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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JANUARY 18, 1985
PAGE 7
been wary of military commitments and uncharacteristically wor
ried about the future. The perceived hesitation and drift in
foreign policy came to be known as "the post-Vietnam syn
drome."•••
Vietnam set America wobbling. Television brought the killing and
the seeming futility of the conflict into every home and sparked
public protest, and some old values and institutions were weak
ened. Much of the public came to distrust the country's leaders,
especially those who had involved America in Vietnam. Congress
distrusted the executive branch•••• The tradition of bipartisan
foreign policy disintegrated.... The acrimony continues.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security ad
viser, says the old establishment lost its will to rule, and that
it now wants the U.s. to be loved rather than feared and re-
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spected••••
Ronald Reagan, who called the war "a noble cause," entered the
White House in 1981 hoping to end the post-Vietnam syndrome••••
President Reagan may have eased the residual pain of Vietnam,
with his patriotic talk about standing tall. But certain prob
lems of the post-Vietnam era remain, especially the absence of
bipartisan foreign policy. The bitter debates of the past four
years over Lebanon, Central America and arms control suggest that
the old consensus is dead. "One of Mr. Reagan's achievements is
that he has undonemuch of the damage we have suffered," says Mr.
[Henry] Kissinger. "But he can't undo the sequence of events--
Angola, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua--which were the indirect
consequences of Vietnam. The fact that we have such difficulty
today discussing Central America in strategic terms--as opposed
to abstract moral terms--is a burden Reagan must carry."
Richard Holbrooke, a politically liberal former State Department
official who spent three years in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, sums
up how the war changed America's image of itself: "I grew up in
school believing that the United States had never lost a war. My
children don't think that. I grew up thinking that the United
States was the strongest country on earth. My kids think that
maybe Russia is. Suddenly we became fallible.".••
If President Reagan has restored an image of strength in foreign
policy, it is thanks to his military buildup. But in dealing
with regional crises--especially in Lebanon and Central America-
the administration's foreign policy has seemed confused.•••
Lebanon contributed another disturbing image to post-Vietnam
foreign policy: the bombed-out rubble of the American Embassy and
Marine headquarters of Beirut, which the U.S. couldn't protect
and wouldn't avenge.
A recent cartoon by s. Kelley, circulated by the Copley News Service, re
flected America's fearfulness in reacting to foreign challenges. In the
cartoon a gun-toting guerrilla labeled "Moslem Terror" is seen standing on
the American flag, his dirty boots having sullied half the stripes. A whim
pish figure labeled "State Department" says to the terrorist: "Oh yeah?
Well, if you cross that next line, I'm gonna get really, really, really
mad."
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