THE PEACEFUL CONTINENT

...they responded in adult fashion by rejecting his party...

...That government is best, Thomas Jefferson once said, which governs least—and with the least possible attention, which is the Italian story this season...

...The old view*, dear to British prejudice," says the dear old London Economist, "that the Germans stand in the way of peace with the East is now hopelessly out of date...

...In Italy, to continue our political tour of the Continent, the news is no news, which is often the best news, particularly for Italy and the Italian government...

...De Gaulle was the West, and the Russian crowds cheered that incarnation...

...Erhard's campaign in the Ruhr was revealing...

...The effect on Wilson himself has been morbidly predictable—and not only by academic Marxists...

...And the Continent has summered in a guilt-free prosperity that may have no precedent—a prosperity that is largely the product of each Continental country's hard work, not that of its colonies...

...No, not war...

...One wonders whether Britain has earned any more respect in Washington than in Western Europe...

...As time passes, there is growing awareness here that the famous confrontation at Cuba, "when Russia backed down," has established perhaps the most dangerous precedent in the history of the American Presidency: that whenever faced with American nuclear power, the Soviet Union—and now China—will buckle under...

...If this is true, then the balance of terror has been upset, at least in the mind of America, and the only restraint to American power is now self-restraint...

...Remember, the group governing our country now is not too certain of itself or of each other...

...And then what...

...He met a group of little children carrying a sign: "We promise to be good and grow up to be non-intellectuals...

...A policy of neutrality for Vietnam (meaning withdrawal of all foreign forces, which at this point are almost wholly our own), recognition of China, and building of real bridges to Russia (another figure of Johnson's speech) would be called common sense by anyone but American Members of Congress...

...Thus, underlying Johnson's new Monroe Doctrine for the Pacific is the new private conclusion that America is the only real power there...

...Not content with taking on the working class, Erhard has been having a running battle with the "intellectuals," especially novelist Gunter Grass...

...Now it must await a changed Johnson, or another Kennedy...

...Kennedy's "iron nerve" has now become the yardstick, and what President will not feel compelled to measure up...

...In like manner, Lacouture reports in Le Nouvel Observateur, Washington has for some time concluded that Soviet Russia will buy peace at any price and proved it by backing down in the Cuban confrontation of 1962...

...As for NATO, we are about to turn a good number of Belgians, once some of our best friends, into Gaullists simply by the act of forcing—that is the word—the new NATO headquarters on them...

...It painfully recalls our own valiant President's denunciation of the "nervous Nellies"—particularly since subsequent events have confirmed the worst fears of the critics of both leaders...

...There is only slight exaggeration in these statements...

...A political tour of the Continent's horizon has never, in our time, been nearly so pleasant—and now one need not stop automatically, in one's mind, at the Communist border...

...Neither Rusk nor McNamara, who have gotten considerable mileage out of Lin Piao's speech, chose to discuss this part of it: "If one does not operate by one's own efforts," the Chinese Communist had warned, "[if one] does not rely on the strength of one's own masses but leans wholly on foreign aid . . . no victory can be won, or be consolidated even if it is won...

...So it was correct to withdraw...

...We feel that Khrushchev had no right to be in Cuba in the first place...

...But how far do you think you can push us and make us look ridiculous...

...rope, for Europe contains Great Britain, the Continent does not—and Britain has become a special case...

...The Continent is not, to be sure, the Great Society of President Johnson's figure of speech, but then neither is the United States, whose endless detour via Vietnam brings it no closer to greatness...

...He scolded booing miners by remarking they would have starved in their diapers had it not been for his economic wizardry...

...he was not the destroyer of NATO, not even the declarer of independence from America...

...He is the author of a new book, "The People of Paris...

...Never have so many good intentions been forced on so many people since the heyday of the Boy Scout movement...

...The conspicuous turning point came with the victory of the Social Democrats in the provincial elections of Catholic and industrial North-Rhine Westphalia in July...

...The Chinese Communists are considered here to be far less adventurous than the Chinese nationalists, far less messianic than they have been conveniently made out to be by the Pentagon's Pekingologists...

...Johnson's America, says Jean Lacouture, the first-rate French journalist whose knowledgeable book, Vietnam: Between Two Truces, was recently published, is beginning to make the Soviet Union look like a model of wisdom and restraint...

...Daily, advertisements in the international editions of The New York Times and Herald Tribune solicit business or tourist relations from Western peoples with Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even Bulgaria...

...Escalation...

...Result: even those Christian Democrats who are ambitious to succeed the badly declining Chancellor Ludwig Er-hard are beginning to compete with the Social Democrats in new proposals for the improvement of relations with the Communists...

...The blandishments could not be more Madison Avenue— and that may well be where the copy is written...

...In politics, the superficial can go very deep...

...It is not entirely a coincidence that Johnson's two European supporters— Prime Minister Wilson and Chancellor Erhard—should be running into the same political difficulties and developing a similar political style...

