The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE first abrupt flash of atomic power disclosed the imperatives that now surround the World Charter. It silhouetted also the mountainous problems that confront the peacemakers in Asia. The United States, which is chiefly responsible for the victory over Japan, emerges as the mistress of the Pacific. Our great responsibilities necessitate a careful overhauling of our policies in Asia.

We must move cautiously in the Pacific settlement, but caution will be invoked in vain unless we fully understand the fact that the greatest revolutionary movement of modern history has been going forward these past thirty years in Asia. Any policy that ignores this fact, or that fails to move with understanding in a spirit of coöperative democracy, is doomed to failure.

Russia deals herself in

Russia’s last-minute entrance into the Pacific war guarantees her a seat at the peace table. There is to be no repetition, this time, of what happened after the close of World War I, when the Asiatic settlement was made. Then, the Allied and Associated Powers disposed of the affairs of the Orient without bothering to consult either Russia’s interests or her wishes. And while the United States, China, Japan, and the European Colonial Powers were arranging things to suit themselves in Asia — on foundations since revealed as flimsy — some of them were even maintaining interventionary armies on Russian territory.

Russia was absent too from the Nine Power Pact and the Five Power Pact. But though she was not invited to the peace table then, events showed that she was under it. We must remember the assistance her revolutionary government extended to the Chinese Nationalists, whose revolt against the inequities of the settlement speedily churned Asia into chaos.

The Russia of those years was weak, wracked by revolutionary struggle, and under assault from without. Today the U.S.S.R. is the most formidable land power in Asia, as it is in Europe. The bulk of Russia’s population lives, not in Europe, but in Asia, where, since 1942, it has been performing prodigies of construction and industrial development.

Russia’s influence in Europe stems from her demonstrated military strength. But Asia looks upon the Soviet Union both as the maker of political and social patterns and as the champion against exploitive colonialism. Moscow’s espousal at San Francisco of the principle of full independence for colonial peoples has added to her prestige throughout the Orient. The fact that Russia had no colonies to give up makes little difference.

The revolutionary stir which pervades all Asia is marked by a view of the Japanese problem that is common from Kamchatka to the Middle East. Russia and China, for instance, believe that the safest Japan in the future will be the one envisaged in the Potsdam declaration — a Japan which has removed “all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people.”

Any survival of the old system of Japanese rule through retention of its imperial core means Japan’s continued isolation in Asia. The imperial system has shielded the Japanese people from the surges of change which have been transforming and modernizing that part of the world. Rid of that feudal incubus, a new Japan might rejoin the peoples of the continent of Asia as a partner in the reconstruction of their destinies. The question of the Emperor involves a way of life that is bankrupt.

These considerations will be present in Russia’s mind as she moves to take her seat at the peace table. They will also be present in the mind of Asia as a whole, which understands why Russian participation in the Pacific war was inevitable once Germany succumbed in Europe.

Russia’s stake in the Pacific

Primarily, Russia’s interests in the coming peace in Pacific Asia involve security for her Eastern frontiers. Almost certainly they also concern her plans for developing the rich territories behind the Russian border from Mongolia to the waters of the Pacific and the Bering Sea. That they will reveal a determination to cultivate the role of the Soviet Union as champion of political freedom and racial equality throughout Asia is equally clear.

Russia has achieved political solidarity among her constituent Republics in Siberia and has unlocked the hopes and energies of her heterogeneous population east of the Urals. There races diverse in history and origin, and given over to barbarism and mutual strife under the Czars, have been brought into a partnership which preserves the creative culture of each and honors the contributions of all.

Strategic security for Russia in Asia depends on the Pacific Ocean. That fact has been emphasized of late by two announcements from Moscow. The first, made a month after the downfall of Germany, is that the Soviet Union plans to develop one of the strongest navies afloat.

The second reminder of Russia’s interest in her Pacific seaways dropped quietly in the midst of the diplomatic hurly-burly attending Japan’s collapse. It was a laconic report that several hundred scientists and military experts have completed a survey, lasting more than a year, of the Kamchatka peninsula. The resources and geography of Kamchatka from the industrial and strategic standpoints have now been fully charted.

Kamchatka flanks the sea and air approaches to Asiatic Russia from the North Pacific. It presents also a long, exceedingly rugged barrier between the Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk, behind which lies the most important stretch of the eastern Siberian coast. From its lower tip the Kurile Islands run down, like a line of stepping stones, to Hokkaido, northernmost of the main islands of the Japanese archipelago which a defeated Japan will retain in accordance with the Potsdam ultimatum.

Behind this peninsula-island outwork lies the island of Sakhalin, whose lower half Japan has held under varying arrangements ever since the defeat of Russia in 1904. Every argument of geography and strategic realism points to a Russian bid to recover the whole of Sakhalin island, since it possesses oil resources needed to supply the Asiatic navy that Russia contemplates. Equally urgent strategic requirements promise to shift to the Soviet Union the sovereignty of the Kuriles, long held by Japan. They guard the gateway to the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific.

Korea and Manchuria

The fate of Japan’s continental strongholds in Korea and Manchuria promises to be less easily determined at the peace table. In the Cairo declaration, to which Russia did not subscribe because she was not in the Pacific war when it was made, Korea was promised ultimate freedom. The pledge was hazy and undefined, however. Was this possibly because Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek did not wish to step on Russia’s toes in Asia at a moment when they were seeking urgently to coördinate military strategy in Europe?

