WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE BIG THREE?
Crawford, Kenneth G.
What Will Happen To The Big Three? David Dal I'm s Book Is As Timely As Tonight's News Broadcast ' THE BIG THREE, by David Dallin, Yale University Press. $3.00. Reviewed by Kenneth G....
...Indeed almost every event of the last few months can be fitted into the logic of his reasoning...
...Consequently they have not been received with as much acclaim as they should have been...
...Reviewed by Kenneth G. Crawford DAVID J. DALLIN'S three informed books on Russia have established him as one of the foremost authorities in the United States on the U.S.S.R...
...DALLIN'S manuscript must have gone to the publisher months ago, yet his book is as timely as tonight's news broadcast...
...were he not to do everything in his power to replace the vague constitution of the vague United Nations organization with the cement of that other entity of the United Nations—the U. ~>.S.R...
...A nation that aspires to dominate Europe, however, must go the whole hog or none...
...Freedom in itself is not a guarantee against aggression, he says, "but lack of freedom promotes the growth of the martial spirit...
...were he not to apply any and alLmeans to achieve these goals...
...France, he thinks, will regain great power status...
...no less than Germany and Japan, is ambitious to rule the world and that its leaders are pursuing this purpose...
...And vice versa...
...to those of its uneasy partners, the United States and Great Britain, and arrives at the inevitable conclusion that the "coming period in world history will be, at best, a period of armed peace...
...In all other cases, namely, those in which a great power is interested in the affairs of a small nation, or in which disagreement among the great powers has reached a stage where no compromise is possible, the United Nations will be as helpless to prevent war as the League of Nations...
...Only one development, the unveiling of the atomic bomb, could in any way affect the Dallin prognosis—and only as it adds to the power of the Anglo-American alliance in its relations with the U.S.S.R...
...RUSSIA, according to Dallin, can still make a lasting peace possible by retreating into her own ethnographical frontiers and giving real freedom to her neighbors...
...Stalin," the author says, "would indeed not be deserving of the title of a great leader of his movement were he to relinquish bis yearning to do away everywhere with inimical social and political groups and simultaneously to extend the Soviet social structure to near-by peoples and states...
...The United Nations," Dallin says, "will be able to prevent military action between small powers, in cases of conflicts among small nations which do not have the backing of one of the big...
...The United Nations will have neither a policy of its own nor a separate military force to achieve its lofty goal...
...Thus "real progress (toward permanent peace) can be achieved only through abolition, down to the last vestige, of international political suppression and subjugation, of all forms of autocracy, in the soil of which warlike tendencies.and lust to conquest are bound to ripen...
...Dallin predicts that the harsh peace for Germany will have to be modified for the survival of Europe because "a cow can't be used for milk and slaughter at the same 'time...
...And this is a hopeful development in the framework of Dallin's thinking because Stalin understands power...
...He does not, of course, share the Lippmannesque delusion that the Big Three nations will lie down together and purr away the world's troubles...
...In his latest, The Big Three, Dallin relates the policies and aspirations of the U.S.S.R...
...They have also, incidentally, made some of the pseudo-authorities look bad...
...It can now be stated almost as a rule of thumb that the sillier a book on Russia is, the greater the praise it will get from the reviewers...
...He believes Japan also will regain some degree of influence in the Orient...
...Russia can't be turned from its purpose of conquest by flattery, sermons, or persuasion but "great force is the most eloquent argument for peace...
...And history teaches that "dictatorship is the high road to war...
...DALLIN feels that the war just ended was necessary —that Japan and Germany as avowed aggressors had to be licked...
...He foresees conflicts between members of the Big Three that will give smaller nations a chance to regain strength and prestige individually and in combination...
...But he recognizes that the U.S.S.R...
Vol. 9 • September 1945 • No. 38
