FOREIGN POLICY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4044, 6 May 1938, Page 7

FOREIGN POLICY

AMERICAN OBJECTS. HOW THEY ARE PURSUED. The present foreign policy of the United States—a continental nation separated by thousands of ocean miles from armed or embattled peoples of Europe and Asia—may be described in two ways, writes Arthur Krock, from Washington to the “New York Times.” It is a nucleus for world peace that changes form according to the nature of the obstacles it meets in advancing. That change of form with reference to difference of obstacle makes our foreign policy comparable to the President’s domestic policy as he stated it in the days of the national emergency of 1933. Mr. Roosevelt told those gathered at one of his early Press conferences that his strategy in attacking commodity prices was like that a football team would employ. He said:— “It is a little bit like a football team that has a general plan of game against the other side. Now, the captain and the quarter-back of that team know pretty well what the next plan is going to be, and they know the general strategy of the team; but they cannot tell you what the play after the next play is going to be until the next nlay is run off. If the play makes ten yards, the succeeding play will be different from what it would have been if they had been thrown for a loss. I think that is the easiest way to explain it.” The Twin Objectives. The goals of our foreign policy are American security and recovery through international recovery and world peace. Sometimes, it is true, Secretary Hull has been running with g.c ball in one direction and his Administration interference has been running in the other. But generally these are the goals. An early administration play was for international consultation in which we would participate. That play did not gain ground; in fact, American policy was definitely thrown for a loss because of the clamant suspicions of isolationists

and pacifists in the country that our Government was getting ready to “help police the world.” So the next play was that in the Far East—of independent parallel action based on the Stimson policy of several years ago, an entirely different formation from what it would have been if the consultation idea had reached the functioning stage. The whole strategy of end runs towards the goal of world peace was changed to the plodding line drives of the Hull Reciprocal Trade Agreements. And this is still going on, despite the assertions of many in the American grandstand that the team is losing ground by yards instead of gaining it by inches.

Viewed from the aspects of the proposed consultative pacts and the actual trade agreements, our foreign policy was accurately if unintentionally described by the President when he was discussing the commodity price levels in 1933. Its other aspect—that of a nucleus of realism in a huge circle of idealism that shrinks and widens with events —can best be recognised in the light of recent experiences in China and current happenings in Europe. The President and Secretary Hull miss no occasion to denounce treaty-breaking, international banditry, the racial basis of national policy, seizure of territory, and the like. They often extol the blessings of democracy and attack the denial of personal liberty under dictators. Mr. Roosevelt once went so far as to point out that nations guilty of these things could be “quarantined.” Administrative statesmen have proclaimed our singleness of spirit with the democracies, our willingness to reduce armament if the warlike Powers will do the same. That is the wide circle of idealism in our foreign policy, as wide as the world. Its realistic nucleus has included official disapproval of furnishing Italy with supplies during the Ethiopian campaign, the State Department’s classification of Japan as the aggressor in China; and munitions embargoes against zones of civil and international war . It has included the non-revocation by the President of the so-called Neutrality Act in the Far East, which is a help to the Chinese, with whose cause our Government definitely sympathises.