Isolationism Confirmed

"Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels."

--Nikos Kazantzakis

Last spring, before he began a three-month tour of Western Europe, Columnist Walter Lippmann, 77, insisted that a new isolationism was sweeping the world, making obsolete the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam. Not surprisingly, on his vacation Lippmann found his judgment confirmed. In the first columns he has written since his return, Lippmann portrayed today's Europeans as a grey, inhibited lot. "They do not have the ambition to participate in history and to shape the future. Their state of mind is marked by a vast indifference to big issues, and there is a feeling that they are incompetent to do much about the big issues." Modern men, Lippmann was led to conclude, "are predominantly isolationist."

The laggard U.S., he argued, does not appreciate the fact that "because of the obsolescence of the power politics of the 19th century and the early 20th, the idiom of American diplomacy today often sounds as if it belonged to the horse-and-buggy age." The President and Secretary of State "have not taken truly into account the cataclysmic consequences of the collapse of empires," continued Lippmann with a rococo flourish. "We can coexist peaceably only if we forgo the Messianic megalomania which is the Manila madness."

"Among Europeans," said Lippmann, "there is a widespread distaste for our moral pretensions. Since President Kennedy's death our foreign policy has been conducted by men 'whose minds were formed and whose convictions hardened about 25 years ago"--a condition that might apply to columnists, too.

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