The Right Consensus?: Holsti and Rosenau's New Foreign Policy Belief Surveys

The Right Consensus?: Holsti and Rosenau's New Foreign Policy Belief SurveysAuthor(s): Thomas FergusonSource: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 411-423Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600642 .

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International Studies Quarterly (1986) 30, 411-423

The Right Consensus? Holsti and Rosenau's New Foreign Policy Belief Surveys

THOMAS FERGUSON

University of Texas, A ustin

This article is a (friendly) criticism of recent writings by Holsti and Rosenau on the foreign policy views of American elites. It argues that their own data show a marked shift to the right by business, lawyers, and some other occupational groups during the late 1970s. It raises some questions about the adequacy of Holsti and Rosenau's questionnaire design and scaling procedures, and it rejects their suggestion that the experience of the Vietnam War explains later divisions among American elites.

Holsti and Rosenau, in their new book and essay, seek to explain the changing pattern of domestic political conflict over American foreign policy. From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, they argue, top policy makers, both major political parties, and the public at large shared what 'critics sometimes called the "eastern internationalist establishment" viewpoint' (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984: 1; also see Holsti and Rosenau 1986). This High Cold War consensus embraced a 'number of fundamental proposi- tions about the nature of the international system and America's appropriate internal role within it' (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:218).1 In negative terms, these new doctrines amounted to a flat repudiation of George Washington's long hallowed admonition against entangling alliances and the 'isolationism' that Holsti and Rosenau believe characterized American foreign policy during the inter-war period. Positively, the new views enjoined a vastly enlarged, global role for the United States; massive outlays for both military and economic foreign aid; the construction of a network of overseas bases; and a wide-ranging series of security agreements and formal alliances with foreign powers. This post-war consensus also included a leading role for the United States

I 'High Cold War consensus' is my term, not theirs. The characterization of their views that follows draws indifferently from both their works cited above. To hold documentation to manageable proportions, notes are limited to direct quotations or potentially controversial points. Note that the same qualifications apply to this discussion as pertain to Holsti and Rosenau's own analysis of the work of others: that space limitations make some stylization inevitable.

Author's Note: The author is grateful to Erik Devereux, Gavan Duffy, Anne McCauley, Benjamin Page, James Sidanius, and the editors and referees of International Studies Quarterly for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

0020-8833/86/04 0411-13 $03.00 ? 1986 International Studies Association



412 The Right ConsensuTs?

within international organizations; broad efforts to open up the world economy and, of course, a determination to 'contain' the Soviet Union.

The war in Vietnam, Holsti and Rosenau suggest, destroyed this consensus. Based in part on an examination of recent foreign policy writings, but primarily on two large surveys they undertook in 1976 and 1980, respectively, they suggest that the war divided American elites into three 'distinct, almost mutually exclusive' camps (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:249) that now share little more than a sense of moral obligation to Israel, a continuing suspicion of the Soviet Union, and (with some qualifications discussed below) free trade.2 The bloc that Holsti and Rosenau label 'Cold War Inter- nationalists', represented by the members of the Committee for the Present Danger and similar groups, views global political developments primarily in terms of the conflict between the United States and the USSR. Believing that US lack of resolve and Soviet aggressiveness have tilted the military balance dangerously against the West, they favor a massive arms buildup and oppose arms control. They also oppose further reliance on nuclear strategies based on the principle of mutual assured destruction. Both 'Post-Cold War Internationalists' and 'Semi-Isolationists', on the other hand, reject this emphasis on super-power confrontation. Insisting on the complexity of contemporary world politics, they pay more attention to the indigenous roots of most political conflicts. Post- Cold War Internationalists, in particular, consider inequality, poverty, hunger, disease, and similar social conditions to be as dangerous in the long run as the USSR itself. Both Post-Cold War Internationalists and Semi-Isolationists favor arms control and believe that US cooperation with the USSR is possible. The former, however, continue to support an expansive definition of the US global role and hope that wider transnational cooperation can help alleviate the world's problems; while the latter identify this messianic impulse as part of the problem. They counsel instead that problem solving, like charity, should begin at home.

Holsti and Rosenau reject recent suggestions that the dramatic developments in international relations during the late 1970s, such as the collapse of the American-supported regime in Iran and the subsequent seizure of American hostages there, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the ascent of Reagan to the Presidency, heralded an 'end of the Vietnam syndrome,' and the arrival of a new consensus. Instead, a comparison of their 1980 survey with that of 1976 leads them to conclude that 'the foreign policy beliefs of American leaders remained quite stable' (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:214). That is, the elites remain divided into the same three camps that the original debate over the Vietnam War created, and each camp's earlier views on Vietnam remain the best clue to their views on the other points in dispute.

How should we regard these studies, whose conclusions are clearly the fruits of unusually wide reading, careful thought and major efforts at systematic data analysis?

