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To be sure, /to unleash nuclear war without a prayerful awareness of its consequences is to open the box of Pandora. But to permit the Soviets to overturn the strategic balance because it has been placed in jeopardy by our own lack of imagination or by the absence of spiritual elan is to compound shortsightedness by dogmatism. The price we will have to pay for failure to take action in time may be the kind of measure which does no more than gain us a breathing spell for more positive steps. The refusal to do so will ensure that the next contest will be fought on even more difficult ground.

In the process of defining our strategic interest we cannot avoid facing another fact of the nuclear age little in accord with our predictions: the difficulty if not impossibility, of holding a perimeter of twenty thousand miles entirely on the defensive either politically, militarily or spiritually. A major part of the perimeter covers countries whose traditional situations are in rapid flux. Even if we were omniscient and were not propelled into a situation more complicated and more confused than anything for which our national experience prepares us, it would seem inevitable that in some countries forces hostile to our interests will gain power. To be sure, Communism has never come to power any- where by peaceful means. But the line between peace and war is steadily being ero- ded; and Communism may well have a different meaning for the newly independent nations of Asia and the Middle East than for the countries of Western Europe. If then every addition to the Soviet orbit becomes immune to overt United States pres- sure while the Soviet bloc remains free to exacerbate all tensions of the non- Soviet world, the result will be almost mathematically our expulsion from Eurasia or at least from Asia and the Middle East. This does not mean preventive war. It does mean that we should be as ready to profit from opportunities in the Soviet orbit as the Soviet bloc feels free to exploit all the difficulties of the non-Soviet world. If the occasion demands we should be prepared to run similar risks within the Soviet orbit as the Soviets have been in the Middle East.

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Such a course presupposes a more dynamic conception of world affairs. A great historical movement which is represented by the coming together of Communism and the anti-colonial revolution cannot be mastered only by negative moves. A policy impelled primarily by a desire to prevent an expansion of the Soviet sphere ensures that we will be foreed always to fight at the point of our greatest weakness; that diplomatically we shall always contest issues of maximum embarrassment to us; that spiritually we convey an impression of uncertainty. In any conflict the side which is animated by a desire for victory will have a decided advantage over an opponent who wishes above all to preserve the status quo; it will be prepared to even greater risks because its purpose will be stronger. The argument that the Soviet orbit will disintegrate of itself if contained long enough reveals a dangerous penchant for easy solutions. No more explicit form of disintegration than the Hungarian revolution is likely to occur; and it found the Free World without the concepts and without the will to exploit it. History can only present opportunities; resolution and insight are indispensible for exploiting them. In foreign policy courage and success stand in a causal relationship.

We thus return to the problem raised earlier: the adequacy of our leadership groups for dealing with the challenges to our society. And here our sudden emergence as the major Power in the free world presents particular difficulties. The qualities of our leadership groups were formed during the period when our primary concerns were domestic. Politics was considered a necessary evil and the primary function of the state was the exercise of police powers. Neither education nor incentives existed for our leadership groups to think in political or strategic terms. This was compounded by our empiricism with its cult of the expert and its premium on specialization. The two groups which are most dominant

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in the higher levels of government, industry, and the law, can serve as an illustration. The rewards in industry, particularly large-scale industry, are for administrative competence; they therefore produce a tendency to deal with conceptual problems by administrative means, by turning them over to committees of experts. And the legal profession, trained to think in terms of discrete individual cases, produces a penchant for ad hoc decisions and a resistance to the "hypothetical cases" inherent in long-range planning. Our leadership groups are therefore better prepared to deal with technical than with conceptual problems, with economic than with political issues. Projected on the Washington scene, they often lack the background to cope with a developing political and strategic situation: each problem is dealt with "on its merits", a procedure which emphasizes the particular at the expense of the general and bogs down planning in a mass of detail. The absence of a conceptual framework makes it difficult for them even to identify our problems or to choose effectively among the proposals and interpretations with which our governmental machinery is overloaded.

This explains many postwar Soviet successes. Whatever the qualities of Soviet leadership, its training is eminently political and conceptual. Reading Lenin or Mao or Stalin, one is struck by the emphasis on the relationship between political, military, psychological and economic factors, the insistence on finding a conceptual basis for political action and on the need for dominating a situation by flexible tactics and inflexible purpose. And the internal struggles in the Kremlin ensure that only the most iron-nerved reach the top. Against the Politbureau, trained to think in general terms and freed of problems of day-to-day administration, we have pitted leaders overwhelmed with departmental duties and trained to think that it was a cardinal sin to transgress on

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another's field of specialization. To our leaders, policy is as a series of separate discrete problems; to the Soviet leaders it is an aspect of a continuing political process. As a result, the contest between us and the Soviets has had many of the attributes of any contest between a professional and an amateur; even a mediocre professional will usually defeat an excellent amateur, not because the amateur does not know what to do, but because he cannot react sufficiently quickly or consistently. Our leaders have not lacked ability, but they have had to learn while doing and this has imposed too great a handicap.

To be sure, many of the shortcomings of our leadership groups reflect the very qualities which have made for the ease of relationships in American society. The condition for our limited government has been the absence of basic social schisms, the regulation of many concerns not by government fiat but by "what is taken for granted". A society can operate in this fashion only if disputes are not pushed to their logical conclusions, and if disagreements are blunted by the absence of dogmatism. And in fact the fear of seeming dogmatic permeates our social scene. Most opinions are introduced with a disclaimer which indicates that the proponent is aware of their contingency and also that he claims no superior validity for his own conclusions. This produces a preference for decisions by committee, because the process of conversation permits disagreements to be discovered most easily and adjustments made before positions have hardened. Our decision-making process is therefore geared to the pace of conversation; even departmental memoranda on which policy decisions are ultimately based are written with an eye to eventual compromise and not with the expectation that any of them will be accepted in its entirety.

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It would be wrong to be too pessimistic. No one would have believed when World War II ended that the United States would assume commitments on such a world-wide scale. Our shortcomings are imposing only because of the magnitude of the threat confronting us. Moreover, the performance of the United States, for all its failings, compares favorably with that of the other nations of the non-Soviet world. Our difficulties are therefore only a symptom -- and by no means the most obvious -- of an inward uncertainty in the free world. To be sure, democracies by the nature of their institutions cannot conduct policy as deviously, change course as rapidly or prepare their moves as secretly as dictatorships. But the crisis of the non-Soviet world is deeper. The tragic element in foreign policy is the impossibility of escaping conjecture; after the "objective" analysis of fact there remains a residue of uncertainty about the meaning of events or the opportunities they offer. A statesman can often escape his dilemmas by lowering his sights; he always has the option to ignore the other side's capabilities by assuming it has peaceful intentions. Many of the difficulties of the non-Soviet world have been the result of an attempt to use the element of uncertainty as an excuse for inaction. But certainty in foreign policy at least as much by philosophy as by fact; it derives from the imposition of purpose on events.

This is not to say that we should imitate Soviet dogmatism. A society can survive only by the genius that made it great. But we should be able to leaven our empiricism with a sense of urgency. And while our history may leave us not well enough prepared to deal with tragedy, it can teach us that great achievement does not result from a quest for safety. Even so, our task will remain psychologically more complex than that of the soviets. As the strongest and perhaps