Power Politics

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY: SHIELD OF THE REPUBLIC -- Walter Lippmann -- Little, Brown ($1.50).

The statesman who means to maintain peace (and yet not play power politics) "must with cold calculation organize and regulate the politics of power." This is no quotation from Goebbels but from Walter Lippmann.* In U.S. Foreign Policy, Mr. Lippmann devotes 177 pages to a lucid discussion of what has been right and what is now wrong in the U.S. notions of its place in the world.

Confession. "I came out of college thinking that Theodore Roosevelt, whom I admired profoundly, was in this respect eccentric, that he kept harping on the Panama Canal and the navy. For in my youth we all assumed . . . that war was an affair that 'militarists' talked about and not something that seriously-minded progressive democrats paid any attention to.

... So I know at least one young man who was not mentally prepared for the age he was destined to live in."

In Walter Lippmann's case the lack of preparation was important. For 25 years he has been an outstanding U.S. authority on foreign policy (TIME, Sept. 27, 1937). With the late great Herbert Croly, he helped form the policy of the Wilson Administration, during World War I, when Croly's New Republic, with a circulation of 48,000 (circulation now: 27,000), was one of the most influential of U.S. magazines. Lippmann knew that a German victory would make Germany the leader of the West, "the leader ultimately of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world." Working with President Wilson, "I did not have the sense to see that the acquisition of the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator by Japan was a fatal blow to our defenses in the Pacific."

Editing the New York World when it was one of the most influential of U.S. newspapers, Lippmann knew that a combination of British-American sea power was (and is) essential. "Nevertheless I was too weak-minded to take a stand against the exorbitant folly of the Washington Disarmament Conference." He praised that disaster as a triumph, denounced the admirals who dared to protest. "Of that episode in my life I am ashamed, all the more so because I had no excuse for not knowing better."

Source of Error. Confession is good for the soul of America, doubly so when it results in a useful book. Troubled, groping, weakened by many a long historical digression, U.S. Foreign Policy suggests that Pundit Lippmann is at a halfway point in the clarification of his views, has shed many an old illusion without quite working out a new position to replace them. The illusions were general.

They were once attributable to most, and are now the property of some, of the lead ers of the democratic countries. Their central source of error was the failure to see that an order of world power must be based on the realities of power. Through this half-blindness the democratic leaders groped after the mirages of modernity: Mirage 1. Believing that foreign policy's chief goal is peace, pacifists were responsible for helping to bring on the two great World Wars. "Until all the nation's rivals and potential enemies are irrevocably committed to the pacifist ideal, it is a form of criminal negligence to act as if they were already committed to it." Mirage 2. Disarmament "is applicable, if at all, only to Tibet, which has no for eign relations, cannot be invaded, is not worth conquering, and has no outlying commitments. . . ." Mirage 3. Isolationism never was and never can be; the Founding Fathers al ways maintained the British-American community of interest, more durable and more important than a practical alliance.

Jefferson's statement in 1802 that the U.S. should "marry ourselves to the British fleet" was unnecessary, the U.S. and Britain were kin. It was when the U.S. and Britain permitted outsiders to come between them that catastrophe attended both.

The ideal of collective security resulted in Wilson's attempt, through the League of Nations, to establish "a union of 50 juridically equal but otherwise unequal states, and not the evolution of a union from a nucleus of firmly allied strong states. ... If the League was a practical instrument, it contained an alliance, and all good and true men, including Wilson, were opposed to any idea of an alliance; if in fact the League outlawed alliances, and still sought to enforce peace, then it was an unlimited commitment supported by no clear means of fulfilling it."

Lippmann's conclusions are that an adoption of the pre-American system of European alliances of great nations is now essential; that "a nuclear alliance of Britain, Russia, America, and, if possible, China, cannot hold together if it does not operate within the limitations of an international order that preserves the national liberties of other peoples"; that these three or four great powers "will not remain united against the revival of German and Japanese military power" if they become postwar rivals in the domination of Europe or colonial countries; that nuclear alliances must be consolidated and perpetuated; that "the great powers must become the organizers of an order in which the other peoples find that their liberties are recognized by laws that the great powers respect and that all peoples are compelled to observe."

* Said Goebbels: We will "unchain volcanic passions . . . set masses of men on the march . . . organize hate and suspicion with ice-cold calculation."

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