The Gullibility of the Neutrals

THE old man blinked in bewilderment on the television screen. Fatigue showed in the droop of his eyelids, in the hesitant choice of words as he expressed dismay over the problems before him. The Prime Minister of India speculated on the meaning of the Red Chinese invasion of his country in October, 1962. The camera shifted to banner-carrying demonstrators marching through a city street, to scrawny volunteers at a recruiting station, to women offering their jewels to the nation; then came some old clips of the Dalai Lama, Tibet, mountains.

For almost a decade Nehru had refused to believe it could happen. In 1954, he had agreed with Chou En-lai’s five principles of Panch Sila (“peaceful coexistence”), then had stubbornly clung to faith in Communist peaceful intentions despite the existing evidence of Korea and Indochina. That same year the Chinese began to build a road across territory the Indians claimed, but no issue was made of it. The seizure of Tibet, the crossing of the MacMahon Line, and numerous minor provocations were explained away as misunderstandings among friends. But the newest act of aggression could not be explained away; thousands of ill-prepared Indian troops lay dead in the passes, and the massive Red armies ground ahead as fast as their supplies caught up with them. The brutal reality, the Prime Minister explained, had compelled him to shed his former illusions. “We were getting out of touch with the realities of the modern world. We were living in an atmosphere of our own creation.”

But his statement revealed that he still had far to go in freeing himself of self-deception. He still considered the Soviet Union his friend and expected aid from it. And he still thought that he could find safety in neutralism.

A month later, those hopes were only slightly faded. By December, the Russian MIGs had not yet arrived. “We understand there has been some difficulty,” the Prime Minister said, “but it has nothing to do with China.” Actually, the only help that reached the beleaguered Indians came from the West; and a painful reconsideration of past errors became necessary.

But the fate of India had no perceptible impact upon the other uncommitted nations which stubbornly clung to policies that threatened someday to expose them also to aggression. Indeed, in November there were efforts to draw Pakistan, theretofore a friend of the West, in the same direction. U Thant was no sooner elected Secretary-General of the United Nations than he reasonably called for “a spirit of compromise” but with “give and take on both sides,” as if both the United States and the Soviet Union were equally prone to aggression.

As 1962 drew to a close, neutralism, the greatest illusion of all, persisted; and few were aware either of its true meaning or of its disastrous effects upon the hopes for world order.

NEUTRALISM is often described as a policy of nonalignment adhered to by the new Afro-Asian nations which desire peace in order to further their own interests. Such a description is inaccurate on almost every count. Neutralism is partisan, European in origin, ideological in character, and a threat to the development of that rule of law which is the only hope for a durable peace.

The neutralism of the past two decades is far removed from the traditional neutrality recognized in international law. Such states as Switzerland and Sweden adopted neutrality as a conscious policy out of an unwillingness to become involved in the nineteenth-century system of alliances. They were able to do so because they were small, incapable of affecting the existing balance of power, and uninterested in expansion. Hence, they could stand apart from the struggle for advantage of the great nations.

However, the neutral countries also accepted the peculiar obligations of their special status. On the one hand, they understood that they had to be strong enough to defend themselves and free from dependence upon external support; otherwise their vulnerability might invite aggression and upset the balance of power. On the other hand, they understood that they could aspire to no positive role in the normal play of international politics. They could only be bystanders to decisions that others made, and they knew that their security rested upon a regime of international law.

The neutralism of the past seventeen years has been different from traditional neutrality in every respect. It is a doctrine not of small but of great states, with populations that run into hundreds of millions. The countries that adopted the policy of nonalignment were militarily weak and dependent upon foreign aid, yet they insisted upon attempting to constitute an independent force in international affairs. In doing so they generally, if unwittingly, threw their weight on the Soviet side. Lacking power, the neutrals could act only through appeals to reason and justice, which only the West respected. Meanwhile, the Reds, contemptuous of weakness, operated without fear of restraint from this source.

To understand these attitudes, one must go back to the immediate post-war years. Then, well before the countries which are now the chief exponents of neutralism achieved independence, dissident groups of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians formulated the basic ideas of neutralism. They did so out of the need for giving intellectual respectability to the anti-Americanism to which socialist ideology bound them.

In England, France, and Italy a significant number of intellectuals and politicians had been allied in a united front with the Communists before 1939. The betrayal of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the attack on Finland disillusioned some of them for a few years, but Russia’s participation in the war reconstituted the antifascist collaboration, particularly in the resistance movements. That experience supplied the background against which most of the European non-Communist left interpreted the problems of the peace.

