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community, along with the American (North and South), and a
potential "neutralist" in the East-West struggle if he gets the im–
pression that his vital interests are being overlooked, disregarded, or
deliberately sacrificed. This is now well understood, and there would
be little point in repeating it here, were it not for a certain peevish–
ness one sometimes encounters even among American liberals who
are presumably free from the cruder forms of national self-centered–
ness. There seems lately to have grown up a tendency, to put it mild–
ly, for Americans in this milieu to feel a little hurt and resentful at
the manner in which Britain and Western Europe have been behav–
ing since the demise of Stalin brought on a slight thaw in the Cold
War. Something will have to be said presently about the nature of
this thaw, and about the illusions to which it gave rise on the Euro–
pean side of the Atlantic. But before plunging into the intricacies of
the subject it may be useful to bear in mind that there is no such
thing as being a disinterested spectator of this particular drama,
and that Europeans, who know what is at stake for themselves,
suspect hypocrisy when they hear others dilate upon the purely moral
character of this or that choice, e.g., the choice between "con–
tainment" or "liberation." (To say nothing of the fact that the
original crime or blunder of letting the Russians into Central Europe
was definitely not of European inspiration.)
Again, there is the inescapable fact that the two halves of the
Atlantic world do not have the same attitude with regard to Asia:
for the simple reason that America "faces" Asia across the Pacific,
while Europe does not. America has two frontiers, an Atlantic and a
Pacific one, and consequently a two-front strategy in the Cold War.
For Europe the Atlantic world is the larger whole into which it is
trying to integrate itself. For America it is that, too, but it is also
one potential "theater" out of several. This difference in approach is
to some extent compensated by the vestigial European interests in
the Far East; by the tradition of Anglo-Indian co-operation, still
powerful in Whitehall and Delhi, though not supported by a popular
mystique
comparable to the American missionary attachment to
China; and by the Commonwealth ties between Britain and Australia–
New Zealand. But some of these links have been snapped or weakened
by the disappearance of the former imperial relationship, and others
-e.g., the bond between Britain and the two Australasian Common-
