The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

AMERICA’S attitude toward the war in the Pacific presents some surprising difficulties — more because of our relations with our Allies than with our enemy. We must exercise great care to keep on good terms with our Allies.

Debate over our relations with China and our struggle with Japan has no foundation in long familiarity with the peoples and the problems of these countries. Because Asia and the Pacific present few of the familiar landmarks of Europe, it is natural that reactions should be confused as public discussion turns toward the East. But if it is not surprising, it is nevertheless serious that we have no common ideological front with our ally in Asia — and that we are not fully convinced we must destroy our enemy.

Suspicion of China and reluctance to face the complete destruction of Japan are apparent in all discussions of the war in the East. Such an attitude arises from the fallacy that Asia is one and all Orientals are alike.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The peoples of Asia, which has never been any more united than Europe, differ widely. They differ in social, political, and economic life. We must remind ourselves it is no accident that the Chinese are our allies and the Japanese are our enemies. “No Chinese patriot,” as Dr. T. V. Soong has pointed out, “however blinded by his devotion, will claim that China has fully realized her own democratic faith. Our Chinese ally belongs naturally in our camp because she is a great, peacefully inclined country undergoing a process of democratic revolution.

Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese have kept on fighting in spite of our early reverses, “because they have a revolutionary faith . . . in the democracy Americans stand for.” In other words, the Chinese feel that they have a chance of building up, in coöperation with America, what they could never build up in coöperation with Japan: a world in which they would care to have their children live.

Will we help aroused Asia?

There is no need to he sentimental about China or Japan. On the contrary, realism has never been more necessary. So great have been the sufferings of the Chinese people that they have been expressing, both in public and behind the scenes, acute disappointment at the treatment they have received. Nothing could have been more diplomatic than the speeches of T. V. Soong on October 10 in America and on October 30 in Chungking. But both speeches made it clear that an understanding of the political sentiment of an “aroused Asia ” is a condition of good relations.

“The future of India is closely connected with the future of China.”China expects her democratic friends to help her with post-war reconstruction — she needs five billion dollars to carry out the program. But if the help is not forthcoming, “we will struggle forward by ourselves.”And the program, according to Dr. Soong, will resemble the five-year plans of Russia.

The reaction of our State Department in the immediate surrender of extraterritorial rights shows a willingness to march some of the way with China which is not shared by everyone. Indeed, Mr. Arthur Krock and Mr. Hugh Byas argued in the New York Times that the Chinese were too critical of the United States — because we could have had peace with Japan at any time if we had been willing to “sell China down the river.”

Nothing is quite so sentimental as the charge that America is at war with Japan because we refused to accept Japan’s conquests in China. The Chinese, in other words, are asked to congratulate us for being wise enough not to arrange a Far Eastern Munich, and for protesting against the violation of American rights and interests, rather than against aggression. Such a view is important only because it is misleading: it hides the real situation. Any truce with Japan on the basis of acceptance of Japanese conquests in China would indeed have been a Munich agreement, protecting America just as much as the historic Munich agreement protected England. Mr. Walter Lippmann asks the Chinese not only to congratulate us on not succeeding in appeasing the unappeasable, but also to take that remarkable fact as a guarantee of our good faith.

We cannot appease Japan

There was never any chance of appeasing Japan. There never has been and there never will be any chance of peace with Japan until the domestic power of the Japanese military ruling class is eliminated. Contrast Japan’s military ruling class, state capitalism, and feudal agriculture, its hatred of the West, its Messianic complex and lust for conquest, with China’s civil bureaucracy, incipient capitalism, intensive irrigational agriculture, and its respect for Western ideas and institutions. It would be idle to expect China, if she became the stronger power in the Far East, not to act in her own interests. But there is a chance of accommodating American and Chinese interests. There is no chance of dealing with contemporary Japan.

Suspicions of China arise from ignorance of the Far East and from fear that a strong China and a strong Russia might develop aggressive tendencies. Hence the reluctance to crush Japan. Hence the argument that the course of wisdom consists in maintaining a strong Japan in order to block the alleged ambitions of our present allies. Here we have the tribute that virtue pays to vice — the acceptance in our thinking of the assumptions of geopolitics, that perversion of political geography which the Germans have made so appealing to some by their theories of race. Those who would be the last to support the application of German race theories to the war in Europe are among the first to apply them unconsciously, to Asia.