Such men as Harold J. Laski, Richard Crossman, and Aneurin Bevan in England, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Bourdet in France, Kurt Schumacher in Germany, and Pietro Nenni in Italy anticipated the development of some form of democratic socialism in their own countries; neither the Soviet Union nor the United States supplied them with a model worth emulating. The one was reprehensible in its authoritarianism, the other in its capitalism. Their efforts were bent toward the development of forms that would avoid both evils. At home they sought to oust the conservative parties and gradually to transfer ownership of the means of production to the state. In foreign policy, their salient objective was peace that would free the energies of men for economic reconstruction.

From that point of view, both the United States and the Soviet Union were threats, for each seemed ready to plunge the world into another conflict that would destroy civilization. Each was a great power armed with terrible instruments of destruction and ready once more to make Europe a battleground. Each, moreover, had its own view of the future in terms of which it was ready to move aggressively, the one to spread Communism, the other to preserve capitalism. The equal likelihood of danger from both sources created a moral parity between the two great superpowers.

For Europeans, reluctant to be pushed to either extreme, the way to salvation was the creation of a third force; the uncommitted countries advancing toward democratic socialism were to hold together, throw their weight in whichever direction was necessary to establish an equilibrium, and thus neutralize disruptive tendencies from either the East or the West.

When these abstract concepts were applied to practice between 1945 and 1950, however, there were significant differences between the Judgments rendered of Soviet and American activities. The interpretation of Communist measures was consistently apologetic, while the United States was generally suspected of covert designs upon the peace.

The European neutralists, by then, had had extensive experience in explaining away the peculiarities of the Soviet regime. The pact with Hitler was a lapse accounted for by the earlier transgressions of France and Britain at Munich. The disregard of solemn agreements in Eastern Europe after 1945 could similarly be justified, on the grounds of Russian fears of attack from the West. The ruthless repressions of the Stalin era were either denied altogether as capitalist propaganda or mildly reproved as the inevitable incidents of a period of reconstruction. A socialist state could not really be anti-Semitic or send its people to slave-labor camps. In any case, there was a disposition to minimize the importance of civil liberties; the well-known omelet could not be made without cracking some eggs. Besides, the United States was just as bad. Characteristically, Harold Laski’s article on civil liberties in the Soviet Union in 1946 concluded with an attack on the private ownership of American newspapers.

THERE was an amazing gullibility in accepting at face value Soviet professions of concern with peace and with the welfare of the working class everywhere. That a government in power for three decades should still require the use of terror to maintain itself aroused no disturbing questions in the minds of the neutralists of London and Paris. In 1936, at the height of the Russian purges and famine, Englishmen had read Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s ecstatic account of Soviet democracy with approval; ten years later, at the height of Stalin’s terror, they again placed their faith in the Red nirvana. Of course, they disapproved of censorship and the police state, but not enough to shake their confidence in the beneficence of Communism. The system had improved the lot of the Russian people; it would do the same for the Czechs and the Poles. Meanwhile, all the peaceloving men of the left could join in the condemnation of the evils of British and French imperialism.

The basic belief persisted that Communism was only an extreme version of a general leftist position, given to excesses, no doubt, but nevertheless progressive in the light of history, which ordained a development from the political democracy of capitalism to the economic democracy of socialism. The common Marxist rhetoric that many wellintentioned writers in Western Europe shared with the Reds persuaded them to accept verbal assurances that the Soviet Union labored toward the same objectives as they, and blinded them to the realities of Russian aggressiveness.

Their view of history also shaped the attitudes of the neutralists toward the United States. The capitalist stage in social evolution was drawing to a close as internal contradictions widened the gulf between the masses and the masters of wealth. The capitalists could block off the ascent to socialism and retain power only by finding other people to exploit or by repression. Imperialism gave capitalists the resources by which to appease the proletariat; fascism supplied the weapons by which to cling to control. Either course was a threat to peace.

