98
PARTISAN REVIEW
been stabilized, for some time to come, on the battlefields of Korea;
while the corresponding issue in Europe was settled, not by atomic
bombardments, but by the bloodless blockade of Berlin and the
equally bloodless Berlin airlift.
It
depends entirely upon the political
direction on both sides, and not in the least on military logic, whether
this kind of struggle shall go on, or whether we are due for a com–
plete and universal breakdown. For short of a direct Soviet military
advance into Western Europe, or an "atomic Pearl Harbor" upon the
cities of Europe and America, nothing will cause the democratically
elected governments of the Western world to send out air fleets laden
with hydrogen bombs; and since both sides must be aware that this
will
occur on one of the above suppositions, it would seem that the
urge for universal suicide would have to become very powerful
before either side made a move calculated to bring about such results.
This is not to say that it will not happen; it well may. But if it does,
it will not testify to military logic, but to political fanaticism and
the absence of rationality.
And conversely, there is nothing to prevent an age of "peaceful
co-existence" from being also an era of cold war, and even of "real"
wars,
provided they are localized.
It is a mistake to talk of co-existence
as though it precluded wars such as those which have taken place in
Korea and Indo-China. On the contrary, the will to make co–
existence possible manifests itself precisely in the occurrence and the
conduct of such wars. They are the equivalent, in modem terms,
of the nineteenth-century struggle between the British Empire and
Russia along the Indian and Afghan border- a struggle which fl ared
into large-scale war in 1854, and very nearly did so again in 1876.
What is implied by the term co-existence is solely the desire to spare
the world the catastrophe of all-out atomic war, and more positively,
the belief that in the last resort the world can and will stay divided
for a very long time to come. To say that co-existence is possible
and necessary is to say that the Communist powers will fail to con–
quer or overthrow the 'vVest, and that the West cannot hope to undo
the Chinese revolution or to overthrow the present regime in Russia.
And the "cold war" for the allegiance of the intermediate areas–
principally, though not entirely, the so-called backward or "unde–
veloped" countries-is the corollary of this state of affairs, for while
both sides will naturally try to win over as many doubtful countries
