There are hatreds which are devoted to real things and people, and there is a hatred which displaces inner violence onto any accessible external object. The deepest causes for hate are racial, fraternal, communal. No trip by Henry Kissinger will mend the savagery of Moslem Pakistani toward Bengali Hindu or solve the fixed enmities of Ulster, for such wars are merciless and personally felt, "popular" in the most terrifying significance of that word.

America's turbulent relationship with China, and the Kissinger expedition, cannot be understood in terms of such hatred. Yet one does find in American feelings toward China a violent and unstable emotion that cannot be accounted for in a relationship based solely on rational calculations of interest and advantage.

Barbara Tuchman's good book on General Stilwell and America's wartime China policy provides an illuminating introduction to that elaborate record of America's Vietnam involvement which the Pentagon, thanks to the New York Times, provided for us recently. The really interesting thing is not the way in which these two accounts of American adventure in Asia are alike but the way in which they are different.

The Calley case has laid bare a neglected fact: Of all the major nations and their armies, the United States and its army have been, in moral terms, the least able to deal with the type of situation Vietnam has presented.

The American style of war has always been the engineer's style—for West Point is, traditionally, a school for engineers. We apply technology to grossly defined problems. We seek our military solutions in logistics, sheer manpower and firepower, thus over- powering all discrimination and subtlety. We have no military caste; since the permanent expansion of our standing army in the 1940's, the influence of the old American military families and schools has been submerged, and with it the last vestige of the aristocratic military ethos.

The words are those of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger as they confront North Vietnam. Does North Vietnam resist our will? We will bomb their missiles, their trails and bases. Do they attack again? Do they punish the South Vietnamese? Interfere with our plan to win victory while withdrawing? We will do such things. …

Yet we know not what they are. Our bombers make cautionary raids across the border. We feint with naval forces along the North Vietnamese coast. We avow to the North that we will no longer be bound by the conventions of the past. We make vague threats of invasion, deny them, disclaim the denials. Our officials call attention to President Eisenhower's warning, twenty years ago, that he might use nuclear weapons in Korea; then we deny that we would use such weapons—in foreseeable circumstances.

NATO was born of a crisis, and its trouble today results from the fact that the crisis is gone. The ruins of war have been cleared away. The drama of 1949—of a clash between Germany's conquerorshas faded. The ambition of the Soviet Union to dominate Western Europe undoubtedly still exists, but it is a passive threat, a latent threat which no longer has in it an immediacy and power sufficient to compel great measures of defense, The states of Western Europe are no longer the unconfldent nations they were in the last years of the 1940's; they no longer need rely upon the United States to defend them from the Soviet Union; and the Soviet Union is no longer quite the bizarre society it was in those years of menace.

We Americans of all people have been most aware of ourselves, most alive to our special character, our revolutionary tradition, our hospitality to human aspiration, our creation of a constitution and a manner of political life which, if it was not without precedent, is nonetheless unique in scope and in ambition. What we did in 1778 changed human affairs, and that will not be forgotten.

But let us consider what we have become. Powerful, to be sure. But important? That is something else. To be important—important not for the moment but important to human history—is not an inevitable result of power or size.

It is difficult not to see elements of desperation and despair, in much that is being said about the international situation. This is a time when events seem in the saddle; when attempts to control the technology of destruction seem all but hopeless; when American policies founded largely upon good will seem failing, and a major part of the world turns from us in disillusionment and often in hatred