The essay that begins below, self-published today by a longtime Washington observer and noted investigative reporter, compares some of the foreign policy actions of the Kennedy, Reagan, Obama, and Biden administrations and notes the advice of insider dissenters in the executive and legislative branches that was not taken. The question in the headline is directed at President Biden. — MCM
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Who’s your George Ball?
This is an account of another American who, like Daniel Ellsberg, did the right thing at the right time in the middle of a war. But unlike Ellsberg’s, his act of courage did not make the headlines, and he suffered little for it. His name is George W. Ball. He was a Midwestern lawyer who did not politically support John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential campaign and did not serve bravely or endure violence during World War II. But he had played a key role in the American postwar rebuilding of Europe and was appointed early in 1961 as an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy Administration. His main task was to deal with international economic and agricultural affairs.
Ball had directed the American postwar bombing survey in London at the end of the war. He understood, as the survey had shown, that the intense daytime bombing of German cities had not destroyed morale, as had been assumed, but had increased citizen support for the Nazi regime—and perhaps extended the duration of the war. Ball would later be the only senior Kennedy Administration official who directly warned the president of the dangers of committing American soldiers to the Vietnam War, as had been recommended by his generals. In his 2000 book Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, A.J. Langguth, who covered the war for the New York Times, recounted Ball’s gutsy warning in late 1961 to the president: “If we go down that road we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Vietnam and never be able to find them.”
In a 1982 memoir, Ball recalled Kennedy’s irritated response: “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.” Back in his office, Ball told an aide, “We’re heading hell-bent into a mess and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Either everybody else is crazy or I am.”
Ball, who had worked with and supported Adlai Stevenson, the liberal former governor of Illinois, in two failed presidential campaigns in the 1950s, was disdained by many of the tough-minded and tough-talking war planners inside the administration not as a truth teller but as a “dove.”
Kennedy had been shaken by his early failure to oust Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader, in the first months of his administration and a brutal summit meeting weeks later with a dismissive Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He would make a stand in South Vietnam. In 1962 he also chose to become the first American president to try to thwart what Washington saw as the Soviet Union’s ambitions to weaponize its enormous reservoirs of oil and natural gas. Russia had announced its intention to build a 2,500-mile pipeline from its oil and natural gas fields in Tatarstan, 700 miles to the east of Moscow, that would be capable of supplying much-needed cheap energy to countries in the Soviet bloc within five or so years, with smaller pipelines that could spread deeper into Europe. All were still struggling to rebuild from the devastation of World War II.
Kennedy responded through NATO in a futile effort to impose an embargo on the imports from Western Europe to Russia of the materials to build the pipeline. In a 2018 study, Nikos Tsafos, an expert who was named last year as the energy adviser to the prime minister of Greece, described what happened next: Kennedy’s “goal was to delay or even stop the . . . pipeline that would increase Soviet oil exports. The embargo split the [NATO] alliance, with the United Kingdom being the most vocal against it; the pipeline was completed with only a slight delay, and the embargo was removed in 1966.” Tsafos quoted a colleague as noting that “one could argue that the pipe embargo caused more damage to US-European relations than to the Soviet economy.” That assessment, Tsafos noted, “applies to almost every transatlantic effort against Soviet and, later, Russian hydrocarbons.”
President Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 determined to confront what he would come to call the “evil empire” and quickly escalated tensions between Washington and Moscow. He revived the B-1 bomber program that had been canceled by the Carter Administration; announced that his Administration would invest billions in an anti-ballistic missile defense system; and deployed Pershing II missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, to West Germany. In a 1982 speech he talked of consigning the Soviet Union to “ash heap of history.”
Reagan, too, attempted to block a second Soviet pipeline that would run from Western Siberia to Western Europe. The West German government had approved the concept and agreed in principle to lend $4.75 billion to help finance it. Reagan offered to supply the West German government with coal and nuclear power if it would withdraw from its agreement with Moscow. The Germans said no. France subsequently signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Soviet Union for the purchase of the Siberian gas. The Reagan Administration responded by escalating the existing sanctions against American business support for the pipeline to include any foreign companies doing business with Russia. All such firms would be barred from doing any business with the United States.
Enter George Ball again, now just retired after many quiet years as a managing partner of Lehman Brothers in New York. He published an essay, “The Case Against Sanctions,” in the New York Times Magazine in the fall of 1982 that is eerily prescient of the anti-Russian views repeatedly voiced today by President Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.
“The Reagan Administration,” Ball wrote, “has now brought to the shaping of governmental decisions an ideological bias one might call the Manichaean Heresy. Present day Manichaeans espouse the doctrinal concept that Soviet Communism is the Antichrist—an evil element that must be extirpated if we are to have peace in the world. . . . [T]hat view is now shared by neo-conservative intellectuals. . . . As their major operational tactic, the Manicheans would have the United States seize every pretext to harass the Russians. . . .The Soviet economy is huge, the Soviet Union commands vast raw materials resources within its borders. . . . Niggling sanctions, no matter how persistently applied, could never prove more than a marginal nuisance. . . . With arrogance in inverse proportion to their own credentials of experience, Administration leaders are using crude methods to try to ride roughshod over the considered judgments and interests of allied governments, acting as though the United States had a monopoly of wisdom.”
Three decades later, in 2014, Vice President Joe Biden would reprise Reagan’s language and his fears of Russia’s gas and oil reserves in a speech to the Atlantic Council Energy and Economic Summit in Istanbul. Russia’s use of its energy was “a weapon undermining the security of nations,” he warned. “Here in Europe . . . READ MORE . . .