Among the first reactions the authors must command is admiration for their exquisite sense of timing. As this essay goes to press, Mexico and many other countries in Latin America appear on the verge of bankruptcy; the US 'covert' war in Nicaragua is becoming ever more overt; the government of South Africa has assumed sweeping 'emergency' powers; an Egyptian regime backed heavily by the American government and leading American businesses grows shakier every day; the wars in El Salvador and Afghanistan continue, as the Reagan administration debates whether to become more involved in the civil war in Angola; economic growth in Singapore and other parts of the

2 For Israel, see Holsti and Rosenau (1984:206); for suspicion of the USSR, see Holsti and Rosenau (1984:75); on free trade, see the discussion, infra, on 'Cold War Nationalism.'



THOMAS FERGUSON 413

previously booming Pacific rim is slowing; Middle East oil surpluses are shrinking with vast, contradictory effects on regional growth patterns; and the American government is preparing major new initiatives to relieve the world debt crisis that will certainly tie it and major international financial institutions far more closely to many reluctant countries in the Third World for a number of years to come.

This is 'complex interdependence' with a vengeance. With two, three, four . . . many Vietnams potentially in the offing, a study of what the first one did to the United States is no antiquarian venture.

And ripeness is far from all that the Holsti-Rosenau studies offer. Though, as will be evident, I interpret a number of the points they make rather differently and disagree with some others, their findings are important and extremely suggestive. They cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with foreign policy and, especially when they are reinterpreted along lines I suggest below, should concern everyone interested in American politics in general. While one might raise some questions about their questionnaire design and scaling technique, the systematic differences they perceive between Cold War Internationalists and Post-Cold War Internationalists are, I think, real. They are important to understanding cleavages among both elites and (because, precisely as Holsti and Rosenau suggest, elites influence many others through a 'two- step flow' and other modes of communication) the public, not only on foreign policy issues, but on many other dimensions of policy as well.

I believe they are also correct in claiming that the distinctions between these camps have persisted after 1979, and that generational changes of the type discussed by Allison (1970-1971), Huntington (1981), and the popular press have little to do with these divisions.3 They are probably also right to distinguish both of these views from 'semi- isolationism', and I am sympathetic to their suggestion that the war in Vietnam coincided with the end of the liberal, eastern, internationalist consensus.

But while I have read the Holsti-Rosenau studies with great interest and profit, I must acknowledge misgivings about several of the claims they advance. These doubts could be developed in several different ways by picking up the threads of the argument at different levels of detail or abstraction. Because this essay is a (friendly) comment on their work, and not an independent piece of research, I shall attempt to frame my discussion in terms of their own analysis.

To begin with, I believe their tripartite distinction between Cold War International- ists, Post-Cold War Internationalists, and Semi-Isolationists neglects at least one other major point of view among American elites: what might be called 'Cold War Nationalism' (though there is little that is distinctively Cold War about it, and before the New Deal it represented the consensus ideology of most of American business).

The need for this additional category is patent, if one accepts-as I believe one must Holsti and Rosenau's characterization of the members of the Committee for the

President Danger as paradigmatic Cold War Internationalists. Most leading members of this group, including David Packard, who made a large donation to help get the group off the ground, Douglas Dillon, and Paul Nitze, are long-time champions of the trade liberalization initiatives that Holsti and Rosenau correctly identify as part of the original Cold War consensus.4 In this highly significant sense, they truly represent 'Cold War Internationalism', and, precisely as Holsti and Rosenau several times affirm

3 See also the other sources noted in Holsti and Rosenau (1984:175). 4 For their identification of Cold War Internationalists and the Committee on the Present Danger, cf.

Holsti anid Rosenau (1984:108). On trade, cf. Holsti and Rosenau (1984:220, 222); Ferguson (1984)



414 The Right Consensus?

(1984:250), they clearly constitute a major bloc within the Reagan coalition. But if one concedes that a commitment, however hedged, to an open world economy

is basic to all forms of 'internationalism' (including Post-Cold War Internationalism), then there must be another box in which to place the strongly pro-military and right wing, but staunchly nationalist and outspokenly protectionist opponents of the New Deal who-until the 1960s-were, after all, the only ones talking about an 'eastern liberal establishment'. While they by no means exhaust the identity of the American 'right' today, or (a bit less clearly) at other points in the past, their viewpoint is too important to be ignored-since it is shared by such prominent American leaders as Senator Jesse Helms (the Senator from North Carolina, textiles, and tobacco, who now sits disruptively on the Foreign Relations Committee); some Helms allies in organizations like the American Security Council; many leaders of the old Gold- water movement (who wrote an import restriction clause into the 1964 Republican platform that Dillon, Nitze & Co., who all backed Johnson, opposed); several top officials in the Nixon and Ford administrations; and (though Holsti and Rosenau usually treat him as an unalloyed Cold War Internationalist) many early supporters of Ronald Reagan, as well as growing numbers of American business men and women anxious for relief from competitors in Japan and elsewhere.5

How did a gmvoup so significant elude Holsti and Rosenau's carefully drawn samples? One reason is obvious: their questionnaire did not include a query on the topic, and their analysis focused on other issues.

