In the past decade Africa has exploded. Where the next explosion will occur no one knows. It might be riots in Nyasaland or Dahomey, demonstrations in Brazzaville or Khartoum, assassination in Constantine. The dead African past of tribal discipline and subsistence-ignorance has been challenged by a civilization immeasurably more productive in satisfying the material and esthetic wants of its populace. The answer to the challenge is diffuse and uncontrolled. Like the expanding galaxies, the ideas that result from the bomb that the West has triggered in Africa are moving with tremendous speed in every direction.

Ten years ago, it appeared that Africa, except perhaps for its northern Arab tier, was still deeply immersed in its ancient ways, that it would be many years before the African peoples reacted to Western nationalism with their own nationalism.

The question of the Chinese off-shore islands is not, for the time being, a central issue. But this situation is not likely to last; the theatre of operations is quickly shifting from the Mediterranean to the Pacific and back, from Formosa to North Africa. Is this still the Cold War, is it the Third World War asjkmes Burnham calls it, or a new era of permanent conflicts, taking place in One World where three billion people are just too jnany to coexist?

Whichever it is, die West must fight it on two fronts: on the wide world scene and, simultaneously, against those whose Utopian frame of mind, and consequent blindness to the realities of power, block the way of elementary realism.

In the field of foreign policy, one of the most intriguing differences between the practitioner and the theoretician lies in the realm of doctrinal controversy. The prime controversy that has agitated academicians in recent years is one that is now very familiar. It is the alleged conflict between Realism and Idealism.

At its heart this argument has to do with the connection between personal ethics and international politics. In its most explicit form this argument involves appraisals of the institutions of collective intergovernmental action our age has erected in profusion, particularly the global variety of political international organization that has taken shape in the League and the UN. It is here above all that our intellectuals have sometimes tended to become a trifle unscholarly as they hurled at each other the epithets of “Cynic” or “Utopian Dreamer”. Our diplomatic tools in the form of inter-governmental institutions have in this sense been made to carry a heavy supercargo of freight bearing on ends and means, the nature of man, and the general residuum of the eighteenth and nineteenth century debates about the perfectibility of man and the inevitability of social progress.

The exchange of criticism that swept back and forth between Cuba and the United States early this year caught many people in both countries largely by surprise. The victorious rebel leaders and the Cuban people were disconcerted when even Americans who welcomed the overthrow of General Fulgencio Batista criticized harshly the rapid trials and executions of those who had been imprisoned as war criminals. And Americans were taken aback at the resentment with which their criticism was met, and often slightly bewildered to find that the resentment has been building up for years.

This mutual criticism, it becomes increasingly clear, marks a watershed between two views of Cuba: the definite but distorted picture presented to the United States when Batista was dictator, and the shape of present Cuba which is only gradually emerging Out of the successful revolution and which is yet to be sharply defined.

Many well-intentioned people have long recognized the absence in our century of any effective international law, government and mores. They have also wasted a lot of time attempting to conjure up constitutional governments for the world, to codify, revise and extend international law, and to call forth a mostly non-existent world public opinion. In a world rent by such basic ideological and cultural splits as is ours, these efforts are foredoomed to failure.

The much more relevant question for one interested in peace in this nuclear-missile’ age is whether or not the United States and the Soviet Union can settle through negotiation some of the political problems of the Cold War. If they cannot agree to “live and let live” as sovereign states in a world of sovereign states, on what basis can we expect that they will engage in that much more intimate collaboration out of which mores, law and government can grow?

The Cold War objectives of both the United States and the Soviet Union are basic factors in any possible negotiation of differences. A third, perhaps more tangible, factor is the distribution of power between the two blocs. Ever since Sputnik I took to space there has been much speculation concerning the relative power positions of the Communist powers and the West.

One immediate but not too well-defined reaction to Sputnik I was that we ought to get down to serious negotiations with the Soviet Union immediately, since we seemed to have lost the race for military power. This approach to foreign policy is as dangerous as that of the crusading moralist. For the proposition which lies behind this position is that we can successfully negotiate with the Soviets from weakness.

