Since the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1968 hopes for détente between East and West have ebbed. The ruthless suppression of internal political autonomy in that often overrun nation seems to have given the lie to all those who have asserted that under the common pressures of modern industrialized society the social systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were becoming more and more alike. The use of the naked force of the Red Army to destroy the Czech road to socialism has left in ruin not only immediate aspirations for a reduction of international tensions in Central Europe but the broader faith in a future peace based on a convergence of the democratic and the Communist ways of life.