Breakup of the Two-Power World

by WALTER LIPPMANN.

IT is my very good fortune to have worked under Newton D. Baker — very far under him, I hasten to add, and in a quite humble capacity, but yet near to him personally — in a time when he was facing grave and momentous decisions. I remember one hot evening in July, 1917, when he called me into his office in the War Department, saying he bad finished for that day, but would I stay a little longer and just listen to him while he put his feet up on the desk and talked out loud and tried to clear his mind.

He was deeply troubled and puzzled, he said, by something which he had never in all his public experience come face to face with before. He had lived in the conviction that any problem could and should be taken to the American people, and that after they had heard the whole story argued out publicly, they would come to the right decision.

But knowing, as Secretary of War, what I know about the power of Germany, the weakness of the allies, and our own unpreparedness, he said, I don’t know whether I dare to tell the people how badly the war is going that they are just beginning to take part in. If they were told the whole truth, if they knew all that I know, would the Germans not learn where to strike at our weakest points, and would not our people be so discouraged and confused that they would not do what will have to be done to prevent a disaster? And yet if our people do not know the whole truth, will they believe us when we ask for their sons and send them to the battlefields in Europe? And if we fail in the war, will our people over forgive us, and ought they ever to forgive us, when we did not trust them in the crisis of their destiny ?

I wish Newton Baker were with us now. For the question that he raised that night in Washington, nearly thirty-five years ago, is with us now, is with anyone who undertakes to talk about the crisis — the indubitable and immense crisis — in which we and all the world are involved.

When we look at the Far East, at Southeast Asia, at Germany, at the United Nations, and at the race of armaments in which we are engaged, the facts are grim. But the raw facts will seem more desperate and more hopeless than they really are, only, I believe, if we interpret them and measure them in the light of the outdated theories, the doctrines, and the conceptions which were popular during the past three or four years. I am referring to the ideas, expectations, and plans which are based on the Truman Doctrine and its corollary, the policy of the military containment of Russian communism.

The mounting crisis in our foreign relations marks the failure of the Truman Doctrine, and if we cling to the ideas of the Truman Doctrine, the collapse of our influence in China will be followed by the collapse of our influence in the whole of Asia and in Central Europe. But I believe that this menacing movement of events can be stopped if we are able to brace and nerve ourselves to reconsider and to revise our policy in the light of a fresh, objective analysis of what is actually happening. Let me begin by naming six developments which are of critical significance.

Copyright 1930, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston Hi, Mass. All rights reserved.

The first is that the American monopoly of atomic weapons ended sooner than the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Congress and the public expected.

The second is that Mao Tse-tung has succeeded in capturing the leadership of the Chinese revolution in the whole of contmental China.

The third is that in Southern Asia the British Empire and the Dutch Empire have been dissolved and have been succeeded In the independent Asiatic stales of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.

The fourth is that in the rich colonial area of Southeast Asia, in Indo-China, Malaya, and Burma, there are end war and nnarehy because the authority and power of the European empires have been undermined, but no native independent states capable of governing themselves have emerged.

The filth is the secession of Marshal Tito from the Soviet orbit in Eastern Europe and the tendency of Titoism to spread to Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

The sixth is the revival of Germany as a power in Europe.

All of these developments have come to a head with in the past year. None of them was, of course, entirely unforeseen. Yet it is the combination of these events which has, I believe, created a radically new situation that will compel all the governments to re-examine their estimates of the cold war and their calculations and their policies.

I venture to suggest that the net effect of all these developments combined marks the beginning of the end of the idea that the world must, and that the world will, align itself in two camps, the one directed from Moscow and the other from Washington. That idea has been at the root of Soviet policy, and also of American policy. It is the one idea which the communist world and the non-communist world agreed upon. Both have said it was a true prediction of what would happen.

The orthodox communists regard this doctrine of the division of the world into two camps as the guarantee of a beautiful hope. They believe that if the world can be divided into two camps, the noncommunist camp will break up because it is not united by a common doctrine, because it is not ruled with an iron hand, and because it represents all stages of political development from advanced democracy to the most reactionary, corrupt feudal and imperial regimes.

The Western world, on the other hand, has regarded this division as an ugly necessity forced upon it by the unity of the communist world, which compels it to organize in one grand coalition all the non-communist states. In every doctrine of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist creed we have challenged the basic principles except in this one. We too have said that the world would be, could be, and had to be divided into two camps.

