THE COLD WAR AND THE CAMPAIGN

...With reality distorted, our foreign policy became captive to emotion-charged shibboleths —especially regarding Asia...

...still to devote its major effort to development of its heavy industry: It can make up some of the deficits of its agriculture and light industry by imports from abroad...

...It also prodded Britain into withdrawing its military establishment from the Suez Canal zone...

...To that extent, they agree with the American policy-makers...

...That concept assumed that economic distress was the chief urge to revolution in Asia...

...There is the "West," led by the United States, and the "East," headed by the Soviet Union...

...The United States entered the postwar period working by rule of thumb to help rehabilitate a war-torn world...

...The United States has ringed Eurasia from South Korea to the North Atlantic with military alliances and establishments designed to contain the dreaded revolution...

...Simply taking in each other's washing...

...Do our military foreign aid programs promise us final victory in the Cold War...

...We were led into the monumental error of trying to divide all humanity into political sheep and goats, and contain half a world...

...The Communist bloc enters into economic competition with the West well equipped with industrial strength, technical skills, and economic know-how...

...Our generation has seen the end of the era of domination of Asia by the white-skinned seafarers...

...The United States and Asia are moving in different directions, and the gap between them is widening...

...But there was an essential difference in the spirit of the two foreign-policy planks: where the Republicans depicted the United States triumphant in world affairs, with "The advance of communism . . . checked, and, at key points, thrown back," the Democrats held that the country had been led "into realms where we risk grave danger" and that "the unity and strength .of the free world have been drastically impaired...

...It is the United States which, after straining so hard in the Nineteenth Century to break down the exclu-sionism of China, Japan, and Korea has now undertaken the construction of a China Wall in reverse...

...Lying between is a gray zone of benighted "neutralists...

...Its accomplishments, in a situation where economic power and organizing skill meant so much, were no less than magnificent...

...It is evident that the Communist strategists in Moscow and Peking consider that the world has reached a new stage in the historic conflict between "socialism" and "capitalism...

...Zinoviev's words at the First Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920 had the ring of prophecy: "Comrades, when the East moves in reality, then not only Russia but all Europe will be but a small side-street in a huge picture...

...That strategy was not designed for a world in which Asia is undertaking an independent role...

...American, British, Dutch, and French colonial possessions in Asia have almost all been given up...

...For they would not oppose the Asian revolution, but join it...

...Washington reported in October that in 1955 the Communist bloc's trade with the rest of the world increased 24 per cent as compared with 1954...

...In Asia, on the other hand, a great political upheaval is in progress...

...The two parties had taken essentially similar platform stands on questions relating to the Communist bloc, colonialism, and foreign trade...

...It is there, not in the United States, that the most potent developments for humanity's future are now taking form...

...In the Middle East today, we reap bitter fruits from that strategy...

...Since the completion of the Marshall Plan, our foreign-aid programs have been devoted almost exclusively to the arming, training, and support of "anti-Communist" military forces...

...But when issues like "China" and "Korea" posed problems for which the U.S...

...Full respect was accorded to the pride of countries in their independence, and head-on collision with Asian nationalism thus avoided...

...Only thus can there be sound promise of service to the aspirations of mankind...

...We call for economic non-intercourse, political belligerency, and military containment—in sum, a clear-cut partition of the world community...

...Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev observed that "the principal feature of our epoch is the emergence of socialism from the confines of one country and its transformation into a world system," and that a vast "zone of peace" made up of both socialist and non-socialist countries in Europe and Asia was now present on the world stage...

...We supply guns to those who show (or voice) a readiness to fight on "our side," but we will not let down our trade barriers to admit their products for straight competition with American goods— whether tuna fish or turbines, cotton goods or cheese...

...The root cause of that divorcement of doctrine from reality could perhaps be found in the ideological conflicts of World War II...

...Our system of 42 military alliances has been infiltrated, and outflanked...

...The United States has depended almost entirely upon wealth and technics for accomplishment of its purposes, but there are some things that dollars, technical assistance, and guns and even A-bombs cannot do...

...government could not in the nature of things provide a satisfying (i.e., "American") solution, frustrations and McCarthyism combined to entangle our statesmanship in violent partisan strife...

...Military force is the core of our strategy vis-a-vis the Communist bloc...

...Thus, faced with a possibility of peace our coalitions tend to languish and our political authority to dissipate...

...Pandora's box had been opened and it appeared that little remained in the Middle East for the Occidental Big Three — Britain, France and the United States—except an uncertain hold on oil fields, and Hope...

