BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
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influential people who can read and write. On this assumption the
following tentative thoughts may in all due modesty be put forward:
( 1) Since the Soviet-Communist problem presents itself at every
kind of level, from the military to the metaphysical, a wide variety
of responses must be expected and tolerated.
In
particular the more
ardent liberationists should renounce the grotesque idea that a kind
of exclusive Rome-Washington Axis can be formed, or alternatively
that all the world religions can be drafted for the duration and made
to enlist in a campaign for the defense of national or international
interests variously defined as "freedom," "the Western way of life,"
and the like. There should be a minimum of such talk which to
most Asians makes no sense whatsoever and to Europeans sounds like
the propagandist departure for an atomic crusade.
(2) On the old principle of
fortiter in re suaviter in modo
the
Soviet government should at some suitable opportunity be presented
with a completely undramatic, and entirely non-publicized, choice
between genuine co-operation in the atomic field and elsewhere, and
the certain prospect of war in the not too distant future: in other
words, with an ultimatum. Nothing of the kind should ever be hinted
at
in
public, and all reports or disclosures to this effect should, if
necessary, be strenuously denied.
(3) As a corollary, the American public-including the news–
papers-should accept what the British public has long taken for
granted: namely the impossibility of "open diplomacy" and the need
to grant the Executive the widest possible latitude in the conduct of
foreign policy. This of course smacks of "Yalta"; but the trouble
with Yalta was not that the talks were secret but that the partici–
pants-especially the American participants--were misinformed and
in some cases naive.
(4) The aim of Western policy should be to reach a
modus
vivendi
with any Russian (and Chinese) regime which is clearly not
expansionist and not completely totalitarian. This is probably easier
to achieve in the case of Russia, since there the new society is already
in
existence and might conceivably be induced to dispense with its
totalitarian shell. No
lasting
agreement is possible with a regime which
must work up hostility toward the outside world in order to justify
the "permanent revolution from above" at home. But it does not
follow that attempts should be made to replace even a clearly hostile
