In their own eyes, the American people have been always a race of bold innovators and mighty builders. Soviet scientific and technological “breakthroughs,” some reported and verified as well as some reported and unverified, have wounded American self-esteem at its most sensitive spot. In individual psychology, a sudden blow to long- cherished preconceptions and illusions can produce serious mental disorders. A mind thus affected will seek escape into sickly petulance, shifting to others the blame for the rude shock administered by untractable realities, or will fall prey to deep depressions, or will lacerate itself with self-accusations. Although the experiences of individual psychology cannot be applied summarily to the psychology of groups and whole peoples, they do supply, however, some clues to collective mental states. At this time, the state-of-mind of the American public seems far from stable. The conduct of not a few of our fellow citizens who, because of their commanding positions in politics, academic life, and the dissemination of news, could be expected to exert their influence in the direction of prudence and sobriety, has not been conducive to restoring the mental equilibrium of the American public.
One of the most common techniques of psychiatry in dealing with mental disturbances is to induce the patient to recall the past. By lifting forgotten experiences to the light of consciousness, the mind, caught in a maze of incomprehensible dilemmas, is able to find its way back to process thinking. Once the American people understand the long chain of developments which joins their present unhappy state to portentous, albeit forgotten, events of many and not so many years ago, they will be able to take stock of the concrete problems confronting them and, prudently and soberly, go about finding concrete solutions.
A number of widely current cliches reflect the erratic moods if not of American public opinion then at least of not a few opinion makers: We have “lost” or are about to “lose” the “technological race” because we have (a) not enough theoretical scientists; (b) neglected our educational system; and (c) stinted our military budget. The way out of this alarming state of affairs is (a) to train more theoretical scientists; (b) make massive public grants available to our schools; and (c) increase massively our outlay for arms, especially missiles. But we must also “negotiate” with the Soviets in order to obtain agreements for arms reduction and control and for the “disengagement” in Europe of Western and Soviet forces, respectively. The Soviets are “winning” the Cold War and, especially, the contest over the “minds-of-men” in the “uncommitted” countries of Asia and Africa. We must, therefore, launch a massive program of economic aid, in competition with Soviet “economic penetration,” and shore up the economic order of the “backward” countries against the “threat of communism.” Then again, we must strengthen the “bonds of the NATO Pact,” while supporting various movements of “national independence” against Europe’s “old colonial powers.” We must develop a new “Strategic Doctrine,” develop long-range guided missiles with nuclear warheads, stand up to Soviet nuclear blackmail, declare that, if we go to war, we will present only “limited challenges” and thus induce the Soviets to keep their warmaking “limited.” Yet our foreign policy, that has been too “rigid” for too long, must become more “flexible.” The communists, despite their increasing military might and seemingly menacing behavior, are becoming more “liberal”; the spread of education in Russia, although chiefly directed towards training more skilled personnel for war technology, creates a new “managerial class” that wants peace and more “cultural exchanges” with the West.
These are but a few select cliches that now lace virtually every discussion on the “international situation.” They can be found in the transcript of Congressional hearings; they are embedded in a spate of reports issued by groups of experts, published forthrightly for the public’s benefit or prepared under the leaky seal of secrecy for the Government. Even a cursory examination will reveal some striking conflicts between the messages which can be culled from these stock phrases of discourse on our foreign and security affairs. Yet, amazingly, it is again one and the same political leader, commentator or expert who manages to package all of these cliches into one and the same speech, column or report. Now, cliches need not be wholly at variance with facts; their common error is oversimplification. Problems in foreign and military policy are painfully complex. It is impossible to unravel here the intricacies of any one problem to which our select cliches purport to address themselves. It is relatively easy, however, to fix a few datum points which can guide our steps across the litter of pained, angry, and stultifying controversies to poised reflection—and sanity.