We Americans, collectively, have suddenly been burdened with a world responsibility for which neither our past experience nor our present values equip us very well. Less than two centuries after our, country was but a collection of remote colonies it has become a superpower upon whom all the old colonial powers depend. Less than twenty years after perhaps a majority of Americans supported the isolationist position against involvement in World War II, the United States is the center of history's most far-reaching peacetime alliance.

This alliance which America leads includes both colonial powers and recently-freed colonies, bitter enemies and close allies from the last war, dictatorships and democracies. It comprises nations upon whose loyalty we know we can depend and others about whose intentions we feel nervous. And since the alliance itself is both complex and ambiguous, America's role in it must be complex and ambiguous too.

The recent accession of Senator J. William Fulbright to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has provoked fresh consideration of the complexities of bipartisanship. Senator Fulbright in past years has been a frequent critic of the policies pursued by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles. Moreover, his advance in status symbolizes the growing influence of the younger Democrats on the committee, such as Senators Mansfield, Kennedy, and Humphrey, who are more critical of prevailing orthodoxies than their senior colleagues. These shifts in personal influence direct our attention to fundamental questions about bipartisanship. How far may a democracy go in stifling debate on basic issues in the name of national unity? How far may responsible men carry criticism and dissent in times of national peril? What is the proper relationship between the two-party competition for power and the framing of foreign policy? That is, when is foreign policy properly a partisan issue?

In the world of the mid-twentieth century, dictation by any one power is impossible and wholesale agreement to federate is Utopian. We must therefore look for any possible agreement only on a retail basis, and this is a task for diplomatists. The choice is not whether to engage in diplomacy but how best to do so; that is, what tools to use in what combination. And how to make these tools as sharp and as precise as possible.

In the adjustment of disputes between state members of a multiple sovereignty system (that is, between states which cannot ordinarily coerce each other except at the risk of war), there are several broad avenues through which in theory at least the difficulty may be adjusted.

The speed with which economics has sped to the front of the Cold War over the past four years has caught the West-used to diplomatic maneuvering and “little wars”-off guard. We have, as yet, no adequate answer to what may well prove to be Communism's most devastating weapon-a Soviet economy producing at a greater per capita rate than the United States. No nation of free men ever rallied round a column of statistics, and yet, clearly, that is where the current battle between East and West has moved.

The change, it now seems, was inevitable. When they continue for any period of time, “total” wars, both hot and cold, slip more and more from the grasp of those charged with diplomacy and come to rest upon the impersonal powers of clashing armies, armies either on the battlefields or in the factories.

In sophisticated theological circles of all religious communions unqualified rejection of war is not even argued against anymore. It is just insulted. The word “pacifists” is apparently never used without the adjective “sentimental,” if not worse.

The reason for this attitude is a little difficult to understand. It would seem that there must be more deserving objects of scorn than people who are so revolted by the shedding of human blood that, sometimes perhaps without lengthy casuistic cogitations, they raise their hands heavenward and swear to abstain from all forms of direct or indirect military action.

More than other fields of public affairs, the discussion of foreign policy presents special temptations to irrelevancy, rhetoricalness, and sheer hocus pocus. Several possible explanations for this come to mind. For one thing, it is a vast and varied subject, remote from the scope of observation and sensory evidence. The relevant processes are too complex for their essences to be tangible. We reduce the complexities to label-words, then pass these around as if they contained the essences of the matters referred to.

The Cold War, thermonuclear deterrence, national self-determination, peaceful settlement, international Communism—a myriad such expressions enjoying common currency are the simple labels put on enormously complex relationships and processes in continuous flux.

“Calculation is the life blood of politics,” writes Ernest W. Lefever, “and the heart of ethics” (The Ethics of Calculation,” Worldview, October, italics added). This statement should be subjected to thorough scrutiny, and searchingly criticized.

Indeed, calculation is the heart of ethics as Mr. Lefever understands it. For this reason, there is for him no particular difficulty about making ethicopolitical judgements; and there is little to disturb or limit the “moral-political calculations” of which he speaks, since the heart of morality was already assumed to be calculative. Research the facts and weigh them properly: this is about all that is needed in politics; and, happily, also about all it is the business of ethics to do.