Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, MAY 10, 1941. BRITAIN’S WAR AIMS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 May 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, MAY 10, 1941. BRITAIN’S WAR AIMS.

|X his latest public- utterance in the I’nit.ed States, the British Ambassador. Lord Halifax, has given a brief but plain statement of British war aims which should go far to silence the criticism, still heard at times in various quarters, that the British Government is unduly reticent on this subject. It is, of course, true that no fully explicit and detailed statement of British war aims has been made, or is likely to be made- until there has been a nearer approach to the victory the nation and its allies are determined to win. On the other hand the principles for which Britain is fighting and some very vital conditions of peace—notably a full restoration of the independence of nations now subjugated by the Nazis —have been staled freely and frankly on many occasions by responsible British statesmen.

Lord Halifax was thus able to declare, in thei statement referred to. that Britain is intent on a system of security that, will ensure international stability. This, as he said, implies economic collaboration between nations, and equally a change in the relationships between nations that will restore confidence in international undertakings. Obviously peace can never rest on secure foundations until an end has been made of the Nazi idea that solemn agreements and engagements embodied in treaties are meaningless things to lie east aside at will or convenience.

Another point emphasised by Lord Halifax in his latest, reference to peace aims was that the new order to be established must, take full account of the welfare and security of the common man and protect the individual from enslavement. It is plain enough that British, peace aims in their total scope, international and social, cannot be put into fully practical shape until Nazism has been smashed. Al present the German nation, slave-minded and bent on the enslavement of all others, as Air Churchill lias said, is dominant over a great part of Europe. All other issues are overshadowed for the lime being by the necessity of winning the war. Only by the decisive victory of Hie democracies can the world be saved from enslavement and the way opened to a. worthy and constructive reorganisation of national and international life.

When victory has been won, much will depend upon the ability and readiness of nations now subjugated to combine with others for their own protection. It may be claimed now with full confidence, however, that an ever-increasing weight of enlightened opinion in the English-speaking nations and in many others is resolved that there shall be no return to the conditions of division, weakness and disorganisation which made the present war possible, and indeed the war of 1914-18 before it.

In an interview in New York some weeks ago, Lord Halifax said that the British Government would like to see the post-war economy of the world so ordered that no nation would have any anxiety about obtaining raw materials. In building the post-war economy, he held (he added) that the two most important rallying points would be “increasingly close economic and political co-operation between the United States and Britain.” and increasing unity among the nations of the British Commonwealth. The United States and Britain, he said, "would be the rallying point—the magnet—for other nations which feel the same way.”

Wlide he emphasised the need for Anglo-American collaboration in the post-war period—a question on which the opinion lie expressed is now being echoed strongly in the United States —Lord Halifax affirmed also that Britain has no wish for a vindictive peace or for territorial gains, nor, he said, would Germany be excluded for a moment from the new economy if the Reich were willing to co-operate and “be a good European.’’ At the same time, he offered a warning that there might be a long period before the gulf between German youth and democratic peoples, dug by the philosophy of Nazism, would be filled in—a period in which Britain and the United States would have to remain “awfully close together.” Subservient as the German masses still are to their Nazi tyrants, the possibility of driving a wedge between Ihe present rulers and the people of Hie Reich is not, at a long view, by any means devoid of practical importance. When the military power of the gangster dictatorship begins to crack, divisions will be possible in Germany of which at present, there is no obvious sign. When that stage has been reached, a fully detailed statement of British war aims, in both their international and their social implications, may be made a potent weapon of war. The overshadowing fact at present, however, is that every honest and purposeful aspiration for a better world order is contingent upon the destruction of Nazi gangsterdom.