The United States was, after all, the last stronghold of capitalism. Its intentions, beneath the surface appearance of generosity, were essentially predatory. The aid it sent across the ocean was by no means disinterested, but designed to bring up to date an outmoded economic system, to inhibit the growth of a just social order, and ultimately to establish a permanent colonial relationship by which Europe would serve American interests. All those packages of food and crates of machinery were but means to diffuse the taste for Coca-Cola and breakfast cereals and to create a need for parts which would add to the mounting profits of Yankee corporations whose greed would lead to disaster. American aid, wrote Laski in 1947, “would lay the foundation for capitalist revival on the Continent; that capitalist revival would mean counter-revolution; that counter-revolution would mean civil war over half of Europe or perhaps more; and that civil war might very easily provoke a third world conflagration.”

It was not surprising to find Americans allied with unprogressive causes around the world. That the United States in actuality often took stands against colonialism that embarrassed its allies seemed less significant than the fact that it had long retained ties with Vichy France and now made common cause with dictators in Nationalist China, Spain, and Portugal. Did it not follow that the regimes it supported in Greece, Turkey, Poland, and Yugoslavia were also fascist in inclination? “The model all of us are approaching,” explained Le Combat, is the police state. Moreover, unlike the Russians, who spoke as the champions of liberation everywhere, the Americans and their allies doggedly defended exploitative colonial empires in many parts of the world. Such was the version of world events many European neutralists accepted.

Although these Europeans never drifted out of the orbit of the West, they were frequently swayed by anti-Americanism. Bitter people who had suffered through the blitz or bombardment or German occupation scarcely concealed their resentment of a country which had remained thousands of miles away from the fighting. Proud people eagerly wished to believe that the gifts from across the Atlantic, on which they depended, were not the products of benevolence but of some ulterior selfish intention.

Anti-Americanism also moved some conservative nationalists. Right-wing Tories in England, some of De Gaulle’s followers in France, and neofascist groups in Italy had reasons of their own for disliking the influences that crossed the Atlantic. Whatever their source, these emotions confirmed the neutralists in the habit of regarding every action of the United States with suspicion and strengthened the conviction that the two great powers were equally dangerous to peace.

The result was five years of calamitous miscalculation. The Soviet Union maintained an immense force under arms, while the United States promptly demobilized and formulated a scheme for the control of nuclear weapons, of which it still had a monopoly. That did not alter the impression of American belligerence or of Russian susceptibility to conciliation. “If war begins between China and the United States,” said the New Statesman in 1950, “the aggressor will not be the Communists.” Events in Greece, Czechoslovakia, and China, the Marshall and Truman plans, NATO, the Rosenberg case, and McCarthyism were all interpreted in the light of the same curious logic. “Yankee Go Home,” scrawled across the walls of every European city, expressed the pervasive will to believe that if only the interlopers from the New World would halt their “phantom crusade against the U.S.S.R.,” then the Old World would be able to take care of its own affairs. That the genuine danger came from the East was a fact that did not fit the neutralists’ image of the world, and was one, therefore, that they resolutely refused to recognize.

Fortunately, the neutralists never won power in any Western European country. Their greatest strength lay in the Labor and the Social Democratic parties, but even there they were a minority, useful in criticizing enemies of the center and right, but never given access to office and never in a position to shape policy. They enjoyed some popular support immediately after the war, but when American aid stimulated economic recovery and growth, their following dwindled, never to be restored. The rising standard of living enabled Europeans to form their own conclusions about the relative merits of their system and of Communism. As sympathizers for the Soviet Union narrowed down to a hard core of committed Party members, it became clear that the free world could find safety only in common action. After 1950, it no longer seemed plausible to argue, as did a correspondent in the New Statesman, that while the North Koreans had been guilty of aggression, they were not to be resisted, because the result would be “restoration of corrupt and oppressive oligarchies which happen to suit American capitalism.” The successive shocks of the exposure of the Stalinist dictatorship and of Soviet brutality in Hungary further discredited neutralism.

Anti-Americanism lingered in Europe as a prejudice of aging intellectuals trapped by a commitment to old ideas. However much they praised the Red Chinese or made a hero of Castro, their influence waned steadily. Neutralism as an effective political program in Europe was dead after 1950, except in Yugoslavia, where it justified Tito’s maverick line.

IRONICALLY, however, the concept of neutralism, sterile in the continent of its origin, was transplanted and flourished in Asia and Africa. India, Ghana, Egypt, Burma, and some of the other countries that acquired their independence after the Second World War proved remarkably receptive to an idea that had already demonstrated its fallacy in Europe.

