Correspondence about war in The Listener, October–November 1955

John Connell responded to Martin Wight’s BBC broadcast, ‘War and International Politics’, published in The Listener, 13 October 1955, by asserting that Wight had presented a ‘misleading and incomplete definition’ of ‘the aim of foreign policy’—that is, in Wight’s words, ‘to preserve the balance of power’. In Connell’s view, ‘the basic purpose of foreign policy’ is ‘to preserve and enhance the security, prosperity, and welfare of this country’. Connell accused Wight of supplying ‘the very grammar of appeasement’ at a time ‘in which a whole new vast wave of appeasement is imminent’. Wight replied that Connell’s definition of the goal of foreign policy was ‘included’ in his own, because the balance of power is ‘the condition of the independence and liberties of states’. Wight observed that appeasement is ‘a language’ that he ‘never learned’, and that ‘western diplomacy at the moment does not lead’ him ‘to believe that “a whole new vast wave of appeasement is imminent”’.