The Technological-Scientific Race
The question as to whether we have “lost” or are about to “lose” the technological race with the Soviet Union is unanswerable since a great variety of achievements in the immensely complex field of endeavor that we call technology cannot be added up as if they were so many apples. Since our scientists and technologists and those of the Soviet Union draw on the same field of knowledge, namely, the common body of thought of Western civilization, it would be surprising were the Soviets not ahead in at least some fields of theoretical and applied science. As the pace of scientific exploration quickens—and it has quickened spectacularly within the last fifty years— “breakthroughs” are bound to follow one another in increasingly more rapid succession. For the sake of our peace of mind, we must get used to this aspect of international scientific competition. Military technology is not an exception from the general rule: the chances are that the Soviets and we will keep on developing surprising innovations—and will thus surprise one another. The significance of new weapon developments lies in their impact upon the strategic situation. A relatively inconspicuous innovation, because it threatens to upset the opponent’s strategic arrangements, may assume the highest military significance, whereas a more spectacular innovation, because it cannot be readily integrated in the operational plan, may have no strategic consequences whatsoever. These general observations are not meant to diminish the achievements of the Soviets in space research and rocket propellants nor as a sop to whatever remains of our complacency in the face of Soviet military progress. It should be noted, however, that estimates of the future rate of progress in war technology by the Soviets and ourselves, respectively, must be read with several important caveats. To begin with, no one knows the future, and wholly unforeseen developments as, for example, scientific discoveries which, for all we know, might be made in countries other than Russia and the United States, might subject present estimates to a radical revision. Then again, changes in the strategic situation as, for example, alterations in the presently existing base systems might send war technology off in unforeseeable directions.
What should we do in order to keep flexible in the joints scientifically and technologically? No less a scientist than Dr. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out in an article in in Foreign Affairs, January, 1958, that, in each country, the number of theoretical scientists —the advance guard of scientific and technological innovation—is relatively small and not susceptible to substantial increase by methods of “forced” growth. Furthermore, Dr. Oppenheimer argued, the United States can boast of vast and many-sided achievements in the field of theoretical science. Thus it seems that whatever defeats we may have suffered in the scientific-technological race are not due to a dearth of talent. One of the principal causes of such “defeats,” especially in the realm of scientific-military development, is probably the faulty employment or underemployment of available talent.
Is our alleged “scientific lag” due to shortcomings of our educational system, and can these be remedied by substantial increases in our educational budget? The flaws of our educational system are many and most of them are familiar to large segments of the public from parent-teacher’s associations to graduate school faculties. Let us give thanks for the coming of the Sputnik if it made us give a hard second look at our schools. For a long time, it stood to reason that a system that cannot be relied upon to teach, at the bottom, proper spelling and arithmetic, could not be expected to turn out, at the top, as large a scientific and intellectual elite as issues from a system that enforces a more rigorous discipline upon tender minds. It is unlikely that any amount of public munificence can up-grade, here and now, our educational system as long as the prevailing educational philosophy has not been rethought and the consequent findings assimilated by the educators themselves. Soviet education is the beneficiary of the educational system of Czardom established at the end of the 19th century by German educators in the image of German public education. Although designed as a system of mass education, Soviet methods of selection are in many respects diametrically opposed to ours: the purpose of schooling is to advance the ablest students and to oust the laggards. The latter category furnishes the recruits of the industrial and agricultural labor force. This is not American educational practice. A reorganization of the American educational system, if this should prove necessary, would have to start from a reappraisal of the educational process with reference to the needs of American society.
The Defense Budget
Have we stinted our defense budget? This question, too, is unanswerable because, in this form, it is far too general. It should be rephrased as follows: Have we had a consistent defense policy that could have told us what kind of defense budgets we should have had over a specific period of time? Our defense budget was cut back severely and with hardly any consideration for the facts of international life as soon as Germany and Japan had been defeated. Even when our policy makers acknowledged that we were engaged in a Cold War with Russia, our defense appropriations were hardly sufficient to defray the mere maintenance of our Services, not to speak of supplying them with better arms. The Marshall Plan was presented explicitly as an alternative to increased spending on our defenses; economic aid to Europe was expected to secure Europe against the communist menace. It was only when the need for putting teeth into the NATO Pact and the outbreak of the Korean War imposed heavy demands on this country’s arsenal that our defense budgets began to reflect the true dimensions of our defense problems. Dr. W. von Braun, the Army’s leading missile expert, stated in an interview on November 10, 1957, that, from 1945-1951, our defense budget did not set funds aside for space missile research and that our long range missile program got under way at about the outbreak of the Korean War. The Soviets had started theirs immediately upon the termination of World War II. They had captured some of the leading German scientists engaged in ballistic missile research and drafted them forcibly into their own war-technological effort. How anyone then in a responsible position in our defense establishment could have ignored, in the face of German successes with “buzz bombs” launched against England and of well substantiated reports of improved blueprints at the German rocket laboratory at Peenemiinde, the virtually inevitable advance to intercontinental and space missiles, is as yet an unexplained mystery. One clue to it is no doubt our characteristic concepts of peace and war.
