THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
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attempts to achieve, what the more enlightened underdeveloped na–
tions seek: a drastic increase in the standard of living through rapid
industrialization. The Communist powers use totalitarian control as
their instrument and Communist doctrine as rationalization and
justification. Seeking the same results, the underdeveloped nations
cannot help being attracted by the methods which brought these
results about elsewhere. In contrast, the slow process, stretching over
centuries, through which the nations of the West achieved a high
standard of living through industrialization must appeal much less
to them. That appeal is lessened even more by the economic processes
of the free market and the political processes of liberal democracy
through which in large measure the Western industrialization was
achieved. For these processes require a degree of moral restraint
and economic and political sophistication which are largely absent in
the underdeveloped nations. The simple and crude methods of totali–
tarianism must appear to them much more congenial.
While the United States must live with these handicaps which
are not of its making, trying to overcome them by compensating for
them, there are others which are the result of misconceptions in
our thinking and errors in the execution of policy.
The United States is both domestically and internationally, and
must so appear particularly to the underdeveloped nations, a con–
servative power. Abroad, it wants to preserve the territorial status
quo, and domestically it wants to protect and develop what it has
achieved. In consequence of this general conservative outlook, the
United States has tended to support abroad the most conservative
elements because they seem to be "safest" in terms of the preservation
of the status quo. This has proven to be a fatal miscalculation. For
in many of the underdeveloped nations the choice is not between the
status quo and change, but between change under Communist aus–
pices and change which at the very least is not directed by Com–
munists. For reasons mentioned above, the United States has recently
come to realize that it cannot help but support radical change. Yet
this realization faces it with a new problem.
Change can be brought about by two different methods: through
peaceful reforms or through violent revolution. Peaceful change re–
quires the cooperation of the ruling groups, which has but rarely
been forthcoming. For social and economic change is bound to
