Reviews of the Week
Christianity and World Politics
War or Peace. By John Foster Dulles. (Harrap. ss.) THIS is a timely book which will help readers to see the Korean struggle against the background of recent diplomatic history. It is also an important, though repetitious, book because of the authority and character of the author. Mr. Dulles is special adviser to Mr. Dean Acheson. He was one of the architects of the bipartisan foreign policy, of the United States: an addition to the unwritten constitution of America for which the free world should give thanks. He has served in the Senate, at the United Nations Assembly and at almost every important international conference since the war.
Mr. Dulles is also a Christian whose religion is the centre of his life and thought. It is not possible for him, therefore, to interpret modern history as a simple struggle between good men and bad. He would agree with Reinhold Niebuhr: " Neither must we fall into the illusion that the foe is alone responsible for our fears and that we are merely virtuous defenders of a great cause, beset by scoundrels. There must be a dimension of faith in which, whatever our loyalties and however justified our defence of them, we recognise the tragic character of the human drama, including the particular drama of our own day, and call upon the mercy of God to redeem us not from the predicament of democracy but from the human predicament."
With this background of faith and of experience, Mr. Dulles not only tells us what we want to know about the international conferences and assemblies of the last years but he gives a plausible interpretation of why the free nations have been losing the world- wide struggle for the hearts of men. " There has been a very definite shift in the balance of power in the world," he says, " and that shift has been in favour of Soviet Communism." And he suggests that this dismal shift has been our own fault, not because we have failed to use more money or more machine-guns, but because we have been morally inadequate. He believes, for example, that the United States made a mistake when she allowed her military men to interfere largely in the making of foreign policy. It was on military advice that America asked for strategic control of the Japanese mandated islands, a demand which
"embarrassed our preparations for the San Francisco Conference and embarrassed us in advancing at the United Nations the program of colonial evolution in Asia as against the Soviet program for violent revolution there.
" The military were scarcely in a position to appraise the import- ance of our colonial policy as an offset to Stalin's program . " It is, I think [adds Mr. Dulles], a fair question to ask : Who has been helped most by seeming to give our foreign policy a militaristic pattern—the United States or the Soviet Union ? We have, perhaps, gained some military advantage. But we have paid a high price m moral and psychological disadvantages . . .
" We shall not qualify for survival if we become a nation of materialists, and if we give the -impression of growing hard and inhuman, and deaf to the cry of mankind that a way be found ti save them from the death, the misery, the starvation of body and soul that make up the human cost of recurrent wars .. . Something has gone wrong with our nation, or we should not be in our presto plight and mood . . . There is a confusion in men's minds and a corrosion of their souls . .. There is no use having more and louder Voices of America unless we have something to say that is more persuasive than anything yet said."
This is unusual language for one of the chief directors of the foreign policy of a great Power. Instead of merely abusing the enemy and insisting on the goodness of his own cause, Mr. Dulles asks the important question: What has gone wrong that the world, should be so sick ? He-offers no false hopes, indeed no hopes at all unless we are prepared to face the moral question. He does not underestimate the importance of material power ; but he insists that the West cannot save itself from Communism by material, means alone, since the Communist faith flourishes on materialism and ours does not. Hence the solemn statements with which the book begins: " War is probable. .. . War is not inevitable, and I do not think that it is imminent. . . . We have the opportunity to prevent the suicide of humanity."
There is no softness about Mr. Dulles's appeal to morality. To quote once more from Niebuhr: " This ambivalence between moral cynicism and moral sentimen• tality can be cured only by a deeper and more contrite understanding of the fact that the exercise of power is never perfectly just, but that it is equally impossible to achieve a vantage point of moral purity by disavowing the responsibilities of power:" That " deeper and more contrite understanding " illumines Mr
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