America to England

IT is therefore very difficult to ascertain, at present, what degree of sagacity the American democracy will display in the conduct of the foreign policy of the country; and upon this point its adversaries, as well as its advocates, must suspend their judgment.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, 1835

THE motto must be, ‘Never war again.’ The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe. I have assured Mr. Chamberlain, and I emphasize it now, that when this problem is solved Germany has no more territorial ambitions in Europe.

ADOLF HITLER, September 1938

THE United States is again at war with Germany. Technically we are at peace with the Third Reich; actually we are at war. We did not choose to help other nations keep the peace. We did not choose to use our herculean power to prevent wars. We had no foreign policy that made sense. We have been intoxicated by the sound of our own highflown words. ‘Cackling geese may have saved the capitol once; they will not save it a second time,’said General Weygand sadly, as he prepared to surrender France to the Nazis. Our foreign policy has recently been fashioned not in Washington but in Berlin. Our minds have been made up not in conferences of citizens in California, Mississippi, and New York, but on the battlefields of France. The remorseless logic of events — not reason, humanitarianism, or even self-preservation save at the desperate midnight hour of our despair — has driven us to the status of a belligerent nonbelligerent at a time when France is in chains and England is battling for her life against the mighty German armaments.

Make no mistake about it. The United States is now at war with Germany. Such have been the stupendous events of May and June, 1940, that the President, with the consent of a slow-footed Congress, has in effect already declared war upon Germany and committed warlike acts against her. A so-called neutral nation that detaches airplanes and other material from its military services and sells them to a belligerent — no matter by what legalistic sleight-of-hand the deal is accomplished — is at war with the opposing belligerents. Certainly the Nazis, who are masters of diplomatic prestidigitation, are not likely to be deceived by our clumsy international pea-game. But in the long run of events as they are seen in the light of recent history, it little matters whether a country that stands in the way of Hitler’s ambitions is at peace or at war with him. In his own time and in his own manner he will carry war to that country. What did it avail Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands that they preserved a scrupulous neutrality toward all the belligerents? They were throttled just the same. It is as futile to live by the diplomatic precedents of the first World War as it is futile to fight now with the weapons of that war.

The upshot of all this is that, for the first time since the founding of the Republic, America faces a hostile world in arms without a strong friend or an ally save perhaps wounded Britain. It faces a hungry, insatiably grasping, revolutionary, dynamic world driven ruthlessly forward with demonic energy by a small group of fanatically determined men with one of the most capable nations on earth at their back, and with most of Europe prostrate under their feet. We are, so to speak, One Against the World: this is the highest triumph of isolationism. Where are our friends? France is in chains; Britain battles for her life; Japan, our ally of 1917, is, if not actively hostile to us, noncoöperative. The South American countries? It is perilous to our security to lose them; we must protect them; and they have little to give us by way of active support.

It is a dangerous delusion to believe that Germany will leave us undisturbed to enjoy the luxuries of wrangling over the appointment of a postmaster at Red Oak, Iowa, or outguessing the experts on ‘Information, Please.’ For the Nazis are not only making war, but spreading world revolution. According to the tenets of this revolution, the United States contains all the elements that Germany is determined to exterminate. This country is democratic, capitalist, free-trading (that is, non-bartering), and Christian. These qualities are anathema to the Nazis. Hitler has repeatedly expressed his corrosive contempt for the ‘degenerate pluto-democracies,’ while Mussolini, calling his people to enter the war, appealed to ‘proletariat Italy.’ The Nazi world revolution, it is clear, can never be achieved so long as the incalculable resources and vast populations of North and South America remain beyond Nazi domination. The dynamism of Fascism will not be satiated until it achieves world dominion or collapse. The issue has long been drawn: We or they.

Under the circumstances, what can the United States do? (a) It can go to war now in the company of Britain. (b) Or it can rearm, attempt to defend North and South America, and reorganize its economy to be self-sufficient so far as that is possible.

