FOREIGN POLICY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 29, 3 August 1939, Page 8

FOREIGN POLICY

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Mr. Allardyce, in congratulating Messrs. Nordmeyer, McKeen, and Anderson, the Address-in-Reply debate trio, is over-bold when criticising British foreign policy, so were the three hon. members he congratulated. However, neither of Mr. Allardyce's foreign policy champions during their speeches improved the situation—on the contrary. In the first place, we are scarcely in a position to chide Great Britain, who put us on the map, and who is the only real pal that can keep us there. Mention is made by your correspondent of Manchukuo, Abyssinia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and China, and to all intents and purposes Great Britain should have policed the world, and saved these unfortunate countries from the ravages of the invaders. In regard to these nations it is a moot point as to whether Great Britain would have had the sole right to have interfered, or whether she could have saved them had she done so. Unaided, it would have been a sorry day for Great Britain and ourselves to have tackled Japan in 1931. The Singapore base was far from complete; Britain was in a virtual state of disarmament (thanks to a Labour Government), and no guarantee was given by America that her navy was available. Much the same state of affairs existed in 1937 in regard to Abyssinia. France was changing her Government almost daily, and would not, or could not, commit herself to support Great Britain in the Mediterranean, while the League of Nations for practical purposes was, as it still is, nonexistent.

Almost precisely the same conditions applied to Spain, with the unfavourable exception that Hitler was more prominently in the picture, threatening France on her western front and every British industrial centre within bombing range of Germany.

In the matter of Czecho-Slovakia, at no time had Great Britain guaranteed that nation, having realised that she was landlocked, and without Russia, from a military point of view, neither Great Britain nor France, without first conquering and marching through Germany, could have rendered any worthwhile assistance, and to have attempted to have done so would have set Europe aflame and staggered humanity.

Mr. Allardyce and the hon. members he rushes in print to congratulate in their fireside criticism are obviously unable to visualise the meaning of another European war and its repercussion on the rest of the world. They merely harp back on the tragic history of the last eight years or so, and look for a scapegoat, little realising that democracy cannot escape its portion of blame. Mr. Allardyce is in deadly fear of Great Britain's prestige being lost, which it surely would have been (with New Zealand thrown in) had she embarked on the adventures he has inferred she should have done.

To read the criticism of some of our foreign policy advisers, one would assume that Great Britain knows nothing of her own strength, or her enemies, and that a few doses of soft talk on social justice would appease and cool the blood of the dictators. This is not so, and the only language they understand is "force, and plenty of it." This is a regrettable statement to make, but what counts in any crisis of an international character when at cross-purposes Avith dictators is not moral justification, but superior force, and the sooner Mr. Allardyce and his Parliamentary friends wake up to this most pertinent fact the sooner will they be able to appreciate some of the fundamentals of foreign policy. I would further remind them that up to date we are more of a burden- than a help to Great Britain, and till we can stand securely on our own feet, and are prepared to make equal sacrifice with the Old Country in the interest of world peace, matters of foreign policy will be best left to those who are acquainted with the facts, and realise that their first and foremost duty is to their own people. —I am, etc., DEMOCRAT.