Where the News Ends

...I received a fair number of responses...

...But there, too, one gets the impression, from visits and from correspondence, of a strong allergy to being reminded of the unpleasant facts of Soviet power and aggression...

...Not long ago, I invited responses from readers of the Manchester Guardian to the question of why one found so much more criticism of America than of the Soviet Union in many British periodicals, why McCarthy was considered a worse enemy than Stalin or Malenkov...

...For it is America that has assumed almost unlimited global commitments, while the virus of isolationism has bitten deeply some of the countries which, in the past, were supposed to set recreant America an example of willingness to fight for morality and collective security...

...But we want allies that deserve the name, that share our views about the reality and seriousness of the Communist threat...

...They assumed then that foreign nations were willing to fight for moral principles, that the United States was the hang-back boy...

...It is now almost two years since the EDC, providing for a six-nation European Army with a German contingent, was initiated...

...one familiar note was that higher standards were expected of America than of the Soviet Union, and that there was more disposition to talk freely to America, as a member of the family...

...The very Europeans who cry out loudly that, in the event of another war, they want to be defended, not "liberated," do everything in their power to make defense impossible, to force America to consider the undesirable and dubious alternative of peripheral defense, mainly by air and sea power...

...Sixth Fleet are a familiar sight in the streets of Athens, Istanbul and other Mediterranean ports...

...Despite the breast-beating of sentimentalists, we cannot grant to "friends" who have given little proof of friendship the right to veto measures essential to a successful stand against Communist imperialism...

...One need only consider the sorry spectacle presented by the European nations outside the Iron Curtain...

...How should we act in the face of this overseas isolationism...

...Behind these global commitments stands an almost unanimous national will...

...A good example is Louis Bromfield's Pattern for a Tired World, which is indeed very tiring...

...Isolationism has become a propaganda trump card of the powerful French and Italian Communist parties, which carry on their seditious activities without hindrance from the feeble governments of these countries...

...Oceans are no longer barriers when weapons of mass destruction can be carried at supersonic speeds...

...The French and Italian Parliaments have still not got around to ratifying this treaty and grasp at every straw of an excuse to put it off...

...America now can be fearfully devastated without being actually invaded...

...And behind these votes was a public opinion convinced that the factors which once made isolation from foreign quarrels (as recommended in Washington's Farewell Message) a very wise policy are no longer operative...

...The balance of power in the outer world, a genuine shield for the United States in the past, has been completely upset by the Second World War and its aftermath...

...Every now and then, too, some conservative wades into waters beyond his depth and produces a book or article that gives Vishinsky quotes for his next diatribe...

...But the votes in Congress that put us into the worldwide struggle against Soviet Communism were nearly unanimous...

...But my misgivings about the state of British public opinion were revived by repeated suggestions in these letters that Germany represented a greater threat than the Soviet Union...

...American troops are keeping the watch on the Elbe and on the Thirty-eighth Parallel...

...Sailors of the U.S...

...Great Britain is in a more robust state of political health than Communist-ridden France and Italy...

...The Communists and fellow-travelers don't like it, of course...

...Ironically enough, just when the United States is turning its back on isolationism, foreign nations, far less able to "go it alone," are succumbing to the pleasant opiates of isolationism and appeasement...

...No doubt there is a good deal of psychological truth in both these points...

...Now, this conception seems a precise reversal of the actual situation...

...we want allies, not satellites...

...This is the standard assumption of "interventionist" Americans who opposed our non-participation in the first years of the two world wars, who would have liked to see us join the League of Nations, call Mussolini to account in Ethiopia and stop Japan in Manchuria...

...American airmen are patroling the skies in bases as far-flung as Greenland, Okinawa and Morocco...

...It would be wrong and futile to try to coerce foreign nations...