THE TABLET, June 16th, 1956. VOL. 207, No. 6056

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUNE 16th, 1956

NINEPENCE

The Visible Church: The Changing Grounds for the Schism The Reason for Nato : The Military Defence of Europe. By Eugene Hinterhoff A Letter from Rome: Greater Political Stability Wanderer in the Night : The Story of Johannes Jorgensen. By Mrs. George Norman Young Man’s Enquiry: Mr. Colin Wilson on Life from the Outside. By Christopher Hollis Cork Film Festival: A Successful Week. By John A. V. Burke Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

ANIMATING NATO

B RITISH defence costs have doubled in the last six years. American costs have trebled, and there are other NATO countries, like France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece, which have seen their costs more than doubled, while Canada’s have increased fourfold. These increases in general began in 1951, when the plans made three years earlier, i following the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, began to be realized. The-general character of the increase through all the NATO countries following the Korean War of 1950 was mainly an increase in conventional weapons. But the United States, Canada and Britain have their huge expenditures because they are trying to keep in the forefront with the new weapons and the appropriate new aviation, all of it immensely costly both from the complexity of the instruments manufactured and the rapid changes in the world. All these Governments have accordingly the strongest economic reasons for wanting to see the pace slow down, for wanting to be able to respond to Marshal Bulganin’s overtures in a co-operative way. A slower timetable is more feasible than the cancellation of the plans that have been made, and perhaps the best way of continuing the relaxation of tension which has come about in the last year.

But those who know what a slow business it was to assemble NATO know how almost every Government taking part had its severe financial problems of a kind which made increased arms expenditure both burdensome and politically unpopular. They still have to keep the Alliance in existence, to avoid at all costs a competition in cutting down contributions to a collective strength which is still in many arms inadequate. The problem for Western statesmanship is how to avoid carrying burdens which are not really necessary, without at the same time presenting the Russians with such a big diplomatic success in taking the heart out of NATO as might create dangerous conditions again.

Those dangers might be most likely to arise in proportion as the Western world had plainly renounced the will and the means to use in two places, the Middle East and Central Europe, force as force was used, politely but firmly, in the

Berlin Air Lift, and in all-out military fashion in Korea. In both the Middle East and Central Europe, behind the local regimes, the struggle for influence between the Soviet and the Western World is going on ; and it is likely to grow more acute as the populations of these countries increase their pressure from below on the politicians and the political parties, and great numbers of people, desiring to conduct themselves with personal prudence, look out on the wider world to see where most ultimate strength and resolution seem to reside. That is why it may be said to be a condition of disarmament that NATO should be animated as a live alliance, not only interested in military defence and the possible contingency of open war in which fewer and fewer people believe, since it is something in which everybody would have much more to fear and to lose than to hope for and gain.

It has, in fact, always suited the Russians to play out the struggle for power like a chess-player playing simultaneous games, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, sometimes drawing, never risking total defeat. That has been the pattern of post-war history. Communism has had its successes in countries under the shadow of the Red Army. It has had to accept reverses elsewhere, as in Greece, where the country was in full contact with the anti-Communist Powers, and to accept draws elsewhere, as in South East Asia.

Perhaps because they believe so much in the historical process, Communists contrive to be singularly unencumbered by their past. They are able to leave it behind, once it has served its purpose as a stepping-off stone to the next stage ; and the Daily Worker has contrived to be quite unembarrassed in following M. Khrushchev’s new line and deploring the personality-cult of the wicked Stalin, whom it has presented for so many years as the first and best of men. This extraordinary vindication of the Trotskyites, who were writing on the crimes of Stalin thirty years ago, does not cause them to be regarded any more kindly, because their being right on the question of fact does not atone for their trying to split the Party, whose unity always was, and still remains, the over­