We do not conceive of war as a social institution (which, alas, it is). In our minds, peace treaties herald the indefinite cessation of all strife (which they never do). In brief, we invest the acts for international politics with a finality which, like all human acts, they lack. More likely than not, this suffices to explain our feast-or-famine approach to the defense budget. In the postwar years, the inconsistencies of our defense policies were aggravated by the reluctance, widespread among the American public and even in policy making quarters, to acknowledge the irreconcilable hostility of the Soviets to Western democracy and their determination to destroy it. Unfortunately, the consequences of inconsistencies and misjudgments in national security policies do not become apparent before they are brought home to us by the acts of our opponents. The basic pattern of communist strategy, i.e., to lull the Western democracies in a false sense of security and to disarm them by a vast campaign of peace propaganda while building up the Soviet war machine, was there for all to see. The prospects were manifestly unpleasant; one way to cope with them was to ignore them or, at least, to gloss them over. This has been, ever since the end of World War II, the Western way.
The stops and starts of our defense machinery—the extreme irregularity of defense appropriations—has made our weaponry much more expensive than it need have been. During the last decade, our defense outlay has been enormous; it has varied absurdly from year to year. Had, sometime in the late ’forties, agreement been reached upon a long- range military budget providing, year by year, roughly the same amounts, we could have saved a great deal of money on the military forces that we do have and produced all kinds of weapons that we now deem necessary and do not have. Had we cut some red tape, we probably could now have a military posture in every respect superior to that of the Soviets and still have made a saving. When General James M. Gavin, in his testimony before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee on January 8, spoke of the “appalling lack of decision and slowness of decision-making,” hardly anyone in his audience can have been surprised at his indictment of the machinery of the Defense Department. This, too, is a condition of long standing noted in many exhaustive reports on the Executive Department including the so-called Hoover Report, prepared under the Presidency of Mr. Truman and largely unimplemented under his and the succeeding administration.
It is likely that now, if we are “to get ahead of the Russians,” some considerable budgetary increases are necessary. A great deal of public pressures for a massive boost of defense outlays are building up, some arising from genuine concern with our security and some sparked by the prospects of increased government subsidies to industry. Before substantial increases are authorized, answers should be found to questions that, for too long, have remained unanswered. How well have our defense dollars been spent in the past? Can defense policies that are not geared to a realistic concept of the protracted and irreconcilable conflict between democracy and communism, guide the military in planning and procuring the appropriate weapons system? These are but some of the important questions that call for answers before the right decisions on our defense budget can be made. To do so, hard thinking, rather than hard cash, is needed.
The “Uncommitted” Peoples
Will the contest over the “minds-of-men” in the “backward countries” prove decisive in the conflict between ourselves and the communists? Of course, it will not. If this question is rephrased to read; will we be in a bad way if all of Asia goes communist? The answer is: most probably, yes! The most important point to remember is that the basic problems of Asia cannot be solved either by us or by the communists. They were created by secular developments which antedate the conflict between democracy and communism by several hundred years. These developments were set in motion by the impact upon ancient and stagnant civilizations of a young and vital civilization, namely that of the West. The improvements in hygiene, transportation, and administration, wrought by the West, triggered a huge expansion of Asian population. How to keep economic productivity growing in order to feed a vast addition of hungry mouths, this is the burning question confronting virtually every Asian government. That Soviet or American economic intervention, even were it many times larger than its present size, could effect any substantial alleviation of Asia’s population problem, is, in the light of well-documented historical precedents, an untenable proposition. That problem can be solved, if it can be solved at all, only by the Asians themselves through initiatives of their own. Its magnitude severely limits the effectiveness of foreign intervention, economic or pedagogical. The admission of this fact implies neither a defeatist attitude nor an argument against American assistance in forcing the most rapid economic growth compatible with the “underdeveloped” countries’ resources. In all cases, such assistance is justified by the claim of human suffering upon our generosity; in some cases, it is also good business and good politics. But when this line of reasoning is stretched to mean that American economic policies towards the “uncommitted” countries, bold and expensive as they may be, can achieve a decisive change in the balance-of-power between the Soviets and ourselves, then we are asked to reckon without the West’s fundamental dilemma in Asia.
No one can reasonably hope for more than that Southeast Asia, India, and a goodly part of the Middle East will not go communist. At best, these lands will maintain their present, ambiguous posture vis-a-vis the two “blocs.” In the foreseeable future, they cannot be expected to side with us against the communists. The maintenance of the Asian status quo will be no mean achievement of Western statecraft. The West can thank its stars if it manages to hang on to its remaining strategic and economic stakes in the rimlands of Asia.