...In much the same manner, the destruction of Japan as an effective political and military force revealed a quixotism regarding China, an inattention to the Soviet position in Asia, and a misreading of the Asian spirit, that have in time combined to threaten grave danger to the American world position...

...We cannot compromise, we cannot agree to disarm...

...And China, for one, far from adopting American democracy, has turned to communism and allied itself to the Soviet Union...

...Washington next played fast and loose with the issue of the financing of Egypt's Aswan Dam and, by striking at President Nasser's prestige, set off the Suez explosion...

...They both wanted bi-partisanship (the Democrats said "non-partisanship") in the formulation of our foreign policy...

...We assert our lack of sympathy with "that brand of neutralism that makes no moral distinction between the Communist world and the free world" (in the words of Vice President Nixon), and strain to pressure "uncommitted" Asian nations into joining our ideological crusade...

...And we must at this late day endeavor to obtain deeper insights into the cultural patterns and political aims of Asia and Africa, to appreciate both their urge for economic advancement and their fiery nationalism, and sympathetically to join forces—if we can—with national and international programs for the construction of a New Asia and a New Africa...

...Arab nationalism has been agitated, and the Arab states brought closer together...

...George Washington warned that a nation which habitually gives itself over to sentiments of love or hatred toward another becomes a slave to that love or hate...

...Events have proved those propositions wrong...

...The political base of the American strategy is too weak to support the military superstructure...

...Stalin's monolithic "international centralism" had been replaced by a "socialist internationalism" that could readily accommodate a liberal variety of non-Communist countries...

...The U.S.S.R...

...Those moves contributed directly to 1) the further alienation of Pakistan from India, 2) a reorientation by Afghanistan toward the Soviet Union, and 3) the exacerbation of Iraqui-Egyptian and British-Jordanian relations...

...Congress appropriated slightly over $4 billion for the year ahead—still in the same predominantly military pattern...

...For, "Where there is no vision, the people perish...

...It had come up against unyielding political limits, beyond which loomed the risk of World War III...

...yet, they generally lack the common political purpose that would give them vitality in the absence of an immediate threat of war...

...This was in error: the main revolutionary drive is Asian nationalism...

...American postwar policy for Asia was projected from the wartime belief that a strong China would emerge from its chaos to serve the American ideal in East Asia—and assumed that the immediate Soviet goals were in Europe...

...It adds a universal desideratum, "Peace...

...Soviet theories regarding the Asian revolution as expounded a generation ago have at last become applicable...

...The 20th Communist Party Congress that met in Moscow in February revealed the matured strategy...

...We dump our agricultural surpluses abroad to the distress of our allies, hike our tariffs against them, and at the same time view as somehow "immoral" any inclination on their part to expand their trade with the Communist bloc...

...But it stood alone, and went no farther...

...The shattering of the Japanese Empire left none of the naval powers besides the United States to fill the power vacuum in the West Pacific...

...The real revolution will blaze up only when the eight hundred million people living in Asia join with us, when the African continent unites, when we see that hundreds of millions of people are moving . . ." The Soviets are happy to be associated in popular repute with a revolutionary China, and to be identified with the "East...

...in 1955, however, 53 per cent of their trade was with the U.S.S.R.—and 25 per cent more with each other...

...This is a world in which mutual compromise, not "the enemy's" unconditional surrender, must be the rule if there is to be solution of the problems before us...

...Western civilization itself, of which the United States is so prominent a part, is faced with a problem of growth: will it develop to meet the demands of the era, or will it disintegrate under the impact of the East...

...Today Europe is seen to be stalemated, with Germany split in two...

...Certainly the implementation of the war-cry "unconditional surrender" in respect to Germany reflected more the tyranny of a slogan than sober regard for the consequences for Europe...

...The bloc as a whole is now organized to import the foodstuffs and raw materials of South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America in exchange for its own products...

...We shall have to abandon "unilateralism" in our major coalitions in favor of true coalition policies, and add political and economic factors to give vitality, if we would develop them (as Secretary of State Dulles said of NATO) into "the totality" of their meaning...

...In the light of these and other current developments we can see that a great gulf has opened between our foreign-policy doctrines and the world of reality...

...Our present policy conceives of no substitute for the destruction (or disintegration from natural causes) of Communist power...

...It has instead adopted a political approach sympathetic to nationalism and hospitable to "neutralism...

...There, the United States attempted to block Soviet influence by sponsoring the Baghdad Pact, thus creating a "Northern Tier" of four states, supported by Britain, abutting the U.S.S.R.'s frontier...

...The Democratic platform had it, "Today new challenges call for new ideas and new methods...

