U.S.A. IN WORLD AFFAIRS

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25923, 1 October 1949, Page 3

U.S.A. IN WORLD AFFAIRS

The Nightmare of American Foreign Policy. By Edgar Ansel Mowrer. Gollancz. 255 pp. Fabulous America. By Robert Payne. Gollancz. 239 pp. [Reviewed by H.L.G.]

As the authors of both these books point out, the fate of the world at present depends upon America. Any book on American foreign policy has, or claims, a corresponding importance. Unfortunately these books are written in a style likely to repel most readers. Payne chatters in print, pouring out everything he has ever thought or read, obviously drawing from a large card-index of quotations, and prevented by the very fertility of his mind from ever reaching any clear conclusions. What conclusions he does reach are puerile; for example, that America should organise “peace armies,’’ gather “a standing conference on freedom.” and establish “a department of peace.”

Mowrer’s book is a different matter, once the reader has overcome his initial repugnance to the style. He writes in short staccato paragraphs, sometimes almost in note-form; you seem to hear the clack of the confirmed journalist’s typewriter. But Mowrer is a lifelong student of foreign affairs and an experienced foreign correspondent, and his book is well worth careful reading. His feet are on the ground. “All politics are power politics.” he says firmly at the outset. He refuses to mince matters: “The United Nations,” he declares, “is an unfinished bridge leading nowhere”; and again, “It was as obvious as Stalin’s moustaches that the Soviet Union did not intend to stop spreading Soviet principles and power.” In an excellent chapter (“Seven Ways How Not to Think of Foreign Politics”) he disposes swiftly of many widely-held and fallacious notions about international affairs. He then takes his reader on a quick review of American foreign policy from 1918 to the present, the most interesting point being his description of Roosevelt’s well-meant appeasement of Stalin at Yalta, the great gamble that failed. America’s mistakes of the past constitute the “nightmare” from which she is now. struggling to emerge.