AMERICA'S PLACE AMONG THE NATIONS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 88, 14 April 1945, Page 4

AMERICA'S PLACE AMONG THE NATIONS

THOUGH President Roosevelt has passed from life to history his realistic conception of the part which America must plaj' in the maintenance of the peace of the world will steadfastly endure. He has wrought an indelible change in the cutlook of his own nation, and of all the Americas, upon their relations with the rest of the world, and upon the responsibilities which they must undertake if the end of the second world war is not to mark the beginning of preparation for a third holocaust. The United States has learned the bitter lessons of isolationism, partial or complete. The wisdom, foresight and courage of the man who guided them through the perilous morass of a depression threatening the future of the whole Union and who led them to the very gates cf victory over the greatest tyranny which ever shook the very foundations of freedom have so inflamed them that they will never again sink into that careless indifference which gave Hitlerism the chance to raise its ugl> head.

America, as every other Allied nation, lies in the shades of a black night of scrrow, but her people believe that night will bieak into a glowing dawn, the dawn of a day of the four freedoms which President Roosevelt so proudly envisaged after his country was forced into the great adventure of war. They will abate no jot or tittle of their effoits to speed the coming of the day, for they know that anj r default on their part would revive the menace which he worked so nobly to defeat, giving his life as freely as any hero of the battlefield for the sake of humankind. The torch has been handed on, and it will be carried high, because, through their lost leader, Americans have realised that they must share in the common destiny of all freedom-loving peoples, that unless all these nations unite they will sooner or later be severally ground under the heel of dictatorial oppression. It was the fond illusion of manj . perhaps of most Americans that Lincoln was wrong when he said that America could not escape history. They believed that, fenced by the wide oceans, and guarded by the friendly British Navy, they could be indifferent onlookers at the quarrels of nations overseas, that they could be a great Power without being involved in any way by the ambitions of other Powers, that the domination of Europe and Asia by a slavemaking race would leave them unaffected. President Roosevelt, aided by the course of the events of the last six-years, tore those scales from their eyes, and gave to them a new concept of their dangers and their duty. America as her great publicists frankly admit, has been bankrupt of foreign policy from the beginning of this century. The nation was divided on the issues of "imperialism," on intervention in the first worl war, on participation in the settlement of that Avar, cn reconstruction after it, on measures to prevent the second world war, and on the necessity of and the time for intervention, until the Japanese forced a decision on those two points. They know now that the frontiers of the United .. .Stats are the coasts of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Japanese mainland, even beyond, those coasts where aeroplanes can take off or rockets begin t h eir stratospheric missions of destruction. They realise that no longe can America wait passively in static defence until a powerful enemy '■looses his own landing place, and that the relations of Britain Russia the United States must decide the issues of peace or war for the Hemisphere as well as for the Old World. President Truman - ill been a follower, even a disciple, of the dead leader, has absorbed the ?— — a continuing peace.