Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (March 8, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Hope of world freedom rests on American-British power
By Dorothy Thompson
One thing is certain about Mr. Churchill’s speech: It was edited and re-edited, and had the general approval of the United States government.
It was uttered simultaneously with the sending of an American note to the Soviet government insisting on the sanctity of specific signed agreements regarding Manchuria and Iran. In both places the situation is urgently acute. According to the Chinese government, all Japanese enterprises in Manchuria which had rendered services to the Japanese Army are being regarded by the Soviets as “war booty.” That means, of course, the major industries, for Japan held this territory for 13 full years. Supplementing this action has been Russian pressure on China for the joint operation of Manchurian industry, a preposterous proposition to make an allied power.
The other note concerned the Soviet breach of treaty regarding the removal of Russian troops from Iran on March 2. Far from evacuating, the Soviets are using the presence of troops to make further demands on the Iranian government.
If the American people are shocked by the succession of speeches culminating in Mr. Churchill’s, it is because, until the last few weeks, there has been a disposition to play down the seriousness of the situation, and to hope that a conciliatory attitude would be more fruitful than a firm stand. But the fact is that nearly every agreement made by the Soviet government in Teheran and Yalta, all of which contained extraordinary concessions to the Soviets, has been cynically violated.
Two things have been cardinal principles of American foreign policy for generations: The sanctity of treaties, and the Open Door in China, whose object is to prevent that great area of Southern Asia from becoming the economic and thus eventually the political vassal of any external power. So important did we regard Manchuria that Mr. Stimson urged League of Nations intervention with our assistance against the Japanese aggrandizement in 1931. To have won the Japanese war on the atolls and islands of the Pacific in order that the Soviets should supplant the Japanese is unthinkable.
The eventual freedom of the entire colonial world rests on only one hope – the power of America and Britain to encourage that freedom under adequate protection against minority coups d’etat, and with sufficient power, to assure that countries nominally “liberated” will not merely be transferred to another empire far more tyrannous to the population and dangerous to ourselves than any of the western empires have been.
While one may have reservations regarding some parts of Mr. Churchill’s speech, his main thesis is correct. Peace cannot be kept by the precariously poised balance of power which has developed so rapidly toward the present crisis, but can only be maintained by (1) overwhelming power displayed by a United Nations in support of clearly formulated international law or (2) overwhelming and unchallengeable power in the hands of one power or coalition of powers.
The former is the end we all desire, but the existing structure of the United Nations, which neither the Soviet Union nor its supporters anywhere are willing to strengthen or modify, is incapable of putting restraints on aggressions of either great powers or satellites which are their agents. The countries whose peoples are receptive to the idea of a real United Nations, with liberty and justice for all, under enforceable law, are the British, American, and Chinese. There is not, I think, the slightest doubt that the Soviet peoples would be receptive to it, but there is no way of presenting the proposition to them as long as their government is against it.
This fact, of a non-existent free public opinion in the Soviet Union, and of its suppression wherever the Soviet Union extends, is the greatest single impediment to peace and understanding in the world today.
In any case only power can create such a world organization, as Mr. Churchill clearly recognizes. Peace, law, security and every hope of serene, progressive development toward greater justice and freedom, or even the maintenance of as much as presently exists, rest on power.
Britain and the United States possess it, overwhelmingly together, but not separately, and it is a cardinal Soviet policy to divide us. Both our countries have governments watched and responsive to the people, with whom rests the ultimate responsibility to use that power for the creation of security under law as widely as we can extend it.
If we fail to take the responsibility, we can be certain of one thing – the world, during the rest of this century, will be shaken to its foundations by civil wars, fomented and decided by interventionisms on the pattern of China and Spain. Parties fighting each other within and without will reduce mankind to a jungle level. And Spengler’s prophecy regarding western civilization will be fulfilled – not sometime, but in this century.