U.S. AND US

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 75, 29 November 1940, Page 3

U.S. AND US

(By

Pacific

HE increasing interest of New Zealand and Australia in what is coming to be regarded as the Pacific Bloc is focusing many hopeful eyes more closely on United States foreign policy. The less widely-circulating reviews have been discussing during the last few years the possibility of a new balance in world affairs, in which war-torn Europe, so long accepted as the pin-wheel of civilisation, might turn to the New World flanking the Pacific Ocean for a reviving spirit. Most people are agreed that the war will force a re-orientation of many things of the world. None quite know what will happen or how it will happen. But already the signboards are turning on the posts, most of them inward to the Ocean that washes Australia and New Zealand in the south, America in the east, Japan, Russia, and China in the north, India and Africa in the west. The Economic Conference in Delhi is one sign of the trend. There are others closer home. More and more New Zealanders are discussing Pacific Affairs with the close interest they used to give solely to European affairs. Journalists are relating what they see in the Pacific to the course of world history. Airlines now criss-cross the whole ocean. Islands are considered more and more as trade centres and naval- arid air-bases, instead

of as tourist attractions. The eyes of nations are swinging left and right like the heads of spectators at a tennis match, At the service end of the court. the player undoubtedly is America. One Thing is Clear One thing above all others is clear about American policy. Expenditure authorised during the last few months, and the results of the Presidential election, say as clearly as any national spckesman ever said anything, that America is interested in the defence of America. Part of that defence-half of it, under the " Two-Ocean Navy" policy -must be concerned with America’s western seaboard; which is our eastern ocean boundary. Beyond those clear facts, nothing is yet clear. But what J. P: Kennedy, American Ambassador to Britain, is reported to have said this month must have set many people thinking. Mr. Kennedy himself claims to have been speaking "entirely off the record." Yet, as J. B. Priestley said in a recent magazine article: "American ambassadors are nearly always typical specimens of the people they represent. If you talk to them, it is ten to one you learn what America is thinking." ‘Clare Booth’s Defence One person who talked to Mr. Ken- nedy, before he left London for America last month, was Clare Booth, wife of Henry Luce, publisher of. "Time," "Life," and producer of the " March of Time" films. Mrs. Luce reported her

conversation with the Ambassador for " Life ": " Everybody in England said Kennedy was a defeatist, who went around saying the most terrible untrue things; that America wasn’t ever going into the war -that America couldn’t help if it wanted to help, ani numerous. other things calculated to give Englishmen and Americans the impression that America wasn’t either willing or ready, and that the Germans were going to come very clese to giving the Allies the licking of their life. In fact, Mr. Kennedy said openly all sorts of things that were damned undiplomatic, and true as only bitter truth can be. The English didn’t like this, So naturally they didn’t like Mr. Kennedy." So Mrs. Luce defended the blunt Ambassador. This month Mr. Kennedy spoke for himself. He still talked about "no sense in our getting into the war"; but the pessimism he voiced for Mrs. Luce in February had turned into an optimism that prompted him to tell the "Boston Globe" that the chances of the U.S. staying out of the war were better than they were three months® aco. Mr. Kennedy has made so many statements and denials now that it is difficult to imagine exactly what he dces think, But I take it, at the least, that he meant in February that he was afraid America might get frightened into participation, and that he believed, last month, that the danger was passing. At all events, if he is the "typical American" whom the U.S. likes to send out as an Ambassador, he as good as tells us that America is looking after America. Whether that means that America thinks she must also look after Britain, we cannot yet know.