The movements for national independence in Morocco, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere had been directed against the allies of the United States—England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal. In the course of the struggle, the colonial oppressors blurred into a single conglomerate target, the hateful image of which endured long after independence. By contrast, the Soviet Union appeared to be free of the taint of imperialism and was generally loud in its protestations of support for the cause of national liberation.

The colonial heritage was thus an important factor in shaping an anti-Western orientation in the new nations. The gains from Western contacts were entirely forgotten; the imperialist past became a record of unmitigated exploitation. Concessions, when they came, were taken as a sign not of democracy, but of weakness. The contrast between the American treatment of the Philippines or the British withdrawal from Africa and the Soviet control over its satellites was not one that seemed relevant to the rulers of Ceylon or Indonesia. The issue of imperialism, as it had been formulated before 1939, overshadowed every other consideration and planted an anti-Western bias in the countries that achieved their independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

The question of color added an emotional pitch to their attitudes. The shameful pages in the record of the contacts of whites with the yellow and black people of Asia and Africa could not be excised by a few tardy gestures of conciliation. The accumulated resentments of many generations now fanned the smoldering hatred of the former master races. And the fact that the new states were still dependent, still needed technical and material aid, added to their bitterness. Pride demanded that they too receive aid, not with gratitude but with condescension as an obligation due them. They had a long account to settle with the whites of the West.

The predisposition to hostility sensitized all of them, and the Africans in particular, to developments in race relations in the United States. Little Rock and the lunch-counter sit-ins were not taken for what they were — incidents in a slow evolution toward equality. They were rather reminders of inequality, of the degradation of slavery, of the former masters in their clubs denying the humanity of the Kaffir. In the minds of many Nigerians and Ghanaians, Washington and Pretoria fused, both centers from which whites exploited blacks.

Most of the men who had led the new nations to independence were socialists by commitment; and the circumstances of their own struggle for freedom confirmed their deep-rooted distrust of the Wall Street capitalists who they thought controlled the governments of the West. Consequently, the Soviet Union was exempt from the general opprobrium attached to Europeans, not only because its record in the treatment of minority groups was little known, but also because it was a general article of faith among neutralist leaders that prejudice was a phenomenon of capitalism and that a socialist society was free of that evil.

In the two decades before independence, Nkrumah, Menon, Nehru, and a good many other future leaders of the Asian and African countries had spent time in London and Paris, as students or as exiles; there they had become involved in the left intellectual circles most sympathetic to their aspirations for freedom. Laski, the New Statesman, and the ideologists of the united front were their mentors and imbued them with the conviction that the causes of liberty and of socialism were identical. Interpreting the world in terms of the class struggle, the future leaders went back to their countries convinced that imperialism was the instrument by which the capitalist rulers of the West kept them enslaved.

At home, they found evidence to support that conclusion. Although the support of middle-class nationalists was sometimes enlisted, as in Egypt and India, the indigenous men of wealth usually worked hand in glove with the colonial authorities, thus confirming the impression that a social revolution was necessary to complete the political one. And when the new states were established, the former ruling classes often were liquidated or fled into exile, while the influential native and European bureaucrats and advisers who took office were generally men with a strong leftist orientation.

In some places, the paucity of informed personnel magnified the neutralist influence. The British and French had made an attempt to train men qualified to take power, but their efforts had fallen far short of the need, and the other colonial regimes had been even more derelict in this respect. Often, as a result, the responsibility for critical decisions about foreign policy devolved upon people inadequately acquainted with any but their own immediate problems.

Rapid economic development was the first requirement of all these countries, and their new socialist governments believed that growth could come only through public ownership and centralized planning. The experience of the West was irrelevant; only the Communist nations, they thought, offered them models worth emulating. The fantastic claims of Russian and Chinese “great leaps forward” were uncritically accepted as accurate, and the evidence of Western Europe was dismissed. Nasser, Nkrumah, and Sukarno were callously willing to risk disorder in the existing economy and a lowering of the standard of living in the interest of forced industrialization.

Freedom, for the neutralists, therefore had a simple meaning — freedom from white colonial rule. From their European teachers they had learned to devalue the importance of civil rights; and the exigencies of establishing control made the new regimes in such places as Ghana and Indonesia fully as repressive as the British or Dutch had been. Nkrumah and Sukarno consequently were unimpressed with warnings about the dangers of Red totalitarianism. “Telling Ghanaians to beware of Communists,” said the former in 1960, “is like telling a man in a burning house not to go outside because it may start to snow.”