For geographical and historical reasons, the position of the Soviet Union on the Asian continent is strong, and that of the West is weak. The Soviets enjoy the strategic advantages of geographical proximity and the continent’s inner lines of communications. The Soviets do not have to live down hundreds of years of colonial history; the West is burdened by the many real (and the many more imagined) wrongs that its colonial rule inflicted upon native peoples. The United States, because of its close affinities with Europe, can never hope to cleanse itself, its fervent anticolonial professions notwithstanding, of its “imperialist” guilt-by-association. True, in every Asian land, we have friends who credit our good intentions and are awake to the menace of communist imperialism. Unfortunately, only in a few countries do they control the government and even there they do not always represent the sentiment of the masses. There is much useful and necessary work for us to do throughout the undeveloped and uncommitted world. But we must look elsewhere for a favorable terrain upon which to carry the offensive against the communist citadel.
The Protracted Conflict
The most favorable terrain for Western strategy in the protracted and irreconcilable conflict between democracy and communism is Eastern Europe. There, in contrast with Asia, the historical currents are running against communism, and the West enjoys natural advantages which do not beckon it elsewhere. For the great majority of the satellite peoples— Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany—communism and Soviet rule are unspeakable abominations. This has been so for a long time. The risings in Poland and Hungary confirmed what anybody familiar with the cultural and historical traditions of Eastern Europe had been able to surmise ever since the communists conquered these ancient and proud countries. More important still, the masses of Russia herself, although cowed by their rulers, detest them. It was only by a hair’s breadth and thanks to the incredible blunders of the Nazis, that communist rule was saved, during World War II, from the wrath of its own people who, when the Germans first advanced towards Moscow and Kiev, were ready to welcome them as liberators.
It is no wonder that the communists want us to measure our strength with them in Asia —and to relax our pressure in Europe. If the West can be induced by propaganda, intrigue, and negotiations to withdraw from Central Europe and to dissolve NATO, the communists will be able to consolidate their position there where, notwithstanding their formidable military posture, they are now vulnerable, and to reinforce their position there where the West is now weakest and can never hope to score decisively against communism, namely in Asia. The communists would like to achieve this end without war. They hope to succeed through propaganda, intrigue, and negotiation. These methods are comparatively safe and cheap. They are particularly effective when applied to the Western democracies in peace time. More violent pressures, such as open attacks in the style of the Korean War, are apt to arouse the Western democracies’ fighting spirit whereas more subtle techniques of conflict, such as a “peace” strategy, alternating with stepped-up political warfare and subversion, are favored by the West’s perennial addiction to appeasement
Negotiations with the Soviet Union
Should we refuse to negotiate with the Soviets? Of course, we should do nothing of the kind. As a matter of fact, we have been negotiating with the communists for a long time. More likely than not, we have been negotiating with them right up to the moment of this writing, for we are in touch, via regular diplomatic channels, with the Kremlin all the time. All diplomatic contacts connote the readiness to negotiate; the exchange of diplomatic notes is a form of negotiation. These last ten years, we have been exchanging diplomatic notes with the Soviets at a furious pace. On all important issues we know, beyond a shadow of misapprehension, the position of the Soviets. They know ours.
Should we meet with them in formal conferences on the highest or next highest level, well advertised in advance? More likely than not, such conferences now would be barren of concrete results as regards an improvement of the international climate. There is available for everyone’s inspection a long series of conferences with the Soviets. Mr. Roosevelt negotiated with Mr. Litvinov the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. The ink of the signatures appended to this agreement was hardly dry when the Soviets began to violate its provisions. During World War II, we conferred with the leaders of the Kremlin at Moscow, Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. After the war we conferred, on the heads-of- state and foreign ministers’ level, with the Soviets at Paris, London, Berlin, and Geneva, and in the United Nations at New York. The Soviets proceeded to observe the provisions of the agreements reached at these various places whenever they were self-enforcing, they violated the rest. In not a single instance did the Soviet leaders display their eagerness to evacuate territories that they had won by conquest. The only notable exception is Austria, and in this special case the Soviets appear to have yielded chiefly because they hoped that their show of reasonableness would induce the Germans to reject the NATO Pact.
If any lesson can be learned from “negotiating with the Soviets,” it is that they respect force. They are prepared to modify their stand whenever the prevailing power relationships make this advisable or necessary. The advice to negotiate with them now when our power position has, by our own admission, suffered serious deterioration and when the Soviets boast vocally of their ability to destroy us, flies in the face of the lessons taught us by twenty-five years’ bitter experience.
