Whether we articulate them or not, the assumptions that we make concerning the future development of the Soviet system are fundamental to our thinking about American foreign policy. The objectives toward which we can reasonably direct our efforts, the philosophy of our situation, are in a very large measure a function of the image we have in our minds of the changes we discern or anticipate in the character of the society and the government of the Russian people.

The leading Powers are actively seeking novel weapon-systems to give themselves the advantages of surprise. Difficulties in the way of that search, and its effects upon the relationships between Powers, furnish the subjects of this article.* We shall confine ourselves to those surprises that consist in or are closely related to the invention of instruments of war. “Surprise” has many other connotations for military and international studies—e.g., surprise attack, surprising changes of alliance—but these shall not directly concern us.

The term “New Left” designates a state of mind—the desire to do away with the division and impotence of the old Left—rather than a definite sector of the political spectrum. It has, in fact, been used in three different contexts. In its most specific sense, it has meant the Nouvelle Gauche behind Claude Bourdet and his neutralist weekly, France-Observateur. In its broadest sense, it includes all the rebels at the Left, from the reformist followers of Mendès-France to non-Communist revolutionary Marxists. Finally, the term can designate—and this is how it is used here—the groups that occupy the no-man's-land between the Socialists and the Communists.

An epigram coined under the Third Republic presents the political Frenchman as torn between the claims of his heart on the Left and of his pocketbook on the Right. At a time when a nationalistic policy in Algeria draws heavily on all pocketbooks this idea seems out of date: today a good section of the French public is trying to reconcile accepted attitudes with a new policy, and the old phraseology of the Left conceals less and less successfully an ideology of the Right. The trend is strengthened by transfusions of new blood from a colonial domain lost or endangered in the last few years; that is, by the arrival in metropolitan France of tens of thousands of politically active and actively resentful citizens from Indo-China, Morocco, Tunisia, impenitently expressing their disrespect for democratic values, their wartime sympathies for Pétain and Vichy, and their contempt for the traditional language of political conformity.