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PARTISAN REVIEW
on the assumption that both will act rationally .
Thus, the unprecedented power which modern technology has
put into the hands of Western nations is useful only under extra–
ordinary limiting conditions . Under most possible and actual circum–
stances , that power is an empty threat and is being disregarded by
nations much inferior in material power. Thus the power that really
counts, a few extreme exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding, is
conventional power, and here the gap between the United States and
the other Western nations, on the one hand , and the non-Western
nations, on the other hand, is of course by no means as wide as it is if
one puts nuclear power into the scales . Consequently, when one
compares the conventional power of the West with the conventional
power of the non-Western world, one notices that the nations of the
West are much less powerful than they appear to be . That impression is
strengthened when one examines the moral principles on behalf of
which the Western nations may be willing to use conventional power
and with a chance for success. The defeat of the United States in
Indochina illustrates vividly the decline of Western power-material
and moral.
It is one of the great ironies ofcontemporary history that the moral
and material decline of the West has in good measure been
accomplished through the moral and material triumphs of the West .
The Third World has shaken off the Western yoke by invoking the very
moral principles of self-determination and social justice which the
West has proclaimed and endeavored to put into practice . That, in the
process , national self-determination was to become the ideology of
new imperialisms and social justice the ideological disguise of
servitudes new and old was to be expected . What points to the moral
exhaustion of the West is its inability to stipulate moral principles with
which to justify its positions and interests against its enemies and
detractors .
This moral helplessness whenever the West had to contend with
the use ofits moral principles on behalf of its enemies-dramatically re–
vealed in the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938-has been one of the main
sources ofits weakness in action.
It
is simple and convenient to identify
this weaknesswith one particular man acting in a particular episode and
thus isolate the " spirit of Munich" from the Western moral stance in
foreign policy. It is equally simple and convenient to decry any kind of
