THE WEST AND THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 21, 24 July 1940, Page 8

THE WEST AND THE WAR

The Pan-American Conference at Havana this week is of importance hardly paralleled in the past because it represents a rallying of the nations of the Western Hemisphere against a threat to their security looming up like a. storm-cloud on the distant horizon of the Old World in the East. Mr. Cordell Hull, the United States Secretary of State, representing by far the most powerful member State of the conference, made all that clear in his address to delegates at the opening. The threat is both political and economic. Politically the threat is the most serious since the Great Powers of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars cast covetous eyes on Latin America, then in the process of emancipation from the disintegrating rule of Spain. It was this danger of the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in Central and South America becoming a battleground for European imperialism that caused President Monroe, with the support of Britain, to promulgate, in 1823, the famous Monroe Doctrine which has guided American policy ever afterwards towards European intervention in the Americas. But Latin America, from the Rio Grande to

Cape Horn, has remained, economically, one of the world's greatest markets for the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods, and, culturally, more closely connected with Europe than with North America. Britain, which played a prominent part in the South American wars of independence, has long had very material interests in that continent, but has not interfered with the politics of the individual republics, in marked contrast with Germany, especially since the advent of the Nazi regime. In several States, notably Brazil, where there is a large German colony, the Nazis have even fomented internal trouble and endeavoured to seize supreme power. It is the strength of this Nazi influence in Latin America that has caused concern all over the two Americas and will* no doubt be fully discussed at the Havana conference.

There is also the effect of the war on the economy of the Latin American States. They are mainly producers of raw material and foodstuffs, for which the main market was Europe, now cut off by the war. It is to combat the dislocation caused by the accumulated and unmarketable surpluses that the United States Government has proposed an extensive system of co-operation under a special "Inter-American" committee provided with substantial funds. In a message which coincided with Mr. Hull's 1 speech to the conference President Roosevelt asked Congress to lend five hundred million dollars for the "purchase of surplus products" from the Latin American countries, "as the first step in the economic offensive against penetration by the totalitarian Powers." The idea is to "avert the necessity" for these countries to "bargain as best they can," presumably with Italy, Germany, and Japan. A further object of the organisation will be to tide over the transition from war to peace by preventing the excessive fluctuation which characterised the period immediately following the Great War. Other questions will no doubt occupy die Havana conference, among them the fate of European possessions in the Western Hemisphere, mentioned by Mr. Hull, who emphasised that the United States could not permit them to become "the subject of barter in the settlement of European differences or a battleground for the adjustment of such differences." He suggested a "collective trusteeship" in the name of all the American republics. In the meantime, there are more urgent problems pressing for immediate attention, and to these the conference, at the suggestion of the Argentina delegate, will no doubt give priority.