The Trend in World Politics

Abstract

There is unhappily nothing new in the fear of war. But the circumstances now are a little peculiar. We are only two years beyond the fighting end of a war which on our side was always represented as a crusade to end wars, and which was immediately followed by the creation of an organization stridently advertised as an improved League of Nations. We are in the presence of a dual concentration of power which is unique in history for magnitude and inclusiveness. The conflict, already engaged though not yet military in form, is more one of systems of modes of life and government than any previous international struggle. Finally, interwoven with the other pulls and strains, is the rivalry for new armaments of a type which seems destined to revolutionize warfare if not, indeed, the general terms of life on our planet. Comparisons with the first few years after the war of 19141918, usually to the marked disadvantage of the present, have become a journalistic commonplace. The two redeeming features invariably chalked up to our credit, namely the strong new interest of the American people and government in organization for peace and the broad realization of conflicting forces that were present but not so clearly seen in the nineteen-twenties, are hardly of a sort to bring short-term comfort. It is, after all, the knowledge of the deep underlying differences that separate and antagonize the two great foci of power, coupled with the spectacle of frustration in the United Nations, that frighten us. Justification for the universal fear can be found not only in the day-to-day relations of the great states but in the clash of their philosophies. And one of the baffling features of an un-