Military demonstrations could conveniently be classified according to objective under two major headings: (a) those intended primarily to convey purpose or intention, and (b) those intended primarily to convey capability. The latter type is generally free of the political risks which often attend the former. Both types, but especially the former, may be effected without necessarily disclosing new advances in the use, design, or performance of weapons. In the latter type, however, there may be a strong temptation—or a strong justification even in the absence of temptation—to parade a new or improved weapon or weapons system which reflects both technological achievement and enhanced capability.

The purpose of this article is to outline a fresh approach to America's economic relations with the non-Communist world. These proposals envisage a direct attack by the United States and its allies on the structural distortions which have persisted since 1945 in the non-Communist world economy. The chronic dollar shortage of our major allies is taken to be, essentially, a symptom of these more basic structural distortions. The proposals would end, after a transition period, the system of annual Congressional grants to our allies and would substitute for it the combined operation of investment and financial pools. These pools might be built up from the present International Bank and the International Monetary Fund, although they would require operations different in scale and purpose from those now conducted by these institutions. The proposals would apply a common approach to the problems of both the industrialized portions of the non-Communist world and the underdeveloped regions, and would thus combine or coordinate U.S. economic efforts in Europe, Japan, and in underdeveloped areas. It is believed, also, that they would mitigate some of the more serious political friction between the United States and other non-Communist countries and strengthen the non-Communist world as against the Soviet bloc.

The postwar drive to liberalize trade, increase competition, and thereby improve productivity within Western Europe has met with determined opposition, as have similar attempts at reducing trade barriers in the United States. This resistance has come from a variety of groups which fear that their interests will be jeopardized as a result of keener competition, and its magnitude can hardly be overestimated. Indeed, it probably constitutes the major single barrier to European economic unification. Certainly, it can no longer be passed off with lectures on the virtues of competition, mobility of the factors of production, and international division of labor.

The comparative ease with which authoritarian groups have come to power in nations where large parties stood pledged to defend the democratic order to the bitter end has become one of the most disturbing elements in modern world politics. Such developments have brought into question the validity of accepted liberal-democratic norms governing the behavior of responsible leaders, both in the domestic opposition to the authoritarian regime and in foreign governments whose security arrangements are adversely affected by the suppression of free institutions. Basically, these traditional norms have implied non-interference with constitutional political processes and acceptance of their consequences. On June 23, 1933, Hitler outlawed the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which for over four decades, until 1932, had been the largest German party and, since the founding of the Weimar Republic iri 1918, the principal advocate and defender of the democratic system and a peaceful foreign policy. In considering the actions of its leadership from the accession of Hitler to the outlawing of the party, this article seeks to contribute to a re-examination of these accepted norms, particularly insofar as they concern the behavior of a liberal-democratic mass party faced with a government seeking total power.

Five years ago the Comintern loomed once again as a spectre on the European horizon with the founding in Poland, September 1947, of the Information Bureau of the Communist Parties of the USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia (expelled June 1948), France, and Italy. It has since become both fashionable and convenient to identify the “Cominform” with all aspects of international Communist activity, ranging from the most general of policy directives to an isolated Communist-led strike. The indiscriminate identification of “Cominform” with international Communist activity provides the layman with a convenient stereotype which spares him the trouble of further inquiry. For the student of Communism, however, this lack of precision merely results in obscuring the actual role of the Cominform, as it is known to us, and more particularly, its function within the configuration of various covert and overt instrumentalities of the international Communist movement. To speak, for example, of a “Cominform” policy of collectivization or of a “Cominform” purge trial in the Balkans, or to suggest by “Cominform” the whole web of controls of national Communist parties maintained by the USSR is to ascribe a role and importance to the Cominform that it simply does not have. For without minimizing the importance of the function the Cominform has come to discharge, it may be said that its role is essentially that of a central, but by no means the most important, propaganda instrument of the international Communist movement, designed primarily to provide public guidance and information to the leadership of various national Communist parties. Thus Pravda and the USSR radio broadcasts furnish daily guidance to the international Communist movement, and the World Federation of Trade Unions is continuously engaged in attempting to bring trade union activity in line with Communist policy.

It is traditional, and frequently beneficial, to express dissatisfaction with the process of foreign policy-making in the United States. If political scientists have attracted a disproportionate share of attention for their indulgence in this national pastime, it may well be due to their command of word and pen rather than to the uniqueness of their concern with the subject. Nearly everyone who thinks about the problem has had a liberal amount of unkind words to distribute among different actors and institutions engaged in policy formulation.

We live in a world that cannot possibly satisfy our highest expectations. For these expectations must envision a universal society in which man would be forever secure from the exercise of arbitrary power; a truly reasonable world governed by harmonious action and not by conflicting interests; particularly, a world in which life would not seek to dominate life and the threat of violence would disappear. Machiavelli once described this world of the imagination as one where statecraft could be based solely upon considerations of “charity, integrity, and humanity, all uprightness, and all piety.” In point of fact, however, it would be a world in which statecraft would be altogether unnecessary. But not only is statecraft necessary; there are limitations imposed upon the possibilities of political action and these limitations must have an important, even a decisive, bearing upon the various strategies open to the political actor.