Sen. Fulbright on Vietnam

This post of an excerpt by the Abbeville Institute from William Fulbright’s book The Arrogance of Power reminds us that not all Southerners are idiots as the New York Times and Washington Post would have us believe.  The people who got us into Afghanistan and Iraq would have done well to read Fulbright’s book.  Fulbright wrote:

The attitude above all others which I feel sure is no longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission. The dilemmas involved are preeminently American dilemmas, not because America has weaknesses that others do not have but because America is powerful as no nation has ever been before and the discrepancy between its power and the power of others appears to be increasing….

We are now engaged in a war to “defend freedom” in South Vietnam. Unlike the Republic of Korea, South Vietnam has an army which [is] without notable success and a weak, dictatorial government which does not command the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people. The official war aims of the United States Government, as I understand them, are to defeat what is regarded as North Vietnamese aggression, to demonstrate the futility of what the communists call “wars of national liberation,” and to create conditions under which the South Vietnamese people will be able freely to determine their own future. I have not the slightest doubt of the sincerity of the President and the Vice President and the Secretaries of State and Defense in propounding these aims. What I do doubt and doubt very much_is the ability of the United States to achieve these aims by the means being used. I do not question the power of our weapons and the efficiency of our logistics; I cannot say these things delight me as the y seem to delight some of our officials, but they are certainly impressive. What I do question is the ability of the United States, or France or any other Western nation, to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy racy where there is no tradition of it and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life. Our handicap is well expressed in the pungent Chinese proverb: “In shallow waters dragons become the sport of shrimps.”

Early last month demonstrators in Saigon burned American jeeps, tried to assault American soldiers, and marched through the streets shouting “Down with the American imperialists,” while one of the Buddhist leaders made a speech equating the United States with the communists as a threat to South Vietnamese independence. Most Americans are understandably shocked ant angered to encounter such hostility from people who by now would be under the rule of the Viet Cong but for the sacrifice of American lives and money. Why, we may ask, are they so shockingly ungrateful? Surely they must know that their very right to parade and protest and demonstrate depends on the Americans who are defending them.

The answer, I think, is that “fatal impact” of the rich and strong on the poor and weak. Dependent on it though the Vietnamese are, our very strength is a reproach to their weakness, our wealth a mockery of their poverty, our success a reminder of their failures. What they resent is the disruptive effect of our strong culture upon their fragile one, an effect which we can no more avoid than a man can help being bigger than a child. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact….

The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends. We are still acting like boy scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across the streets they do not want to cross. We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders. The objective may b e desirable, but it is not feasible….

If America has a service to perform in the world_and I believe it has_it is in large part the service of its own example. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest. This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said!
“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” . . .

There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world. We have the opportunity to set an example of generous understanding in our relations with China, of practical cooperation for peace in our relations with Russia, of reliable and respectful partnership in our relations with Western Europe, of material helpfulness without moral presumption in our relations with the developing nations, of abstention from the temptations of hegemony in our relations with Latin America, and of the all- around advantages of minding one’s own business in our relations with everybody. Most of all, we have the opportunity to serve as an example o f democracy to the world by the way in which we run our own society; America, in the words of John Quincy Adams, should be “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” . …

If we can bring ourselves so to act, we will have overcome the dangers of the arrogance of power. It will involve, no doubt, the loss of certain glories, but that seems a price worth paying for the probable rewards, which are the happiness of America and the peace of the world.

From J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (Random House, 1967).

 

Use Nuclear Power to Fight Global Warming

 The Economist magazine has an excellent article on the importance of nuclear power in fighting global warming. It says:

Because nuclear power is expensive in ways that show up in profits, whereas damage to the climate is not priced into burning fossil fuels, this would be unsurprising even if it were popular with environmentalists—which, by and large, it is not. But it is still too bad. The paradigm-shifting drop in the cost of renewable electricity in the past decade is central to the decarbonisation pathway the world is fitfully following. But a clean-energy system requires redundancy and reliability in its electricity grids that are hard to achieve with renewables alone. It will probably also require lots of hydrogen for, say, powering aircraft and making steel and chemicals, which reactors could provide.

Nuclear power has its drawbacks, as do all energy sources. But when well-regulated it is reliable and, despite its reputation, extremely safe. That is why it is foolish to close down perfectly good nuclear power stations such as Diablo Canyon, in California, because of little more than prejudice. It is why some countries, most notably China, are building out their nuclear fleets. It helps explain why others—including, as it happens, Saudi Arabia—are getting into the game for the first time. And it is why approaches to reducing nuclear energy’s cost penalty are at last coming into their own.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/11/13/the-discreet-charm-of-nuclear-power

Nuclear Energy at COP26

 

Time Magazine reports that nuclear energy is having a mixed reception at COP26,  One group sees it as a source of energy that does not contribute to global warming, but another sees it as just another source of pollution.  Natural gas faces an equally mixed reception, since it contributes less to global warming than coal, but it still releases carbon dioxde.  France and Russia are champions of nuclear power, with US support, but Germany, Belgium, New Zealand, and Austria oppose including nuclear as a green power source. 

One argument against nuclear plants is that they take a long time to build and are expensive.  But that may be an argument to get started soon if we are going to need them. 

 

Biden's Plan vs the New Deal

 

Biden has often compared what he wants to do with his Build Back Better plan to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  When Roosevelt was elected during the Great Depression, unemployment was a huge problem.  People needed money, and there was no work.  Roosevelt created a number of programs to put people to work.  These included the Civilian Conservation Corp, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration.  

Unemployment was a big problem only at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.  It soon developed that many office workers could work from home over the Internet.  Many of those who couldn’t work from home continued to work in their service jobs at grocery stores, farms, etc.  Those who lost their jobs, mainly lost them because many travel-related businesses closed or became much smaller, hotels, restaurants, airlines, etc. Thee was a huge spike in unemployment, but it did not last long. 

Covid meant that a jobs program like the CCC was inappropriate because of fears about infection from concentrations of workers.  Thus the government just gave money to citizens to support them while they had to stay home.  There were some relief programs like this under the New Deal – the Federal Emergency Relief Act and the Social Security Act – but relatively few compare to jobs programs. 

Now, as the threat of Covid is reduced and people can go back to work, they don’t want to.  There are many jobs that cannot be filled, as more people drop out of the labor force.  Whether they will return for higher salaries remains to be seen.  What effect the higher salaries will have on the national economy remains to be seen.  It is not clear that there will be enough skilled workers to build Biden’s infrastructure projects.  Workers may have to come from other countries. 

In addition to paying people to stay home, the government reduced interest rates to almost zero in order to spur the economy.  The worked almost immediately.  After a big loss, the stock market recovered robustly, making many people rich in the process.  The government response had the perverse effect of increasing the gap between the rich and the poor in America.  While it prevented the poor from starving, it made the upper classes much wealthier, so that the pandemic was the best thing that had happened to them in a generation. 

The New Deal probably made some people rich, but not nearly as many as the pandemic did. It was quickly followed by World War II, which put everyone to work, but also used up all the nation’s resources, so that almost everything was rationed, for rich and poor. People made sacrifices for the Depression and for World War II, but nobody has made any sacrifices to deal with the pandemic, except for some doctors, nurses, and other service employees like grocery workers and meatpackers.