...The Bonn government's decision to reduce the service term for conscripts for West Germany's NATO forces, and the Tokyo decision to normalize Japan's relations with the Soviet Union are evidence of the inherent instability of some of our basic assumptions...

...By this Cold War concept, there is a terrible fatality that attends our moves in international affairs: by the inherent logic of the proposition, any relative improvement in the American position brings all the "West" closer to victory and the "East" closer to defeat—and the converse is just as true...

...These relationships limit our freedom of political maneuver...

...That is the foreign policy issue confronting the American nation...

...But the strategy they have adopted for use in the given circumstances is very different indeed...

...This is true whether the problem is one of disarmament, the position of Germany, foreign economic relations, the development of the United Nations into its full promise, or relationships with China and the rest of revolutionary Asia and Africa...

...This primarily military spirit pervades the alliances we maintain with 42 foreign states...

...In the April Lloyd's Bank Review, A. Nove analyzed "The Pace of Soviet Development" and ended with a sober warning: "The conclusion is inescapable: the West faces a really serious challenge on the economic front...

...And "containment," as an emergency measure, here had a limited function...

...The trend induced by such coordination of economic effort is indicated by figures for trade within the Communist bloc...

...stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, now challenges what Occidental colonizers have stood for in the past—political dominance, economic power, cultural superiority...

...The revival of the idea of a confederation of European States independent of American support underscores a growing Anglo-French-German estrangement from American NATO policies...

...The Communist strategists have selected as their field of combat the arena of political, economic, and cultural competition—especially, in Asia and Africa...

...For the H-Bomb gives us the power to pull Man's temple down on the heads of all...

...The Communist planned economy has been made international, with coordination of economic functions and division of labor among the different countries of the bloc...

...Today's world, as viewed by official U. S. doctrine, is divided into two great power blocs which, representing fundamentaly different political and moral systems, are locked in a struggle only one can survive...

...The Communist bloc's political orientation and economic set-up are adapted to existing political and economic conditions in Asia...

...Not military alliances, but "economic cooperation," would be the basis of the Communist policy...

...we can only plan for Armageddon...

...Where President Wilson held that an enduring peace must be "a peace without victory," the Cold War thesis envisages no peace without victory...

...Three times in as many years, in Korea, Indo-China, and the Formosa Strait, the United States stood on the brink of atomic warfare...

...The Middle East developments are a mark of the failure of the concept of military containment...

...There the West, having gravely weakened itself by two fratricidal World Wars, has been forced to relinquish all of its political authority...

...The Communist bloc has refused battle on the U.S.A.'s chosen ground...

...it would be foolish indeed, through over-concentration on military dangers or through obstinate complacency, to disregard the facts...

...The Suez crisis has provided a somber backdrop for the Republican promises of "Peace" and the Democrats' sketching of "a new America...

...The Soviet foreign economic policy is not based on charity: Moscow makes some outright gifts, and grants long-term credits for as little as two per tent annually, but it ordinarily stands ready to accept full payment, and to buy as well as sell...

...According to Dana Adams Schmidt, writing in the New York Times December 5, 1955, before 1940 only ten to fifteen per cent of the foreign trade of the East European satellites and China was with the Soviet Union...

...Most of Asia, moved by the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference, wants the universality and international order promised by the U.N...

...Nor do economic factors make up the balance...

...The antipathies of the English against the French Revolution, and the American horror of "Bolshevism" in the 1920's, find their counterpart in our manifestation of implacable hostility toward the Communist bloc today...

...The momentum of that conception carries us on...

...The vast continent of a billion and a half O. EDMUND CLUBB, a retired American Foreign Service officer, served for 20 years in Asia...

...But the United States still cleaves to its Cold War, and by its own ideological exclusionism frustrates the develop-ment of understanding and friendly cooperation between itself and the real "East"—Asia...

...As in the 1920's, the United States practices a neo-mer-cantilism that would have us sell to the politically orthodox (Communists are now rated as second-class customers), but "Buy American...

...Practically all of Asia (including most of the Middle Eastern countries), and the Soviet Union, were found in solid opposition to the use of military force or economic boycott to bring Nasser to his knees...

...On this occasion, the Arab-Asian nations abandoned "neutralism" and chose sides...

...In this century of the H-Bomb, our foreign policy decisions would thus be vital not only for ourselves but for all our allies—and might bring humankind's existence to an end within the visible future...

...had at last, with little effort on its own part, become an influence in the Middle East—the crossroads of history...

...This permits the U.S.S.R...

...To make adequate answer the United States, commanding so much power for molding the world's future, must make an ideological breakthrough—into that future...

...Postwar foreign aid had cost us a total of $55 billion by the end of June 1956...