I believe the lime has now conic when we have a right to ask ourselves whether the theory is in fact true. We have a duty to ask ourselvesos whether in fact our minds have not become infiltrated and misled by the basic dogma of the very creed against which we think we are fighting. And I believe that if we examine the facts of the world as they are, rather than the communist theory, if we look at what is really happening and what is most probably developing in Asia and in Europe, we shall find the strongest reasons for doubting whether mankind can he or will be organized into two and only two coalitions.

Even before the events of this past year the two coalitions were by no means complete and they were far from solid. We know to what lengths of suppression and terror and purging the Cominform has had to go in the satellite countries in order to keep them subordinated to the Kremlin. And wo know from our own experience how complicated has been the task of achieving unity of action in Western Europe under the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Security Pact. Everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain nationalist and separatist forces have interfered with the organization of the world into two great alliances.

2

IF WE look more closely at the six big developments which I named before, leaving aside for the moment what has happened in the field of atomic energy, I should like to point out that there is a common denominator in five of these developments

—namely, the rebellion of Tito, the Chinese revolution, the independence of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, the breakdown of authority in Southeast Asia, and the revival of Germany. In each case one or both of the two coalitions has lost or is losing control of an important region. But in no case is it at all certain that the one coalition has won the region that the other has lost.

Russia has lost control of Yugoslavia. It by no means follows that Tito could or would align himself wholly and reliably with the Western powers. The tendency which we know as Titoism is manifestly at work in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czcchoslovakia. We know that from the purges conducted against communists who have devoted their lives to the movement. On the other hand, it would certainly be a delusion to suppose that communists who rebel against the domination of the Kremlin have become intellectually and morally converted to the ideology of the Western democracies.

There is strong evidence that a similar tendency is at work in Germany. It manifests itself in the concessions which the Soviets are making to the East Germans in order to appease and to seduce the German nationalists inside the Cheistian Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the parties of the Right. There is, on the other hand, growing evidence that even the West German Republic is more and more disinclined to accept the position of a docile and subordinate member of the Western coalition.

I think it is no exaggeration to say of Germany that with the establishment of the government at Bonn and its unmistakable growth in political and economic power we are in the process of relinquishing our control over the future of Germany. I think no one can go to Germany today and continue to believe that Mr. McCloy and his colleagues, the British and French High Commissioners, have it in their power any longer to determine the future of Germany. They are in fact liquidating the power of the Western allies over Germany, and are being drawn into negotiations about a series of demands made by the Germans. No doubt the United States, Britain, and France still have a certain discretion as to the rate at which the Germans shall recover their sovereignty. But the time is already clearly in sight when the Germans will recover it and when the Germans will make German policy.

I shall not dwell at any length upon the developments in Southern Asia, except to point to the wellknown fact that there are seven new independent states in Sout hern Asia — namely, Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, the I hilippinos, and Israel. Of these the biggest and most influential is India. As these states have achieved their national independence, they have declared that they will not enter into the military and political coalition of the Western powers or of the Soviet Union.

Pandit Nehru was quite explicit on that issue when he was in the United States, and I have no doubt myself that here he reflects the purpose of all the new national governments of Asia. They have decided, as this country did 150 years ago when it was new and weak, to avoid a policy of entangling alliances. There is little reason to think that anything but an overt military invasion of Southern Asia by Soviet or Chinese communist armies could alter their decision.

When we turn to the Far East there is, of course, the obvious fact that the Chinese government which we backed has been defeated. The victorious leaders of the Chinese civil war are communists. They have declared that they are the allies of the Soviet Union, They have turned their backs on Washington. They have gone first to Moscow.

But it is by no means certain that the marriage of the two communist revolutions is indissoluble. For many generations the imperial interests of Russia and the national and imperial interests of China have been in conflict all the way from the Sea of Japan to the Pamir Mountains along a borderland that extends 4000 miles into the heart of Asia.

Moreover, over the larger part of that immense borderland the peoples on both sides of the political frontier are neither Russian nor Chinese but are peoples of various tribes and nationalities of Asia over whom both China and Russia assert power and influence.

While it is true that we have lost our power and, for the time being, most of our influence in China, it by no means follows that Russia has won control of China or has achieved an enduring alliance with China. It is not wishful thinking, but common sense informed by historical experience, to say that if Russia finds it difficult to maintain its domination over small countries in the Balkans, there is no reason to jump to the conclusion that she can consolidate her domination over this much vaster and more complicated region of the world.

