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PARTISAN REVIEW
mental straitjacket. It is all the more important that Western states–
manship should recognize and proclaim the impossibility of either
incorporating the Communist powers in our kind of world, or de–
stroying them by force. However they may dislike the prospect, the
Atlantic world and the Eurasian bloc are fated to live together, or
at any rate alongside each other. When this realization has sunk in,
our opponents may be compelled to revise their concepts, and having
taken the first step on the road to sanity it is not inconceivable that
they will
in
time shed enough of their mental apparatus to make
co-existence genuindy workable. Yet to say
this
is merely to express
a hope, not to risk a prediction. Much may be credited to the sub–
terranean urge for self-preservation which cannot
fail
to be operative
on both sides; but it
is
useless to deny that there are forces at work
which may yet carry the major powers, and with them the world at
large, "through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea."
