Realpolitik
MR. GELBER wrote some years ago a solid, useful, academic book on The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship. It is possible that his studies in that field showed him the close relation between the power, the interests and the sentiments of the two nations. But the book itself gave no indication of the fact that, in addition to being a solid academic historian, Mr. Gelber is a first-rate pamphleteer. There is a punch on every page of this short tract, none of them are pulled, and Mr. Gelber does not stand away from his victims to let them stagger to their feet in peace. He steps in and knocks them down again.
The chief victims of Mr. Gelber's punch are those timid and morally tender-minded persons who cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that politics is about power, the groups whose consciousness of British and American imperfections is so great that they can see but slight differences of shade between British and German im- perialism, the groups who are busy fighting the last war over again and whose minds stop working at the mere mention of the word " Versailles." (Mr. Gelber makes a good point when he admits that it was wrong to be rude to the German delegates in 1919—and contrasts this with the obsequiousness of Hitler to Marshal Petain at Montoire, a display of waiterlike blandness followed by an exploitation of France that makes German woes in 1919-24 minor Irritations.) Mr. Gelber's main thesis is that we should not be ashamed of the old idea of the balance of power. By balance he means not an unstable equilibrium, but a balance decidedly on one side, a credit balance of power. Most of our present woes have come from senti- mentality ; from a failure to appreciate the facts about German power, by overestimating our and French power, and continuing to think we were in command of a situation which had got completely out of our control. Mr. Gelber can rightly claim credit as a prophet ; when our leaders were telling us the old, old story he was pointing out the disastrous implication of our limited liability policy, of our suspicion of French alliances in eastern Europe. It would not be necessary to dig up the corpse of this policy if some of its most vehement supporters were not still preaching to us, with the same fervour, but with a slightly different text.
Mr. Gelber does not see this refusal to recognise the facts of power as the fault of one party or one class. All parties produced their muddlers of the public mind (and all parties are still doing so). At bottom this shrewd, pugnacious and entertaining tract is a plea for not missing a tolerable world in the search for Utopia, whether that Utopia is federal union or a world in which a reformed and penitent Germany is trusted with all those instruments of aggression and domination which she possesses if left " free." As Mr. Gelber points out, when Germany has these powers she uses them. I think that Mr. Gelber attaches too much importance to the formal dis- unity of Germany. It is not to agree with Mr. Dark to feel that the Bismarckian Reich has come to stay. That is a reason for regarding that Reich with the gravest suspicion and perpetual vigilance, no matter who rules or appears to rule it. But it is not the political unity of Germany but its military resources that are the threat. But whatever excesses of argument may be charged against this book, its
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