The result was the transplantation of prejudiced neutralism, lock, stock, and barrel. The new regimes refused formally to commit themselves on the issues of the cold war. They did not wish to adopt or to favor either capitalism or Communism, systems which they identified respectively with the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead, they were to constitute a middle group pursuing an independent policy, vigilantly on guard against threats to peace which were equally likely to come from both the East and the West. They were to supply “a vehicle for possible negotiations between the two great Power blocs.” In practice that meant that the neutrals, refusing to make a moral judgment between the two antagonists, usually tried to compromise with, rather than resist, the aggressor; and the more intransigent one party was to a dispute, the more pressure was put on the other to yield in order to arrive at an accommodation. The neutralist course was thus inconsistent with the orderly development of international law. And on concrete issues the neutralist swung invariably into the Russian orbit.

THE first steps toward the formation of a bloc came in meetings of the Asian Relations Conference in 1947 and 1949 at New Delhi, shortly after Indian independence. The impetus of events in Palestine and Korea thereafter persuaded the Arab and Asian countries to work together in the United Nations. They did not thereby become a single cohesive unit. They were divided on issues that affected their immediate interests, as in the rivalry between Egypt and the other Arab states. And the West found occasional friends in the area between Tunisia and the Philippines. But the general tendency was toward neutralism in the conflicts stirred up by Communist aggression.

The decisive steps came in 1954. The settlement in Geneva that year temporarily brought to a halt Chinese expansion in Korea and Indochina; Chou En-lai then agreed with the prime ministers of India and Burma upon the five principles of peaceful coexistence; and President Sukarno of Indonesia succeeded in summoning a meeting the next year in Bandung to define the contribution the peoples of Asia and Africa could “make to the promotion of world peace and cooperation.”

Invitations to Bandung were deliberately selective. The Arab states were asked to come, but not Israel; the Central African Federation, but not South Africa; the People’s Republic of China, but not the Chinese Republic; the Gold Coast, but not Nigeria. Insofar as was possible, nations with a Western orientation were excluded. From the sessions emerged ten flawless principles of justice and international cooperation, affirming respect for fundamental human rights, racial equality, abstention from interference in the affairs of other countries, the renunciation of “acts or threats of aggression or the use of force,” and the right of all colonies to independence. The great powers were also called upon to suspend the production or testing of all nuclear weapons. Subsequent consultations among the neutralists at Accra, Belgrade, and Cairo and continuing collaboration in the United Nations attempted to preserve unity of action toward those desirable goals.

It was in the spirit of those principles that the neutrals the next year joined in condemning the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression in Suez. With their help, and that of the United States, the United Nations secured a withdrawal of the invading forces. It was in that spirit, too, that most of the neutrals voted for the admission of Red China to the United Nations, supported the Lumumba regime and condemned Belgian activities in the Congo, welcomed the grant of independence to one African state after another, and hailed the suspension of atomic testing in 1959. All these measures, whatever their intrinsic merits, were adverse to the West.

But not once have the neutrals taken an equally strong stand on the far clearer Communist violations of the Bandung principles. With what cynicism Chou acceded to those pleasant propositions we can well imagine; he had already been guilty of aggression in Korea and had supplied most of the force that won the war in Indochina. Those misdemeanors did not cool the warmth of his reception at the conference. Thereafter, the brutal repression of all human rights in North Vietnam and in China itself, the march into Tibet and the persecution of its people, and the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu earned not the slightest reproof. Those actions were all explained away as steps by which a progressive regime protected itself. Even the frequent violations of India’s frontiers earned no condemnation from Nehru’s neutralist friends, and the open attack in October, 1962, brought offers of mediation rather than condemnation of the aggressor. The fighting in the Himalayas was inadequate to prove the belligerence of Communism.

The Soviet Union has fared fully as well. In the same month as the events in Suez, Soviet troops invaded Hungary against the will of the legitimate government of that country. An appeal to the United Nations evoked only a lukewarm and ineffective response. India and Yugoslavia particularly distinguished themselves in evading responsibility for the principles they professed. Tito’s legation in Budapest callously handed the fugitives who found refuge within its walls to their assassins; and the Indian representative in the United Nations occupied himself in quest of a solution that would please the Russians.