But while they did not ask a direct question on import restrictions, their survey included one question which might have alerted them to a problem: their inquiry about the importance respondents attached to preserving American jobs. Alas, for what are almost certainly reasons of sampling, the answers failed to discriminate between the three camps: no one cared very much. As Holsti and Rosenau rather delicately report:

describes in detail the New Deal origins of the postwar trade initiatives; Ferguson and Rogers (1981:17-19) analyze the position of the Committee on the Present Danger and defense groups in relation to the stances of their various members to international trade.

Another way of making the point urged here is to consider the dimensions that underlie Holsti and Rosenau's classification. One dimension is Internationalism/Nationalism. The other could well be considered to be pro-Cold War/anti-Cold War. Considering these together yields the familiar 2 x 2 table, and makes it plain that Holsti and Rosenau neglect one entry. I am grateful to Benjamin Page for bringing this point to my attention.

5 For the right-wing opposition to the New Deal, see Ferguson (1984); for the postwar period, generally, see Ferguson (1983); specifically on Helms, the Goldwater movement and certain early supporters of Reagan, see Ferguson and Rogers (1981, but especially 1986, chapters 2 and 3); high Nixon and Ford officials from strongly protectionist sectors included Commerce Secretary Dent and Army Secretary Callaway, both of whom had major textile holdings. For the commitments protectionist industrialists have extracted from Republican presidential hopefuls, see e.g., Ferguson and Rogers (1986), or the blunt statements in Ronald Reagan to Strom Thurmond (September 3, 1980 and October 4, 1982) (copies made available to me by Senator Thurmond's office).

Robert Galvin, the chief executive officer of Motorola, which has recently strongly promoted an import surcharge, is a prominent member of the board of the American Security Council; note also that Helms and other representatives of the textile industry have sharply attacked the US opening to China, mentioned by Holsti and Rosenau (1984:215, n.7) as generally championed by Cold War Internationalists. The Chairman of Burlington Industries, for example, has strongly assailed US China policy (see Raleigh News and Observer, November 25, 1982) as a threat to the US textile industry.

Note, incidentally, that this discussion of the relation of the trade issue to party politics and international relations refers to the New Deal era. Particularly since 1980, traditional party (and some interest group) alignments have evolved rapidly, as, for example, parts of the Democratic coalition (both labor and certain business interests) have become more sympathetic to protectionism, while the struggle inside the GOP sharpens. For more details, cf. Ferguson and Rogers (1986).



THOMAS FERGUSON 415

'relatively few leaders ascribed great importance to protecting jobs of American workers' (1984:88).6

While it certainly does not negate Holsti and Rosenau's entire discussion, the omission of a category for 'Cold War Nationalism' almost automatically raises some doubts about their analysis of the dynamics of elite opinion change. But it is impossible for an outside analyst, who lacks access to the original data, to say anything very precise about the difference it might make.

Beyond these misgivings about categories, I do have another concern. Holsti and Rosenau emphasize the relative stability of elite opinion and they insist on rooting the perceived lack of change in contrasting (elite) perspectives on Vietnam. In my view, their position requires closer scrutiny than it has so far received.

Put simply, the main problem is this: although Holsti and Rosenau correctly emphasize continuing conflicts between rival modes of thought, and rightly note the coincidence of the Vietnam War with the disappearance of the old foreign policy consensus, their analysis nevertheless misses a major feature of the debates: a move of the whole system of thought among American elites to the right in the late 1970s.

This broad move to the right can be described in various ways. Perhaps the easiest way to make the point is to direct attention to the levels of defense spending representatives of the various camps discussed by Holsti and Rosenau proposed at different points in the 1970s. Holsti and Rosenau, of course, are completely correct in affirming that

6 My interpretation of the responses to this question assumes that, during periods of 6-9 percent unemployment, even the hardiest free trader would shrink from claiming to be totally uninterested, and thus would not register extreme opinions. For the failure of the question to differentiate, see Holsti and Rosenau (1986:18); Holsti and Rosenau (1984:88-89) note that the jobs question also fails to differentiate respondents according to their position on the war.

The 'sampling' problem arises from Holsti and Rosenau's reliance on Who's Who (1984:261) for their sample of business people. Ever since the 1950s, when the chemical industry began making major direct foreign investments, the industrial heart of the protectionist bloc has been in declining sectors such as textiles, steel, and shoes, or independent oil, whose resources are-as a group-dwarfed by the successful multinationals. Because they are, on the average, smaller, their owners and executives are almost certainly much less likely to show in Who's Who than they are irn the corridors of power. For the same reason, the firms in the nationalist bloc employ fewer lawyers listed in the directories that Holsti and Rosenau used. The same comparative lack of resources, I think, is also a major reason for the fact that the Cold War Nationalists endlessly bemoan that they are underrepresented in the media and education. Perhaps only among the clergy -a number of whose leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, have close ties with leaders of this bloc-do their representatives appear in any strength at all. In the sample as a whole, they are simply too few, and their responses are probably lumped in with the Cold War Internationalists, or, in some cases, perhaps, the Semi- Isolationists.

