Books: Speak Low

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EUROPEAN UNION AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY, by F.S.C. Northrop (Macmillan; $4.75) blames most of the U.S.'s foreign difficulties on the present administration. Professor Northrop contends that pre-election and post-election statements by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles about "rollback" and "liberation" frightened Europeans into increasing neutralism and anti-Americanism, thereby damaging the cause of European union. What Northrop wants to roll back is U.S. foreign policy—back to the way it was handled under Truman. He would have the U.S. make no major decision and announce no policy in foreign affairs without first consulting the opposition party and the European allies.

Whatever the setbacks or successes of recent U.S. policy, events hardly warrant the overriding fear, which runs through all these volumes, that the U.S. will be too arrogant in world affairs. The greater danger is that the U.S. will become too impressed with its "limitations" and forget its opportunities. Realistic caution is obviously needed in U.S. policy, but so are imagination and a will to win. The advice from this quartet of distinguished foreign-policy brains is less than caution: it is a plea for compromise that sounds like a statement of the will to lose.