PSU Magazine Spring 1987

hired for that expertise, because RAND had a very big project on Vietnam that I joined, and secondarily for my China specialty, which was really my main area of interest. I was largely in favor of U.S. policy in the war. My criticisms of it were very modest. I would say I didn't have any commitment to global values such as peace and environmental protection, and I was a pretty mainstream sort of guy. The paradox is that being in that environment, where everybody was working under contract to one or another part of the military industrial complex, was what led me to begin to move in my political thinking. As I delved more deeply into some of the classified documents and other studies, but in particular these interview documents of captured Communist Vietnamese soldiers, getting their insights into why they were fighting the American and the Saigon regime , that's what led me to start raising more fundamental questions about the U.S. intervention. Q: As someone who has written extensively on U.S. intervention in various parts of the globe, how would you characterize the United States' approach to the Third World? A: I think it perceives the Third World as, in some senses, a liability, and in some senses, a dependency, and in any case, as a place where the United States must compete for influence and always be prepared to interfere by force, threat or economic penetrations, to the end, presumably, of building up the influence and power of the United States ... Instead of seeing the Third World as an area that's inhabited by three-quar– ters of the population of the planet and needs to be worked with in order to save the planet as a whole, as an area in which we're increasingly interdepen– dent in terms of our lives and "sacred fortunes," we tend to see it as an opponent of our interests. Q: With terrorists from small nations manipulating us as they have, is the power the United States wants to maintain in the Third World an illusion? A: It is an illusion both for us and for the Russians and for a lot of others who would like to follow in our footsteps. I think if there's anything that world politics teaches us it's that raw military power is increasingly irrelevant to major global issues - terrorism, refugee flight, unemploy– ment, enormous poverty and hunger, and environmental pollution, among other things. And not only that, but the continuing investment in military hardware undermines real security. (There is) wisdom in President Eisenhower's messages in the 1950s about excessive military spending as a "theft from the people." All my research, which has been very squarely in this area, tells me that we ought to heed that kind of warning. The trade deficit and the national debt in general and America's declining position as an economic leader, and the sad state of our educational system, and our inability to fund cleaning up the thousands of major toxic waste dumps, and our inability to clean up the air and water supplies of our country, all of which are part of a real national security program, has very centrally to do with outrageously high levels of military spending. This unpaid-for debt and the exorbitant commitments that have been made in terms of long-range scientific and technical research are mortgaging the futures of our children and their children. Q: I guess I don't need to ask you what your platform was when you ran for Congress! A: The platform was specifically called "human security." Although obviously I didn't win, I think I was real successful with the diverse audiences I spoke before in getting agreement that yes , something is very wrong with our priorities and that yes , we are neglecting our human resources. Q: Since the Sixties, when we first saw photos of Earth from space and began to develop an awareness of the planet's limited resources, have we come any closer to addressing world problems from a global perspective? A: It's very easy to be pessimistic that, because official thinking changes very little or not at all, we're kind of stuck in an old paradigm and that the prospects for peace and equitable economic development and environmental protection and so forth are simply PSU MAGAZINE PAGE 18 foolish ideas that will never be realized . But I think there have been very encouraging signs that give me basis for some optimism. Specifically, just in the last ten years there have been some major worldwide movements that have become very powerful. I would mention the women's movement, alternative energy, the anti-nuclear movement, the development of more diverse economies in the socialist states, the reductions in military budgets and armed forces that have taken place in China, the occasional development of successful interna– tional boycotts . . . At the community or neighborhood level - where people are "thinking globally and acting locally," as the saying goes, in terms of energy conser– vation or farmer's markets or job creation - these experiments are not noticed by the press because they're not flamboyant activities. They don't get the attention that a coup or a war or some useless diplomatic exercise gets. Q: What are your plans for the international degree program here at PSU? A: My first step is to develop an advisory council consisting of business, civic and community people whose role will be basically twofold : one, to help me in fund raising, and two , to feed in ideas on the kinds of confer– ences, seminars and colloquia that we put on. I'm busy writing grant pro– posals to foundations both national and Northwestern . . . We've given approval to an African Studies track, which adds a fifth area, and it's conceivable we can add other tracks as interest among faculty and students permits - for instance, peace studies. There's a lot we can do, but the basic message is the need for resources. If you ask me what I'd do with a million dollars , a situation I'd love to have, my long-range top priority would be to have our own faculty, to hire people who are by training and view– point multi-disciplinary, to offer a clear sequence of courses that enable people who will leave this program to be very clear about what defines international studies, what's the gel that holds it together as a distinct discipline and what one can creatively do in the world. PSU