It should be noted that Holsti and Rosenau's treatment of the relation of their three camps to the trade issue is not entirely consistent. Their description of both Cold War Internationalism anid Post-Cold War Internationalism suggests strongly that both are committed to free trade, and, as noted, these views could hardly deserve to qualify as 'internationalism' if they did not. But despite the failure of the jobs question to differentiate all three camps, including Semi-Isolationism, they do at several points identify 'protectionism' with Semi-Isolationism (see, e.g., p. 123 or p. 254). They also make an ambiguous remark on p. 254 that identifies Reagan with Semi-Isolationism on trade, whereas he is elsewhere treated as an unalloyed Cold War Internationalist.

This tergiversation, which no doubt derives from the absence of a clear category for 'Cold War Nationalism', is very confusing. Granted that Semi-Isolationist labor leaders are very concerned about jobs, .still, either the jobs question differentiates across categories as a whole or it doesn't. (It is worthy of note that Holsti and Rosenau prudently did not include the question on their Semi-Isolationalism scale, p. 128.) Nor, if protectionism is a form of Semi-Isolationism, does it then make sense to say that support for Semi- Isolationism showed signs of decline between 1976 and 1980 (p. 210), a time when, as Holsti and Rosenau recognize, protectionist pressures were rising dramatically. Their somewhat elusive characterization of 'Semi-Isolationism' is probably also related to the points raised in note 19, below.




a proposal for sweeping increases in American defense spending defined the position of the Cold War Internationalists during the mid 1970s (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:110). They are also right in noting that Post-Cold War Internationalists concentrated on other priorities. Here, however, the quantitative magnitudes really matter. I do not believe there can be any doubt that during the course of the 1970s the whole tenor of the debate over defense spending shifted. Though Cold War Inter- nationalists always remained well to the right of Post-Cold War Internationalists, all categories shifted apace: by the end of the decade virtually everyone advocated more, although 'more' was defined relative to his or her own previous view. In the waning days of the Carter presidency, when the phenomenon was so obvious that it could not be ignored, the difference was sometimes said to have crystallized into a struggle between the advocates of a 3-5 percent and a 6-8 percent rise in overall defense spending. Regardless of what one thinks of the specific numbers, the general point is irrefragable: the 1978-80 'debate' over weapons spending differed materially from that of 1975-1976 (Cumings, 1981; Ferguson and Rogers, 1981; Posen and Van Evera, 1983).7 And because all camps (or more precisely the Cold War Internationalists and Post-Cold War Internationalists, who appear to dominate Holsti and Rosenau's samples) had shifted their targets, many other aspects of policy had to change also. With economic growth fitful (and in 1979-1980, nonexistent) and a tax rise out of the question in an increasingly open economy amidst world recession, a rise in defense spending implied the scaling down or abandonment of social spending for many other goals that Post-Cold War and Cold War Internationalists might (sometimes) clash over, and which certainly concern the rest of the population: social services, urban develop- ment, welfare, etc. (see Ferguson and Rogers, 1981, but especially 1986; Ferguson, 1983).8

Nor is defense spending the only instance where American elites moved right without converging at the close of the 1970s. There is clear evidence that the failure to secure macroeconomic policy coordination during the Bonn summit in the spring of 1978 dis- organized the Post-Cold War Internationalists. Without ceasing to differ from the Cold War Internationalists in their long run strategy, many became convinced that no set of international negotiations could ever succeed in bringing about the changes in economic policy they believed were required. Convinced that only unilateral action by the United States could secure these policy objectives, vast numbers of them, at least in the business community, helped elect Ronald Reagan (see de Menil and Solomon, 1983:27; Nau, 1984-85; but especially Ferguson and Rogers, 1986, chapter 3).

If one asks, as in the earlier case of the missing Cold War Nationalists, how Holsti and Rosenau's surveys missed this 'right turn' among America's elites, the answer is plain, though slightly more complicated.

Partly it was a simple matter of their scaling technique. Though their discussion of Cold War Internationalism lays heavy weight on the military targets and objectives, their operationalization of the concept (and that of Post-Cold War Internationalism, with which it is contrasted) makes no reference to them. Instead, respondents are sorted into categories according to whether they rank idealized goals (such as containing

7 The very last budget Carter proposed, incidentally, called for a rise in defense spending of around 5 percent. 'Right' here, incidentally can be taken in the sense of more 'conservative' in the usual public opinion survey sense, as for example in Tom Smith (1981}.

8 The increasing openness of the economy made revenue raising more difficult because it shifted the incidence of the corporation income tax, cf. Ferguson and Rogers (1986, chapter 3).



THOMAS FERGUSON 417

communism) higher than others and according to how they respond to other almost equally abstract questions (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:115). Questions about a desired level of military spending, or indeed, virtually any other concrete policies, were not asked in significant numbers. So if, in 1970, Post-Cold War Internationalists perhaps thought that detente allowed the United States to cut defense spending, gradually became convinced in the mid-1970s that outlays should be chopped less or held steady, and in the late 1970s became persuaded that expenditures should rise, while at each stage of the argument Cold War Internationalists wanted 3, or 5, or 10 percent more, Holsti and Rosenau's scales would not register that difference.

