Until the end of World War II, U.S. leadership in the struggle against colonialism was universally acknowledged, and the U.S. record spoke for itself. Woodrow Wilson, leader of the first onetime colony to win independence of Europe in modern times, raised "self-determination of peoples" as a standard to which native leaders everywhere could repair. In World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt so harried Churchill about Britain's colonial possessions that during one wartime conference Churchill cried: "Mr. President, I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire." In 1942 when Sir Stafford Cripps unsuccessfully tried to reach a settlement with India's nationalists, a U.S. representative took part in the negotiations—a step which, together with Roosevelt's constant prodding of the British, encouraged Gandhi and Nehru in their fight, thereby hastened the independence of India and Pakistan.
Armed with France's written pledge to give independence to Syria and Lebanon, F.D.R. in 1945 assured Saudi Arabia's Ibn Saud that he would back the Syrians and Lebanese by all means short of outright force. And during the Casablanca Conference Roosevelt insisted on dining with Morocco's Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef, then subject to France, pointedly told the Sultan: "A sovereign government should retain considerable control over its own resources." Most Frenchmen date the Sultan's stubborn drive toward ultimate independence from that day.
MORE THAN HALF
The chorus of disapproval that portrays the U.S. as a bastion of imperialism erupted after World War II. It has been assiduously fostered by the propaganda mills of Russia, the greatest postwar imperialist of them all. Yet since World War II, 20 Afro-Asian ex-colonies, inhabited by more than 700 million people, have achieved independence, and more than half of them owe their liberation, at least in part, to the U.S. Items:
THE PHILIPPINES. The only large and economically important colony ever held by the U.S. got its independence, according to prewar promise, on July 4, 1946. (Puerto Rico, offered independence, chose to remain tied to the U.S. as a semi-autonomous "commonwealth.")
INDOCHINA. While supporting France's military effort against the Communist imperialism in Southeast Asia, the U.S. gently but steadily pressured the French toward the grant of full independence that South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia finally got—almost too late—in 1954.
INDONESIA. In 1949, after The Netherlands, in defiance of continual admonitions from the Truman Administration, persisted in its efforts to reconquer Indonesia, the U.S. Senate laid the cards on the table with a bill calling for suspension of economic aid to any nation whose conduct was "inconsistent ... with the charter of the U.N." Between such threats and the on-the-spot diplomacy of Merle Cochran, later first U.S. Ambassador in
Djakarta, the Dutch were goaded into the negotiations that ended in a free Indonesia. Though few Indonesians realize it—and fewer still feel any appreciation—Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was speaking the simple truth when he declared that the Indonesian Republic "came into being in large part as a result of the interest of the United States that a republic should be founded."
MIDDLE EAST. When the Egyptians in 1951 launched a campaign of terrorism to drive British forces out of the Suez Canal Zone, the U.S. made clear that its sympathies lay with Egypt. Long after the British finally gave way in 1954 to Egypt's demands, Sir Anthony Eden grumbled that the negotiations had been vastly complicated by the fact each time a settlement seemed near, U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery had urged Egypt's Nasser to demand better terms. Two years later, when Britain and France set out to reoccupy the Canal Zone by force, the U.S. publicly repudiated its two oldest and closest allies, in a demonstration of devotion to principle perhaps unique in diplomatic annals.
A QUESTION OF CREDIT
Despite such a record, the U.S. earned small thanks in Afro-Asian countries. Why does it find itself portrayed, by such disparate men as Nasser and Nehru, as a covert aider and abettor of imperialism? Diehard Colonel Blimps—British, French and American—retort that such "ingratitude" simply proves the folly of "appeasing" the Afro-Asian world. The real answers are more complicated.
- ¶ Nations newly emerged from colonial status are irritated by U.S. unwillingness to support their every aspiration, however unrealistic. Many somehow expected that independence would bring with it the material blessings they had always lacked, and blamed the U.S. when it proved unable to provide them.
- ¶ The U.S. has made mistakes. In Indonesia, judging from the chaos that now reigns there, the U.S. may well have thrown its weight on the side of independence too soon; in Algeria it is arguable that out of deference to France the U.S. has held its hand too long. By refusal even to discuss eventual re-establishment of Japanese civil government in strategic Okinawa, the Pentagon has needlessly fed Asian distrust of the U.S.
- ¶ The U.S. has suffered from a propaganda failure. Despite a national obsession with "good public relations," no U.S. Administration has ever found a means of capitalizing on its anti-colonialism in Asia and Africa without bitterly antagonizing the colonial powers of Europe.
Overriding all others is the new fact that leadership of the free world has thrust upon the U.S. responsibilities and commitments that neither Roosevelt nor Wilson ever confronted. Ten years ago most U.S. citizens could share the traditional American concept of colonialism as unrelieved oppression and exploitation. Today's U.S. leaders are aware that colonialism has often been an instrument of progress, that the world's problems cannot be solved by simply taking an anticolonial stand in every circumstance.
If Britain subjugated the Gold Coast, it was also Britain that transformed the Gold Coast from a geographical expression into a nation; if Englishmen grew rich off Malaya, they also introduced to Malaya the rubber and tin industries that lifted it out of a feudal economy, gave its inhabitants their first glimpses of the economic well-being they are now demanding as an underdeveloped nation.
Nor has Wilson's appealing formula—self-determination for everybody—proved the magic wand that it once appeared. The cry of self-determination offers no solution to the problem of West Irian, where Indonesia and The Netherlands are disputing the mastery of savage peoples who have no ties with either the Javanese or the Dutch, yet are incapable of developing and ruling a nation in the modern world. It is scarcely any more helpful in Cyprus, where straightforward recourse to a plebiscite might well bring Greece and Turkey into an armed conflict that would destroy NATO's Eastern wing.
Here, as in many another area, U.S. idealism has been brought face to face with an unpalatable truth: when self-determination conflicts with the overriding U.S. objective of preserving the free world from Communist conquest, both expediency and good conscience dictate that self-determination must take second place. For unless the tide of Communism is contained, the world's dependent peoples will lose even the freedom to cry for freedom.
PAEANS & PAINS
Responsible for the free world as it is and not as the U.S. would like it to be, the U.S. cannot indulge in the slogans or the ringing declarations that are possible to those who can demand what is desirable only because they are not charged with doing what is possible. That possibility was best formulated more than a year and a half ago by John Foster Dulles: "I believe that the role of the U.S. is to try to see that that [anticolonial] process moves forward in a constructive, evolutionary way, and does not either come to a halt or take a violent revolutionary turn ... I suspect that the U.S. will find that its role . . . will be to try to aid that process without identifying itself 100% either with the so-called colonial powers or with the powers which are primarily and uniquely concerned with the problem of getting their independence as rapidly as possible."
Such a policy will earn few paeans of gratitude, will expose the U.S. to an incessant and painful barrage of criticism from both Europe and Afro-Asian countries. But in the long sweep of history, it may be the best hope of building a world order based on freedom and justice.
