EAST AND WEST: PENDING CHANGES

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 42, 17 August 1918, Page 6

EAST AND WEST: PENDING CHANGES

"President Wilson is firmly convinced that America's policy ought to be centred on the Western front, and should decline to bo driven from that one thing." This announcement, made through General March, does not exclude military action in the East; America is, indeed, already a participant in two military undertakings in Russia—one in North Russia and one in Siberia. If the Wilson-March pronouncement means simply that provision to secure decisive victory in the W«st is a prime necessity and a sine qua non, there is, in this, nothing inconsistent with Allied policy as it is generally understood. That policy we have summed up as under:

Allied policy is ... to seize every chance of exerting direct pressure in tho Eastern theatre, consistent with not compromising the chance to secure the decisive Western victory. Two things are basic to Allied success. The first is sea-powor, which includes the holding of the submarine peril; the second is military victory in the West. If possible, military supremacy in the East must be added to these twain, but without compromising them. Not an ounce of strength necessary to the West, should he sent East. But neither should the exercise of power in tho East be neglected when it is oxercisable without projudice to the basic plan.

The Westerner or the Easterner who could not subscribe to such a policy as this is probably both rare and abnormal. The real point of difference is not the principle, but the application of it; the difference lies in conflicting estimates of the military force essential in the West. But the success and authority achieved by Marshal Foch are surely a sufficient safeguard against any possible future neglect of the Western forces, the Grand Army of the Alliance.

President Wilson, has never given, the slightest sign of being narrowly Western in military method, and in political outlook no undue Westernism can be alleged against him. His speeches show how clearly he recognises the threat of the Berlin-Bagdad policy, which he has condemned as an attempt to outflank nations and commerce, and to dominate the world. In April last he specifically denounced the German plan to buVjby Western concessions, "a free hand in Russia and the East." On that occasion Wilson said:—

Their (the Germans') purpose is undoubtedly to make all the Slavic peoples, all the free and ambitious nations of the Baltic Peninsula, all the lands that Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to their will and ambition, and built upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy that they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy—an empire as hostile to the Americans aa to the Europo which it will overawes — an empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the peoples of the Far East.

This is the utterance of a statesman who sees the situation as a whole. In America there is no doubt whatever that German aggression must be put down in the East as well as in the West; and any doubt that exists as to whether the army establishment (1,700,000) shall be raised to 4,000,000 or to 5,000,000 will in duo course be dissipated by the march of events, Military strategy progresses according to circumstances, and will soon discover what total number of men is needed, what proportion in the West, and what proportion in the East. Even at this moment Germany's effort to buy Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian troops for the West front, at the price of a now partition of the Russian . borderland, hangs in the balance. If, on the other hand, the Eussian counter-revolution assumes a. strongly anti-German character, tho enemy may find that the front demanding reinforcement is not tho West, but the East. Meanwhile tho supreme strategist of the Allied group proceeds on his victorious way in masterful

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