A somewhat more abstract factor may also be operating, besides the defect in the scales themselves. I cannot escape a sense that even these two very experienced survey researchers, who are clearly sensitive to the pitfalls attending all attempts to relate survey results to real world behavior, are but incompletely aware that what they are trying to measure is, after all, only ideology. As Anthony Downs (1966) observed, ideology is, by its nature, quite indeterminate.9 Because even fairly consistent sets of ideas cannot provide much detailed guidance to someone trying to cope with the complexities of the real world, the fit between ideology and policy is, at best, likely to be quite loose. So that, in other words, we should not be terribly surprised if we discover that, for example, high officials of the Gulf Oil Company show an adept understanding of the higher tenets of Post-Cold War Internationalism in enlisting the support of the Cuban backed revolutionary government of Angola to guard their oil installations, while simultaneously promoting the reelection of an aging ex-actor inclined to the rather less flexible Cold War Internationalist perspective. 10

There is another reason Holsti and Rosenau miss the American foreign policy elite's collective lurch to starboard in the late 1970s. As part of their research strategy, they deliberately chose not to inquire into what their findings imply about the nature of power in America.

Like virtually every other aspect of their methodology, this one had a solid initial justification. Well aware of the long running controversies over the primacy of various groups in their sample, viz., who the 'real' elite are-they deliberately chose to cast a wide net, so that 'the acknowledged uncertainty as to the precise structure of American leadership' would not preclude 'meaningful comparison' (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:21).11

But while this is exactly right as a methodological principle to guide data gathering, there is no justification for such skeptical catholicity once the data have been collected. At the point of analysis and interpretation Holsti and Rosenau should have returned to the question, and assessed what light their research might shed on it.

For some of the implications of their study are remarkable. There is, for example, no doubt at all about which of the groups Holsti and Rosenau sampled were getting their way in 1981: business and the military, by far the most Cold War Internationalist of all the groups (Holsti and Rosenau, 1986, Table 13).

9 More recently Rogowski (1975), and Popkin (1979) have made similar points. l0 Thus the Federal Election Commission records Gulf chairman James Lee as a member of the 1984

Republican campaign's Golden Horde of contributors. l I am inclined to think that, were this question pursued, it might lead to some important questions of

methodology and statistical procedure that cannot be explored here for reasons of space. As noted below (note 15), because different parts of Holsti and Rosenau's sample disagree substantially, results for the whole sample may be very sensitive to exactly how many members of each group are represented in the total sample-an issue which amounts to a de facto answer to the question of the composition of the 'real' elite.




Carefully interpreted, however, Holsti and Rosenau's data show something else besides the fact that America now acts as if it is run by a coalition of (or part of) big business and the military. Contrary to what they suggest about the post-Vietnam stability of elite foreign policy attitudes, there has been a trend in the 1970s, and it is unmistakable. While Holsti and Rosenau are correct to claim that their samples as a whole show virtually no changes between 1976 and 1980, their own statistics demonstrate that lawyers (many or most of whom should properly be considered part of the business community), the media, and public officials all show a sharp shift toward Cold War Internationalism while business itself appears to have drifted a bit more in that direction! (See Table 1, which I have recalculated from their data.)

In the strategic case of the media, for perfectly understandable reasons I do not have the space to relate, the shift is particularly marked. It amounts on their scale to 0. 16.12 While one or other of the smaller shifts could conceivably be an artifact of sampling or

TABLE 1. Cold War Internationalism-changes 1976-1980.

%o of group in highest quintile

Absolute Cold War Change in highest index Shift Internationalism quintile since

(1980) from 1976 -1980 1976 in CWI

Military officers 0.35 -0.05 30 -7 Business executives 0.31 + 0.07 33 +6 Clergy 0.03 -0.11 18 -1 Labor leaders 0.01 -0.04 20 -4 Lawyers 0.16 +0.14 28 + 12 Foreign Service officers -0.08 -0.05 1 1 -4 Public officials 0.05 0.12 22 +4 Educators -0.14 0.08 1 1 +3 Media leaders -0.06 +0.16 15 +7 Others 0.07 +0.14 22 + 10 All 0.06 + 0.02 20 + 1

Sources: 1st column from Rosenau and Holsti (1986, Table 13); scores interpreted as per notes to the table (1.00 is most Cold War Internationalist, -1.00 the least.) 2nd column-calculated by subtracting the appropriate entry for 1976 in Table 5.4 of Holsti and Rosenau (1984) from the figures in my column 1. 3rd column-from Holsti and Rosenau (1986, Table 13). 4th column-subtracts my 3rd column from appropriate entry in Holsti and Rosenau (1984, Table 5.4), with sign changing appropriately to indicate direction.

Cautioni-see text on significance tests.

12 There is no point here in attempting to elaborate a theory of the media. In my view, however, media should be treated like all other industrial sectors, along the lines of Ferguson (1983). Two conclusions, I think, would emerge from such an inquiry. First, there is not one, but several, indeed many, points of view represented in 'the media'. Since all the media are business enterprises, however, this 'diversity' is really a special form of diversity within the business community. Second, in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, the telecommunications revolution has not as yet decentralized the elite media. Virtually all are successful multinationals (Bagdikian, 1983). Being capital intensive, in favor of free trade, and not cross pressured by many forces that affect other parts of the multinational community (and tied closely to multinational finance), they remain closer to the older 'Multinational Liberalism' analyzed in Ferguson (1984). For a more concrete discussion of the media in the 1970s and 1980s, see Ferguson and Rogers (1986, chapters 2 and 3).



