Problems and Possibilities -A Look at Foreign Policy

Punch recently published a cartoon that shows three frightened little men storming into a launching station for guided missiles and shouting, “It’s coming back!” John Foster Dulles must have had similar feelings during the last few months as his whole array of “liberation” propaganda threatened to blow up in his face.

Since the events in Poland and Hungary it has become clear that American foreign policy, far from being geared to the liberation of the satellites, is in fact committed to a tacit agreement with the Russians not to upset the unstable equilibrium that has slowly been established between the two remaining world powers. As Hans J. Morgenthau has written:

The events of the fall of 1956 have opened up a gap between our verbal commitment to a policy of liberation and the actual policy we pursued when the opportunity, not to initiate liberation, but to support it after it had already been achieved, arose in Hungary.. . The United States, far from seeking out or creating opportunities for opening the door to liberation, has proven to be unwilling even to enter the door when a satellite nation kicks it wide open. (Commentary, February, 1957)

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