When the Labour Party took office in 1945 it had a detailed economic program on which all its intellectuals were agreed. By the time it left office in 1951, controversy had already started as to what its next program should be. This controversy is still active, though fairly wide agreement has been reached on some of the major issues. The purpose of this article is to put the controversy into its setting.

Surely, more has been written about the Russian Revolution and the ensuing forty years of Soviet rule than about any comparable episode in human history. The bibliography of items on the French Revolution occupies, it is said, one wall of the Bibliothéque Nationale. A complete bibliography on the Soviet Union—which is yet to be compiledand may never be because of the geometric rate at which it multiplies—would probably make that earlier cenotaph to scholarship shrink the way in which the earlier tombs diminished before the great complex at Karnak.

Whether we articulate them or not, the assumptions that we make concerning the future development of the Soviet system are fundamental to our thinking about American foreign policy. The objectives toward which we can reasonably direct our efforts, the philosophy of our situation, are in a very large measure a function of the image we have in our minds of the changes we discern or anticipate in the character of the society and the government of the Russian people.

GOVERNMENT stocks of surplus agricultural commodities, which reached a record level of over nine billion dollars in February 1956, have moved to the center of the stage in recent agricultural legislation and discussions of the farm problem. Reasons for this prominence are numerous. Most obvious perhaps is simply the reaction against the apparent waste of resources in building up huge stocks for which no clear use is in sight. Merely to maintain stocks of this magnitude is a costly undertaking and has necessitated an uneconomic expansion of storage facilities. Little wonder, then, that more and more attention is being devoted to finding means for disposing of this vast mass of agricultural products acquired by the United States government as a prop to farm prices.

THE United Nations Charter repeatedly refers to “disputes or situations” and to “threats to the peace or breach of the peace” but does not use the word “conflict.” In the Kellogg-Briand Pact, however, the parties agreed “that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be solved except by pacific means.” A “conflict” appears to be less formulated than a “dispute” but more formulated than a “situation.” A “conflict” does not necessarily involve violence as does a “breach of the peace,” but violence is probable, as in a “threat to the peace.” Thus conflict always involves a considerable degree of tension. The close relation of conflict to violence is indicated by the derivation of the term from the Latin word confligere, meaning “to strike together.” Thus, physical conflict is suggested.

The published report on the international conference on NATO held at Princeton University in June 1957 has been read widely and with great interest. Every participant in that conference will recognize the report as an accurate and fair summary of the discussions. But its authors have also written in their introduction that “there is not a single participant who would give his unqualified support to the whole report.” This is certainly true of me.

There can be little doubt that the development and increasing availability of modern, especially nuclear, weapons will greatly alter the military policies and relationships that obtain among nations. This article addresses itself to those topics; more particularly it considers, in the light of changing technology, such problems as the objectives of major and minor powers in both general and limited war, the definition of limitations in limited war, the validity of alliances, and alternative military postures for the United States and for small nations.

The leading Powers are actively seeking novel weapon-systems to give themselves the advantages of surprise. Difficulties in the way of that search, and its effects upon the relationships between Powers, furnish the subjects of this article.* We shall confine ourselves to those surprises that consist in or are closely related to the invention of instruments of war. “Surprise” has many other connotations for military and international studies—e.g., surprise attack, surprising changes of alliance—but these shall not directly concern us.

The contemporary Indian scene is exciting. Of immediate relevance to the present article are two basic aspects of the evolving situation in India. First is the fact that there is in process, for anyone to see, a deliberate effort to raise living standards. The government of independent India articulated a framework for economic expansion almost a decade ago, at about the time that President Truman dramatically injected the problems of economic development in the arena of international affairs. Since then India has been proceeding with development activity more or less within this framework.

TOWARD the end of the Second World War, Field Marshal Rommel confided to his diary that, once the German U-boats were beaten in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the swelling stream of American soldiers and supplies could reach Europe, Germany “was doomed to inevitable defeat at any place which was accessible to the Anglo-American transport fleets.” Not everyone will agree with this assertion of the prominent role played by sheer masses of military manpower and matériel in deciding the outcome of World War II. It is suggestive, however, that the fortunes of that war turned in close association with the changing ratio of munitions production by the Axis powers and the United Nations.

The term “New Left” designates a state of mind—the desire to do away with the division and impotence of the old Left—rather than a definite sector of the political spectrum. It has, in fact, been used in three different contexts. In its most specific sense, it has meant the Nouvelle Gauche behind Claude Bourdet and his neutralist weekly, France-Observateur. In its broadest sense, it includes all the rebels at the Left, from the reformist followers of Mendès-France to non-Communist revolutionary Marxists. Finally, the term can designate—and this is how it is used here—the groups that occupy the no-man's-land between the Socialists and the Communists.