THOMAS FERGUSON 419

response rate variability, there is little chance they all are.13 Moreover, the pattern is characteristic and all too consistent with what is known from other sources.14

From this standpoint, perhaps, the future of the continuing dissensus Holsti and Rosenau see among American elites looks rather different. At the end of their study they briefly explore the possibility that 'leadership capable of developing and articulating a vision of the world, of the American role within it' might somehow contrive to bring the elites (and, by implication, the rest of the public) together (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:254). They also discuss possible realignments of the three camps. But surveys, as Holsti and Rosenau would be the first to acknowledge, do not tell us anything about the hierarchical structures of influence that are integral to the working of power. They do not tell us which parts of the sample receive payments-or grants-from others; which take orders; which hire and fire, and so on.

But if one has in mind some account of the political economy of the contemporary American state, then their data suggest a rather more somber scenario. It is of course true, and extremely important, that the entire business community is not united around either Ronald Reagan or Cold War Internationalism. All through the 1980s, many investment bankers, some multinationals, real estate developers, and insurance company executives have helped underwrite a Democratic opposition. In addition, opposition to particular policies by various business groups within the Republican party has been very strong, while budgetary pressures are now working heavily against the administration's military buildup and vehement anti-Soviet posture. But many, probably most, of the most powerful sectors of American industry and finance appear likely to remain committed to policies consonant with Holsti and Rosenau's description of Cold War Internationalism. 15

These sectors are not likely to view the problem of elite dissensus as an occasion for further reflection on the ideal notion of national interest. While it is somewhat reassuring to read that some 70 percent of the total leadership sample Holsti and Rosenau surveyed profess to believe that smothering domestic dissent inhibits the conduct of foreign policy, the actual record of American elites in response to foreign policy dissent is quite equivocal (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:70).16 Moreover, Holsti and

13 In the tables from which these figures are taken, Holsti and Rosenau do not report variances, so I cannot test for significance.

14 See, for example, the discussion and references in Ferguson and Rogers (1986). Note, incidentally, that given the r-esults Holsti and Rosenau report for their sample as a whole, the move to the right by the business groups and other allies, implies something of a shift to the left by the rest of the sample.

15 For a discussion of the business opposition to Reagan with references based on a detailed examination of Federal Election Commission records, see Ferguson and Rogers (1986). The contested issues include the deficit, the weapons and particularly the naval buildup, and many regional economic issues, among others. Note also that were the 1976 and 1980 surveys to be repeated more recently, the defects in Holsti and Rosenau's questionnaire and scale design mentioned earlier in regard to elite attitudes on defense and national security might raise even more problems of interpretation. For example, the combined pressures of the budget deficit, the European allies, and the Reagan administration's domestic critics (in and out of the business community) might well induce many Cold War Internationalists to champion 'arms control' or even 'd6tente' of some sort, coupled with acceptance (by some) of a slowdown in the rate of growth of military spending. But unless these verbal responses are carefully evaluated with respect to desired rates of military spending (both absolutely and in percentage terms) and concrete policy alternatives in, say, Latin America, the enormous differences between the policy discussions of the early 1970s and now might be hidden even further. One should also bear in mind that because the various parts of Holsti and Rosenau's sample are clearly subject to quite different incentives and pressures, the mean response of 'elites' in general can easily shift right or left depending on the number of respondents in each occupation.

16 By far the best study of the US record on dissent is Goldstein (1978).




Rosenau's own figures show that the Cold War Internationalists who now dominate national policymaking are precisely that section of the American elite most in favor of repressive responses (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:62, Table 2.8).

One would worry less if the other parts of the elite that Holsti and Rosenau sampled-the educators, the 'media leaders', the clergy-who are still not completely on board the Cold War Internationalist bandwagon had stronger, more independent power bases. If, for example, boards of twenty or twenty-five educators hired, fired, and controlled the budgets of the business groups. If the clergy decided which fortunate business and military groups should receive donations and patronage. If the 'media leaders' Holsti and Rosenau discuss really were leaders, instead of second tier employees increasingly subject to strong, formally organized pressures by their own top executives, corporate sponsored groups like Accuracy in Media, and subsidized lawsuits. 17 If unions were not shrinking rapidly, and the AFL-CIO were not funnelling more than $35 million dollars az year-a sum almost equal to half of its total budget- to the Third World with the enthusiastic support of Cold War Internationalists in government and big business (Ferguson and Rogers, 1986: chapter 7).