If we grant — as most Americans now do — that our first frontier of defense was the Rhine, it follows that the last frontier has shifted to the English Channel where Britain is making a last stand against the world’s enemy and ours. Let Britain go under now, and we face alone the bombers and the gray-green hordes and the U-boats and the fifth columns and all the brutal, sordid stratagems of Germany. Let Britain die, and we let die the last stronghold of humaneness, of liberty, and of reason left in Europe. Let Britain die, and we face the loss of the import of vitally needed raw materials, of our overseas trade and investments, the ruin of our prosperity, the end of the kind of living and thinking that this country has enjoyed since the founding of the Republic; we face the centralization of government until it achieves or approaches totalitarianism, the prospect of violent internal revolution, and, in my opinion, eventual ruin. If we save wounded Britain, we may save ourselves; if we abandon her to death today, the chances are that we shall face death in a not too remote tomorrow.

If Britain goes, we shall have to fight a defensive war against the mightiest and most ruthless coalition of powers the world has ever known. The time and the place will be of Hitler’s choosing. He will have available to him the shipyards of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Within the continent of Europe the Nazis will find nearly everything they need for shipbuilding; what they do not find they can obtain with goods; and their ships will be built by a vast mass of skilled workers employed for a pittance. Under these circumstances Germany can build two or three ships to our one. We shall have to defend the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States, Canada, and Mexico; Alaska, the Gulf, the Caribbean, and Panama; Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, and much of South America. And if we assume that we are capable militarily, economically, and spiritually of successfully accomplishing a task of almost cosmic proportions, we shall nonetheless be eternally on the defensive. Our eyes will forever be turned seaward and skyward; our economy will be a military instead of a peace economy; our souls will have to be trained to an inexhaustible patience and a quality of steel resistance they have never known.

We know now that Britain and France, amid a host of other errors, made the fatal error of committing themselves to a war of defense. Why should we now with our eyes open consign ourselves to the same error? The primary object, therefore, of joining with England is to fight offensively — to carry the war to the enemy on his own terms on his own soil. We shall be fighting to preserve the British Isles as naval and air bases from which at some time in the future we might be able to launch unceasing and irresistible air attacks on Germany. Once the United States is organized for production, we can build planes faster than Germany. Certainly we can build them faster than a still fighting, warweakened Germany. We can train pilots. We can find mechanics. The future of the world might turn upon our present resolution to strike now before the last hope of striking shall be gone.

It is not necessary, for the purposes in view, to send millions of men to Europe. The question is one of airplane production and pilot training at home; of the transport of men, materials, and food; of the use of these men and materials against Germany in precisely the way she used her air force so crushingly against Poland and the Netherlands. The Nazis are neither superhuman nor invulnerable. Their bodies are maimed by bombs just as easily as French bodies; their factories collapse under explosion just as readily as English factories. By the continuous, unceasing employment of overwhelmingly superior air power the Nazi will to war can be broken as the Polish or Dutch will to resist was broken. Given time, we are capable of producing and applying that force. But we shall be able to do it eventually only if we act now while Britain still has the strength and the will to resist, while her mighty fleet is still intact. If anyone believes that we shall be spared by Hitler because we do not make war against him, let him go to bomb-blasted Rotterdam. If anyone believes in the superiority of the war of defense, let him visit France.

There are other possibilities. With the United States ranged alongside Britain, Turkey may enter the war. Russia, knowing that her day will come when Hitler has crushed England, may also enter the conflict. A war-weakened Germany would then have to dissipate her strength on other fronts, while Italy becomes a burden to her; and the remaining free countries of Europe, all of which dread an ultimate Hitler triumph, may align themselves against the Fascists. If this war can be continued, it will be won by the democracies. But its continuance depends upon what America does now.

If we join Britain, many men may be lost. Many billions will be spent. Against these the country must weigh the grim possibilities of the future as they affect the lives and liberties of 130,000,000 people; the enslavement or liberation of the whole western world; a descent into abysmal darkness or the beginning, perhaps, of a new era of light for all men everywhere.

