OTHER RECENT BOOKS
IT is one of the hurts done to American reputa- tion abroad by the antics of Senator McCarthy and Mr. Scott McLeod that one can easily forget that plenty of sense has been talked in Washington and out of it even during the last !eve years and that, despite the barrage of abuse from McCarthy et al. and the more sophisti- cated insinuation by Time that Chiang Kai- shek is one of the great Christian martyrs of the age, sense is still marketable in America. Mr. Halle was for long (is he still?) one of the 'policy planning staff' of the State Depart- ment with Messrs. Kennon, Nitze and Marshall, all since retired to other fields of activity. It was his duty to think about the Problems of foreign policy, to reflect on the fact, too much neglected in Congress, that foreign policy, simply because it is foreign, cannot be simply a matter of counting heads and votes and acting accordingly. The Kremlin casts no votes but cannot be disregarded. A long spell at the rather misnamed 'War College' gave Mr. Halle the duty and the time to think and here are the results. There are no great novelties, no lively paradoxes. Mr. Halle has
been impressed by Thucydides and by velli, as well as by Sir Eyre. Crowe. He knows
that no historical situation exactly reproduces itself, but that problems have family:resem- blances all the same. Sometimes I cannot quite see the resemblance myself. Whatever be the future of 'Maoism,' the parallel with the BYzantine 'secession' from Rome casts, I think, no light on it and not much on Rome. And a navy, as the case of Chile shows, may be as decisive a force,in internal politics as an army. The basic truth that Mr. ,Halle wants to impress on his countrymen is that theirs is 'not a Position of choice'; they are in a disagreeable situation in which they must take stock ribt only of their hopes but not only of their jears either. Mr. Halle uses the reductio ad bsurduni method to show the impossibility of isolationism and the dream or nightmare-like character of plans for 'liberating' Russia Or China. The =struggle for security is never won' and a policy based on a quick and final solu- tion is either mere wind or the preliminary to a world catastrophe. These points are ably and persuasively stated; that they are common- Places, among us, does not make them less worth stating.
D. W. BROGAN
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