Nato-An American View

Abstract

the Germans and after them the Japanese gave up the fight six years ago, the inhabitants of the world, optimistic in their relief from war, looked forward to a better life. The epoch that followed has visited a grievous disappointment on those hopefuls. Instead of having an opportunity to attain that worthy goal, millions of men and women now devote themselves desperately to the problem of mere survival. We might name our post-war epoch the austerity epoch, or the insecurity epoch, or the epoch of dashed hopes, or by any one of a number of titles which would reflect the fact that we live in a period of international tension, when inhabitants of the most advanced countries are forced to make material and spiritual sacrifices in order to bolster their own and their neighbours' chance of staying alive as individuals and as nations. Even where the standard of living remains reasonably good, the common apprehension about the threat hanging over peace destroys tranquillity. Whatever we call the epoch, we ought to give credit where credit is due for the present state of affairs in the west. The outcries of politicians in the van of restless men and women aggrieved by the substitution of re-armament for social rehabilitation as the immediate goal of western European nations are filled with excoriations of their own countries and of the United States. They stand by the simple notion that if the west is uncomfortable, it is the west's fault. But it is not the western world that has turned the west's high aspirations inside out. It is the Soviet Union. The clearest fact about the post-war epoch is that for the past four years western nations have been making policies that are responses to Soviet policies. The romanticizing astigmatists who damn the policies as symbols of aggression on the west's part cannot hide the real origin of those policies. That goes for the protestants in the British Labour Party captained by Aneurin Bevan and intellectualized by the New Statesman and Nation. It goes for the complainants who this year have unstabilized the governments of France and Italy to a remarkable degree for even those perennially