Along with many other military and political phenomena, psychological warfare has been thrust into a period of "no war and no peace" which has proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Western men to deal with either emotionally or intellectually.[45] Such phrases as Churchill's term, "the Iron Curtain," and Walter Lippmann's coinage, "the Cold War," have become a part of civilized speech throughout the world. They have obscured almost as much as they have explained. It is entirely conceivable that an adequate description of the present historical period will only be written after the forces now operating have ceased to be significant; at that future time it may be possible for serious and reflective men to determine what happened in the middle of the twentieth century. =Recognition and Delay.= One of the preeminent factors in the psychological and opinion aspect of the turmoil in the mid-twentieth century has been the very sharp contrast between the _time_ on which a given event occurred, the _delay_ between the occurrence of the event and the final understanding of that event in their own terms by the strategic policy-makers affected, and the successful _recognition_ of the event in policy papers looking toward a further future. The political and strategic character of much recent military history has therefore been a grotesque comedy of errors--ridiculous if it were not so deadly serious--involving the lives of the major urban populations of the world. An event such as the liberation of Indochina from Japanese military occupation in 1945, met competently and reasonably by the standards of an anticipated "world of 1946," which unfortunately never materialized, led to the frustrations, bloodshed, deceit, and warfare of the late 1940s, and by 1954 became partially intelligible as a facet of the free world's struggle against Communism. =New Interpretations of Policy and Propaganda.= Polemic writing has been done concerning the role of propaganda, psychological warfare, psychological strategy, and comparable operations. In many instances the polemics have involved the presentation of two sides, each of which was right--one side maintaining that the old-fashioned world of free, sovereign nations, meeting in a parliament of man as constituted in the United Nations, could and should use the "realities" of traditional power politics as a guide to the present and the future, and should avoid the hopelessness, terrorism, and fanaticism of chronic ideological war; the other side with equal merits has often argued that the ideological war is here, that its deniers are the witting or unwitting sympathizers or appeasers of Communism, that their "realities" are outmoded, and that the United States must face up to a crusade which will end in annihilation or death for either the Communist system or the constitutional democratic group of states.