FOREIGN RELATIONS: Lippmann’s Cold War

U.S. journalism’s best-known pundit left his camp in Bernard, Me. a little while ago and returned to his ivy-covered home in Washington. He did not have any fresh-caught fish. What he had was a fat, prickly and impressive essay on U.S. foreign policy. Looking a little old, with heavy pouches under his eyes, 58-year-old Walter Lippmann—author of 19 books, New York Herald Tribune columnist since 1931—sat down to put together his thesis, which he called The Cold War. Two secretaries hovered beside him. Western Union stood by to pick up his copy daily at 1 o’clock and transmit it to New York, while Mr. Lippmann, in red silk Chinese trousers and a grey-&-black silk shirt, sat at his antique desk and wrote. By this week, enough of his columns had appeared to indicate the trend of his thoughts.

Not All God’s Chillun. He took as his target the now well-known article by “X” which recently appeared in the magazine Foreign Affairs. “X” was George Kennan, top State Department planner and Russian expert. The State Department denied that the article inspired the Truman Doctrine, but the thinking behind both was certainly cut from the same cloth.

Kennan, in brief, recommended “a policy of firm containment [of Russia] . . . with unalterable counterforce at every point where the Russians show signs of encroaching”—until the Soviet Union either “mellows” or collapses. Kennan detected in Soviet power “seeds of its own decay.” He also believed that the U.S., meanwhile, could show the world that it was a nation of “spiritual vitality.” If it could only hold, therefore, the U.S. and democracy would win out.

To Pundit Lippmann, this conception and plan “is fundamentally unsound . . . ‘a policy of holding the line and hoping for the best’ . . . [which] cannot be made to work unless we get all the breaks . . . [i.e.] the Soviet Union will break its leg while the U.S. grows a pair of wings.” Asked Lippmann: “Do we dare to assume that?”

A Seething Stew. “[It] would mean that for ten or 15 years Moscow, not Washington, would define the issues.” It would also mean asking Congress for a blank check for money and military forces to apply “counterforce” at a moment’s notice—impossible to conceive of under the U.S. constitutional system, “even more unsuited to the American economy, which is unregimented and uncontrolled.

“The policy can. be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets … a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble and disorderly nations, tribes and factions around the perimeter of the Soviet Union . . . [which] cannot in fact be made to coalesce . . . a seething stew of civil strife.

“Worst of all, the effort to develop such an unnatural alliance of backward states must alienate the natural allies of the U.S.”

Those natural allies, said Lippmann, “are the nations of the Atlantic community . . . the British Commonwealth, the Latin states on both sides of the Atlantic, the Low Countries and Switzerland, Scandinavia and the U.S.”

Under “the threat of a Russian-American war arising out of conflict in the borderland . . . the British, the French and all the other Europeans see that they are placed between the hammer and the anvil.” Their real aim now, said Lippmann, is to extricate themselves from the Russian-American conflict.

Peter’s Heir. How, Lippmann wondered, could the Administration ever have developed such “an unworkable policy?” He believed it was “because Mr. X has neglected even to mention the fact that the Soviet Union is the successor of the Russian Empire and that Stalin is not only the heir of Marx and Lenin but of Peter the Great and the Czars of all the Russias.”

The fact that the men in the Kremlin believe in the ideology of Marxism is, to Lippmann, simply a corollary to the fact that they are rulers of the Russian empire.

The Kremlin’s ambitions could be well defined, said Lippmann, because they were historically imperialist Russian ambitions: a pan-Slav affiliation extending to the Oder River, the Alps, the Adriatic and the Aegean. It was the Red Army, not Marxist ideology, Lippmann argued, which had placed Russia in control of virtually all the territory she coveted.

“It is the threat that the Red Army may advance still farther west . . . that gives the Kremlin and the native Communist parties of western Europe an abnormal and intolerable influence in the affairs of the European continent. Therefore, the immediate and decisive problem of our relations with the Soviet Union is whether, when, on what conditions the Red Army can be prevailed upon to evacuate Europe.”

Quid pro Quo. This week Lippmann was halfway through his thesis. The quid pro quo for the Red Army’s withdrawal, he indicated, would be withdrawal of U.S. and British troops from Europe. Then it would be possible (he implied) to establish a balance of power,* and, based on that traditional kind of diplomacy, establish some real hope of peace.

In giving the Red Army, rather than Marxism, the credit for Russia’s present powerful position, Pundit Lippmann was on debatable ground—and had failed to note that the Red Army was built by Russia’s Marxist rulers. And did Lippmann mean to say that Stalin’s objectives were no wider than Peter’s old-fashioned imperialism? It seemed clear to many people that Soviet Russia was a new-fashioned force.

State Department officials privately pointed out that Lippmann’s criticism was directed chiefly at a doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, since supplemented by a policy, the “Marshall plan,” which was in fact something more than “hold the line and hope for the best.” But Lippmann had opened up a wide line of attack, and it came at a moment when U.S. policy was undergoing a critical test.

*In LIFE this week, DeWitt C. Poole, veteran of the U.S. State Department and lecturer on foreign affairs, also plumped for “balance of power” as not only the traditional U.S. policy but the only workable one, and “the key to an American peace.”