The Conduct of American Foreign Policy:Reflections on a Heavy Year

George W. Ball, currently a senior managing director of the firm of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in New York, was Under Secretary of State from 1961 to 1966 and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 1968. He is the author of The Discipline of Power and Diplomacy for a Crowded World.

This year was in all respects a very heavy time," wrote the authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1097, and we can appropriately use the same phrase to describe 1980. To be sure our country was not engaged in war; the Danes did not raid our coast; America was still rich by world standards; and the harvest was adequate. But a doleful chorus of lamentation was heard not only in our land but throughout the non-communist nations. It had a persistent recurring theme. At a time when the Soviet Union was systematically extending its military reach, the United States was falling into apathy and incompetence. No longer did we Americans seem willing and able to assure the security of our friends and allies. No longer did we display the mastery of events that had given confidence in our economic, political and military leadership.

To some extent one heard overtones of Schadenfreude. America had been top dog for a long time and we had not always worn our epaulets of authority with grace and dignity. Still, one could not shrug off such pervasive apprehension merely as the sour fruit of jealousy. After all, our friends were merely repeating worrisome questions about our capacity for leadership that we had ourselves first uttered. Our military theologians were asserting that we faced a dangerous period when our second-strike strategic nuclear capability might be vulnerable. Our generals were insisting that we lacked the conventional power to halt a Soviet encroachment in such a critical area as the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, we were documenting those dire assertions by symbols of our incompetence.

A symbol that most shocked our friends was the breakdown of the helicopters during our aborted April rescue effort in the Iranian desert-a spectacular failure in an area where American supremacy had long been taken for granted, the ability to make complex machinery work effectively. The only conclusion to be drawn was that America's volunteer armed forces were in appallingly poor condition, and our sophisticated foreign critics memorized the frightening statistics of flagging enlistments and lamentable levels of illiteracy and incompetence in our army.