One of the recurring themes in those books on the diplomatic prehistory of the second World War which have come to us from the former enemy countries is the plight of the professional diplomat, whose training and knowledge convinced him that the policy of his government was leading straight to disaster but whose advice was seldom solicited and never followed. The memoirs of Erich Kordt, of Herbert von Dirksen, and of Rudolf Rahn, the books of Elisabetta Cerruti, Mario Donosti, and Filippo Anfuso include abundant and circumstantial evidence of the lack of influence exercised in matters of high policy by the permanent staffs of the Foreign Offices of Germany and Italy and by their agents in the field.

One of the factors in world politics which social scientists are beginning to subject to systematic analysis is that of elite behavior in international relations. While hypotheses about elite behavior appear to be not only essential to, but also implicit in, any formulation of foreign policy, it still requires to be demonstrated whether research of this order has any operational utility. Clearly, many students in this field have not articulated their assumptions about the conduct of elite groups in foreign affairs; it is often doubted that hypotheses based upon intensive investigation of the doctrine of elites and their cultural matrices have any bearing on the analyses usually pursued in the study of international relations.

The war in Indo-China, sinister, bloody, and seemingly endless, presents as curious a farrago of paradoxes and incongruities as any in recent military history. For one thing, its character has changed from a colonial to a civil war. It has changed from a war fought for the restitution of French sovereignty by a professional, traditionally colonial army to a war in which the same army is still fighting, but now side by side with native troops for the avowed purpose of securing the former colony's independence against the threat of Communist imperialism. Thus, in a sense, it has also become an international war, with Indo-China one of the areas ignited by the friction between the free and the Communist worlds. Indeed, it may be argued that the French forces in Indo-China are fighting the flank action of another and greater conflict, the main line of resistance of which lies somewhere between the 38th Parallel and the Yalu River in Korea.

The Soviet-Yugoslav dispute and the subsequent defection of the Yugoslav Communist Party from the ranks of the Cominform early in 1948 took the world by surprise. This surprise was in itself indicative of our belief that Stalinist control was to be taken for granted at least in the areas where the local Communist parties had come to power through direct or indirect help from the Soviet Union and particularly from the Red Army. Even when no such help had been given, the ideological affinities of Communist states and their need of alliances to preserve the Communist power structures would lead, it was believed, to a tightening of relations with the Soviet Union and to Soviet predominance. In other words, we tended to accept without question the premises of Stalinism.

There seems little doubt that the defense and strengthening of the “free world” in our time depends largely upon American leadership. Confidence that America will continue to play this role in world affairs is weakened by the memory of America's political isolation following World War I, and by certain currents of American opinion noted by observers since World War II.1 Barbara Ward warns the peoples of the West that “we shall certainly fail unless our effort is at once sustained, calm and supremely positive.”

Of recent years American interest in France has taken a new turn, for France has become the chief Continental ally of the United States in its power arrangements to prevent Russian aggression, and a bastion in the defense of those values which are the very foundation of Western civilization. Indeed, France occupies, in spite of the events of 1940, a stronger position in the West of Europe than it held in the period between the two World Wars. Now the French have alliances in which they can put confidence and from which they can get real support if the crisis comes. And then, as Professor André Siegfried, the dean of commentators upon French affairs and upon Franco-American relations, has written in the opening paragraph of Modern France: “With the countries of Eastern Europe looking in a new direction, with a defeated Germany no longer in a dominant position economically or politically, France has of necessity become the center of the entire Continental system.” The nation has moved into a partial but temporary vacuum.

Time was when a nation, at the pinnacle of its might, asked itself the question: “In the relation of states, what is the right thing, which ought to be done, and what is the wrong thing, which ought not to be done?” It was Spain, a worldconquering power, which thus approached problems of policy in the light of rational choice and raised a crop of great and lucid minds who laid the foundations for what later became international law. But the particular principles to which these men looked for their answers have been proved inadequate, first in the practice of statesmen and then in the theory of jurists. Hopes that international relations could be ordered by the relatively simple moral rules which we recognize in the organized societies of men have been repeatedly and cruelly disappointed. The failure of this one great historic attempt to apply rational concepts to international relations has evidently made us despair of any possibility even of different rational systems in this field.

It is doubtless a truism to state that Europe is on the wane, at least as a center of political power. Few would deny that a change of major proportions has taken place since the turn of the century in Europe's role in world affairs. But once this is stated, agreement ceases. The causes and mechanism of Europe's decline have received the most varied interpretations, and the bearing of this change on the future is so profound that each school of thought tends to evaluate the destiny of Europe in terms of its own political philosophy. The widest assortment of scholars and prophets have been drawn to this problem by the fascination of its perplexities, and their treatises already comprise a formidable library. Yet the solutions proposed can scarcely be said to have resulted in a clarification of the problem of Europe, and even the most distinguished and influential of these writers have found relatively few areas of agreement.