Volume 4, Number 9 · June 3, 1965
Misalliance
By George Lichtheim
After Twenty Years
by Marcus G. Raskin, by Richard J. Barnet
Random House, 243 pp., $5.95
The Troubled Partnership
by Henry A. Kissinger
McGraw-Hill, 259 pp., $5.95
Next to organizing an alliance of nominally equal members, formulating its aims in convincing language is the most difficult test of statesmanship. In a sense of course both matters come to the same thing. Alliances after all are held together by shared beliefs as much as by anything else. Ideally it should be possible to arrive at an acceptable statement of aims, simply by generalizing the common interest of all concerned. Yet experience shows that alliances break down just over the definition of what constitutes their raison d'être. If the partners are equal, they will tend to quarrel. If one of them achieves hegemony over the rest, the term 'ally' becomes a euphemism for 'auxillary.' If a hegemoniac relationship is avoided, it may still be difficult to elude the choice between a confederacy with fixed rules, and an ad hoc relationship which leaves the partners free to rat on each other. In the best of circumstances, material will always be at hand for a polemicist determined to denounce the conduct of the allies as a mixture of blind egoism and base perfidy.
Review, 2743 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |