=The Cold War.= In some respects the Cold War is not novel. It resembles the intercivilizational wars of the past in which competing civilizations with definite moral and political foundations fought one another for final survival. This kind of warfare is very different indeed from struggles waged between nations which have a common civilization and which have a common interest in the preservation of that civilization. The Americans of the 1950s are waging a struggle much more like that between the Protestants and Catholics in the years 1618-48 than they are to the Civil War of 1861-65 or the Revolutionary War of 1775-81. In some respects we Americans are back all the way to the fight between the Aztecs and Cortez or the struggle between Chinese and Chams in ancient Annam. What Mr. Lippmann calls merely a Cold War is something deeper, bigger, and worse than any war Americans have ever known before. The only parallel to it was the struggle between settlers and Indians on our own frontier: our battles with the Indians at least had the advantage of never leaving us with the hideous dread that the American Indians might sweep a White and Christian civilization from this continent. =Nature of the Cold War.= The Cold War is therefore a struggle, the beginnings of which can be found at any one of several dates (1848, 1917 and 1943 are some of those given) which is now being waged between non-Communist states and a Communist group of nations. No one now living can speak with assurance of the outcome. Only the most foolhardy of optimists could visualize a world in which the better aspects of each system would be developed and the factors common to each would be underscored and strengthened as supports for a peace-seeking international system under the UN. The struggle is larger than a war because it comprises pre-belligerent, belligerent, and post-belligerent activities both in global wars and in a possible general war. On the Communist side the techniques include sabotage, revolution, conspiracy, and fanatical organization. On the anti-Communist side a family of para-military weapons is gradually being developed and may or may not be thrown into the struggle. No war was ever as bitter or uncertain as this one because war, whatever its demerits, at least commits the nations to combat and to victory. War has the supreme merit of _decision_. The Cold War does not: people have to fight it without knowing what it is or what they would get out of it if they could obtain the advantage.[46]