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Under "the threat of a Russian-American war arising out of conflict in the borderland . . . the British, the French and all the other Europeans see that they are placed between the hammer and the anvil." Their real aim now, said Lippmann, is to extricate themselves from the Russian-American conflict.
Peter's Heir. How, Lippmann wondered, could the Administration ever have developed such "an unworkable policy?" He believed it was "because Mr. X has neglected even to mention the fact that the Soviet Union is the successor of the Russian Empire and that Stalin is not only the heir of Marx and Lenin but of Peter the Great and the Czars of all the Russias."
The fact that the men in the Kremlin believe in the ideology of Marxism is, to Lippmann, simply a corollary to the fact that they are rulers of the Russian empire.
The Kremlin's ambitions could be well defined, said Lippmann, because they were historically imperialist Russian ambitions: a pan-Slav affiliation extending to the Oder River, the Alps, the Adriatic and the Aegean. It was the Red Army, not Marxist ideology, Lippmann argued, which had placed Russia in control of virtually all the territory she coveted.
"It is the threat that the Red Army may advance still farther west . . . that gives the Kremlin and the native Communist parties of western Europe an abnormal and intolerable influence in the affairs of the European continent. Therefore, the immediate and decisive problem of our relations with the Soviet Union is whether, when, on what conditions the Red Army can be prevailed upon to evacuate Europe."
Quid pro Quo. This week Lippmann was halfway through his thesis. The quid pro quo for the Red Army's withdrawal, he indicated, would be withdrawal of U.S. and British troops from Europe. Then it would be possible (he implied) to establish a balance of power,* and, based on that traditional kind of diplomacy, establish some real hope of peace.
In giving the Red Army, rather than Marxism, the credit for Russia's present powerful position, Pundit Lippmann was on debatable ground—and had failed to note that the Red Army was built by Russia's Marxist rulers. And did Lippmann mean to say that Stalin's objectives were no wider than Peter's old-fashioned imperialism? It seemed clear to many people that Soviet Russia was a new-fashioned force.
State Department officials privately pointed out that Lippmann's criticism was directed chiefly at a doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, since supplemented by a policy, the "Marshall plan," which was in fact something more than "hold the line and hope for the best." But Lippmann had opened up a wide line of attack, and it came at a moment when U.S. policy was undergoing a critical test.
*In LIFE this week, DeWitt C. Poole, veteran of the U.S. State Department and lecturer on foreign affairs, also plumped for "balance of power" as not only the traditional U.S. policy but the only workable one, and "the key to an American peace."