Word: spykman
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...named George T. Renner, of Columbia University's Teachers College, published in Collier's a map of a post-war world drawn to "democratic specifications" (TIME, June 15). A disciple of the small but respectable school of American geopoliticos which includes Yale's Professor Nicholas John Spykman (America's Strategy in World Politics- TIME, April 20), Professor Renner believes that scholars, not "amateurs," are best able to write the peace...
Upon this thesis Spykman builds his house in which the family of nations lives about as peacefully as most families with a flock of aspiring young egos seeking self-expression. The United States, he believes, is caught in the game of power politics which finds us menaced by a super-pincers in the event of a German-Japanese victory and shows us as a bogeyman to South America, especially the A.B.C. countries. Economically tied to the transoceanic routes, we are also tied to them politically and militarily. The notion of hemispheric defence, streamlined stand of the isolationists, the author explodes...
Professor Spykman's post-war world would be made with the materials at hand--independent states. These nations will form leagues in each of the three major continental blocs, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A strong country, like the United States, from each bloc will police the other blocs...
While it is encouraging to find an intelligent man who can still write a book without calling Hitler the devil, such an overwhelmingly realistic study as Spykman's appears extreme. His concept of balanced power may perhaps be broad enough to meet the challenge that power politics has already held the stage too long, and should not be perpetuated...
...that thought is relative. To a realist any form of internationalism is a cloak for a dominant group. To him a balanced power is fairer than any World Federation which would be simply a disguise for Anglo-American hegemony. One need not be a Utopian, however, to feel that Spykman's world order excludes any finite goal, any emotional appeal, or any basis for action. Even Karl Marx, after all, had to postulate a goal in which his discouraging dialectic no longer worked...