Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Ben Wattenberg and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. Senator, the history of the Unites States in post WWII Europe is indeed a fascinating one and a successful one. Yet today we see apparently the rise of a new anti-American feeling there and apparently a new wave of Soviet influence. Has it all turned sour? What is going on there? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). Simply, there has been a shift in the balance of power. The Soviets are now perceived as the dominant power in Western Europe in just the way the United States earlier was perceived and indeed was the dominant power. Think about the certain kind of absurdity, you re seeing demonstrations all over Europe about missiles, right? But the demonstrations are about the missiles that aren t there, about the American missiles which will be deployed under the NATO agreement in response to the deployment already of the Soviet missiles, in particular the SS20, a mobile missile with three warheads, one a week is being deployed. Now you don t see any demonstrations about the missiles that are there, only the ones that might be coming. Doesn t that tell you a lot just in itself?
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. Are you suggesting then that the demonstrators are demonstrating against America rather than the Soviet Union because they re afraid of the Soviet Union and that s what a balance of power shift, not only steel and missiles but men s minds as well? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). What did Dr. Johnson say about the prospect of hanging, it wonderfully concentrates the mind. And you re beginning to see in Europe the results of the sustained Soviet military buildup that began after the Cuban Missile Crisis and which in fact they told us they were going to do, and the corresponding decline, relatively of American power. But there s something behind this that you have to go back to fully absorb and that is the sustained animus against the United States in European elites. It s always been there. And why is it there? Well, the fact is that American popular culture is now universal. It first swept to Europe, it s now swept to the world. What greater joy can a Soviet factory worker have than a pair of blue jeans. Host Ben Wattenberg. You can watch Dallas between the innings of the war in Lebanon. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). You can watch Dallas in Algiers. And it s been that way from the beginning of the century in Europe. This has always been resented by that traditional elite. Which, and here you get the complexity, which elite has tended to be Leftist through most of the 20th Century. So you have that distaste for America as a kind of vulgar place and a rich place and a place without the higher culture, then you give it a Leftist twist, then you start bringing in the reality of who has the greater number of divisions and you begin to see the results you have there. Which is not however to say that the Europeans have no reason not to want to be a nuclear battleground. But why the one sided nature of the protest. Kind of a judgment has been made, the Soviets have got the edge now.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. And yet, I was just looking through some public opinion data from Western Europe, not among elites but among the whole mass of the population, showing on that axis in any event, that the people are still preponderantly pro-American compared to pro-Soviet or even pro-neutralist, in a variety of questions believing that America is still the good guy. And those are in fact the people who vote, they are not the people who write the editorials, but they are the people, but they are the people who vote. So what is there, sort of a, if one is a European left of center politician he must have a very tricky path to walk with the elites and the editorialists on one side and the population still on the other side. The population still remembers the heroic role of America in rescuing Western Europe and so on and so forth, both during the war and after the war. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). Yes, but that s the same population which had to make a judgment about the Nazis and chose to appease them. Basically accepted appeasement, accepted the preponderance of Nazi power and it was real. And you get this kind of sequence, Ben, you see some of it in this country too, a process whereby year after year you say it doesn t matter, it s not happening, they re not building up, nothing is going on. And then bang, as if a tilt took place and say it s too late, you can t do anything.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. You used to tell that wonderful story about what was it, the Swiss Family Robinson and the snake? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). Oh. When our family was young, it was back in the Kennedy years, there was a movie called Swiss Family Robinson and it was a vulgarized version of Robinson Crusoe, but you had to take the children. So one Saturday afternoon we took the children up to a movie house here Georgetown. And this family is shipwrecked and they do wonderful things, they build houses and the find cows and they grow vegetables and they re having a wonderful time. And then comes the snake scene. Young man is in the creek bed, doing something useful, gathering mussels or something, chirping birds are happy, then silence. And the sounds change and the music becomes more ominous and the camera moves up and suddenly, there is the snake. And the snake the snake starts moving down, down. The chirping audience of five and six year olds just goes silent. And in the middle of the silence, our five year old girl suddenly says, That snake likes me. Now that s normal in a five year old, abnormal in a forty-five year old because that snake doesn t like you, that snake wants to eat you.