EMBARGO THREAT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 127, 30 May 1940, Page 14

EMBARGO THREAT.

AGAINST JAPAN. AMERICA'S STRONG WEAPON. BUT DANGER IS THERE. WASHINGTON, May 8. Obviously enforcement of an antiJapanese embargo is the threat veiled by Secretary of State Cordell Hull's firm warning against Japanese "protection of the Dutch East Indies." Laet summer Hull and the President seized the opportunity of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg's resolution on the subject to prepare for an embargo by terminating the Japanese-American trade treaty. Long before that they had begun to consider the possibility that the embargo weapon might some day have to be used.

Enforcement of an embargo against Japan, which would have to be voted by Congress, would have a deadly effect. In the Dutch East Indies the Japanese would get some of the oil they now obtain from us, but oil is far from being the only war material. Some good authorities estimate that the Japanese are purchasing as much as 50 per cent of all their war materials in this country. They can go to no other market, since the Europeans have no war materials to spare. Thus at the least an embargo would cripple the Japanese war effort, and at best might bring it to an eventual end.

The difficulty is that besides such obvious forms of retaliation as an attack on the Philippines, the Japanese have in their power something considerably more serious. The United States needs rubber. The vast majority of our rubber oomes from the Dutch East.lndies and the Malay States. The Japanese could answer our embargo by blockading rubber shipments to this country, and our navy would hardly be able to break a blockade all the way across the Pacific. The result would probably be general war in the Far East, but the Japanese, rendered desperate by our embargo, would be in a mood to let the devil take the consequences.

This is one of the reasons why Far Eastern policy is the subject of anxious debate at the State Department and the' White House. Both the President and Secretary of State side with the more daring spirits. Thus, in brief, our policy is to keep the Japanese in check with the threat of an embargo, until their war machine breaks down or other nations are ready to help in putting them in their place. But even the most daring hopo that we will not have to make our threat good, while several cautious officials tremble at the mere mention of such a possibility. The Dutch East Indies question brings the policy to its first real test. Kougblv, if the Japanese do not attempt the "protection" they have been talking a.bout, the policy will be successful.—N.A.N.A.