BETWEEN
TWO WORLDS
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wealth countries-have suffered from the massive intervention of the
United States. Thus, to take one instance, exclusion of Britain from
the tripartite defense pact between the USA, Australia and New
Zealand is not merely resented in Whitehall and Westminster: it
is regarded as symptomatic of a tendency to confine all of America's
allies to purely regional groupings supervised and co-ordinated by
the USA. Even NATO is increasingly coming to be looked upon as
one such grouping: not a confederation of the Atlantic world in
which America plays the role of
primus inter pares,
but rather a
regional military alliance manipulated from the Pentagon.
If
this
tendency is accentuated-as presumably it will be, at least as long
as the Republican Party is in power-neutralism in Europe must
inevitably grow
pari passu
with nationalism in the United States. Each
feeds on the other, and not merely at what Churchill recently called
the "McCarthy-Bevan level" (incidentally a deliberately malicious
phrase, much resented by the Bevanites, whose hero after all is an
honorable man, if not always discreet or clear-headed). Each will
continue to feed on the other even if the Luce propagandists should
acquire better manners and a less distorted perspective, or their
British counterparts get over their nostalgia for the days when im–
portant issues could be settled by the dispatch of a gunboat. For
in the long run the Atlantic world must either become a community
of equals with some sort of confederate status, or fall apart. (The
argument that equality of status is impossible among a group of
members ranging from the USA to Iceland hardly merits serious
notice; it is the essence of any such arrangement that it insures
stability by conferring ("formal") legal equality upon unequals,
thereby transcending crude power relationships and making co–
operation possible. The alternative is simple dictation which in the
end always fails.)
This having been said, it remains to be added that even if these
causes of friction were eliminated we should still be a long distance
away from a unified attitude toward the Soviet complex. Europeans
and Britons would continue to think of India as being somehow
"closer" (geographically as well as linguistically and culturally)
than China or Japan: which from the European viewpoint it is.
There would still be a tendency to draw a sharper distinction between
the Russian and the Chinese revolution than is warranted by the
