The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1939. BRITAIN AND OUR DEFENCE

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 20, 25 January 1939, Page 10

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1939. BRITAIN AND OUR DEFENCE

for M* cause that lacke' asni&tanem, For the vrong that needs retistanoß, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

Like other visitors to these Dominion.*, Enrl Beatty has been impressed by the wcnkncss of British naval forces in the Pacific, unci in his eloquent address yesterday to members of the Navy League he urged that we should not l>e satisfied until we have " more ships." The need is felt both in Australia and New Zealand — though more keenly there than here—but it is widely recognised that no single Dominion can provide sufficient naval forces for its own security. " Our defence problem as a small nation," said the Australian Defence Minister recently, "' is insoluble without Empire **>operation. We can provide forces for local defence as a deterrent to aggression and as a means of holding out until support is forthcoming, but we cannot defeat a powerful aggressor «ingle-handed." Unfortunately, the factor in "co-operative defence" upon which the Dominions had reckoned —a strong British fleet based on Singapore—is missing, and the Dominions are thrown back on their own resources, to a degree entirely unexpected. We do not see that any Dominion could have anticipated and provided against this contingency, which is n development of the last six or seven years, but all can .be blamed for slowness in realising its implications. They are being realised in Australia now, at least by the Government, but there is little evidence that they are fully realised in New Zealand. But naval forces, like all other armaments, are but the instruments of policy, and the British policy over the last few years ha» shifted and changed more than once, and is now most difficult to define. ■Whatever opinions may be held of it, it is clearly mote a European and less a world policy than in the past. It takes account most—as it must—of German and Italian ambitions in Europe and the Mediterranean, at the neglect and cost of British interests elsewhere, notably in Eastern Asia. On behalf of the policy it can be said that it has " kept the peace," but the apprehension is growing that peace has been kept only by sacrificing strategic positions which were valuable in the past and would have been no less valuable in the future. At the least, there has been created a feeling of doubt whieh is in painful contrast with the belligerent certainty of the dictatorship countries. Perhaps, if the expectations concerning a joint German-Italian " push " for colonies are realised, the British Government, by its actions, will show that it has resolved that disputes between nations shall not be settled by the force of the greater. Such a demonstration would have a 'most powerful effect in promoting unity in the British Commonwealth—unity both of sentiment and of effort in eo-operative defence.