John Kennedy walked into his duel with de Gaulle like a man who walks into a play just as the curtain rises on the last act: because he does not understand the characters, he does not understand the plot.

Kennedy is handicapped, as the first of these articles (February 9) suggested, by his personal view of history. Since he sees the confrontation as an episode in his own career, he employs the same tatics (February 15) that he employed against U.S. Steel. For de Gaulle, on the other hand, this crisis is an episode in the history of France, and the battle is not between men but between ideas. De Gaulle's behavior is incomprehensible to Kennedy because the ideas behind it are strange and little understood. The American press has therefore been forced to concoct a whole series of improbable explanations (February 16) for what de Gaulle has done. The present article is a small attempt to account for de Gaulle's recent actions in Gaullist terms.

The Miracle

The situation in which Europe found itself after the Second World War had a certain ghastly symmetry. In order to repel Hitler, it had been necessary to call in the two monsters from the East and from the West. Russia and America are not states, in the sense that France and Italy are states; they are continents. Their triumphal meeting on the Elbe permanently erased the independence of Europe, which lay exhausted and bewildered between them. At almost the same time, Europe's writ over the southern two thirds of the world expired.

Many prescient Europeans, including Churchill, thought that Europe might be dead. The age in which the physical resources of a single nation were enough to ensure its sovereignty had ended. No European state, and perhaps no combination of European states, was powerful enough to with-stand the domination of the two multinational empires whose boundaries now met in the geographical center of the old continent.

Europe staggered miraculously to its feet within five years. But when Europeans looked around them they saw two things. The first was that they had been permitted to survive only because of massive injections of foreign assistance. The second was that Western Europe, whose injections had come from across the Atlantic, had fared much better than Eastern Europe.

The aid received from America had been far greater and more effective than the aid received from Russia. And the price demanded of Western Europe was much less onerous than that exacted from Eastern Europe. So much did Russia demand from the Eastern Europeans, in return for so little, that it could be said that they had never been liberated at all.

In this gloomy picture there stood out an amazing fact. Four countries, two in the East and two in the West, had participated to a greater or lesser extent in their own liberation. Yugoslavia and Albania defy Russia today partly because they rose against the Germans initially without Soviet aid. And in the West, it was Italy and France who helped the Americans drive out Hitler. Raymond Aron has written: "If France had not taken part in her own liberation, she would have had to under-take the heavy task of reconstruction in an atmosphere of grief and humiliation."

The Temptations of Empire

The emancipation of the former colonial territories and the turning inward of Europe have both taken place independently of the Cold War. Indeed, these two phenomena are more closely related to each other than to the rivalry between the two continent-states. Eastern Europe has been swallowed and digested by the monster in the East. But the monster in the West has allowed the Western Europeans to determine their own destiny, and they have done so by joining together to save what is left of Europe from complete disappearance. So far, the United States has resisted the temptation to accord to Western Europe the treatment given to Eastern Europe--a process known as Stalinization. But the U.S. has the power to Stalinize Western Europe, if it insists.

So long as America resists that temptation, there is hope for Western unity. America's liberal treatment of Western Europe has accomplished something that no deliberate effort could have achieved--the realization by the NATO countries that they have more to fear from the other monster than from this one.

Americans find it easy to assume a permanent community of interests between themselves and the Western Europeans. But this community is based chiefly on a collective impulse toward self-defense. Americans may think that both parties are equally threatened by the Soviet Union. But many Europeans do not. Only so long as their dependence on America weighs lightly will Western Europeans prefer American suzerainty to Russia. A slave is a slave no matter who his master; a Western Europe Stalinized by the United States would have nothing to fear from being Stalinized by Russia. You can only be Stalinized once.

Neutralism and Gaullism

If Western Europe is compared to the "new" nations, with regard to their roles in the Cold War, a striking similarity emerges. The struggle between the two monsters is not a European or an Asian struggle; Europe is a stake, not a participant.

This line of thought leads us to a surprising parallel between neutralism and Gaullism, though we have argued above (February 16) that they are very different. Half of the Social-Democratic International thinks that since the Cold War is not their quarrel, they should not provide shock troops for the Western monster. The Gaullists reason that the Cold War is not their quarrel, but that they should be permitted to make it so. Gaullists therefore accept the American contention that Russia is a threat which unites Western Europe to America, but they accept it on the condition that a real difference exists between American overlordship and Russian overlordship.

Only an independent Europe can be expected to defend itself, because only it would have something to defend. A Frenchman will not fight for the American way of life.

Deference and Defiance

Why did France blackball British entry into the Common Market?

During the Second World War, it was clear to both Churchill and de Gaulle that America would henceforth hold a mortgage on the fate of Europe. But the two men responded to this fact in different ways. As Churchill told de Gaulle: "It is better to persuade the stronger than to pit yourself against him. . . . The Americans have immense resources. . . . I am trying to enlighten them, without forgetting, of course, to benefit my country." This is the definition of the "special relationship," which Britain has pursued for twenty years. British policy assumes that by deferring where necessary to the United States (as at Nassau), Britain can obtain better treatment from her master. De Gaulle believes the opposite.

When the Common Market was formed, Britain refused a charter membership, because she preferred to base her policies on the "special relationship" with the United States. But the "special relationship" is the antithesis of Gaullist Europe. "What concerns us," said the French Foreign Minister at Brussels, "is not whether the Europe we are trying to create is big or small, but whether it is European." "European," in this sense, means "Gaullist," which means independent of the United States.

At Nassau, however, Britian showed that she was not European in this sense at all. Despite the abrupt abandonment of the Skybolt Program, which meant the end of at least semi-independence for the British, Macmillan once again leased the destiny of his country to the United States.

The "multinational" Polaris force promised by 1968 in place of the Skybolt does not fool many people. Like all other "multinational" NATO programs, it will be under the effective control of the United States.

De Gaulle gave his reason for blackballing the British when he said on January 24:

At the Bahamas, Britain turned over to America such poor atomic forces as it possessed. Britain could have handed them to Europe. Britain has made its choice. I am distressed to see England align herself with the U.S., for she risks acting like their traveling salesman.

A deferent Britain has no place in a defiant Europe.

Divorce-Kennedy Style

There are two diametrically opposite forces at work in the Atlantic Alliance. One is national interest, the other collective security. It may seem an obvious thing to say, but Washington has apparently forgotten it: the national interests of two states can never exactly coincide.

Cuba meant life or death to the United States, and less to any of the Europeans. Berlin means more to them than it does to us. Our interests are increasingly global, and a concession in one area may balance an equal or greater gain in another. Europe's interests are increasingly parochial, and they can make no sacrifices at all on their own continent. A tactician as skilled as Khrushchev can always present a limited threat, or the offer of a compromise bargain, which is in our interest but not in Europe's. And vice versa, of course.

Under such circumstances, is it surprising that France is restive when she has no control over her own destiny?

Collective security is a very real concept, and it gives the Alliance a wide common interest. But Kennedy cannot pretend that America's interests are identical with those of Europe. He would do well, therefore, to permit the existence of a loyal opposition within the NATO group.

Yet he seems determined to have it his own way, less because he wants to crush the miraculously revived Europe than because he does not understand it. He is personally affronted and he will have his reprisals against de Gaulle. Like the mythical Italian who must murder his wife to obtain a divorce, the President of the United States would rather try to ostracize France than live in a divided house.

It would be better if he knew what he was doing before he did it.