Russia and the world : study of Soviet foreign policy

The world is now in a very curious state. It is more united and more divided than it has ever been. It is united by technology; nothing of importance can happen anywhere without everyone hearing about it immediately, and seldom without repercussions all round. But this little planet, so covered over with this tight skein of technology, is divided by deep rifts of ideology. Technology imposes on us all a necessity to work together, which ideology renders inoperative. But technology also, sometimes, closes the rifts made by ideology; but for the nuclear weapon, for instance, the Third World War would have broken out on at least three occasions since 1945.

The greatest of the ideological rifts is of course that between communism in its Soviet form and capitalism in its American form. There are many others; within the so-called "Socialist camp" there are rifts as deep as any, between the Soviet Union and China, between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia or Albania. There are rifts in the West, originating mainly in General de Gaulle's whimsical belief in the greatness of France. There is the rift between the developed and the developing countries. But these are all less important than the great rift, because neither China nor Czechoslovakia, neither France nor any of the developing countries are, in modern terms, Great Powers. The greatest and most significant, though not perhaps the deepest, of all the rifts is that between the Soviet Union and the United States, because these two powers between them, and they alone, hold the power of life and death over mankind.