The United States and a United West

The recent crisis over the Suez Canal has for the time being strained the relations not between the United States and NATO but between the United States and two of its NATO partners, Great Britain and France. The suspicion that by opposing the invasion of Egypt, the United States wished to abandon NATO, is of course, unfounded. NATO after all owes its existence as much to the initiative of the United States as does the Marshall plan. Both were destined to strengthen Western Europe and to preserve it from the extension of Soviet influence. Both these goals have been achieved. It was the United States, too, which insisted on the unification of Western Europe, so much so that the Europeans resented this American attitude as an interference. Now some British and French propose a closer European integration as an act of “independence” from the United States, as if the United States had not always welcomed such a step. . . .Britain and France were stalwarts of the principles of international morality embodied in the United Nations; Israel was a creation of the United Nations and of the diplomatic and economic support of the United States. Yet these three nations acted in complete disregard of the United Nations. The world was brought nearer to the brink of a great war than at any time since 1945, and not by the Americans who have often been called “trigger-happy” by their European friends.The Israeli-Franco-British aggression provided also a much-needed alibi for Khrushchev. Following the latter’s famous speech of February, 1956, the Communist empire was subjected to serious internal tensions, and an even more serious crisis made itself felt among the Communist intellectuals. The revolutions in Poland and Hungary started among intellectuals and students. This fact is the more remarkable because the Communist regimes concentrated their indoctrination on these very groups. University youth in the satellites was carefully selected by the authorities and ideologically scrutinized and supervised.Yet recent events have shown that Communist education—like all totalitarian education—has turned out to be a failure. Boredom engendered by the prohibition of independent thought and by the insistence on non-problematic conformism led to revolt as soon as the window to the West was slightly opened, even though this youth was so young in years that it had no personal experience of Western freedom. Moscow felt for the first time that it could no longer rely on the satellites and perhaps not even on its own youth. The revolutions in Poland and Hungary put a momentous decision before the Kremlin. It had to choose between allowing the relaxation of its grip over the satellites or facing the loss of all the great gains of Khrushchev’s diplomacy in the last two years—the rapprochement with India and Yugoslavia and the fulfillment of Lenin’s original hope of creating an anti-Western alliance between the new Asian-African nationalism, the “colored world” on the move, and Russian communism.In that dilemma, tragic from the Russian point of view, the Israeli-Franco-British aggression disarmed the West morally. It gave the Russians an “alibi” to act in Hungary and to pose at the same time as the defenders of the Arabs, and of Asia and Africa in general, against imperial aggression. . . .A United Nations, not preoccupied with Middle Eastern aggression, could have become much more effective in Hungary. Even so today it is likely that, thanks to the world forum of the United Nations, Russian repression in 1957 will not be so uninhibited as it was in 1849 or 1863, and that some degree of liberty, a very relative degree which can be called liberty only in comparison with the situation which existed before 1956, will survive in Hungary and Poland.Therein the increase of the prestige of the United Nations as a result of its Middle East action will be helpful too. This action was not the result of United States initiative alone. Some commentators have demagogically presented the case as if the United States had ganged up with Russia against Britain and France. In reality, the Israeli-Franco-British aggression was viewed with greatest alarm by the overwhelming majority of public opinion throughout the free world. . . .The dangerous implications of the invasion of Egypt should persuade the West of the need for growing political consultation and cooperation. The dialogue between the United States and Western Europe, a dialogue in which Canada and Scandinavia, Germany and Italy have to participate as much as the United States and Britain and France, must go on, unhampered by recriminations. It must seek constructive solutions for the urgent problems confronting the West, solutions in harmony with the realities of the twentieth century and with the ideals of the United Nations, which after all, are only the application of principles of modern Western civilization to an international community in which the West no longer plays the dominant role.