The Evening Star (April 10, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
We are entering armament race and tying our own feet
By Dorothy Thompson
Gen. Eisenhower, in his Army Day speech, reiterated the theme of Gen. MacArthur: “The goal is the universal renunciation of war… with certainty.”
That is possible presuming that the U.N. governments mean business – to make the Kellogg-Briand pact a reality, and abolish every possibility of force as an instrument of national policy.
But the United States cannot disarm on that assumption. The Soviet Union – a dictatorship ruled by a party of world-embracing ambitions, and a philosophy which affirms violent struggle as the only road to progress – is rebuilding an army of 15,000,000 men, adding new armed forces from neighboring states and proselyting people from all nations into its international party and instrument.
Our government, it seems to me, has failed to initiate a radical move to abolish war while permitting our military defenses to decay and our internal affairs to drift, at the same time collaborating in political decisions which create easy opportunities for a powerful aggressor and the likelihood of another war – after we have put ourselves in the best position to lose it.
We are thus both entering an armament race, and tying our own feet.
As long as war is a possibility, it should be an axiom of American foreign policy never to permit a situation to form under which any power could attack and defeat us, while we could not defeat it. As long as war is a possibility, we should take a leaf from the book of the Soviet Union and regard as possible aggressors against us all countries powerful enough to risk such a venture.
The Soviet Union would be in a position to do so if it controls Europe. It can control Europe if it controls Germany. Our political policies are leading inexorably in that direction. The Potsdam agreement was, for the United States and Britain, the most disastrous political action of this war. Through it we are creating all but the certainty that Germany will produce, not another Hitler, but another Tito to add German labor, science, ingenuity and military aptitude to what is already the most powerful military state on earth. That will be the German “revenge-politics” of the future. If we go on as we are.
Just as Hitler during the Russo-German pact moved or developed industry eastward to protect production from British bombings and western invasion, so we are now helping move all German heavy industries into the Soviet military complex or destroying them. The Silesian, Czech and Austrian heavy industries, of incomparable use to Hitler, the Yugoslav copper mines, and all the oil of Europe, Polish, Romanian and Austrian, are at the disposal of the Soviets. The Polish oil fields were taken by the Soviet Union from an “ally”; Austrian oil, first discovered and developed by American initiative, is wholly in Soviet hands; Romanian oil belonging to American, British and Dutch firms has been taken by the Soviets without compensation.
The Soviets themselves assert that their oil reserves are above American oil reserves without the oil of Europe. Now, in all probability, the Soviets will add that of Northern Iran. All of this is at Soviet disposal within a contiguous land complex.
The only great heavy industry left in Europe is that of the Ruhr-Saar. That we are engaged in dismantling. The Soviets do not want the Ruhr to go to France. Any proposal to Europeanize it meets demand for Soviet participation, though there is no western participation in Eastern German heavy industry.
The latest decrees for Germany ban 14 additional industries, including synthetic gasoline, oil and rubber, and seek to establish for 70,000,000 people the living standard of 1932 – the year of highest unemployment and unrest that brought Hitler.
Germany may have light industries, but these need tools, oil, rubber, machinery, metals. Germany can pay for them only by exporting consumer goods. But to whom? Certainly not the United States! Germany can find a reciprocal market and source of supply only in the Soviet Union. Her only hope to keep her workers employed under present arrangements is to tie her economy with the Soviets, exactly as the light industries of Hitler’s Europe had to work with, and for German owners of heavy industry, a plan which when practiced by Germans was correctly called “Raubwirtschaft.”
Politics follows economic necessity. The necessity we are creating for Germany is to join the Soviet economy or perish.
The negative American policy plus starvation will inevitably produce a German Tito to combine a purge of anti-Communist elements (called Nazi collaborators) with patriotism and revenge directed against the west.
Yet Potsdam was not an American policy. We were committed to its insanities without foresight, discussion or approval of Congress.
This writer wants to be on the record before the American people against the almost certain results of this policy for our freedom and security and to urge that we make a radical move for the abolition of war. If that fails, we shall know where we stand.