Foreign Affairs at 70

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

William G. Hyland leaves the editorship of Foreign Affairs with this issue.

The United States did not in fact make its weight felt, and Hitler kept to his inexorable march toward war. The "armistice at Munich," as Armstrong described it, proved a failure. In a long 94?page appraisal, published just three months after the agreement, Armstrong wrote of appeasement:

Might not Mr. Chamberlain have done better to adopt a motto implying more reciprocity than ?appeasement??. . . Would a bolder choice of the sort of a world in which Englishmen have traditionally shown that they do positively like to live, rather than acquiescence in the idea that they must live in a different sort of world ?whether they like it or not,? have won the former and staved off the latter? The possibility is suggestive for Americans who see some such eventual choice before them too.

Hermann Rauschning, a former colleague of Hitler?s who had broken loose, summed up the inevitability of war:

Compromise, for National Socialism, is death. The alternatives facing it were and are total success or total capitulation. One or the other. Any retreat abroad would at once create difficulties at home that would lead to the regime?s collapse. From it, then, one could and can expect nothing but an unwavering advance along the road on which it set out?the road to hegemony over Europe and to world revolution.

Finally, on the very eve of the Blitzkrieg against France, journalist Dorothy Thompson, confessing her "frustrated love" for Germany, wrote at length of the German character and concluded that:

Germany is greater than Hitler esteems her to be and Russia is greater than Stalin esteems her. One cannot avoid recognizing that the West confronts the greatest danger in her whole history. . . . The West must save itself from destruction. Its awakening may accompany or follow the war. It has not yet come. But we who love the West, and yearn for a Germany integrated with the West, have faith that it will.

Prophetic words indeed, though they took decades to come about. Ms. Thompson?s faith was eventually justified. Germany would be integrated into Europe, and Russia would finally surmount Stalinism.

IV

The twentieth anniversary of Foreign Affairs found America deep into World War II. Hanson W. Baldwin, military correspondent for The New York Times, summed up the situation after Pearl Harbor:

In less than 90 days the strategic picture of the war had been considerably altered. The United Nations had suffered their worst defeats since the fall of France. As spring approached, the short?range prospects were grim. The Japanese attack . . . enlarged the theater of military operations from a continent to the world. . . . In the fullest sense it is total war.