Korea, occupied by Japan in 1904, formally annexed in 1912, and now cut loose by Japan’s disintegration, presents the same kind of security problem for Russia in Asia that Poland does in Europe. The southern approaches to Russia’s greatest city in the Orient, Vladivostok, are controlled by this little country. The upper coast of the Yellow Sea is Korean also. Port Arthur, wrested from Russia by Japan in 1904, projects on the tip of the Liaotung peninsula directly into that highly important body of water.

During recent months frequent references to Port Arthur in the official Russian press have foreshadowed Russian determination to re-acquire full and unrestricted use of that great warm-water port. This policy expresses in the Far East the same pressure which Russia is exerting in the Baltic and in the Black Sea. It is a pressure for ice-free ports and for access to the open oceans.

The highly strategic position of Korea makes it probable that her future history will resemble that of Poland. Although the Polish parallel should not be pressed too far, Korea presents another similarity in the bitter split of Korean political opinion, with one faction demanding full collaboration with Russia, and another insisting upon absolute, untrammeled independence.

Mr. Soong goes to Moscow

The two visits to Moscow of Mr. T. V. Soong just before and during the crisis of the Japanese war undoubtedly represent an attempt to iron out differences between Russia and China regarding Manchuria. Pledges at Cairo stipulated its return to China. Russian interest in Manchuria is nevertheless strong, both strategically and economically. From Manchuria the Russian Far East has been repeatedly threatened during the present century.

Across the upper bulge of this territory runs the Chinese Eastern Railway, short-cutting the TransSiberian railroad with a direct run to Vladivostok. Russia was ousted from that valuable communications link by Japan in 1933-1934 by threat of war. Will Moscow be content to forget this now? Will she agree to permit transfer of the road to a Chinese sovereignty expanding northward? What arrangements are to be made to accommodate China’s sovereignty to Russia’s desire to regain Port Arthur, the key port of the whole of Northeastern Asia? Will the valuable port be internationalized?

Here are riddles galore. They promise to tax the ingenuity of the victorious Powers. It may prove far more difficult to unravel them than to find a basis for accommodation between China and Russia about Mongolia. That region may continue to maintain the political paradox of light obeisance to Chinese sovereignty and close association with the U.S.S.R.

China divided against herself

China’s internal problem now assumes tremendous importance. The Chungking Nationalist regime stands face to face once more with the strongly entrenched Chinese Communist forces in the northwest. The only semblance of unity China has had during the past decade has been provided by Japan’s effort at conquest, which caused Nationalists and Communists to bury their differences temporarily.

During the past two years even this reluctant coöperation has failed as the Chungking regime has come to be dominated more and more by the friends of landlordism and reaction who insist on war against the Communists. Since the essence of the Chinese Communist movement is not Communism in the Russian sense at all, but rather fundamental agrarian reforms which are centuries overdue, the gulf between the two factions is wide.

So far, Russian support of the Chinese Communists has been extremely mild and circumspect, perhaps because Moscow has no desire to be party to an alignment in Asia which might tend to muster either American or British support behind the other side in China’s internal revolution — for that is precisely what the persistent feud between Chungking and the northwest areas amounts to.

How do we stand?

With Japan disposed of, disunity in China will offer the most dangerous threat to the peace of Asia. It is notable that there is also disunity in American policy with regard to this Chinese dissension. American backers of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime should remember that he heads a transitional government, raised by the tides of revolutionary change.

The demands lately heard at Chungking for definite steps toward popular government under a constitution imply a resurgence of energy. And there can be no lasting reconciliation between supporters of the Nationalist Government and supporters of agrarian reform through any alignment tending to place the United States behind one, and Soviet Russia behind the other. That would spell disaster.

It will not do any good to minimize this danger, which ranges far beyond China. It affects every colonial holding in an Asia astir with the hope of independence. The loosening of Japan’s grip on Burma, Indo-China, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch Indies, and Thailand confronts the Colonial Powers, as well as an America whose business interests are already exerting their weight on the scales of policy, with a grave choice.

Do we intend to give genuine democratic guidance and economic coöperation to the peoples of Asia as they struggle toward the goal of freedom? Or is a new chapter in colonial exploitation to be written behind the screen of trusteeship pledges in the San Francisco Charter?

Is Thailand slipping?

Thailand, which possessed most of the attributes of self-government before the war in the Pacific, may suggest the answer. Franklin Roosevelt proposed that Thailand should be entirely independent and self-governing, once the war with Japan ended. London has lately urged that Thailand be placed under trusteeship, which presumably would mean British control and a new buffer state between Britain’s colonial holdings and China. If the San Francisco Charter means what it says, why not permit the people of Thailand to make their own choice?

It may be possible for the Colonial Powers and aggressive American business and industrial interests, working in partnership, to bamboozle their own people at home for a time, while they press exploitive policies in Asia, by uttering loud shouts about their liberating mission. But this game will not delude the Asiatics for a minute. They know it too well.

France, whose anxiety about the future of IndoChina has induced her to prepare a revolutionary revision of her entire political and economic set-up in that valuable Far Eastern possession, has begun to see the light which signals the end of colonialism in Asia. The Netherlands government is attempting to meet the powerful upsurge of nationalism among natives of Indonesia by proposing to admit the Indies to equal partnership in a federated empire.

Asia’s demand is for racial equality, self-rule, and mastery in its own household. The removal of Japan from the Oriental picture will augment that demand. Asia, aware that its renaissance is under way, balances what Russia has to offer with the performance of the Colonial Powers.