AMERICAN POLICY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 156, 30 December 1938, Page 8

AMERICAN POLICY

TOWARDS DICTATORS

THE PRESENT CONFUSION

In the state of flux and confusion of American foreign policy after Munich it is not remarkable that the President and his predecessor, Mr. Hoover, should have approached the question on different roads in their remarks before the "Herald-Tribune's" Forum, writes Arthur Krock in the "New York Times." And this fluid condition of the policy explains why the President's party members in Congress would be more inclined to approve Mr. Hoover's latest stated position than Mr. Roosevelt's. At uny rate, that is the implication of the Neutrality Laws. The President spoke as an interna tionalist, Mr. Hoover as an isolationist. Mr. Roosevelt accepted the possibility i of a totalitarian threat in the Americas and called for armament sufficient to repel any such threat with force. His predecessor dwelt long on the contention that Germany and Italy are facing East, and Japan towards the mainland, and he found no possibility of a threat in any Pan-American quarter. Both the President and the man he defeated in 1932 mentioned the immemorial position of the United States —that the form of domestic government in any other nation is not our concern. But Mr. Hoover went further. In something of the mood of Ambassadbr Kennedy'^ Trafalgar Day meditation, he said democracies and their opposites ahvays have existed and always will exist coevally "and there must be peace between the totalitarian governments and the democracies." The President, however, left the inescapable inference that he believes democracies cannot co-operate with, and must work to eradicate, totalitarian national policy which is based on treaty-breaking, the threat of force, and force itself. REPUBLICAN REUNION? The former President, while he conceded the risk of American involvement in a war abroad, saw numerous reasons for and ways of avoiding it. The President expressed no such sanguine opinion, and, mentioning the Western Hemisphere specifically, said "we are determined to use every endeavour that the . . . Hemisphere may work out its own interrelated salvation in the light of its own interrelated experience." Bad feeling between Senator Hiram Johnson, of California, and Mr. Hoover, and cool relations between the then President and' Senator Borah, contributed to the loss of Mr. Hoover's influence with the Senate. But unless Mr. Johnson and Mr. Borah, both' Republicans, have changed theu views in the current of general changes, or conceive that Mr. Roosevelt's warnings against the consequences of totalitarian policies apply only to this hemisphere, these Senators are more likely to approve what Mr. Hoover had to say before the forum. By the laws of logic this should also be true of the large Congressional majority which demanded and voted for those Neutrality ' Acts that make "fighting speeches" by American Presidents pass for gestures in Germany, Italy, and Japan. In a mixup like this the average citizen may well look on in bewilderment, and wonder whether American foreign policy, practised or preached, has become the "twenty-four-hour" affair which domestic policy was officially proclaimed to be during th. first few years of the New Deal. "PEACE BY FEAR." And if he listened the other night to the broadcast from Lord Halifax also, and recalled recent words uttered by personages as various as Undersecretary Welles, Senator Wagner, Prime Minister Chamberlain, and Premier Daladier, the President's denunciation of "peace by fear," saying it is no peace at all and something statesmen should not make, must have bemused him. For it has become one of the Administration's steady pre-election claims that the timing and content of the President's September peace messages, and their superscriptions to the dictators, did most to bring about the Munich conference and agreement. Even National Chairman Farley has seized upon these as a political asset, remarking that in the present state of the world it is of paramount importance that such a President be voted an obedient Congress. *• But, as the President says himself, the peace accomplished was not peace at all. "Peace by fear has no higher or more enduring quality than peace by the sword. There can be no peace if the reign of law is to be replaced by a recurrent sanctification of sheer force." These words conflict with the official jubilation in Washington over the President's pre-Munich intervention and the claims since officially advanced that this "peace by fear" was chiefly Mr. Roosevelt's accomplishment. CONDEMNATION TODAY. Though Lord Halifax and the others do not go so far, they have gladly and often certified him as a partner in the Munich agreement which he now denounces, while his spokesmen and political followers continue to assert that Mr. Roosevelt was chiefly responsible. Mr. Roosevelt was chiefly responsible. Yet on September 27, addressing Hitler, the President wrote of this very I "peace by fear": "Should you agree to a solution in this peaceful manner I am convinced that hundreds of millions throughout the world would recognise your action as an outstanding historic service to all humanity." It had already been so arranged. The threat of force obtained what was sought without the use of force. Now Washington condemns what so proudly hustings. No wonder there is confuit hailed, and is still hailed on the sion.