The Evening Star (February 20, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Tension due to expansion of Soviet state
By Dorothy Thompson
There was nothing in the Stalin speech which was not in more veiled form in the Molotov speech of November 7. There was nothing in either that had not been made abundantly plain by Russian and international Communist policy in actual practice, since the end of the European war. Some people – and they are even among our own officials – have to have their noses rubbed into reality before they can see it, and then they are capable of pretending it is not there.
These people, and among them must be included now former Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., are political Coueists, who think that by infinitely repeating “We must have an efficient working relation with Russia,” they will bring that consummation to pass. An “efficient working relation” is never possible between nations or individuals except through the mutual and sincere acceptance of a common ground of principles.
We could have had an efficient working relation with Russia on the basis, for instance, of the Atlantic Charter, prohibiting territorial or other aggrandizement. It is not the difference in ideology which causes the present tension. It is the expansion of the Soviet state, using that ideology as an international power instrument and employing fifth column methods not only in neighboring states, but within the states of Russia’s allies anxious for that “efficient working relationship.”
We have got to be clear about the source of the tension. Before the American civil war, for instance, there was a conflict of ideology between North and South. But war came not because the difference of ideology and interest existed, but because one side (the South) sought not only to maintain it, but to extend it. In Lincoln’s words, “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union… the government claimed no right to do more than restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”
The same is true of this war. German Nazism was a cause of war only when its leaders sought an enlargement of it outside the German frontiers.
Mr. Lodge falls into the perpetual American error of overrating American power in the present world. He refers to “the emergence of the so-called superstates – the United States and Russia.” The United States is not a superstate in the sense of the USSR. We are actually the greatest of the nation-states. We do not wish to enlarge the United States. Russia is a multi-national empire embracing before the war 11 different nations to which, as a result of this war, five more have been added by direct annexation and 130,000,000 people – almost the population of the USA – together with all their resources, either by annexation or as satellites in Europe alone, while the pro-Russian parties, organized within all states, continue to act as spearheads for Russian policy despite wartime assurances to the contrary from Stalin.
Add to this the enormous rearmament program of Russia; the devolution of her military organization toward the frontiers; her geographical position, with huge land armies, that need no transportation across seas, from Manchuria to the Elbe; her unremitting propaganda that all non-communist states are, by nature, war-mongers; her isolationism of her own sphere and her interventionism in every other; her apparent aim to disintegrate all other world-empires – and become the heir to their parts.
“He has sent informers and spies amongst us,” says the indictment of the Declaration of Independence. The United States has suggested an international atomic commission to make a “working agreement” about the use of atomic energy. But at our gates, in Canada, an espionage scandal develops, which has more sinister implications than are presently visible. The Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, before ordering the Canadian trials, consulted with our State Department with the idea that the two governments should proceed simultaneously. In Canada? Canada can take care of her own officials discovered to be serving a foreign power. The spy ring obviously involves the United States and inferentially some of our own officials. But we are told, Mr. Byrnes doesn’t want to “rock U.S.-USSR relations.”
If these things represent “efficient working agreements,” we must ask, “efficient for whom?”