One could also be more optimistic if all segments of elite opinion were not moving more, as Holsti and Rosenau usefully observe, in favor of a stronger executive-as though that were unrelated to the future of foreign policy dissent (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984:212). 18

But these are all dreamy 'ifs'. Reality is harsher. As Holsti and Rosenau show- contrary to their own intentions-the media have already moved sharply right (though they will never drift as far right as, say, a modal weapons-producing or weapons subsidized Cold War Internationalist would like), and Semi-Isolationism, always more a set of private opinions than a live current of thought in the heavily subsidized literature Holsti and Rosenau survey, is, as they note, already receding. 19 Receding, too, is its challenge to the multinational liberalism that underlies both 'Cold War' and 'Post-Cold War Internationalism'. What will be left-in several senses-by the time the next

17 For Holsti and Rosenau's 'media leaders' category, see (1984:262, Table A.1). In the 1970s however, certain parts of the business community spent millions of dollars to pressure the media by various forms of attack, including subsidized 'scholarly' publications and lawsuits. At the same time publishers and other high level personnel inside media companies consciously sought changes in editorial policy. For a particularly striking case, that of the New York Times, cf. D'Souza (1984); on the media in general, cf. Schneir and Schneir (1983), Saloma (1984), and Ferguson and Rogers (1986).

18 Rosenau and Holsti wisely refrain from making too much of their finding that most of their sample (though not the Cold War Internationalists) profess not to care much about the promotion of capitalism or American business. It is easy to understand why. As many survey researchers have emphasized, controversial survey questions can produce very unstable answers. In addition, it scarcely matters if one claims not to be interested in promoting business, but only governments that are 'effective and responsible' (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984: 100) and committed to free trade.

And if, as I have seen with my own eyes recently, high officials will flatly deny they supported 'intervention' even when confronted with their own memoranda, how can one credit their answers on opinion polls?

19 It should be noted that very few, if any, of the journals most cited in the Holsti and Rosenau survey of writings on US foreign policy consistently operate at a profit. Virtually all have sponsors. The research, and sometimes the writing, of many authors they cite, including those critical of certain practices of some multinational corporations, are often subsidized. Some authors are also affiliated with prominent policy organizations that promote distinct points of view.

In this respect, I think, the case of Semi-Isolationism calls for some comment. The articles Holsti and Rosenau cite in their discussion of this tendency come from a very few authors, notably George Kennan. One suspects that Kennan is as prominent as he is in the discussion largely for extraneous reasons. Semi- Isolationism, accordingly, is perhaps not a view on the same level as the other two. It exists primarily as a body of mostly unvoiced opinion and does not have the degree of definitiveness that the others have.



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Holsti-Rosenau study appears, after three or four years of continuing economic distress, peripheral wars, any number of new 'Accuracy in (fill in the blank: Academia, Unions, etc.), and expensive, intimidating lawsuits is anyone's guess. By then perhaps only the overriding need of international financiers and some multinationals for more international economic coordination and regulation and the pressures to rein in military spending to save the budget may be the only remaining institutional supports for Post-Cold War Internationalism.20

As I have sought to indicate, the Holsti-Rosenau study is an exceptionally interesting and thoughtful piece of work. Though I believe its tripartite division of American elites must be amended, and its discussion of the dynamics of elite opinion has shortcomings, the work as a whole is most stimulating. Its discussion of the continuing divisions among American elites, of the differences between 'Cold War Internationalism', and 'Post- Cold War Internationalism' is immensely valuable, and, I think, broadly accurate.

If, however, one accepts the view-which their own data support, as the earlier table indicated-that elite opinion importantly evolved in the 1970s (particularly the late 1970s), then one feature of Holsti and Rosenau's interpretation must raise questions: the emphasis they place on an individual's 'position on the war' as an explanatory variable. What is one to think of this association between a 1968 position and a 1976 or 1980 response?

This question, I think, has a ready answer. We have seen that lawyers, the media and business groups have moved to the right, even in terms of Holsti and Rosenau's classification. We have also seen that their scaling procedures are quite abstract, and are better at sorting people into positions r elative to one another than they are at picking up changes in the whole spectrum.

The coincidence of these facts, I think, suggests that if a sample such as Holsti and Rosenau drew for 1976 and 1980 had been taken in 1972, when Cold War Inter- nationalists like Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were thinking of Red Square less as a possible target for US nuclear missiles than as a promising place to do business, the sample as a whole (if scarcely the business groups or the media) might well not look too

20 Note that such regulatory efforts will assuredly draw opposition from some affected interests. No more than in the case of domestic regulation, however, should this fact be used as evidence that 'business' interests in genieral ar-e opposed to initernational regulatory efforts.

I do not, incidentally, mean to imply that financiers have not been prominent supporters of the military buildup that Holsti and Rosenau take as defining Cold War Internationalism. They have (Ferguson and Rogers, 1981, 1986). Note, however, that as the Gulf example mentioned earlier suggests, there is no necessary contradiction in supporting all (or major parts) of the tenets of Post-Cold War Internationalism and Cold War Internationalism at the same time, particularly if one is concerned with concrete goals rather than broad interpretative views. (Indeed, a failure to recognize this point is perhaps the chief weakness of the huge literature that counterposes the rather obvious Post-Cold War Internationalism of most members of the Trilateral Commission to the Cold War Internationalism of the Committee for the Present Danger.) Of course, if many companies and individuals were so circumstanced, the distinctions would collapse.

