THE NATIONS: Creeping Suspense

It was a week of creeping suspense. No one event dramatized the fierce acceleration of history. No voice dominated (or clarified) the tumult of clashing policies, hopes and fears. Men suffered piecemeal, but comparatively few minds grasped the totality of civilization’s crisis. There was only creeping suspense.

Economic Crisis. For crisis had become general. There was scarcely a level of human activity, scarcely a corner of the world unaffected by it. There was the crisis in food. Crops had been bad almost everywhere except Russia. The specter of hunger in winter haunted Western Europe and much of Asia. There was the crisis of production, which was in part a crisis of war’s destruction. But it was essentially a crisis of the will to work—a crisis from which the U.S. was scarcely more free than Europe.

Britain was struggling in the economic pit. France was stumbling toward it. Germany lay almost prone in it. China staggered on with no one to lend a helping hand.

Political Crisis. There was the chain reaction of political crisis. There was scarcely a political area on the map of Europe or Asia that was unthreatened within or without. In Korea, U.S.-Russian negotiations had broken down. India was in the throes of mass murder and fleeing populations. Persia, stiffened by promises of U.S. support, was resisting Russian demands. Greece (and the U.S. support of Greece) was confronted by the danger of a rival Greek Communist state, supported by Russia through her Balkan stooges. Almost anything might happen in Italy.

Complicating both economic and political crises was the crisis of socialism highlighted by the plight of the British Labor Party. How could a government ruling in the name of the working class compel workers to work? How could a minority of the nation force the whole nation to accept the regimentation inseparable from planning? Communists, realistic and ruthless, had answered: by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which in reality meant the dictatorship of the secret police. Socialists, well-intentioned and opportunistic, had evaded this problem in theory; now, in practice, history had brought them face to face with it.

Crisis in Paris. There was a crisis of the Marshall plan—that hopeful but somewhat vague U.S. endeavor to solve Europe’s economic and political crises. The 16 nations convened in Paris had made scant progress toward mutual self-help (see Conferences). This crisis might still be overcome, but it was psychologically damaging.

Embracing all other crises was the crisis of the U.S. policy of containing Communism. Last week, Pundit Walter Lippmann asked the disturbing question whether such a policy was feasible at all (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). For at the bottom of almost every phase of crisis was the Soviet Union. From the heartland of Eurasia she irradiated the world along a vast circumference with waves of disruptive power.

During World War II it had been popular to say with the geopoliticians that whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland would dominate the rimlands and the rest of the world. The geopolitical fad had passed, but the fact remained—augmented, by Russia’s successes in the war and at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, to ominous power.

Russia’s political and military advantage was obvious from a glance at the map. In containing Communism, the U.S. was forced to approach Russia from all sides, at widely scattered points, with widely scattered and diffused resources. Russia could strike where she wished. She was always on the offensive, the U.S. must act constantly on the defensive. Eastern Europe was gone. Russia, in effect, stood on the Elbe River and the Adriatic Sea. The rump of Europe scarcely differed in effectiveness from Europe in the 5th Century, when the Slavs had pushed to the North Sea and the Frankish Kingdom occupied the Low Countries and France.

But now there was no Byzantine Empire to secure the southeast. Now the weak bastion of Greece and Turkey blocked the Communist road to the Middle East. In the Far East, an unsupported and economically battered China blocked the Russian advance. Some thought that Secretary of State Marshall had made a mistake in writing off China and that the U.S. position would be greatly strengthened if he frankly admitted it and promptly bolstered this traditional Asiatic flank of U.S. foreign policy.

Crisis of the Mind. His failure to do so highlighted the greatest crisis of all—the crisis of the imagination. Civilizations do not fall primarily by a failure of force. They fall because of a failure of the mind and the instinct to survive. It was this failure that a Frenchwoman had in mind when she said to an American, in a sweltering Paris restaurant last week: “The fate of Western civilization is being settled now—this week. And there seems to be nobody, in your country or mine, or in any country, with enough imagination to save it.”