The advocates of a new round of negotiations with the Russians argue—and indeed must argue—that the communists are no longer today what they were under Stalin. A surprising number of people in the West have become convinced that the Bolsheviks are on their way out. Yesterday it was the “peace-loving” generals who were about to take over in the Soviet Union. Today, it is the even more peace-loving “managerial class,” supported by increasing numbers of average, enlightened Russians who have learned, through better education, to take a more tolerant view of the West and a dimmer one of their ruling ideology, who will impose its will upon the Kremlin.
Granted that Russian society is changing— and what society is not?—the communist regime is still what it has been since 1917. Its political power and its power urge are undiminished. Its morals have not improved. Its dogmatism has not weakened. The regime has become militarily and economically stronger, and politically more skillful and more influential. So long as the “managerial class” is merely an abstraction contrived by Western political scientists and not an organized political force, the plant managers, engineers, and foremen as well as the scientists will not supersede the communist party. The communists are still in full power. In fact, Russia has advanced to Khrushchevism which is the most dangerous enemy of the United States in all its history. The United States has yet to assess the threat which Khrushchev holds out as a crafty dictator and as the master of the technically most progressive military machine in the world.
The Soviet barrage of proposals for negotiations, beginning with Bulganin’s letter to President Eisenhower in November, 1956, leaves no doubt that the Soviets are prepared to negotiate about: a rollback of Western military power in Europe. Now, it is possible to conceive of arrangements under which the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union could be withdrawn from their present position and a zone be created between, let us say, the Dnieper River and the North Sea where no foreign forces will be stationed. It should be noted, however, that such an agreement would have to satisfy a condition on which the United States cannot yield. The United States cannot jump across its own shadow. In the minds of men everywhere, United States foreign policy is associated with two principles, namely the right of national self-determination and democratic process. We have so strenuously avowed our devotion to these principles that we must submit to being judged by the measure of our adherence to them. If the Soviet Union agrees that all peoples between Russia’s national borders and the perimeter of the NATO alliance shall choose their respective national governments by free, direct, secret and popular vote, the basis for a far reaching agreement on a European settlement would have been created.
The question: should we or should we not negotiate with the Russians on a European settlement should read: is it likely that the Soviets will agree to the liquidation of communist puppet governments in Eastern Europe and their replacement by democratic governments presiding over sovereign states? If this question can be answered in the affirmative, then we are justified in hoping that we can obtain through negotiations with the Soviet Union peace with honor and security. If it must be answered in the negative, then negotiations with the Soviet Union, although they might lead to the solution of some fringe issue (as, indeed, they have done in the past) will not bring us nearer to “peace in our times.” To the contrary, in the light of past experience, such negotiations will be likely to redound to the Soviets’ unilateral benefit, weaken our position in Europe and strengthen the Soviet position in Asia. In sum, a “flexible” foreign policy—flexible is a euphemism for soft—is unlikely to wring from the communists those concessions which our “rigid” foreign policy has thus far failed to obtain. It is likely to lead to a global Munich.
Strategic Doctrine
The spectre of thermonuclear war haunts the advocates of such “flexible” policies as, for example, the suspension of atom bomb tests, the neutralization of Germany and a Summit Conference as suggested by Chairman Bulganin. Paradoxically, the same dread apparition is invoked by another, equally vocal school-of-thought in support of an American policy that rejects “coexistence” with communism as a chimera and urges increased preparedness for war, albeit a very particular kind of war: “limited war.” The gist of its argument is as follows: We have put too many of our defense eggs into the thermonuclear basket; the “nuclear stalemate” precludes all-out nuclear war between us and the Soviets since mutual devastation would deprive “victory” of its meaning; a future war is likely to be fought for “limited objectives,” and we might have to condone “limited” communist aggression since we do not now possess adequate means of “graduated deterrence.” Hence we must design, and put up the funds for, a new “strategic doctrine.” This “strategic doctrine” will tell us how to fight both a total war which, as long as we are ready for it, will be unlikely, and a limited war, which is a high probability. This is an interesting theory—as long as we do not look too closely at history and geography. Up until now, the larger part of America’s military resources— part of the Air Force, most of the Navy, and the Army—and virtually the entire military strength of our allies have been geared to fighting limited wars. All of NATO, because it lacks strategic retaliatory capabilities, is, strictly speaking, a “limited war” outfit. The United States Strategic Air Command is not at the orders of the NATO commander, and NATO does not possess long range missiles. Only we and, to a lesser extent, the British manufacture nuclear warheads and are capable, we hope, of delivering them upon far away targets. Most of our allies have trouble in maintaining their military power on the level of conventional war. It is possible to verify this fact, a rather alarming one, on the basis of various national budgets.