...It is not at peace with itself—which takes some measure of prosperity—nor at peace with the world: witness the support, however queasy, of President Johnson in Vietnam and the concern for military posts east of Suez, a concern more appropriate to Imperial than to Labor Party England...

...China, too, in comparison, has come in for a second look...

...Indeed, it is as much Harold Wilson's devious politicking that bothers his own countrymen these days as it is the declining pound...

...In fact, General de Gaulle's Soviet journey earlier this summer was the crystallization of the new postwar world of the Continent...

...Had it been Chiang Kai-shek in Peking," a Harvard expert on the Far East told Lacouture, "the Chinese would already have intervened in Vietnam...

...Especially in view of China's accusation that we are betraying fellow Communists...

...The month before, their leader, Willy Brandt, took the risk of publicly remarking that some formal recognition of East Germany might lead to contacts of advantage to West Germany, rather than the contrary—and won in the Ruhr...

...style is often the accurate picture of the political mind (think of Churchill, Roosevelt, or Kennedy...

...The French are proud of their President...

...As for the Prime Minister's venture in Eastern Europe, even the English press called Wilson's hasty political trip to Moscow a "non-event...

...Americans should realize," he said, "that there is a limit to our own 'good sense,' as you call it...

...The truth of it lies in the ironic fact that it is now East German leaders, such as the fading Herr Walter Ulbricht, who are shying away from togetherness...

...It has produced a new style, reflected in one of his less happy speeches denouncing "the defeatists' cries, the moaning Minnies, the wet editorials...

...In short, he says, America is convinced it has finally won the cold war and has emerged from it as the one super-power of the world, not only with the God-given mission but the unchallenged capability of playing policeman to the universe (outer space is not excluded...

...On a recent whistle-stop, Erhard was given his answer...

...I emphasize the Continent, not EuJOSEPH BARRY, a former columnist for The New York Post, is European correspondent for The Progressive...

...Previously Brandt had proposed public rebate with the East German leaders, who reneged at the last moment...

...A change of government, or rather of policy, is the German story...

...Britain is today's sick man of Europe, leaning on America to keep the pound from collapsing...

...When, last fall, Lin Piao proclaimed that "the rural areas of the world" were capable of winning a victory over "the cities of the world," as the agrarian revolutionaries had in China, Washington rushed to denounce this concept as Red China's scheme for world conquest...

...Had President Kennedy made that trip, as he planned, the incarnation would have been even clearer...

...Previously they talked only of Mao's reckless madness and only publicly, not privately, do they still compare him to Hitler...

...You can't know what it might feel it must do...

...Washington's experts, says Lacouture, now concede, but only privately, that China, fearful of American power, is bent on preserving socialism within its own borders rather than in extending it abroad through its Red Army...

...Then more escalation...

...East Germany, in this sense of separation, is still the Stalinist exception in Eastern Europe...

...It is a turn scarcely imagined barely a year ago...

...Strategic Air Force—and humanity will be entering a Hollywood world of science fiction, where the American military will be parachuted into another country's politics as if it were an unfriendly rice paddy...

...Meanwhile a few influential Continentals have been on a political tour of the United States, and have brought back a rather bleak report...

...In Erhard's opinion, intellectuals criticize too much to be proper citizens...

...In this connection, I would like to report a confidential conversation with a Russian stationed in Paris...

...Many, among them the financial experts of the Observer, are boldly advocating devaluation of the pound to save Britain's soul, if not Britain...

...You have to go beyond Napoleon and Louis XIV, back to the coexistence of Islam and Christianity for some kind of precedent...

...Britain, to some extent by its own choice, is now the exception of Western Europe...

...It was too obviously an attempt to appease the left-wing critics of his own party rather than to appeal seriously, with any expectation of success, for the calling, by co-chairman Russia, of a new Geneva conference on the Vietnam war...

...Brighton Beach, it is safe to say, will not...

...But in a poll, seventy-six per cent of the West Germans said they thought such debate a good idea...

...What with prices and crowding on the Riviera, the Black Sea might yet be the "in" resort of the "in" tourist of the near future...

...Certainly not a Johnson...

...Lacouture recently completed a teaching assignment at Harvard...

...It limps along behind American foreign policy for all the world like a satellite rather than a firm friend and ally...

...What with the American President reacting epidermically by dispatching troops at the drop of a hat to places as distant from each other as Santo Domingo and South Vietnam, there is, to put it coolly, considerable doubt on the Continent about that self-restraint...

...The opposition has been outflanked on the left...

...Recognition of the existence of three Ger-manies—West Berlin, East, and West Germany—as Rudolf Augstein of Der Spiegel dared write some time ago, might yet lead to one...

...pique with the General has never been more popular here, and understandably so...

...In this self-righteous vision, the dreamed-of international police force will be the U.S...