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. What should we be doing? We filmed with Irving Brown in Europe talking about the combat of ideology, the combat of organization, and he and you and I would agree, you have to have a base of a military firmament to wage that case. You can t do it without it. But as you say you ve got to go beyond it. What are we doing wrong? How do we do it? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). Ben, with the general exception of the English speaking nations, there is not a country in the world outside the Soviet orbit that does not have a Soviet related political apparatus of some kind in that country. There is no country in Africa, Asia, South America, that doesn t have a Communist Party in one form or another. They have world political apparatus. And it has greater or less influence, by in large rarely majority influence, but it can punish. It can make like difficult for governments. It can increasingly, incredibly, threaten Soviet intervention. Now that is just happening. Afghanistan is just the most conspicuous event. I m heartbroken at some of the things that seem to be happening in Nicaragua. We had hoped for the best there. President Carter worked hard down there. It s not going well. It s going badly. And that kind of episode around the world is seen.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. Our challenge is then is to redress the power balance and at the same time, go on the ideological offensive. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). We ve got to speak for liberty in the world. And we have to make clear that the huge event, the largest event of the 20th century, has been the experience in Poland. We had thought, and had told ourselves, you told me, I told you, we all quote knew that once in place a totalitarian state is never dismantled from within. This is something we don t know how to deal with and the world should know about it as a huge event.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. What do we do, you say we ve got to make the case for liberty, what is the mechanism? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). We have to learn the art of ideological struggle. We have to know that our adversaries in this matter see life as a struggle, interpret every event from the perspective of that struggle of a world that is not getting more peaceable, not getting more democratic, not getting more liberal, but just the opposite. And learn their techniques. Host Ben Wattenberg. Didn t Lenin say something about capture the language? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). Capture the language. Stalin knew this. He thought of these things. When they re-established their international organization, the common form after WWII, he decreed that the newspaper would be called For A People s Democracy . That would be the title of the newspaper. It doesn t sound like a title of a newspaper to you and me, Times, Sentential, whatever, but For A People s Democracy . Why did he want that? Because every time that newspaper had to be quoted they had to say Today For A People s Democracy said . That s where you get The People s Democracy this, or the Democratic People s Democracy or whatever. The technique has been described by Fred Ickle who is a very fine scholar in these matters, as semantic infiltration . The minute you get the other side to start using your language to describe reality, then you win.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. If you look at it from a domestic, political point of view in America, does a conservative have the credibility around the world to make that liberty case? And does a liberal have the desire? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). There s got to be a lot more fire in the belly of people who might point out your views, my views, about making our case. And we have to train people to do it.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
Host Ben Wattenberg. Let me ask a last question. I guess in 1940 or so, Henry Luce wrote that famous essay called "The American Century" saying really that America could lay claim not just to half a continent, but to a century. The 20th Century was going to be the century where American culture, American science, American technology, American ideals, American ideology, would be the regnant force in the world. Is it possible that despite your gloominess on many of these issues, and mine too for that matter, that when all is said and done when this epoch comes to be written about if we pull our socks up on some of the issues that you ve been talking about, that that is still in our future? Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D New York). Sure. It s not going to be a century that will end up dominated by America but American things will have informed and shaped the century. Our problem between here and the year 2000, is how to deal with the breakup of the Soviet Empire. It s going to break up, Ben. It s collapsing. They can t feed themselves. They are beginning to be adventurous abroad basically in response their failure at home. That system is going to come apart. Those White Russians can t dominate that vast Euro-Asian world. They can t control their satellites anymore in Eastern Europe. The year 2000 is going to see made up of peoples who would very much like to have what Americans have, and what a lot of other peoples will have by then as well. They may find that what they would like to have is what the Japanese have, but what the Japanese have is what we had. And a lot more liberty. A lot more liberty. It is a powerful idea.
Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
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Wattenberg At Large - Irving Brown. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan discuss American foreign policy.
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