94
PARTISAN REVIEW
much to the continuance of liberal-labor influence in the United
States-the only influence which in this age can keep America in
touch with the radical mass movements of Europe and Asia.
The relationship between the new world society and the emerg–
ing Pax Americana is neither simple nor free from contradictions. It
requires some mutual adaptation, for the United States will in the
foreseeable future not merely be more powerful but socially more
conservative than the majority of her allies. The alliance demands
from Americans tolerance for the world-wide growth of socialist
tendencies, and from socialists in Europe and Asia a better under–
standing of the fact that America need not be a hindrance to progress,
even though she is still wedded to capitalism. It requires the creation
of common organs, such as an Atlantic Council and possibly a
Pacific Council, to include like-minded nations-a function which the
United Nations should never have been expected to fulfill, and which
the institution at Lake Success will become increasingly less capable
of fulfilling as it becomes more truly universal. It demands common
planning in the economic sphere, even at the cost of some distress
to the fanatics of laisser-faire. It necessitates, in short, a genuine
alliance between, or synthesis of, liberalism and socialism, freedom
and planning, American and European-Asian thinking. There was
a brief period after the war when this aim seemed to have been
accepted on both sides of the Atlantic and in parts of Asia, but
the opportunity was allowed to slip, and we are now witnessing the
consequences of this retrogression. No doubt ·Western Europe bears
as much or more responsibility for this partial debacle as America.
What matters now is that both should recognize their common in–
terest and the need for another joint advance.
III Problems of
Co-existence
To discuss the question of so-called "peaceful co-existence"
III
a world radically divided into two incompatible halves evidently
requires something rather different from the kind of political analysis
appropriate down to 1914, and in some degree even down to 1939.
Instead of the familiar "concert of powers," all pursuing limited aims,
there are now two great political-military centers, around which the
remainder of the world tends to organize itself. And while in the
