THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
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5. What has been the effect of the cold war on western political
thought?
Good-insofar as it has led to a reappraisal of the sources
of democratic energy; bad-insofar as it has encouraged misguided
efforts to produce an ideology for the West as rigid and comprehensive
as the ideology of the Communists themselves.
6. Are the objectives of East and West ultimately negotiable?
So long as Communism remains committed to a belief in the infalli–
bility of certain doctrines, states, parties and leaders, there can be no
genuine peace in the world. However, one can conceive the achieve–
ment of a state of inspected truce which would represent a great
improvement over the present cold war.
If
we could attain such a
truce, I am confident, as I said earlier, that the West could win a
genuine competition of ideas. But it must be remembered that a
genuine competition requires that Western ideas be as accessible in
the Communist world as Communist ideas are in the Western world.
The day that Western publications are as freely available in Russia
and China as Communist publications are in Britain and the United
States is the day when I will begin to believe Communist talk about
peaceful coexistence. That day, I fear, is still far off.
7. Better red than dead?
I reject the notion that this is our choice.
And I believe that until we have a reliable system of general and
complete disarmament, continued military preparedness is an es–
sential part of the policy to keep the choices from narrowing. Uni–
lateral disarmament, in my view, is the shortest way to make the
red-dead choice a reality.
c.
P.
SNOW
1. The West has been approximately holding its own, or
more exactly, losing the cold war at a much slower rate than one
might have expected. This is mainly because advanced countries
(i.e. the United States and most of Western Europe) have made a
pretty good go at modified capitalism. The basic trouble is, of course,
with under-developed countries. To such countries modified capital–
ism seems intolerably hard to work. It is very difficult for the West,
