Commitment and capacity

Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?

— Luke 13:31

One of the advantages of working Saturday nights (and there aren't many) is hearing Alistaire Cooke's "Letter from America" on the BBC while driving home.

I often disagree with Cooke, but even so I find him an amiable host. I enjoy his dry sense of humor and his ability to weave together stories and to find the connections between the many disparate things he's seen and learned in his long life.

Now, at the age of 95, Cooke is retiring and the "Letter from America" — which has been broadcast since 1946 — is signing off for good. The BBC has a nice page in Cooke's honor, with the audio and text of many of his memorable broadcast segments.

As part of it's extended farewell, the Beeb broadcast this segment on Saturday night. It was Cooke's 1,000th "letter," originally airing on March 24, 1968. The immediate topic was the war in Vietnam, but the real topic was American power and the limits thereof, which makes this particular radio essay rather timely.

Cooke describes Secretary of State Dean Rusk's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There's something almost Capraesque in the way Cooke describes the proceedings:

… last week the administration was brought to the bar of a standing committee of Congress and nothing, either in a parliamentary or a federal system, can offer such an inquisition as a congressional inquiry, which is the nerve system of what Americans like to call the democratic process. …

Here was the secretary of state called as the president's understudy and subjected to the third degree by the representatives of the people.

And if that sounds a little lurid or sentimental let me remind you of the cast of characters that sat like a court of judges the other day and challenged Secretary Rusk from ten in the morning to six-thirty one day and from nine to two the next.

There was a farmer from Vermont, a mining engineer from Montana, a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas, the school teacher's son of a hardware merchant from South Dakota, an electric products manufacturer from Missouri, a stockman from Kansas, a professor of Far Eastern history, a former secretary of the air, six lawyers — not too many to reflect the preponderance of lawyers who sit in Congress and who do, after all, make the laws.

The entire piece is worth reading as it builds to this, toward the end:

The United States has 132 military bases abroad and solemn treaty commitments to come to the aid of 43 nations if they're attacked or — what is more likely these days — disrupted from within.

The earnest and gentle Senator Church put his finger on this Achilles heel by asking the secretary if the great conflict was not between commitment and capacity.

In other words, America may be right but is she able?

How did it come about that this country led successively by a soldier, then an alert foreign affairs student and then by the shrewdest of politicians, committed itself to play St George to 43 dragons?

We must go back I think to what I called the early glow of American world power in the early 1950s. That is when the pledges were given and when the cost of them was never counted.

The Communists, not to mention the nationalists, and the millions of Asians who simply want to see the white man leave their continent for good had not attempted a test of American power.

As late as the day of Kennedy's inauguration the United States was still flexing and rippling its muscles for lack of exercise.

And on that day the president delivered himself of a sentence magnificent as rhetoric, appalling as policy.

Secretary Rusk, very much moved, recited it the other day to the committee as the touchstone of America's resolve.

"Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

This I suggest is fine to read but fatal to act on. …

I believe there's room to agree both with Cooke and with Kennedy. One can embrace the magnificent notion that America's interest and purpose is "to assure the survival and success of liberty" while still avoiding the hubris of believing our capacity to do so is infinite. The resolve to "pay any price" does not negate the responsibility for counting the cost.