Postscript to E. D. C.

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THE Communist military offensive in the Far East has given hard blows this year to the anti-Communist coalition in the West, and the Communist political offensive in the West greatly damaged the anti-Communist coalition in the Far East. As a result, the grand alliance formed in the West after the last war and strengthened by constructive measures for defense like the Marshall Plan and NATO is no longer what it was. It has not been so much broken as changed in substance, from something hard into something soft. When pressure is applied at one point, that point tends to yield; when attractions are offered at another point, that point tends to respond.

Granted that things which are hard are often brittle also and that there is danger they may break when the strain becomes too great. If the grand alliance as it was had been subjected to the strain of a direct Soviet attack it might have held or it might have broken; probably it would have held, and the probability deterred its enemies from trying. But what is soft lacks strength even as a deterrent. Does the alliance as it is now taking shape, soft but nevertheless still adherent in many of its parts, have enough tensile strength to continue to exist and even become in time the matrix in which new and effective agreements among some of the non-Communist Powers can crystallize?

Politically, the free world stood at its strongest at the start of the Korean war in June 1950. The Security Council of the United Nations voted that there had been an "armed attack" on South Korea and followed this by recommending that members furnish assistance to repel it. The greatest postwar emergency since the decision to break the Berlin blockade found the three chief Western nations together.

Militarily, the free world was probably at its strongest in the months immediately following, even though the forces of the individual nations were not fully developed. This was because its will to fight was at the peak. The nations which voted to stop North Korea and its backers by force did so reluctantly; but they believed not only that they were in the right but that they were risking less in stopping aggression then and there than in temporizing until it became more formidable...