Self-Criticism has been a characteristic of NATO ever since it was established. We are perhaps too inclined to pull up our institutions by the roots from time to time to see how they are growing. But whether this is a good habit in the ordinary way or not, it is something that was virtually bound to happen in 1957, after the most critical twelve months that the Western nations had experienced since the Second World War. Nineteen fifty-six began with a widespread feeling of relief that the danger of a major war in Europe (the only kind of war that seemed possible) had greatly receded. Before this feeling of relief had time to wear off, there supervened a series of crises that shook NATO to its foundations. There was a virtual state of war in Algeria (itself a part of the NATO area), and many of France's best troops were withdrawn from Europe to fight it; there was an increasingly bitter dispute involving three members of NATO over the future of Cyprus; there was the Suez crisis, which also involved both NATO interests and troops from the NATO area; and there was the Hungarian revolution, which greatly damaged, if it did not destroy, the hesitantly re-emerging belief in Soviet good faith.

DIPLOMATS in our day rarely make much history, but in times of crisis they occupy unique vantage points from which to see it made. Such an observer was William Christian Bullitt, the American Ambassador to France from 1936 to 1940. Few other foreigners resident in Paris enjoyed so intimate a view of high politics during the last years of the Third Republic, and even fewer have left so lively and colorful a contemporary record of that period. Perhaps it is true that the bulky file of Bullitt's daily telegrams from Paris reveals more about Bullitt himself than about the state of France.1 Yet those cables, sprawling, scrappy, and personal though they may be, also illumine two significant aspects of Bullitt's era: the slow conversion of American leadership from isolationism to interventionism, and the disintegration and destruction of the Third Republic.

Despite the oft-quoted language of Article II of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO was not designed as an institution for economic collaboration among its members. It has not in fact acted as such an institution. Every initiative toward investing it with direct economic functions has run into a blind alley.

An epigram coined under the Third Republic presents the political Frenchman as torn between the claims of his heart on the Left and of his pocketbook on the Right. At a time when a nationalistic policy in Algeria draws heavily on all pocketbooks this idea seems out of date: today a good section of the French public is trying to reconcile accepted attitudes with a new policy, and the old phraseology of the Left conceals less and less successfully an ideology of the Right. The trend is strengthened by transfusions of new blood from a colonial domain lost or endangered in the last few years; that is, by the arrival in metropolitan France of tens of thousands of politically active and actively resentful citizens from Indo-China, Morocco, Tunisia, impenitently expressing their disrespect for democratic values, their wartime sympathies for Pétain and Vichy, and their contempt for the traditional language of political conformity.

This article points out and analyzes some overt and implicit family imagery underlying political and economic discussion in one passage by Mao Tse-tung, and discusses the value of such analysis. Along the way, some methodological questions—the significance of form and content in such “content analysis,” and verification of the findings—are also considered.

THE new Soviet diplomacy in Asia involves an active effort to extend economic aid to a select group of countries who qualify as non-allied with the United States, or, in some sense of the term, as “neutralists.” To date, the Soviet Bloc has made aid commitments in South and Southeast Asia of over $500 million to India, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Burma. Virtually all the aid has been committed in the past two years; most of it since early 1956. TABLE 1 shows the size and character of the commitments.

Economic development in the West proceeded, until the latter part of the nineteenth century, without the aid of the intellectuals. Neither the innovators in technology nor the enterprisers and managers of industrial firms were highly educated, nor did they interest themselves in intellectual matters. The world of finance contained a few exceptions to this proposition, such as David Ricardo, Samuel Rogers, and George Grote, but it, too, moved without the aid of economists or other professional or avocational intellectuals. The graduates of universities stood aloof from the practical work of commerce and industry in their countries; they went into scholarship, into theology and the church, into administration (first in Germany and then gradually in the rest of the countries of Europe), into medicine and the law, but they did not enter into the central stream of the economic life of their countries.

Recent developments in the study of international politics reflect two major emphases. One comprises a variety of attempts at systematization and stresses the “frame of reference” approach; the other seeks specific knowledge of national policies in greater detail and stresses the “area studies” approach. Theoretically, the first explains international politics in terms of broad generalizations applicable to all international actors insofar as they conform to an ideal model or depart therefrom in a calculable manner. The second seeks to understand international politics in terms of the relationship of foreign policy to the total social and historical context from which it emerges. This article is an attempt to find a middle ground between these two emphases.