A brief glance at the map of Europe should convince anyone familiar with the range of even the lowest yield atomic weapons that the chances are one to one hundred that any local fighting, were it to break out along the present line of scrimmage, could be kept “limited.” Both the United States and Russia have integrated tactical atomic weapons into their military forces stationed in the heart of Europe. If fighting breaks out anywhere, these weapons will be used. Neither the Soviet commanders nor the NATO commanders could do otherwise. The result would be nuclear war. Given the narrow confines of Western Europe, the distinction between strategic and tactical atomic weapons fades into practical insignificance. Given the many unknowns of a future atomic war—none has been ever fought between two atomic powers—and given the notorious idiosyncrasies of military commanders, only a bone-dry theorist would care to predict what will happen once atomic bombs start popping off and that such a war can be kept, with the best will in the world of the opposing commanders, from turning into a total slug fest.
As regards other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia where wars are now being fought, or where wars might conceivably be fought in the foreseeable future, the use of nuclear weapons is inhibited, for both sides, by political considerations. Do we propose to meet, let us say, Syrian aggression against Jordan or a guerrilla attack by the Vietminh against Vietnam with nuclear weapons or, for that matter, by American forces deployed locally? Of course, we do not. A good case can be made for strengthening our allies in the Middle East and Southeast Asia by making available to them the best we have in conventional weapons. They do not lack manpower. Properly armed, they will know how to cope with local incidents. Our task is to prevent the Soviets from blackmailing—through nuclear threats—our allies in the Middle East and South Asia into neutralism and surrender. To enforce the ground rules of any local war in the Middle East or Southeast Asia fought with conventional weapons, we must be able to persuade the communists to keep it conventional and, for our part, desist from intervening with nuclear weapons as long as they are not being used by either of the parties involved in the fighting.
It is inadvisable to drive home a thumbtack with a sledge hammer. It is inadvisable, too, to employ scarce American manpower and expensive material where the abundant forces of our allies, properly equipped and trained, can handle expeditiously a local incident or war. What matters is our capability to enforce the ground rules against a Soviet attempt to change them in the course of the fighting. But this capability is nothing else than our old standby, namely our capability' for massive retaliation and, psychologically, our capability' for standing up ourselves against Soviet nuclear blackmail. Thus, the idea that we can get the better of the communists by developing the fine art of waging “limited” wars with “graduated means of deterrence” while taking the “nuclear stalemate” for granted is a dangerous delusion. It is dangerous because it subsumes that the greatest threat of the Free World lies in so-called communist nibbling tactics. The greatest threat to the Free World lies in Soviet military-scientific progress and the over-all capability of the Soviets for war. Every communist “limited challenge” is backed by the total potential of the Soviets; it is measured to the overall power relationship between the communist bloc and the Western alliance. In this sense, every communist challenge represents a gambit in thermonuclear brinkmanship no matter whether it is launched over the strategic control of outer space or over a bale of Syrian cotton.
The essence of life is change. There has been an evolution in the pattern of conflict between the communist bloc and the Free World. There have been shifts in the balance of power, most of them unfavorable to our side. Yet none of these shifts have been decisive. The Soviets are the last to think so. The grip of our power on the perimeter of Soviet power is not broken. On the other hand, the prospects for world peace are today about as bright or as dim as they were five years or ten years or twenty years ago, that is, ever since the communists emerged as an aggressive, totalitarian power. The Lenins, Stalins, and Khrushchevs come and go; communism remains. The prospects are for the continuation of the indefinite and irreconcilable conflict between democracy and communism.
In every age, the fundamental problems dividing nations and civilizations proved insoluble. The highest wisdom of statesmanship is to learn to live with insoluble problems and to exercise in all matters steadfastness, prudence, and moderation. Our age is no exception. Not a few of the problems of this age are unprecedented. But even these novel problems are rooted in the past. If we ask history the right questions, history will give us guidance to the problems of the present and the likely problems of the future. “He who ignores the lessons of history is condemned to repeat them.” If we do not take stock of the developments that have brought us to the present and manifestly critical turning point of our fortunes, we will not know where we must go from here.