GOVERNMENT stocks of surplus agricultural commodities, which reached a record level of over nine billion dollars in February 1956, have moved to the center of the stage in recent agricultural legislation and discussions of the farm problem. Reasons for this prominence are numerous. Most obvious perhaps is simply the reaction against the apparent waste of resources in building up huge stocks for which no clear use is in sight. Merely to maintain stocks of this magnitude is a costly undertaking and has necessitated an uneconomic expansion of storage facilities. Little wonder, then, that more and more attention is being devoted to finding means for disposing of this vast mass of agricultural products acquired by the United States government as a prop to farm prices.

THE United Nations Charter repeatedly refers to “disputes or situations” and to “threats to the peace or breach of the peace” but does not use the word “conflict.” In the Kellogg-Briand Pact, however, the parties agreed “that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be solved except by pacific means.” A “conflict” appears to be less formulated than a “dispute” but more formulated than a “situation.” A “conflict” does not necessarily involve violence as does a “breach of the peace,” but violence is probable, as in a “threat to the peace.” Thus conflict always involves a considerable degree of tension. The close relation of conflict to violence is indicated by the derivation of the term from the Latin word confligere, meaning “to strike together.” Thus, physical conflict is suggested.

TOWARD the end of the Second World War, Field Marshal Rommel confided to his diary that, once the German U-boats were beaten in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the swelling stream of American soldiers and supplies could reach Europe, Germany “was doomed to inevitable defeat at any place which was accessible to the Anglo-American transport fleets.” Not everyone will agree with this assertion of the prominent role played by sheer masses of military manpower and matériel in deciding the outcome of World War II. It is suggestive, however, that the fortunes of that war turned in close association with the changing ratio of munitions production by the Axis powers and the United Nations.

DIPLOMATS in our day rarely make much history, but in times of crisis they occupy unique vantage points from which to see it made. Such an observer was William Christian Bullitt, the American Ambassador to France from 1936 to 1940. Few other foreigners resident in Paris enjoyed so intimate a view of high politics during the last years of the Third Republic, and even fewer have left so lively and colorful a contemporary record of that period. Perhaps it is true that the bulky file of Bullitt's daily telegrams from Paris reveals more about Bullitt himself than about the state of France.1 Yet those cables, sprawling, scrappy, and personal though they may be, also illumine two significant aspects of Bullitt's era: the slow conversion of American leadership from isolationism to interventionism, and the disintegration and destruction of the Third Republic.

THE new Soviet diplomacy in Asia involves an active effort to extend economic aid to a select group of countries who qualify as non-allied with the United States, or, in some sense of the term, as “neutralists.” To date, the Soviet Bloc has made aid commitments in South and Southeast Asia of over $500 million to India, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Burma. Virtually all the aid has been committed in the past two years; most of it since early 1956. TABLE 1 shows the size and character of the commitments.