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be sacrificed to the rhetoric of American spokesmen, especially if
there was ground for believing that the Soviet Union would shortly
draw level in the arms race. That this has now occurred, or almost
occurred, while the West is as far as ever from having restored the
balance destroyed in 1945, is the largest and most disagreeable fact
on the contemporary scene. It was, however, by no means unfore–
seeable ten years ago.
There is of course a sense in which every international system
can be said to balance. Thus the present relationship between the
NATO powers and the Russo-Chinese bloc is roughly one of balance,
if by this is meant that neither group is significantly stronger than
the other, and that each would do well to refrain from putting
matters to the test. But this is not what the Western governments
had in mind during those wartime conferences on which so much
startling light has been cast by Sir Winston Churchill's memoirs and
similar disclosures. There is indeed ample evidence that the Grand
Alliance was never as solid as it looked on the surface, and that the
cold war really began as soon as the Axis had obviously been de–
feated. But the quantum of wishful thinking that went into the
Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam agreements was much larger than the
American and British publics had a right to expect from their leaders.
No real effort was made to preserve either the independence of
Poland (for which Britain and France had nominally gone to war
in 1939), or the existence of a viable Germany. In the main this
outcome reflected the emergence of two non-European colossi with
world-wide interests quite different from those of the traditional
European powers. It has proved a misfortune that Britain, even
under Churchill, was unable to resist this trend, but in the long run
the tendency for America and Russia to treat European interests as
bargaining counters was bound to assert itself. That it did so under
wartime conditions of censorship and official propaganda calculated
to flatter the naivete of the Common Man and his readiness to take
a one-dimensional view of the world, doubtless facilitated the opera–
tion but did not alter its essential character.
II Utopia Revisited
The neo-liberal utopia, of which the United Nations Char–
ter was the most exact-i.e., the emptiest-expression, had for a