Suppose, however, that we abandon England and Europe to their fate? It means that we must forever stand to arms, and for an indeterminate number of years spend fifteen to twenty billion dollars annually on armaments. To arm insufficiently is not to arm at all; to arm equally with the enemy is to run the risk of defeat; to arm in a manner overwhelmingly superior to the enemy is to assure the greatest probability of victory. Our defense problem is as great as or greater than that of the British Empire. Britain has recently been spending about ten billion dollars annually for arms. (Germany, it is reliably estimated, has spent about seventy-five billions during the past seven years.) Three considerations must be borne in mind in calculating prospective American arms expenditures: the vast territories, overseas and at home, that we must defend; the fact that costs are higher here than elsewhere; and the further fact that we must begin practically from scratch. It is not far wide of the mark, then, to assume that we shall have to spend fifteen to twenty billions annually for armaments for an indeterminate number of years. Add to this eight or nine billions for the ordinary federal budget and we shall have annual budgets of about twenty-five billion dollars, or more than one third of our present national income. But this by no means marks the end of our necessary efforts.

While engaged in a gigantic task of rearming we shall have to revise nearly every department of our economic life. This calls not only for a wisdom which we seem hitherto to have lacked and for an experienced civil service which we have never taken the trouble to create, but also — considered merely in money terms — for a new, vast, and expensive bureaucracy. We shall have to overhaul our agricultural production. There is little point in growing cotton, tobacco, and other crops when there will be no place to export them to save a Nazi-controlled Europe which will take them only in exchange for manufactures which we ourselves produce. And if, in the field of industrial exports, the loss of these exports is compensated for by the production of armaments, it must be remembered that arms are nonproductive instruments, the continued manufacture of which on a gargantuan scale must inevitably lower the standard of living of the people. We may find ourselves after a while — unless we show iron resolution and a greater spirit of sacrifice than any Americans have shown since the War between the States — in the position of France during the régime of Léon Blum. He then said that it was impossible for France to build armaments, service the national debt, and maintain the social services demanded by the people. No government that reduced armaments could survive; if the debt was not serviced there would be financial chaos; and if the social services were discontinued or curtailed there might be internal revolution. We are a far richer country than France, but the strain upon us will be enormous and perhaps eventually intolerable unless the people are determined to work without regard to hours and pay taxes without regard to personal comforts. That is the challenge easy-going, comfort-loving America faces.

So far we have been considering the measure of our efforts in terms of arms and the domestic economy. But turn to South America. In the Hitlerian world, economic domination precedes political domination. How are we to prevent Hitler’s economic-political domination of South America? The odds are with him. His economy is complementary to that of the South American countries: he needs their raw products and they need his machine products. Our economy, by and large, is antithetical to the South American: that is, we produce the same agricultural products and minerals that those countries produce, and so in the normal course of events we are debarred from taking great quantities of their goods in exchange for our manufactures. How, then, are we to keep Hitler out of South America? It is proposed that we set up a federal corporation with a capital of one or two billions. ‘Exportable surpluses of Western Hemisphere countries would be deposited with the corporation for orderly marketing.’ Ever since Hoover’s ill-fated Farm Board we have had with us the comforting phrase ‘orderly marketing’; ever since that day we have had the surpluses with us and Uncle Sam has taken the losses of orderliness. We now propose to take the surplus products of twenty-one countries and market them in an orderly manner in a hostile world when we have been able to do so little by way of marketing our own surpluses in a friendly world.

If, however, we guarantee a market to South America for her surplus products, what is there to prevent her from increasing her production? Are we going to lay down crop-control plans and administer them from Cape Horn to Panama in twenty-one countries of which one alone (Brazil) is larger than the United States? Are we to succeed on another continent, at a great distance, and among alien peoples, in doing what we have been able to do at home only with the greatest effort and at gigantic money cost? But if we do not, Latin America goes to Hitler. If, therefore, the plan succeeds at all, it will probably cost us between 300 and 500 millions a year. And while such a cost would be cheap in view of the purpose sought, it must come out of the pockets of the people of the United States.

It is impossible to envisage the myriad difficult and dangerous problems that we shall face in a Nazi-dominated world. One of them is already upon us. Congress has passed a joint resolution to the effect that no transfer of the possessions of one European power in this hemisphere to another would be tolerated by the United States. But suppose puppet Fascist governments arc erected in France and the Netherlands — governments which will control French and Dutch islands in this hemisphere for the actual benefit of the Nazis? What shall we do then? Or, rather, what should we do now? It is clear that we should now take over these possessions, alone or in concert with the LatinAmerican countries, and without so much as a by-your-leave from anybody. Is the United States a ladies’ sewing circle animated by the clacking of tongues, or is it a vigorous country preparing itself against the direst peril it has ever known?