“Reactionary Elite”

The thesis of Professor Graebner, who teaches history at Iowa State College, is that Americans in the last half dozen years have “lost their sense of reality in foreign affairs,” and will not regain it until they “accept the realities of power and possession” and create the “foundations for future accommodation” with the Communist world. Pending that time of enlightenment, which he considers far off, the United States will remain isolated and ineffective, out of step with the British (who have “no animus against Red leadership” in China), other allies and, of course, the neutralist nations.

The mischief, as Professor Graebner sees it, can be dated at the midpoint of the second Truman Administration. It was then, under the impact of Mao Tse-tung’s victories, that our “new isolationists” began to succeed in routing the forces of reason, containment and accommodation. The priority of politics in our kind of democracy did the rest. Operating with assumptions that are no longer valid, if they ever were, the New Isolationists imposed “inflexible patterns” upon our diplomacy—especially the refusal to dump Chiang Kaishek and the obsession with liberation—which Eisenhower and Dulles, though they know better, cannot break through.

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Eugene Lyons

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The thesis of Professor Graebner, who teaches history at Iowa State College, is that Americans in the last half dozen years have “lost their sense of reality in foreign affairs,” and will not regain it until they “accept the realities of power and possession” and create the “foundations for future accommodation” with the Communist world. Pending that time of enlightenment, which he considers far off, the United States will remain isolated and ineffective, out of step with the British (who have “no animus against Red leadership” in China), other allies and, of course, the neutralist nations.

The mischief, as Professor Graebner sees it, can be dated at the midpoint of the second Truman Administration. It was then, under the impact of Mao Tse-tung’s victories, that our “new isolationists” began to succeed in routing the forces of reason, containment and accommodation. The priority of politics in our kind of democracy did the rest. Operating with assumptions that are no longer valid, if they ever were, the New Isolationists imposed “inflexible patterns” upon our diplomacy—especially the refusal to dump Chiang Kaishek and the obsession with liberation—which Eisenhower and Dulles, though they know better, cannot break through.