“THE KEY BUSINESS”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 December 1941, Page 2

“THE KEY BUSINESS”

CONDUCT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS. Foreign affairs should be recognised for what they really are, the key business, writes Lord Vansittart, former Under-Secretary of the British Foreign Office. They govern—unfortunately—all other trades. According as they are well or ill conceived, they decide automatically whether men shall live their lives as artists, or clerks, or gardeners, as “tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor” —indeed, whether they shall live at all. If a country is unhappy in its handling of foreign relations, the most perfect conduct of its internal affairs will be vain.- The Scandinavian States were model administrations, save in one respect. They would have done well to spend more time in uniting to build dykes against the German flood. During the inter-war period —one day men will rub their eyes at it —the right priority was reversed: external affairs, particularly in the great democracies, became subordinated to internal politics, and so were subjected to all kinds of exigencies, manoeuvres and pressures, till the parish pump was confronted by an international conflagration. The silly slogan, that other pies’ systems do not concern us, was coined as an internal excuse for inaction rather than because anyone sincerely believed it.