The uncommitted countries consistently accepted as evidence of his pacific intentions Khrushchev’s calls for immediate total disarmament, overlooking the roadblocks he repeatedly threw up in the way of practical steps toward that end. By the same token, the Soviet use of the veto in the Security Council and Soviet disregard of the recommendations of the General Assembly did not seem to run counter to the respect for world opinion wich the neutrals demanded of the West. Nor did the people of Berlin seem entitled to the right of self-determination; as Tito explained in 1960, peaceful coexistence could not “halt the historical processes in international life.”

The resumption of nuclear testing in 1961 most fully revealed the double standard that exempted the Communists from the criteria by which the West was judged. I was in a Japanese mountain resort, lecturing to a group of Asian students, at the end of August, 1961. In the evening, discussion turned to the bomb, about which the young people felt strongly. It was agreed that renewal of the explosions which polluted the world’s atmosphere would be a crime against humanity; but the general assumption was that if the ban was to be violated, it would be by the United States. When the question was raised explicitly, an earnest Indian youth assured the group that the Soviet Union could not conceivably take a step that would damage common men everywhere.

Before the week was over, of course, the news came that the Russians had indeed resumed testing. The students were perturbed. But within a day they came around to the explanation that Khrushchev must have acted to anticipate an American resumption that he knew was coming.

Their elders were no wiser. By the time the conference of neutrals met in Belgrade, the evidence of Soviet perfidy was clear. The delegates hemmed and hawed at the violation of a crucial Bandung principle, and in the end they issued a call to both the United States and Russia to refrain from testing, as if both were equally culpable. In November, a statement by Krishna Menon, then Foreign Minister of India, ascribed the ultimate blame to the Americans. He and his colleagues had closed their minds to the possibility that the Communist states could be guilty of misdeeds which their prejudices informed them were always committed by capitalists.

Nor did the neutrals consider the Bandung principles any limitation upon their own freedom of action. The obligations to respect the right to self-determination and to refrain from threats of the use of force applied to the wicked imperialists. But India felt no compunctions about refusing to accede to the plebiscite in Kashmir suggested by the United Nations, and it ruthlessly moved its army into Goa, a province that had been Portuguese for more than four centuries. Indonesia’s actions in West Irian and Egypt’s in Yemen showed the same unscrupulous disregard for a moral code they sanctimoniously urged upon others. In the light of Marxist history, a progressive state could do no wrong.

The monumental task of the young leaders of nations struggling toward modernity can evoke only sympathy and assistance. Their success is vital to the future of all mankind. Independence found them weighted down with tremendous burdens of social, economic, and political reconstruction; and it would be premature to attempt either an assessment of the extent to which they have managed to deal constructively with their problems or a judgment of the degree to which their domestic policies have furthered their own interests.

But in foreign policy they all had one clear and vital interest — the preservation of peace and the nurture of a system of international law, which alone would protect them against interference and ensure them the freedom to use all their energies for their own development. And that interest they have served badly in the past decade.

From the calamities of the greatest war theretofore fought, men emerged in 1945 with few consolations other than the faith that they could avoid a repetition of the disaster. The feeble glimmer of hope lighted their way to the United Nations, which some of them thought might help create a world order, and within which people would learn to deal with one another through reason and law rather than through violence. In time, consistent standards of proper behavior would be recognized, acquire the force of law, and peacefully govern the relationships of nations.

All that was a dream, perhaps, but it was one worth cherishing. And the uncommitted nations might have brought it a little closer to reality had they been genuinely neutral and applied the same moral criteria in every conflict. They did not. They fell in with the game of power politics, seeking what they could for themselves; and between the East and the West, they played the role of brokers, expecting each side to yield a little regardless of the right and wrong of the situation — partitions in Korea and Indochina, coalition in Laos, the cession of Guantanamo for the Russian missile bases, for example. In the process, all questions of principle receded conveniently into the background, and the uncompromising extremists, willing to risk conflict, gained an advantage over those committed to a reasonable, peaceful adjustment of differences.

The neutralists were unable to recognize the genuine source of danger to peace since 1945. Their past grievances against the white capitalists of the West blinded them to the greater threat from the East. The vision of the idyllic socialism they had learned to respect in London and Paris obscured what Communism had actually become — the militant doctrine of totalitarian regimes with indefinite expansive urges. Statesmen who refused to look candidly at the historical forces at work about them were in no position to help bring order to a disordered world. One can only hope that as past hatreds abate and past illusions fade, there will still be time to preserve the peace for which all men long.