FUTURE IN PACIFIC

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 290, 7 December 1944, Page 4

FUTURE IN PACIFIC

POWER OF AMERICA A VIEW FROM CALIFORNIA Impressions of American opinion, Rained on a visit to San Francisco in September, are given by D. W. Brogan, in The Spectator, of London. The Japanese are everywhere in retreat, everywhere faced with disaster—everywhere, that is, except in China. And in San Francisco the war in China is not very remote. Even though Chinatown still keeps itself largely to itself, the Chinese population of the city is large, and is accepted as part of the political and aesthetic background. Hatred of Japan, combined with optimism about China, is a link binding together the two races. And the disasters threatening at the moment in China are taking a little of the gilt off the gingerbread of victory in Europe and the Pacific. It is better to be frank and state that, rightly or wrongly, it is not felt that ve in Britain, or at any rate our Government, have any such solicitude for the fate of China as is felt here, or any adequate perception of the importance of the Pacific or of the necessary adjustments to be made in it.

"A Predominant Partner" Seen from this side of the Pacific, Russia, China, Australia, New Zear land and the islands are all part of a Pacific system to which the remote island on the north-west coast of Europe is a stranger. In that Pacific set-up, the Californians (and I am sure the people of the other States between the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades and the ocean) see the United States as a predominant partner. They know to what prodigious strength the American Navy has grown; they know with what prophet's-gourdlike rapidly the shipyards of San Francisco, the aeroplane plants of Seattle and Los Angeles, have grown. They feel the reflection of the confidence that a series of unbroken, desperately fought for, and more and more fruitful victories has b red in the American armed forces, especialy in the Navy. It is no longer a case of desperate holding actions like the Coral Sea or almost Pyrrhic victories like Guadalcanar or Tarawa. Now the Americans move with the confidence of predestined victors, bringing their forces to bear with an almost impudent indifference to the countermeasures of the Japanese. i

"Strong Wine" Of course, this strong wine of victory goes to some heads. It is not a totally fanciful danger that, if an international organisation should not be created soon, many Americans would fall naturally into a more than Palmerstonian attitude with more than Palmerston's power behind it. Many Americans believe that the whole position of Britain, Australasia, the Netherlands East Indies and the French possessions depends on American power and American policy. The motives for a restoration of the status quo in Malayan waters, for instance, will not be merely generous, they will be prudential. But if the labour and glory of effecting that restoration fall almost exclusively on the United States, the American people, especially on the Pacific coast, may feel in a few years' time like a rashly generous man who has set a rival up in business and regrets now that he didn't make conditions. Nor is it merely paradoxical to say that one of the genuine emotional drives of the American people, a deep-rooted dislike of "imperialism," may be an instrument of ambitious and shrewd politicians to invade the eastern Pacific in a big way. "Of course we can have fascism in America," said the martyred Huey Long, '"but we'll have to call it antifascism." In the same way it is not impossible to have imperialism in America if you call it antiimperialism.

Wanderlust Dead ? But against such fears must be set the fact, politically so important, that the American wanderlust seems to have died. San Francisco is the city of the Argonauts, but few people to-day seem to want to set out to seek more golden fleeces outside the boundaries of the United States. JThere does not seem to be any deep desire to push out into the world, whose margins fade for ever and for ever. Here on the western rim of the continent the long tidal movement of settlement has finished.

Here in California, it is especially 'difficult to find valid arguments for persuading native sons and daughters to go elsewhere to fare almost certainly worse. To the Golden State could be applied the once famous story of the Bostonian who, on arriving at Heaven's Gate and giving his place of origin, was told by St. Peter "You won't like it here." The Ameri-. can people, especially the people of the coast, will knock Japan cold, but that does not mean that they will be eternally vigiant to keep her cold. For the man in the street, at any rate, one of the most famous song's of this region sums up his fundamental war aim; "California, here I come, right back where I started from."