Abstract
In late June, 1980, the new Secretary of State of the United States, Edmund Muskie, flew from Europe to a meeting of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. En route, he read a draft prepared by his subordinates for him to deliver at the meeting. Referring to the recent invasion of Thailand by Vietnam, the text asserted that the United States would abide by its security commitments. When the secretary asked what his government intended to do in support of Thailand, he was startled to learn that no plans had been made. He then proclaimed his distaste for mouthing empty rhetoric and insisted that ‘if there isn’t any substance to this, I am not going to say the words’. Urgent messages to Washington stimulated officials to develop a program of aid which, thanks to the magic of radio, Muskie was able to announce soon after his plane landed.
Reprinted with permission from Political Science Quarterly, vol. 96, no. 3 (Fall 1981).
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Notes
Don Oberdorfer, ‘U.S. To Rush More Aid to Thailand’, Washington Post, 28 June 1980;
and ‘Muskie Rejects Shopworn Diplomacy’, Washington Post, 29 June 1980.
US Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 79th Congress, 1st session, 23 July 1945, 91, pt. 5:7962.
Harry S. Truman, Memoirs. Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY, 1956) pp. 106, 250.
J. William Fulbright, The Vietnam Hearings (New York, 1966) p. 42.
Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston, 1943) pp. 9–10.
Lippmann, Washington Post, 9 February 1969.
Walter Lippmann, Early Writings (New York, 1970) pp. 31–41.
Theodore Marburg and Horace E. Flack (eds) Taft Papers on League of Nations (New York, 1920) p. 76.
Henry Cabot Lodge, The Senate and the League of Nations (New York, 1925) p. 244.
See George W. Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978).
Warren F. Kuehl, Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to 1920 (Nashville, Tenn., 1969) pp. 342–3.
See Nicholas’s paper in Arthur S. Link (ed.) Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982).
Ray S. Baker and W. E. Dodd (eds) The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, vol. 2 (New York, 1927) p. 505.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920) pp. 42–3.
Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1964) pp. 164, 184, 196–204.
Quoted in Paul Mantoux, Paris Peace Conference 1919, Proceedings of the Council of Four (Geneva, 1964) p. 93.
Richard Cohen, ‘They’re Making It Illegal to Break a Promise’, Washington Post, 10 August 1980.
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© 1988 Inis L. Claude, Jr
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Claude, I.L. (1988). Casual Commitment in International Relations. In: States and the Global System. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09826-2_5
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