When the Labour Party took office in 1945 it had a detailed economic program on which all its intellectuals were agreed. By the time it left office in 1951, controversy had already started as to what its next program should be. This controversy is still active, though fairly wide agreement has been reached on some of the major issues. The purpose of this article is to put the controversy into its setting.

There can be little doubt that the development and increasing availability of modern, especially nuclear, weapons will greatly alter the military policies and relationships that obtain among nations. This article addresses itself to those topics; more particularly it considers, in the light of changing technology, such problems as the objectives of major and minor powers in both general and limited war, the definition of limitations in limited war, the validity of alliances, and alternative military postures for the United States and for small nations.

Self-Criticism has been a characteristic of NATO ever since it was established. We are perhaps too inclined to pull up our institutions by the roots from time to time to see how they are growing. But whether this is a good habit in the ordinary way or not, it is something that was virtually bound to happen in 1957, after the most critical twelve months that the Western nations had experienced since the Second World War. Nineteen fifty-six began with a widespread feeling of relief that the danger of a major war in Europe (the only kind of war that seemed possible) had greatly receded. Before this feeling of relief had time to wear off, there supervened a series of crises that shook NATO to its foundations. There was a virtual state of war in Algeria (itself a part of the NATO area), and many of France's best troops were withdrawn from Europe to fight it; there was an increasingly bitter dispute involving three members of NATO over the future of Cyprus; there was the Suez crisis, which also involved both NATO interests and troops from the NATO area; and there was the Hungarian revolution, which greatly damaged, if it did not destroy, the hesitantly re-emerging belief in Soviet good faith.

Despite the oft-quoted language of Article II of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO was not designed as an institution for economic collaboration among its members. It has not in fact acted as such an institution. Every initiative toward investing it with direct economic functions has run into a blind alley.

Economic development in the West proceeded, until the latter part of the nineteenth century, without the aid of the intellectuals. Neither the innovators in technology nor the enterprisers and managers of industrial firms were highly educated, nor did they interest themselves in intellectual matters. The world of finance contained a few exceptions to this proposition, such as David Ricardo, Samuel Rogers, and George Grote, but it, too, moved without the aid of economists or other professional or avocational intellectuals. The graduates of universities stood aloof from the practical work of commerce and industry in their countries; they went into scholarship, into theology and the church, into administration (first in Germany and then gradually in the rest of the countries of Europe), into medicine and the law, but they did not enter into the central stream of the economic life of their countries.

Occidental nations had distinct images of India long before they recognized the new republic ten years ago. To Herodotus and his contemporaries India was the scene of fabled wonders; to devout Christians in the Middle Ages it was the likely site of Paradise; and to the learned of later enlightened centuries it was above all the abode of superior wisdom. In fact, nothing about India seems to have attracted Western scholars so much as the religions and philosophies that originated in the subcontinent millennia ago. The fundamental principles of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism were analyzed and exposed with scholarly care during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Western minds, increasingly convinced of the essential “materialism” of their own heritage, made a steady pilgrimage to the repositories of the great spiritual truths that India held.