Turning to Japan, it is clear, I think, that out position has been seriously weakened by what has happened in China. The main economic connections with Japan are on the mainland of Asia. There lie the most important sources of Japanese imports. There lie the principal markets of Japan. Nor can it be denied that the strategic security of Japan has been greatly affected by the fact that the whole mainland of Fast Asia — all the ports and airfields and the whole hinterland — is in communist and anti-American hands.

3

I HAVE left until the last the event which was announced by the President on September 23. that there had been an atomic explosion inside the Soviet Union. This event marked the end of the short-lived American monopoly of atomic weapons. Lei us make the most favorable assumptions. Let us assume that we can make more bombs and bigger bombs than the Russians, that we can build faster planes with longer range, and that we can organize better defenses to detect, to warn, and to intercept. Even on these dangerously optimistic assumptions no one can doubt, it seems to me, that the military situation has become radically different from what it was when we had the monopoly of atomic weapons. The difference will, I believe, be felt soonest in Germany and in Japan.

During the period of our monopoly there existed a military stalemate between the Red Army and the American strategic air force armed with its atomic weapons. The one was a deterrent upon the other. The military defense of Western Europe and of Western Germany rested on our capacity to bombard the vital centers of Eastern Europe and of Russia. The American atomic bomb pinned down the Red Army. It acted as a military shield behind which Western Europe could attempt to organize itself to revive its military defenses and to carry on its economic reconstruction.

On the other hand, the American monopoly of the atomic bomb, though sufficient for defensive purposes, was not sufficient for any policy which required direct military pressure upon the Soviet Union. The capacity of the Red Army to occupy the vital centers of Germany and of Belgium and of Fance excluded from the consideration of any reasonable man the idea of preventive war or of a diplomacy which aimed to compel the Russians to accept Western terms for the settlement of Europe.

The Soviet achievement of the atomic bomb, even if relative to us the Russians have only a few bombs, has changed the balance of military power. It has changed it most radically and critically, and first of all, in Western Germany and Japan. The question now is no longer how they are to be defended against the Red Army alone, but how they are to be defended also against atomic bombardment.

Until a few months ago that question had not been faced. It did not enter into the calculations and the plans of the North Atlantic Security Pact, or of the American military aid program. It was believed until September that while some day no doubt the Russians would achieve atomic weapons, that day was still in the future. Therefore the question of how the countries adjacent to the Soviet Union were to be defended against atomic weapons was hypothetical and could be passed by. But now it is an actual and urgent problem.

Both Germany and Japan are small countries containing highly concentrated industrial areas. The ultimate defenses against air attack — namely, dispersion and space—are not available to Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan are in fact the ideal targets of atomic warfare. Even if it is technologically possible to create an effective aerial defense against atomic bombardment, the difficulties of doing that are peculiarly great in Western Germany and in Japan, and the cost would be, I believe, prohibitive.

We are compelled, therefore, to re-examine the strategic situation. For the strategic formula on which we have operated from the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in ihe spring of 1947 to the signature of the Atlantic Pact in the spring of 1949 had as its major premise the American monopoly of the atomic bomb. Working on this premise, our chief military problem was to design and construct aircraft capable of penetrating the Soviet defenses in order to deliver the bomb.

But now we have the additional problem of creating defenses in a large number of countries which we have guaranteed, and in two countries, Germany and Japan, which we occupy and have disarmed — defenses that cannot be penetrated by the Soviet air force carrying atomic bombs and by the Soviet navy carrying atomic bombs. Until recently there has been almost no public discussion of this problem in the United States. But it is being discussed anxiously abroad, and beneath the surface the reaction is profound. The effects of the new strategic situation in the countries I have just visited are unmistakable to anyone who looks beneath the official appearance of things.

4

IN the exposed and vulnerable countries along the periphery of the Soviet Union the effect, I believe, has been to reinforce decisively their natural impulse to disassociate themselves from the two coalitions and to seek such security as they can find by recovering their independence from both. For in this new strategic situation neither the U.S.S.R. nor the United States can offer the vulnerable countries any guarantee, or even any reasonable hope, of security against the fearful devastation of atomic warfare.

The Russians cannot offer that security to the Germans or the Japanese if they join the Soviet Union in an alliance, and we cannot offer those countries security if they join us in an alliance. These countries have neither the offensive power of retaliation nor the power of defense. They are caught between two lines of fire, and whichever side they turn to can offer them nothing but the prospect of devastation from the other side.

