How foreign policy is made

The wars that marred the first half of the twentieth century have settled only limited areas of dispute. Their outcome has not cre ated, as so many had hoped, a brave new world. On the contrary, new problems have come to the fore the solutions of which in volve such far-reaching decisions that there is reasonable doubt that a workable and permanent compromise can be reached in the near future.

Ostensibly, World War I started as a conflict between the eco nomic interests of the great competing European empires. In the course of its progress, however, the belligerents found that the traditional issues of markets were superseded by those of freedom versus domination. During the Great Armistice, 1918-1939, the effect of the political religions of Sovietism, Fascism, and Nazism further reduced the one-time importance of economic conflicts as the causes of war. Competition for foreign markets became a marginal issue; instead, the far more fundamental problems of the relationship between state and individual had to be refaced. Even the Japanese-American war, whose origin was supposedly devoid of ideological conflicts, soon began to show that more than eco nomics was involved when extreme Japanese nationalism claimed leadership over all Asia on the grounds of racial and divinely pre-ordained superiority under the principle of Hakko Ichiu.¹ The participation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the side of the Western Allies in World War II created much con fusion in the hearts and minds of many persons and prevented the struggle from becoming a clear-cut issue between liberal democ racy and tyrannical statism. The presence of essentially nondemo cratic powers such as China-China being neither a democracy nor a capitalist state in the western sense-added to the intellectual and ideological mixup. The apparent toleration by the democra cies of such Fascist disciples as Pétain or Franco, a condition that was felt to be a necessary strategic expedient for the hard-pressed Allies during the first years of the war, produced even greater misunderstandings.