An Anxious and Conciliatory Kremlin -
MR. HoRowrrz concludes his work : 'When America set out on her post-war path to contain revolution throughout the world, and threw her immense power and influence into the balance against the rising movement for social justice among the poverty-stricken two-thirds of the world's population, the first victims of her deeds were the very ideals for a better world—liberty, equality and self-determination—which she her- self in her infancy, had done so much to foster.' And his piece of special pleading against the American leadership appears to find whole- hearted acceptance with his publishers. In their long and laudatory blurb we are told that the book 'dispassionately argued and painstakingly documented . . . based on indisputable if gener- ally ignored facts, will irrevocably alter the image of the free world colossus.'
This last seems very doubtful. For one thing we are told next to nothing about what the Americans were up against. In his preface the author explains that to deal with Soviet policy and tactics would make the book too long. This is quite likely, but there is little evidence either in text or bibliography that he has seriously studied the Soviet side. (The index has no entry for Communism or Communist parties). There emerges a picture of an anxious and conciliatory Kremlin, whose continued attempts at rapproche- ment were invariably and brutally rebuffed by people like Truman, Acheson, John Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson. Mr. Horowitz is given to sweep- ing assertions. 'If, for example, Lippmann's strategic policy recommendations had been accepted by Washington as an alternative to con- tainment, it is certain (within the limits of all such hypotheses) that Europe would not be divided today.' Why, one wonders, is this so certain? We are told that up to 1947 Stalin had no intention of soyietising Eastern Europe; there is ample evi- dence that this is quite untrue.
When the author does undertake to argue his case he usually fails to prove his point. Instances are his suggestion that the outbreak of the war in Korea came as a surprise to Moscow; and that 'kennedy's overriding motive in the Cuban affair was to humiliate Khrushchev. A marked selec- tivity is shown in the choice of the indisputable facts: much is made of the Koreans in Japan who elected to return to North Korea, but nothing
is said of the POW repatriation issue, or of the
huge influx into South Korea of refugees from the north. The only reference to the Berlin Wall is in a footnote: 'The Berlin situation had' been stabilised by the erection of a wall by the Com- munists.' The documentation largely consists of a number of painstakingly assembled quotes by people whose views happen to be the same as the author's. One could go on at length in similar
strain about this dreary, pretentious and uncon- vincing book. Of course there are people about who will swallow anything provided it is anti- American. But even some of these may feel that at 60s. The Free World Colossus is rather expen- sive.
The climate of Dr. Lerche's little book is far more temperate. The Cold War . . . And After is written throughout in modern American acade- mese, which some of us find rather hard going. But, at a grave risk of oversimplification, the lesson seems to be that after all the confronta- tions from Berlin to Cuba, with the increasing, improbability that either Moscow or Washington will ever want to start a war, and with the grow- ing sophistication and maturity of each of the parties in its recently acquired status of a world power, a supreme effort should be made to in- augurate a lasting era of normalised 'competitive co-existence.' Among the many benefits which such a state of affairs can be hoped to bring would be the putting of a brake on the younger and brasher members of the General Assembly and the scotching of any serious trouble from Red China or from the France of de Gaulle.
DAVID FOOTMAN
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