George Kennan, architect of America's policy of containment adopted in 1946-47, said a decade later in his Reith Lectures over the B.B.C. (subsequently published as Russia, the Atom and the West), that the “moral example” of this country should be its primary instrument of foreign policy. In his words, this country could best “apply the hand” (to stem Communist challenges) to “our American failings— to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes: to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.“

Leo Tolstoy once remarked that “certain questions are put to mankind, not that men should answer them, but that they should go on trying.” The highly complex Middle East situation in which we must deal with the rights of Jews and Arabs against the background of a power struggle between a Russia and an America with nuclear weapons often seems to be one of those questions. I do not here propose to offer any final answer. But I will try to state clearly what I conceive to be some misconceptions blockinga possible solution.