At the present moment, the United States and varied Allies, Northern Korea and Soviet China are fighting in Korea; the French are fighting a communist force in French Indo-China and live in expectation of a Soviet Chinese force attacking them; India and Pakistan are on the verge of war over Kashmir; the British are preparing to meet the Suez question by military force if they are pressed to the wall; yet the whole world is supposed to be at peace.

Such an event as the seizure of the property of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company would, in the past, have provoked military intervention which could have led to a general war. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke at Sarajevo was not of greater importance. Nor was the sinking of the battleship "Maine" historically more serious than the seizure of the Suez Canal.

But, the sinking of the "Maine" led to a limited war between the United States and Spain which ended Spain’s colonial empire in America and Asia, and the shooting of the archduke produced World War I.

The fact of the matter seems to be that the great powers are war-weary and are prepared to accept peace, at this moment, on almost any terms short of invasion of their own territory. Great Britain, since Mary lost Calais (1558), has not accepted the umbrage meted out to her by the Moslems, and the United States, since the days of the Barbary Coast pirates (1800-1830), has not accepted such offenses as North Korea and Soviet China offer.

Yet, there is no general war. And although NATO is war-preparation and General Eisenhower’s activities are aimed at Soviet Russia as a direct target, the response of the objective enemy has not been what might have been expected. Either Stalin is as war-weary as the Western World is or his industries have not served him amply or he is biding his time as we are. Whatever the reason, the general war which in other eras came so readily, almost at the droop of a king’s eyebrow, is held off.

From that standpoint, the fact that Sir Gladwyn Jebb and Dr. Mossadegh did come to the United Nations is of historic importance. In the “War of Jenkins’ Ear,” an obscure affair from the years 1739-1741, the British fought for much less than what Dr. Mossadegh has done.

It is not necessary to be as brilliant an historian as Arnold Toynbee nor as great a statesman as Benjamin Disraeli to realize that we are living through a period of vast reorganization of political power, the emergency of new peoples, the resurrection of ancient nations and the shifting of the balances of authority from Europe to Asia. The process may take a century, even in these swift times, before stability reappears.

Usually, such eras as the The Age of Pericles in Greece or Augusts in Rome or Charlemagne in Europe are at the end rather than at the beginning of a great upsurge of peoples. Genghis Khan, whose movement of races from Asia to Europe was not unlike the effort of Stalin to build an overwhelming empire in the Eurasian heartland, ushered in the pressures Which disturbed the then known world from the Pacific to the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Amazingly similar is the area currently affected, except that the United Stales, then unknown, is now included.

And that makes the difference: For while all the world may be war-weary, the United States can produce in unlimited quantities and in novel forms munitions of war, food and clothing so that the human mass, so often the determining factor in war or peace, is less important.

The United States is only 130,000,000 persons and the so-called free world in Europe runs about 270,000,000 making an outside total, say, of 425,000,000. The Soviet world is roughly 800,000,000 and the Moslem world about 200,000,000. The remaining free peoples of Asia, apart from the Moslems, will run to perhaps 270,000,000.

In this unbalanced situation, the greatest factor is the production of weapons of death, their degree of effectiveness and the capacity of industry to keep pace with death-dealing novelties. Equally important is the provisioning not only of armies but of civilian populations. Food takes on altogether a new aspect in total war because even if production were possible, distribution becomes very difficult.

The balance of power is obviously in Asia among the Moslems. What they do with it will make the history of the next decades.