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PARTISAN REVIEW
inflation, monetary disorder, and the proportion of transfer payments in the
national income. After an almost miraculous recovery, France is losing its
place in the world, because it has not adapted to the rigors of competition,
because it is half-paralyzed by internal quarrels and the persistence of
anachronistic ideologies.
The United States has lost its military superiority. The Soviet Union
has accumulated weapons, at first to intimidate, and also to intervene as soon
as an opportunity arises. The political class of the American republic, the
Eastern elite, that inspired and conducted diplomacy for a quarter-century,
has committed suicide; responsible for the Vietnam War, it laid the blame on
Richard Nixon, who had not brought it to an end quickly enough. Presidents
Carter and Reagan oscillated from one extreme to another. The consensus
on foreign policy has disappeared. The country is no longer rich enough to
finance both social legislation and rearmament.
It
still has scientific preemi–
nence and an unequaled system of production, but it has become unpre–
dictable for its enemies and for its allies.
In Europe, the Federal Republic of Germany, more than ever the
keystone ofthe Atlantic Alliance, seems troubled. On the front lines, touching
the Soviet empire, it attempts to maintain an American army on its territory
without irritating the men in the Kremlin. The pacifism of millions of Ger–
mans has reduced the government's decision-making capacity: Does it ex–
press the legitimate fear of horrible weapons or the rejection of participation
that the German people has more and more difficulty in accepting? The rec–
onciliation of the French and the Germans remains solid and authentic. But
has the day evoked in the controversies of the 1950s arrived? Socialist or
conservative, the chancellor in Bonn looks both toward the threatening East
and toward the protective West. In what direction will he turn in the end?
If I were
to
give in to my darker feelings, I would say that all the
ideas, all the causes for which I have struggled seem to be in danger at the
very moment when, retrospectively, it is granted that I was not wrong in
most of my fights . But I do not want to surrender to discouragement. The
regimes for which I have argued, in which some would see only a camou–
flage for power, by its essence arbitrary and violent, arc fioagile and turbu–
lent; but as long as they remain free , they will possess unsuspected re–
sources. We will continue to live for a long time, in the shadow of the nuclear
apocalypse, divided between the fear inspired by monstrous weapons and
the hope awakened by the miracles of science.
I would not like to end this too lengthy retrospective with reflections on
history in the making. By definition, it goes on; the point at which it stops for
me means nothing in itself or for others. My professional activity has not
filled my life, neither articles, nor books, nor teaching. lowe to my wife, my
