The Press Monday, February 9, 1925. A National Foreign Policy.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18302, 9 February 1925, Page 8

The Press Monday, February 9, 1925. A National Foreign Policy.

A long cable message in Saturday's "Press" gave the substance of a scries of special articles in "The Times" demanding a change in the conduct of the Foreign Office. This is not the first attempt of "The Times" recently to take hold of a profound national problem and settle it in a few thousand words. It will not be the last. "The Times" is a national institution, and rightly, and usually profitably, thinks and acts in the grand national manner. But with regard to the Foreign Office it is even more important at present to ask what our national policy is than to demand a cut and dried method of expressing it. It is true that if we cannot "agree upon and support" a common foreign policy it is "only a "question of time when [the Empire] "will separate into independent "States," but that means more than anything else that the nation should try to. understand what it is that we must at this given moment try to agroe upon. Mr Ramsay MaeDonald, whose conduct of foreign affairs was with one exception exceedingly good, suggested recently in the "Spectator" that the common ground of all parties at present is, first, that Britain* should undertake no further commitments in territorial administration or for iifae security of foreign States. "No co-operation with "foreign States should involve us in "military alliances, and we should "with absolute rigidity rofuse to bo "parties to all apparent solution of the "problem of national, or indeed international, security by the formation of such alliances." He even goes so far as to suggest that wftat happens in this respect within the next twelve months will decide, not whether there "may" be another but whether there "must" be. On t/he other hand, 'he argues that all parties without reserve champion the League of Nations, "not as an alliance which, "should a war break out, would secure "victory to one side, but as a eom"bination of nations to create tthe "machinery and the obligations noces"sary to maintain peace." He thinks that the two views jmplied here are still contending for mastery, but that the second is the national view, and must prevail if we knew what we were doing when wo signed the Covenant, and did not have our tongues in our checks. And on one other great question, our relations with America, he says that tho «tand taken by ( all partios is that we must co-operate with the United States if we can, but "pursue our own policy with America "or without it." Instead of trying to influence Americans by "European !'smiles or frowns," our policy, Mr MaeDonald says, is to carry out our own programme in the belief that Amoricaus will co-operate to the extent to which we work for progress and peace.. Mv MaeDonald has a good deal to say,*also, about continuity in foreign policy, and in spito of some wordiness ho says it well; but continuity is like the machinery by which our agreoment is to be. registered: it comes afterwards.