In reading the history of past wars and how they begun, we cannot help but be impressed how frequently the failure of communication, misunderstanding, and mutual irritation have played an important role in the events leading up to fateful decisions for wars.
– President John Kennedy
I recently finished reading Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman by Barbara Leaming. The book chronicles Britain’s influence on the American President.
Jack Kennedy was often sick growing up, and as he lay in hospital beds he flirted with nurses (or so he wrote his friends) and followed the career of Winston Churchill. He read Churchill’s books and his speeches, printed in major American newspapers, denouncing the current British government’s approach to Hitler. While Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed tolerating Germany’s abuses would maintain European peace, Churchill argued that Britain should vigorously rearm, so as to pressure Hitler from a position of military strength. Later, Joe Kennedy, Jack’s father, would praise Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in his role as the United States’ ambassador to the Court of St. James. In his Harvard thesis, Jack, who lionized both his father and Churchill, sided with the ambassador. Only as Europe and the world descended into the dark years of the war would Jack realize Churchill’s prescience.
After the war, faced with the new aggression of the Soviet Union, Churchill developed what he called the “double-barrel” policy. As Leaming demonstrates, Churchill and Kennedy adamantly believed that in a world armed with nuclear weapons, a shooting war was unacceptable because of the vast devastation it portended. The double-barrel policy was Churchill’s strategy to defeat, or at least contain, Communism without threatening the survival of humankind.
First, Churchill argued, democracies must maintain ready armies possessing the most deadly weapons, not in order to go to war, but to prevent war by negotiating from a position of strength. Britain’s lethargy under Chamberlain had allowed Hitler’s upheaval of the balance of power. Hitler had no fear of Britain’s atrophied army and navy, and so he acted with impunity. Churchill did not want Britain and the United States to repeat this fatal mistake with the Soviets. He believed that at the negotiating table the democratic powers could curtail Soviet expansion and that one deal would lead to more, making the world inevitably safer and reducing Moscow’s ability to demonize the west. Military strength would make the Soviets listen.
The second barrel focused on infiltrating the closed Soviet society with the open-society ideals of western democracies. In contemporary parlance, it was the “hearts and minds” strategy of what the Obama administration has gratefully stopped calling the “war on terror.” Churchill reasoned that exposure to free speech, freedom of religion, the standard of living advantages of free economies, and other hallmarks of open societies would undermine the pillars of Communism and lead to its slow, internal collapse, without recourse to a dreadful war. Any time the west could culturally engage Communism, Churchill argued, it should. Moreover, positive contact with the developing world could impede Soviet expansion. As Communism attempted to spread into Asia, for example, national leaders might face a choice of bending to pressure from Moscow or allying their nations with Britain and the US. Cultural interaction and financial and technological aid could dramatically affect the outcome of that choice.
At the bravest moments of his Presidency, Kennedy adopted the former Prime Minister’s double-barrel policy. As Leaming writes, “far from proposing to live with dictators in Moscow, he followed Churchill in viewing contact and agreements as part of a fully-fledged battle plan to bring about the downfall of Soviet Communism in an age when war was no longer an option for rational men.” Kennedy’s commitment to avoiding war through negotiating from a position of military strength prevented Soviet expansion into Western Germany and brought an end to the Cuban missile crisis. Moreover, long-term, direct diplomacy led to the first nuclear test ban treaty, an agreement with Khrushchev achieved by Kennedy and Prime Minister of Britain Harold Macmillan, with the enduring advocacy of Britain’s ambassador to the United States and long-time Kennedy friend David Ormsby-Gore. The test ban treaty was the “beginning” Kennedy repeatedly spoke of in his campaign and in his inaugural.
Seen in this wider context – and I am now moving beyond the content of Leaming’s book to its implications – the United States Peace Corps began, in a certain sense, as a weapon to win a war. The Peace Corps sends American citizens across the globe to offer their talent and hard work to address local needs and to develop lasting connections between citizens of the United States and host nations. While clear lines demarcate the Peace Corps from the United States’ intelligence agencies, during the Cold War the program clearly advanced the aims of the second barrel of the double-barrel policy devised by Churchill and implemented by the Kennedy and Macmillan governments. By placing thousands of American citizens on the ground in foreign communities throughout the world, the Peace Corps acted as part of an investment to head-off Soviet aggression by winning foreign public support for the United States.
Most volunteers have idealistic or personal reasons for applying to the Peace Corps. Very few probably ever considered themselves as foot soldiers during the Cold War, just as today, especially for volunteers deployed during the Bush years, few see themselves as extensions of the White House’s foreign policy. But to miss the soft power implications of service is to miss one of the fundamental purposes of the agency. The Peace Corps’ autonomy, which utilizes the good will of ordinary citizens without a political agenda, has always been an effective tool in international public relations.
The Berlin Wall fell two decades ago. Churchill’s double-barrel policy of negotiation backed by the threat of deadly force and cultural engagement defeated Soviet Communism without a direct conflict between Russia and the United States. The Peace Corps was some miniscule part of that strategy. Today, in a new world, as Pico Iyer writes, “in which almost every culture could access every other,” the United States faces new threats. First, extreme Muslims, loosely organized, but interconnected, have declared a holy war on the United States, motivated by religious fervor and brutal grievances, both real and imagined. Second, hostile regimes, such as in North Korea and possibly soon Iran, of smaller nations possess nuclear weapons. The Peace Corps may again have a small role to play in containing these threats, and the President should consider the admittedly small – but, on a small scale, significant – strategic possibility of future Peace Corps investment.
Like George W. Bush, who did not live up to his promise, Obama has announced a desire to expand the Peace Corps by tripling the number of volunteers. This is a good first step, but the White House should also see that new volunteers are placed in as strategic assignments as possible. The President may soon be appointing a new Peace Corps Director, and I hope he picks someone who, while competent and knowledgeable about the logistics of non-profit development, has a vision larger than the world of NGOs and relief agencies – someone who sees the potential for influencing populations that may eventually feel the pressures of extremism.
As a freshman at the University of Arkansas, I attended a speech given by former President Bill Clinton at the unveiling of a statue of William J. Fulbright, the former Senator from my state. Watching from beneath a row of small trees, far back in the crowd, I heard Clinton, standing between Old Main and the Peace Fountain, make the case that in the next thirty years the United States could find itself with far less economic influence, as China, India, and the European Union rise in power. If history reaches that point, said the former President, the United States cannot expect the world to blindly follow its lead, and so in preparation for that possibility, the US must begin laying a foundation of goodwill around the world. We can remain a leader, Clinton argued, but not just through military and economic strength; we must give nations a reason to trust our leadership.
The Peace Corps, USAID, and all the other shotgun shells of soft power should be part of that campaign.