Our own brand of geopolitics represents just one more example of the danger of thinking of the peoples of Asia as one race — and consequently as one society. Wars in the East, fortunately for us, have exactly the same causes as those in the West. But because most of the peoples of Asia at some time or other have been subject to Western imperialism, we find it difficult to accept the political independence of one, such as China, because of the implications this would have for others, such as India.

This division in political attitudes toward Asia would be less alarming if it were not reflected in strategy. The argument that supplies had to be withheld from China because there were not enough to go around would be more convincing if there were a united command and a common strategy within the United Nations. As it is, there is still every reason to believe that the China front has been neglected for political rather than for purely military reasons.

Let us not underestimate the difficulties of adjusting ourselves to “an aroused Asia,”but we shall be foolish if we resent the consequences. Winning the war in the Anglo-American manner, according to Mr. Churchill’s plan, — America helps Britain in Europe first and Britain helps America in the Pacific later, — will be long, costly, and guaranteed to lose the peace.

Our dilemma arises from the uncertainty of our future relations with our Oriental allies — China and India and the millions who live in our former Pacific possessions. Great Britain can trust America to renounce territorial ambitions in Europe. Can America trust Great Britain to share American ideas on the future of colonial Asia? And what are American ideas on that subject?

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Clearly, political difficulties must be overcome before we can begin to defeat Japan. So far, our strategy in the Pacific, though brightened by naval successes, is an excellent illustration of the absence of what China has been asking for — an executive council of the United Nations “capable of dispensing justice and enforcing law and order among nations during, as well as after, the war.”

Russia in Asia

The Pacific area includes not only Mr. Soong’s “aroused Asia,”but also the vast new Soviet power east of the Urals. As a result of migration which will not be reversed when the war is over, there are now an estimated 100,000,000 people between the Urals and the Pacific. These people are a power on the Pacific and in Central Asia in their own right. If the time should ever come when China should appeal to the Soviet Union for a political and military alliance, the means of communication are already developing. Besides the old route from China to the U.S.S.R. through the northwest there is the road from Chungking to Alma-Ata which links up with the railway system of Central Asia. The air route from China to the Soviet Union is very well developed. China need not look to Russia in Europe. She has to deal with an industrial power east of the Urals. The relation between China and Russia could easily be the determining factor in the industrial life and development of the East.

The future of our relations with China is a function of our relations with the Soviet Union. And this much is certain: the day has gone by when China turned only to the sea and could be controlled from the sea. There is no way of maintaining good relations with China and bad relations with the Soviet Union. But there is a very good chance, if we are willing to make full use of China’s potential political and military contributions, to develop good relations with both countries. The need for these good relations becomes even more important if we anticipate Japan’s future political offensive.

Japan wants to negotiate peace

We can expect that that offensive, when the time comes, will again be directed towards a Far Eastern Munich. Japan hopes to win this war by keeping the pot boiling as long as possible in Europe while she is consolidating her Empire. She will appeal to war-weary nations to come to terms on the basis of accepting her conquests. To those who already favor having a strong Japan to counterbalance China and the Soviet Union, she will expect to add in America large numbers who will be tired of war. And the more America becomes independent of raw materials formerly imported from Southeastern Asia, the better the chances of such a peace will appear.

Can Japan consolidate her Empire? Judging by past experience, Japan has been able to develop those areas in which she has not met with strong political opposition. In Korea and Formosa, as well as in Manchuria, she has succeeded in development and exploitation. In China, where she is vigorously opposed, she has failed. She has not been able to make extensive use of Chinese manpower — one of the main things she wanted. She has destroyed the markets she was out to capture; by the process of conquest, she has impoverished a nation. It is possible that her whole economic program of using war to feed war may lead to its own destruction. But that is a long process which we can hasten only by the consolidation and development of political opposition among all the people of Asia.

WHAT IS OUR PACIFIC POLICY?

Real progress in the Pacific War still depends, therefore, upon our political rather than our military offensive. Formulation of the first is indeed a condition of the second. Few things, however, are more difficult of achievement. There can be no solid basis for a political offensive until America has worked out its philosophy for the future. Do we see America’s role as that of the balancer of power in the old-fashioned sense, that of a world empire with Great Britain as a junior partner, or that of a member of an embryonic world government in union with China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union? We must make up our minds.