National Affairs: JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES

COLLECTIVE SECURITY IS A MYTH

CHRISTIAN CENTURY, Protestantism’s most vigorous, international-minded weekly, regretfully spells out the end of a Western diplomatic tradition.

GREAT numbers of well-intentioned, idealistic persons have accepted the contention that peace and order can be secured only by binding the “peace-loving” nations in an agreement to use their armed forces in concert to restrain or punish an aggressor. The collective security idea was inserted into the Charter of the United Nations. But the member states in the U.N. have never been willing to provide the forces. And as for “collective security” from common action by national armies, the Security Council veto takes care of that. Yet regional pacts as instruments of collective security are as illusory.

The abortive EDC was knocked out before it started. NATO is basically, in the view of most of its members, a device to obtain an American guarantee of their borders, but if it were ever put to a military test, the virtual uselessness of most of its component elements would quickly be demonstrated. The ruin of United States foreign policy by the collapse of the EDC scheme should be a final demonstration that collective security is a myth. This is a lesson that needs to be learned by the government and people of the United States. It needs to be learned by those concerned for the future of the United Nations.

DEMOCRAT LEAD LOST IN NOVEMBER ELECTIONS FRANK KENT, Baltimore Sun columnist whose Great Game of Politics is still a classic of U.S. political analysis, weighs the prospects for a Republican victory in November.

A FEW months ago it seemed that the President was definitely on the defensive. The opposition shrieked with glee at what they termed the “Republican mess” in Washington. Mr. Eisenhower was denounced as “lacking in leadership” and unable to hold his party together. Some of the General’s strong newspaper supporters assumed that his program was doomed to disaster. He was pictured by his opponents as bewildered, confused and dismayed.

The change came when it was realized that Mr. Eisenhower was going to get through, despite a wholly undependable party majority, a very large part of one of the most massive programs ever submitted by any President to Congress. Since the session ended, the talk about “lack of leadership” has completely dried up. Nor are there any more descriptions of him as “bewildered, confused and dismayed.” In other words, what looked to the Democrats in May as a pushover for November does not look that way at all. They are now faced with the necessity of reconstructing their earlier anti-Eisenhower propaganda.

U. S. FOREIGN POLICY: AN ERA OF MAKE-BELIEVE

DAVID LAWRENCE, conservative columnist-publisher (U.S. News & World Report), attacks U.S. “passivity” in foreign policy.

THIS period in history will probably be described some day as the era of make-believe—when governments and peoples of the free world simply refused to be realistic about what was happening all around them. When, for example, the Korean war broke out in June 1950, the world was assured that the “police action” would be over in a short time. When it ended after three years of fighting, the world was assured in glowing terms that aggression had been “repelled” and Communism had suffered a setback. But the Communists haven’t stopped fighting. They now have started another war—this time against Formosa. Planes have been engaged in the raids off the coast of China, and the word is that the Soviet navy is into the area where the U.S. Seventh Fleet is also engaged in some maneuvering.

It’s a confused situation in which the American people are not being alerted to the dangers that lie ahead. Possibly it’s because the Republicans think they have printed too many copies of their “peace and prosperity” slogan to adopt a new one before the congressional elections are held in November. But time is running out, and the factors of tension and explosiveness that make for sudden war are not being erased by the attitude of passivity which seems to prevail in official quarters—including Denver, where the fishing and the golfing have been pleasant—as if peace is attainable by merely wishing that the bad men of the world would just go away.

IRISH AMERICANS SET U. S. AGAINST BRITAIN

KINGSLEY MARTIN, editor of Britain’s anti-American New Statesman and Nation, looks at Anglophobia in the U.S.

ALL over the world the descendants of the aggrieved Irish, whom we turned from their native countries, hate the British, and carry on an effective propaganda against British imperialism.

A few years ago, an English visitor could scarcely move in America without finding himself beset by angry people denouncing Britain’s failure to quit India and half a dozen other countries where America has now built or hopes to build air bases.

Today the British are still criticised in America, and it is still the Irish who organise the anti-British feeling. But now that we are really becoming anti-imperialists, the bitterness and the imperialism of the McCarthys, the Mc-Cormicks, and the McCarrans take the form of denouncing us as Socialists, and, above all, as “anti-Americans.” Perhaps we ought to forget that superiority which has always made us too proud to answer back. We might select a few of the daily vituperations made in America against Britain, and start a campaign against the anti-Britishism so rife in the United States.

MENDÈS CAN RESTORE ATLANTIC SOLIDARITY

RAYMOND ARON, who has been called the “French Walter Lippmann,” tells Premier Mendes-France how he can counteract the loss of EDC.

Mendès-France indignantly denies the accusations of those who imply that he intends to junk the Atlantic alliance. His denials are well justified, for to anyone who knows the moral strength and courage he has shown during the war years, the accusations are absurd. There should be no doubt about the sincerity of his repeated declarations in favor of the Atlantic alliance; only these declarations mean nothing. In politics intentions mean less than the consequences of our actions. Benes did not want the Sovietization of his country; the Roosevelt government did not intend to deliver a hundred million Europeans into slavery. But both made one irretrievable mistake: they believed they could trust Stalin. Certain statements uttered by Mendès-France, and the atmosphere created by the French Cabinet, lead one to fear that the same mistake is being repeated.

Mendès-France should order the government radio to explain to Frenchmen that the irritation our Western partners feel toward us is understandable. He should announce as soon as possible what his alternative solution is to the German rearmament. The Premier should say that the majority which rejected EDC is not “his” majority and that his real majority will soon be composed, not of Communists, neutralists or false nationalists, but of those loyal to European and Atlantic solidarity, who by mischance, on the EDC issue, find themselves dispersed between the two camps.