THE NATIONS: Interval

For exactly eight days—between the Paris Conference’s end and the convening of the U.N.’s General Assembly in New York—the world had a chance to draw breath, to look both backward & forward along the rough road it was traveling. The peacemakers and world rebuilders were, most of them, in transit (see below). The world’s troubles rode with them every mile.

Looking backward, the most important event of the year, between the United Nations Assembly meeting at London and its second sitting this week in New York, was the clarification of U.S. foreign policy. A year ago neither the friends nor the antagonists of the U.S. had a clear idea of where the U.S. stood. Today the world sees the U.S. as a leading champion among the great powers of a strong United Nations and as an active participant in the discussion of every international issue, from Stettin around to Harbin.

In its relations with Russia, the U.S. has rejected two extreme views of what Russia really wants. The leading spokesmen of these opposed views were Henry Wallace and William C. Bullitt (ex-Ambassador to Moscow). The Wallace view, in brief, was that, once Russia feels secure against attack, she will stop expanding and start providing the long-promised socialist Utopia for her own people. The Bullitt view was that the Bolshevik leaders are irrevocably committed by the “Communist creed” to world domination, and that nothing will stop them but force, the sooner applied, the better.

The view which won out over both of these was that the Kremlin could not be appeased, but that it might be dealt with, because its masters do not want war in the near future; that Moscow’s policy was not an implacable plan but an opportunistic scheme of expanding where weakness shows up, stopping in the face of strength.

Looking forward, the world could expect its politics to turn around the interplay of Russian expansionism v. the U.S. policy of “patience and firmness.”