Difficult as it may be for us to understand today, however, Dulles predicted that the social structure of a just world society would be modelled on the prototypes of totalitarian countries like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. In the same article that featured his proposition to abolish the independent nation-state, written in preparation of the ecumenical conference in Oxford 1937, he discussed the benefits of Communism and Fascism, and the ideal social policy to be adopted in the future world state:

How are we to overcome the obstacles created by pride and selfishness? ... We can get rid of them only by replacing them by some sentiment more dominant and gripping and which will contain in it the elements of universality as against particularity. This is no visionary dream. Before us today we have the spectacle of Communism and Fascism changing almost overnight the characteristics of entire peoples. Millions of individuals have been made into different and, on the whole, finer people. Elemental virtues are again treated as matters of concern. Immoralities and dishonestness, personal prides and prejudices are replaced by courage, self-sacrifice and discipline. There is a conscious subordination of self to the end that some great objective may be furthered.

John Foster Dulles believed that Communism and Fascism were inspiring spectacles from which the American Christians should learn a lesson in successful social engineering. In War, Peace, and Change (1939), which was by far his most significant literary accomplishment, Dulles elaborated this thesis in further detail, eliciting the following comments by Albert N. Keim:

Dulles saw fascism and communism as outstanding contemporary examples of the skilful combining of the ethical and political solutions. There was, he believed, an 'inherent interconnection' between the ethical and the political solution in any viable polity.

During the Second World War Dulles became more cautious in his public references to the Nazi movement, but for most of the 1930s he openly defended the political model of Fascism. In a speech at Princeton in March 1936, he suggested that what was happening in Germany and Italy was all part of the inevitable struggle between the new 'dynamic' nations and 'static' nations like England and France, and Americans must adjust themselves to the changes that were coming. He added that, although 'distasteful', the Nazi revolution in Germany represented a change that it would be better to accept rather than go to war to stop, and that if everyone yielded gracefully, then Hitler, National Socialism, and its excesses would prove to be a passing phase. On the eve of World War II Dulles still entertained these sentiments. Ron Chernow, in The Warburgs. A Family Saga, states:

Jimmy [James Paul Warburg] always thought Dulles a pompous stuffed shirt, a view amply confirmed when Dulles intoned, "Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplate war upon us." Not without a touch of admiration, Dulles described the Axis powers as the 'dynamic have-not nations' whose legitimate demands must be met.

To come to a better understanding about Dulles' sympathetic attitude towards European totalitarianism in the 1930s, one needs to examine his transcontinental business connections during that period of time.

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© 2005 Martin Erdmann