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Policy toward Germany. The chief U.S. war aim in Europe is to prevent Germany from ever again detaching one of her neighbors from the Atlantic Community or from the Russian Orbit. AH other political and moral accounts should be settled not by the U.S., but by Germany's victims in Europe. Later a neutralized and demilitarized Germany may find her place in the Atlantic Community, but "only with the sincere consent of the Soviet Union." If, on the other hand, Lippmann warns, Germany should ever slip into the Russian Orbit, Russia would have expanded to the shores of the Atlantic. "This solution would be intolerable for the Western World."
A World Divided. In the last analysis, everything in Author Lippmann's audit comes down to the question of relations between just two powers—the U.S. and the Soviet Union. "They can prevent a third World War. If they fight, it will be the most terrible of all world wars." But if Russia remains within her orbit, they have no reasons to fight. They would certainly fight "if the Soviet Union made an alliance with Germany, with Japan, or a separate and exclusive alliance with any member of the Atlantic Community"—for example, France.
Lippmann is willing to go even farther.
There can be no durable peace between the U.S. and Russia "until the basic political and human liberties are established in the Soviet Union. ... If [the Russians] refuse, it will be better not to deceive ourselves. . . . The world order cannot be half democratic and half totalitarian."
Wilsonian Refutation. For many readers the most provocative section of Author Lippmann's book will be the 13 pages in which he undertakes to refute Woodrow Wilson's international political principles. For not until the Wilsonian fallacies are cleared away can the U.S. achieve, or even formulate, realistic war aims.
Says Lippmann: "Wilson's name is now so completely identified with the ideal of a universal society that the principles he laid down for attaining a universal society are generally believed to be axiomatic and immutable." Author Lippmann believes that "a universal society cannot be realized by following the Wilsonian principles."
In the 14 Points (in whose formulation Lippmann himself collaborated) Wilson called for reduction of national armaments "to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety."Says Lippmann: "In the interval between the two wars British, French and American military policy followed this disastrous prescription."
Wilson insisted that "the settlement of every question" must be "upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned." Says Lippmann: "This principle gives to the people inhabiting any strategic point upon the world's surface—say Panama, Gibraltar—an absolute veto on any arrangement designed to use that point for the security of a nation, a region, or of the world."
Wilson insisted on the "exceedingly tricky general principle" of self-determination. Says Lippmann: "The principle can be and has been used to promote the dismemberment of practically every organized state. None knew this better than Adolf Hitler himself."