The Germans cannot once again become the allies of Russia, as they have so often in the past, because Russia cannot defend them and they cannot defend themselves against American air power, But by the same token Western Germany cannot become the military ally of the West, as Field Marshal Montgomery and some of the French generals so fondly hope, because Britain and America cannot with certainty and effectiveness promise to defend Western Germany against Russian aerial attack.

The Germans are a highly intelligent people, especially in military matters, when they are not befuddled by demagogues like Hitler. They are confronted with a dilemma and they know it, and there is only one way out of it open to them which offers them any prospect — even if it is not a certain prospect —of security. The Germans will take that way out because there is no other way out. They will recognize that they lie between two armed coalitions, each attempting to win them over to it. They will exploit this middle position to recover their national independence by making demands and gaining concessions from both sides. They will by this method restore their unity. They will shake off the controls of the occupying powers. They will get rid of the military occupation. Then they will develop their middle position in the heart of Europe outside either alliance, and in between both alliances, to regain their power and influence in Europe.

This policy will reflect the realities of their military position and their own vital interests. The Germans may call it a policy to neutralize Germany, or a policy of independence and isolation, or a policy of liberation, or conceivably a policy designed to make them equal members of a European federation of nations which is not part of either the Russian or the American military system. But whatever the Germans choose to call their policy, the course they are most likely to take—unless there is a general collapse and a civil and international war is similar to the course which more and more of the leading nations in the borderland all around the Soviet Union are also trying to take. It is the policy of avoiding entangling alliances in a two-power world.

Thai is the course which India, Pakistan, and Indonesia have already decided to take. It is the course which Tito in effect is trying to take. It is the course which Austria is bound to take. It is the course which every country in the Soviet orbit would take if it could disentangle itself from the grip of the Red Army. It is the course they will all be taking if the Germans succeed in putting an end to the occupation of Germany and, therefore, to the presence of the Red Army on the StettinTrieste line.

The logic of the German situation is also, I believe, the logic of the Japanese. Because General MacArthur cannot guarantee Japan against atomic attack from the Asiatic mainland, the Japanese struggle to survive must take the form of a struggle to make Japan independent of both military systems.

5

THIS vast and complicated process, which is well begun but far from completed, is in fact the disintegration of the military alliances envisaged by those who have believed that the world could be organized into two military coalitions.

Can this process of disintegration be stopped and reversed?

I believe that in practice it will prove to be impossible for the United States to reverse this process in the countries immediately adjacent to the Soviet Union. That is to say, it cannot any longer be the object of our policy to meet the Soviet expansion by organizing a military coalition in which Western Germany, Japan, and China are to be, as we once conceived it, the principal outer bastions — in which the United States, Great Britain, and France would be the arsenal, the citadel, and the headquarters. That was a conceivable arrangement in the days when General Clay appeared to be supreme in Western Germany, when General MacArthur appeared to be supreme in Japan, and when General Chiang Kai-shek was still the chief war lord of the greater part of China. It was just conceivable then because the United States had the monopoly of atomic weapons and could strike the Soviet Union without the prospect that the Soviet Union could strike back at the United States or at Great Britain or at France. It is not conceivable now.

My own view is, therefore, that the paramount object of our policy cannot be to contain Soviet expansion by organizing a global coalition. The paramount object of our policy from now on will have to be to frustrate and to disorganize and to disintegrate any Soviet attempt to form a global coalition.

The critical areas in which such a policy must operate are Germany, Eastern Europe, China, and Japan. We should prevent Germany, as she recovers, from making an alliance with Russia. That can be done. And the strategic air power we possess should be the perfect instrument of that policy. It should be plain to the Germans, even without the necessity of our making it plainer than it obviously is, that if they ally themselves with Russia they become the first target in case of a war with Russia. But since, if they ally themselves with us, they will become the first target of the Russian attack, we cannot ask the Germans, and we must not expect the Germans, to ally themselves with us. Therefore we should influence and encourage the Germans to do what so many Germans already want to do: namely, to identify German nationalism and German patriotism with German unity and with tierman independence. He should help the Germans to neutralize themselves in order to end the military occupation and the partition.

We should clear our minds of the fallacy that neutrality is altogether obsolete because so many neutral countries from Belgium in 1914 to Denmark and Norway in 1940 have been unable to maintain their neutrality. The fact is that, while some countries could not pursue the neutrality that they desired, others did manage to achieve it. In Europe, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Turkey, and Spain managed in the second war to remain nonbelligerent. And it will, I believe, be increasingly difficult to convince a growing number of Europeans that the risks of attempting neutrality and disentanglement are greater than the alternative.

