Can There Ever Be Peace Again?

U.S. WAR AIMS--Walter Lippmann --Atlantic-Little, Brown & Co. ($1.50).

America's retaliation for Christopher Columbus, Walter Lippmann, continues to discover the Old World. In U.S. War Aims, an occasionally repetitious sequel to the spectacularly successful U.S. Foreign Policy* he reports his latest discovery: the U.S. is a part of the Atlantic Community.

Those who think that Author Lippmann has merely coined a new name for the old ideogram "Western World" will do an injustice to the most analytical mind in U.S. journalism. For Walter Lippmann wrote his new book around the term Atlantic Community to describe a historical development which, if true, means a political change of planetary significance: the Western World's center of gravity has jumped West. Henceforth the Atlantic Ocean will be what the Mediterranean was for 20 centuries--the lake of decision. Implication: to the strongest power along the shorelines of this new Mediterranean may fall the splendor and the responsibility that once were Rome's. That strongest power is the U.S. Its war aims ultimately express only one concern: the safeguarding of the unique U.S. position as the dominant Atlantic power.

America, says Lippmann, is a continental island in the great oceanic basin of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and hence is foredestined to try to prevent the establishment of an aggressively expanding empire in either sea. That, and not trade conflicts, is the real reason why the U.S. has fought two wars with Germany in 24 years and has always supported China against Japan.

The Atlantic Community includes all nations on both shores of the Atlantic, and those nations on the Pacific side who have had the good sense to be far from

Asia. Combining about 522,000,000 people in about 42 sovereign states, it is the only area of the planet where "the facts of international life conform with the spirit of the Atlantic Charter." The Atlantic is the crucial area of U.S. fate.

Three Worlds. Correcting Wendell Willkie, Author Lippmann submits that the world, far from being one, is divided into three parts--the Atlantic Community (in which the U.S. and Britain play the leading roles), the Russian Orbit, the embryonic Chinese Orbit. The postwar settlement with Germany is the combined job of the Atlantic Community and the Russian Orbit. The settlement with Japan is the tripartite job of the Atlantic Community, the Russian and Chinese Orbits. Together, the three "are the founding members of a world order of peace."

Policy toward Japan. Japan, Author Lippmann believes, must submit to being expelled from the Asiatic mainland, entirely shorn of sea power. "The terms defined in the Cairo Declaration will last if Russia, China and the U.S. stand firmly upon them."

Policy toward Germany. The chief U.S. war aim in Europe is to prevent Germany from ever again detaching one of her neighbors from the Atlantic Community or from the Russian Orbit. AH other political and moral accounts should be settled not by the U.S., but by Germany's victims in Europe. Later a neutralized and demilitarized Germany may find her place in the Atlantic Community, but "only with the sincere consent of the Soviet Union." If, on the other hand, Lippmann warns, Germany should ever slip into the Russian Orbit, Russia would have expanded to the shores of the Atlantic. "This solution would be intolerable for the Western World."

A World Divided. In the last analysis, everything in Author Lippmann's audit comes down to the question of relations between just two powers--the U.S. and the Soviet Union. "They can prevent a third World War. If they fight, it will be the most terrible of all world wars." But if Russia remains within her orbit, they have no reasons to fight. They would certainly fight "if the Soviet Union made an alliance with Germany, with Japan, or a separate and exclusive alliance with any member of the Atlantic Community"--for example, France.

Lippmann is willing to go even farther.

There can be no durable peace between the U.S. and Russia "until the basic political and human liberties are established in the Soviet Union. ... If [the Russians] refuse, it will be better not to deceive ourselves. . . . The world order cannot be half democratic and half totalitarian."

Wilsonian Refutation. For many readers the most provocative section of Author Lippmann's book will be the 13 pages in which he undertakes to refute Woodrow Wilson's international political principles. For not until the Wilsonian fallacies are cleared away can the U.S. achieve, or even formulate, realistic war aims.

Says Lippmann: "Wilson's name is now so completely identified with the ideal of a universal society that the principles he laid down for attaining a universal society are generally believed to be axiomatic and immutable." Author Lippmann believes that "a universal society cannot be realized by following the Wilsonian principles."

In the 14 Points (in whose formulation Lippmann himself collaborated) Wilson called for reduction of national armaments "to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety."Says Lippmann: "In the interval between the two wars British, French and American military policy followed this disastrous prescription."

Wilson insisted that "the settlement of every question" must be "upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned." Says Lippmann: "This principle gives to the people inhabiting any strategic point upon the world's surface--say Panama, Gibraltar--an absolute veto on any arrangement designed to use that point for the security of a nation, a region, or of the world."

Wilson insisted on the "exceedingly tricky general principle" of self-determination. Says Lippmann: "The principle can be and has been used to promote the dismemberment of practically every organized state. None knew this better than Adolf Hitler himself."

Moral Frustration. Americans never intended to reduce their armaments to the vanishing point or to give up defense of the Panama Canal. The North fought the South in a great civil war against the principle of self-determination.

Says Lippmann: "The cynicism which corroded the democracies jn the interval between the two German wars was engendered by a moral order which was in fact a moral frustration. . . . The moralists at Paris gave humanity a code of morality which no one could observe, which . . . was a preparation not for peace under the law, but for aggression in the midst of anarchy. The [Wilsonian] moral code failed because it was not a good moral code.

"We too shall fail to find a moral basis for the international order," Lippmann warns, "if we do not discern and then correct the spiritual error which underlies the Wilsonian misconception. It is the error of forgetting that we are men and of thinking that we are gods. . . . We shall collaborate best with other nations if we start with the homely fact that their families and their homes, their villages and lands, their countries and their own ways, their altars, their flags, and their hearths--not charters, covenants, blueprints and generalities--are what men live for and will, if it is necessary, die for."

* One of the many readers of 1943's political bestseller: Thomas E. Dewey.

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