the praises of General Motors plants, World Bank investment, and the federal system of government. Moynihan was Kissinger's Agnew: his role was to make it seem like America was all but isolated in the world--two dozen "democracies" defending "civilization," as he put it, against the hordes--and that we had better pull together again to avoid the rule of the all-powerful and violent slave State, embodied in a waxing Soviet Communism. It was all meant for domestic consumption, aiding the attempted restoration of a post-Viet Nam and post-Watergate conservatism.

As an ideologue with popular backing Moynihan is dangerous. As a serious theorist he is absurd: he denounces OPEC, as is de rigeur on the American center-right, for its raising of oil prices and he extolls the world free market. Yet there is no free market; monopolistic multinational corporations control international trade in manufacturing, charging inflated prices and thus adding to their profit margins. Third world producers of food and raw materials have heretofore engaged in competition with each other to their detriment, over-producing and lowering prices for their goods. In the 20 years between 1952 and 1972, the UN reports, prices of primary commodities (mainly from the underdeveloped countries) declined relative to manufactured products (mainly from the developed nations). A large proportion of third world countries have thus increased their production as much or more than Western nations since 1945, but have grown relatively poorer.

EXPLAINING anti-Americanism by anti-democratic tides of Soviet influence washing over the third world is inadequate. Nor is the democratic versus antidemocratic split as positively correlated with the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as Moynihan portrays it. Military and authoritarian government by the score have been directly installed by the U.S. or remain there only because of American support; among these nations are Chile, South Korea, the Philippines, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Singapore, Ghana, Guatemala, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Moynihan, and the type of foreign policy he represents, has no interest in parliamentary government for itself; "democracy stands only as a code word, meaning the continued functioning of a world-wide market and system of investments, channelled through Western institutions like the World Bank, which systematically discriminate against third world countries.

But Moynihan, though possibly the most hated man in the underdeveloped world, may well be the most admired man here. Next month, The New York Times reported, he will probably announce his candidacy for the Senate from New York. A small campaign has already started, portraying Moynihan as the intellectual elite's liaison (with working class background) to the workers, while Moynihan is always pointing out that organized labor of the Meany description has been longest and loudest in its condemnation of Soviet totalitarianism. working class anger, dormant for the moment because of apathy and Wallace's paralysis, could revive again under Moynihan or some other figure--this time as the servant of a nationalist appeal meant to increase the power of the multinational corporations but satisfying popular needs for an overriding sense of meaning. The national case of disillusion has been somewhat mitigated by the pseudo-religious politics of Carter and Jerry Brown. A presidential campaign with or without Moynihan but based on his theme for getting tough with the rest of the world could make those guys look like straight-talkers and candy-ass idealists