We must not misunderstand or minimize how people feel who know themselves to be disarmed, who know they cannot be guaranteed against invasion or bombardment, when they are expected to commit themselves irretrievably to participation in a war in which their allies and their enemies can offer them only the certainty of devastation. I hey know its well as we do that there is no certainty in a policy of neutrality. It may well be, they know, that they will be overrun, occupied, and destroyed. But on the other hand they know also that as members of either alliance they are certain to be fought over. As neutrals they might have a chance of staying out of the havoc.

I believe therefore that we cannot ignore these feelings; that we shall fail if we try to override them. We should regard every country around the Soviet Union,—which seeks by diplomacy and by its own forces to preserve its independence, — as a military asset in the defense of the free world, as one less liability against our overextended military and economic commitments.

Within the framework of this new policy we, the British, and the French, as the leading members of the Atlantic Community, should support Titoism in Eastern Europe by taking a firm and unequivocal stand, as in fact we have, not against communism as such, but against Russian imperialism and Russian aggression. But in encouraging Tito to remain independent of Moscow we should not ask or expect him to become our ally.

In China we should do what Secretary Acheson has indicated that he wishes to do. We should offer Red China what we have offered all Chinese governments since the time of John Hay fifty years ago: our support, which the Chinese will eventually need, against dismemberment and imperialist aggression. They should be made to feel that they have an alternative to submitting to the demands of Moscow, that they can turn to Washington and London, that they are not imprisoned in the Soviet system, that they are not limited to the economic help which can be drawn from it, that when they feel they need support and seek it, the doors will not be slammed in their face and they will not be driven back into the arms of the Russians.

We should base our policy in Japan on a recognition of the vital interests of Japan. We should make it plain to the Japanese that we know as well as they do that they must trade with the Asiatic mainland, and that therefore they must be allowed to have diplomatic relations with their two Asiatic neighbors. Japan cannot be expected to join our alliance because we cannot defend Japan against Soviet atomic attack; but we can prevent Japan from joining the Russian alliance because we have the power to attack Japan if she does.

I am quite well aware that I cannot possibly have answered all questions and resolved all doubts. I do not know all the answers, nor have I resolved all my own doubts. I feel sure thal the basic conception of our foreign policy will have to be reconsidered, and in important respects revised, in view of what is happening in Germany and in Eastern Europe, in the Far East and Southern Asia, and in the field of atomic energy. I think that our best course from now on is to work toward the general objective of disintegrating the Soviet coalition.

That would mean that we put our influence and power behind the general tendency towards national independence, towards military neutrality, and towards diplomatic disentanglement — a tendency which is manifest in almost all of Asia, and in much at least of Central and Eastern Europe. I believe that in the last analysis the matter reduces itself to this: that since we cannot encircle the Soviet Union by a military coalition, we should cultivate and exploit all the national forces, all the human impulses to escape from the havoc of war, in order to prevent the Soviet Union from forming its coalition and in order to disintegrate its military alliances in Eastern Europe and those which it hopes to achieve in Asia.

I believe we can never afford to forget — as we form our policy—the true nature and the essential limitations of our power in the world. We are a continental island, separated by the oceans from the great land mass of the Eurasian continent. Inside that great land mass we have and can develop great striking power exerted at long range. But our power to occupy, to fortify, and to hold secure large land areas on the other side of the two oceans is limited. We are not and will never be a great land power on either continent. We can base no policy on the assumption that we might be. Nor can we base any policy on the assumption that the heterogeneous peoples of Europe and of Asia can be united, consolidated, armed, and defended in one military system.

We cannot organize military coalitions inside the Eurasian continent which require the presence or the immediate availability of large American land forces. The kind of naval and air power that we have and that we can exert will not support a policy which seeks to organize such a coalition. Our kind of power can be used, however, to support a policy which seeks to deter aggression by the Soviet Union by the threat of retaliation. Our power will support a policy which seeks to disorganize that coalition by encouraging the natural and almost universal human impulse, the national and personal search for an escape and for a refuge from the ravages of war.

In taking this new line, we may look back, recalling how l he dream of one world was shattered, and then how the nightmare of a two-power world is breaking down. But now there is opening up the prospect of a world of many powers associated in the universal society of the United Nations, but not aligned irretrievably and not committed to the monstrous heresy and fallacy which we have inadvertently adopted from communist doctrinaires, that all mankind can be divided into two and only two camps.