As the Secretary of State looks out over the Potomac River, pondering reports from his embassies to the south, the fundamental question: “What is it?” comes to him again and again. Is a new regime in a Latin American country controlled by “agrarian reformers,” “moderate socialists,” “malleable leftists,” “Christian Democrats,” “safe militarists,” or—others?

We report our investigations into tetrathiafulvalene (TTF) derivatives bearing N-methylthiocarbamoyl and halogen substituents which engage in intermolecular interactions in the solid state. The synthesis of new donors is presented, along with the X-ray crystal structures of some of these derivatives and their radical ion salts.

When the governments of the Latin American states were taking part in the negotiations leading to the founding of the UN, they could hardly have done so with nostalgic memories of the League of Nations. The League had provided no protection to the Caribbean countries from interventions by the United States, and, largely because of United States protests, it did not consider the Tacna-Arica and Costa Rica-Panama disputes in the early 1920's. Furthermore, Mexico had not been invited to join; Brazil withdrew in 1926; and Argentina and Peru took little part in League affairs. The organization was regarded as being run mainly for the benefit of European states with the aid of what Latin Americans called an “international bureaucracy,” in which citizens from the southern hemisphere played minor roles. The United States was, of course, not a member, and both the reference to the Monroe Doctrine by name in Article 21 of the Covenant and the organization's practice of shunning any attempt to interfere in inter-American affairs against the wishes of the United States made the League in its first decade a remote and inefficacious institution to countries that were seriously concerned about domination by Washington.

The four books under consideration in the present review fall readily into two groups. The first two deal with various legal questions relating to the Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The others share a concern about the role of an interi national secretariat, although their points of view are quite different.

These four publications appeared in the latter half of 1947 but all of them were written near the middle of the year. Three of them deal directly with the policy which the United States should adopt toward the Soviet Union. The concern of Mr. Armstrong at first seems to be limited to “the two main objectives of American foreign policy”: “to help Europe live and to strengthen the United Nations.” Subsequently, however, although Mr. Armstrong is nowhere explicit on this point, it appears that these are techniques, rather than objectives, for the first would avert the “planned social and economic disintegration” furthered by the Soviet Union, while the second would diminish the effectiveness of Moscow's policy of “indirect aggression.” It is, therefore, not unreasonable to include Mr. Armstrong among those offering answers to the question: Where do we go from here in seeking equilibrium and even an accord with the Kremlin?