Holsti and Rosenau's discussion of the future, I think, also takes far too sanguine a view of the Reagan administration. They ignore its attempt to muzzle the press during the Grenada invasion, its efforts to institute polygraph testing, the official surveillance and increasing harassment of groups opposed to its policies in Central America and elsewhere, and its efforts to prevent Americans from contacts with Cuba. I must also observe that Holsti and Rosenau's usually balanced and dispassionate survey of foreign policy literature is very unfair toward Noam Chomsky. 'McCarthyism', at least to me, implies the charge of treason and efforts to prevent people from holding jobs because of their politics. I cannot, therefore, understand their attempt to apply this term to Chomsky (p. 259, n. 12). It was not he who warned me, when I was a new member of the faculty of MIT, that I should for the sake of my career stick to my work on the New Deal and ignore contemporary politics.




different. Cold War Internationalists would still be more suspicious of the USSR than Post-Cold War Internationalists, while the latter would be more enthusiastically in favor of arms control. The scales would reflect the differences between the attitudes, though not the great sea change in policy, and the striking correlation Holsti and Rosenau found between opinion in the later stages of Vietnam and the positions of the Cold War and Post-Cold War Internationalists would still exist.21

But there is less to this than meets the eye. It does not provide a good reason for thinking that American elites (or anyone else) now believe what they do because of their wartime experiences. The notion of the Vietnam experience Holsti and Rosenau employ derives much of its plausibility from images associated with the First World War -from the memories of anger and disillusionment that filled Remarque's All Quiet on The Western Front, or the poems of Wilfred Owen, and which were pithily summed up by Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That. These images in turn were themselves used by a later generation of post-Munich. liberal historians as evidence of overreaction-as a yellow warning light to what could happen when democratic publics decline prudent armament. I do not here want to argue that the liberal historians' emphasis on these images was misplaced, that inter-war antimilitarism had basically other origins (particularly within the financial community). My argument is more limited-that there is little evidence that the entire world view of even Graves, Remarque or their artist friends was determined by their admittedly horrific experiences. To be a surrealist, an expressionist, a precisionist, or whatever, it was not enough to be anti-war. One had to deal competently with a great many other matters-from the ideas of Nietzsche to the concrete qualities of one's medium-that opposition to war (or the War) provided no clues for.

The case of American elites and Vietnam, I think, bears comparison. For all its terrors, the war could not possibly provide any segment of American elites with much instructive guidance on the many issues Holsti and Rosenau suggest are somehow war- related: on what should be done about tariffs in the 1970s, about exchange rates, international macro-economic policy coordination, buffer stocks and commodity price agreements, or relations with the NATO allies, the new holders of petrodollars or even (as the careening from de'tente to New Cold War suggests) with the Soviets and a fortiori, with China. The experience was simply not rich or determinate enough.

On the other hand, there is a way of approaching the Vietnam experience which makes sense of the Holsti-Rosenau data, but which does not require a 'big bang' theory of elite dissensus. This is to treat Vietnam as posing in its most acute form the problem that would loom ever more obtrusively upon the consciousness of American elites throughout the rest of the 20th century: the problem of the costs and benefits of global

21 Assuming that some people have moved from one occupation to another since the war ended, but that opinion change lags behind the occupational shift, 'personal' variables like 'ideology' or 'position on the war' should be slightly better predictors than occupation, even if occupation were the main underlying variable.

Holsti and Rosenau's treatment of the relation between occupation and the Vietnam experience, incidentally, is not entirely consistent. In the early parts of their book, they push very hard on the unique nature of the Vietnam variable. Their first mention of occupation (p. 151) insists that the Vietnam experience is prior without reporting any specific statistics. But the importance they attach to the occupation seems to grow in the later stages of their study. Compare, for example, their dismissal of the generational hypothesis on p. 160).

There is a sense, of course, in which the views put forward in this essay make occupation (or better, position in the world economy) the most important variable. Note, however, that 'occupation' in this sense, which takes account of different sectoral positions in the economy, is very different from the undifferentiated notion of 'business' tested by Holsti and Rosenau.



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hegemony. At times, as in Vietnam, Angola, Central America, these costs and benefits had an obvious military expression. More commonly, however, these costs and benefits were more conventionally economic. Always, however, they involve losses for some major part of American society-including, sometimes, parts of the business community and other American elites-as well as gains. By the late 1960s, when Holsti and Rosenau's respondents had arrived at the views they were later asked to reveal, this was obvious. Not only educators, foreign service officials and clergy, but many sectors of American multinational business-which watched as the war destroyed the value of the dollar-were coming out against the conflict (Dye, 1986:249; Ferguson and Rogers, 1986: chapter 2).

While the problems associated with the decline of the US competitive position evolve through time-undoubtedly becoming more acute, though not in a simple linear fashion-they do so mostly in ways that will not register on Holsti and Rosenau's indices. As a consequence, in 1968, or 1976, or 1985 (when Halley's comet, the traditional herald of the decline of mighty empires, once again glowed in the heavens) a member of the American elite's position on the war in Vietnam is likely to correlate with many other policy views-not because Vietnam was somehow unique, but because it wasn t.

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The Right Consensus?: Holsti and Rosenau's New Foreign Policy Belief Surveys

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