The Waikato Times WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1944 AMERICAN CONCEPTION OF WORLD PEACE

Waikato Times, Volume 194, Issue 22321, 12 April 1944, Page 2

The Waikato Times WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1944 AMERICAN CONCEPTION OF WORLD PEACE

Mr Cordell Hull in his striking statement of American foreign policy has contrived to inspire hope for the post-war world. If the statement is carefully analysed it will be found that the hope springs not from any departure from well-recognised essentials to world peace and progress but from the undertaking of the United States to co-operate fully in the reconstruction. Mr Hull is conscious of the fact that after the last war the United States opened a somewhat similar prospect and then at the last moment withdrew from the League of Nations and thus robbed of power at its birth the most promising peace organisation ever launched. Sceptics will say the same thing may happen again, but they should not forget that the experience of the past 25 years has had an indelible effect on the minds of the American people. “ Isolationism” is not yet dead but the prospect that it will again sway American foreign policy is far more remote.

Broadly the meaning of Mr Hull’s declaration is that the United States is inevitably committed to international co-operation, which demands full collaboration with Britain, Russia and China in fighting for victory and founding the new world peace. Nazi and Fascist ideologies must be utterly destroyed. Having achieved the victory the great Powers must bring into being an organisation “which must be based on the firm and binding obligation that member nations will not use force against each other or against any other nation, excepting in accordance with arrangements made. It must provide for the maintenance of adequate forces to preserve peace and for constitutions and procedures for calling this force into action to preserve peace.” In other words, United States policy has turned the full circle and returned to the original concept of the League of Nations. Was there any alternative? American policy recognises also that the framework of a world peace organisation having been erected it is necessary to furbish it with the more intimately human requirements for the happy and progressive existence of all the people concerned as individuals. The heart of this matter, Mr Hull said, “lay in action which would stimulate and expand production in industry and agriculture and free international commerce from excessive and unreasonable restrictions.” This recognition of the fundamental importance of economic and financial justice to the common man and woman may present even greater difficulties than the formulation of a system of international justice. But of course international justice and justice to the individual are inextricably bound together. If the relations of the nations, as individuals, are sounded and solved to their ultimate depths, economically and politically, most individual problems will be well on the way to solution. Besides being politically practicable the foundation tenets of the new order must be clean, just to all men and fully understood by everyone. Not only nations but individuals and groups of men are capable of tyranny.