London

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE Republican landslide, following the WallaceByrnes controversy, has made Britain re-examine her defense and foreign policy. The result is selfquestioning, uncertainty, and fear.

The British have become jittery because the whole domestic edifice of their post-war plans, promises, and programs was erected upon the assumption of Anglo-American solidarity in world affairs. Now they questioned not only where American policy was headed, but also where British policy was either going of its own accord or else being dragged.

For the first time since Dunkirk, British public opinion and party lines became crossed and confused on foreign policy. The liberal Economist and the left-wing New Statesman and Nation led the widespread demand for a British foreign policy independent of America’s policy, a purely British one that would “mediate” between Russia and America; in other words, a policy which would be the British equivalent of the policy advocated earlier by Walter Lippmann, of American mediation between Russia and Britain.

It was even more confusing to find Anthony Eden speaking out for “a new spirit and a new approach to Soviet Russia” and ranging himself alongside such strange bedfellows as the Communist Party of Great Britain and all radicals in an attempt to avoid “entangling alliances” with America.

Secretary Byrnes strongly reaffirmed the bipartisan American policy in Paris and back home, and President Truman did likewise in his address welcoming the United Nations Assembly. Field Marshal Smuts addressed the Empire, and later the Dutch and Belgian peoples, trenchantly supporting Churchill’s plea for a United States of Europe (to begin in the West if necessary). He warned his hearers that much talk of peace did not make peace, and admonished those who put too much trust too soon in an unprepared United Nations that they would be wise to look to their defenses.

Britain’s new defense system

These speeches high-lighted a lot of seemingly unrelated news items which collectively made anything but a pretty picture. Between swift visits to the United States, Canada, the Middle East, and more distant points, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Montgomery, said a few well-chosen words on Britain’s need to learn from America’s rapid system of officer training.

News of the integration of Canadian military and naval training, standards, and weapons with those of the United States for hemispheric defense was played down in Britain just when the Labor Government was being pummeled parliamentarily for its inability to secure greater defense collaboration with the Dominions.

There were also the little-publicized movements of British and American naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. There were equally underpublicized projected Canadian-American maneuvers in the Arctic Northwest. From the Far East came a small news item reporting that the United Kingdom authorities are now developing a defense system there on the assumption that neither India and Burma nor Malaya (including Singapore) and Hongkong could be major British bases in the future.

The Eastern bases in the future would have to be Australia and New Zealand, which implies a falling back from the new post-war Asia’s mainland. And South Africa began to be played up as the biggest overseas base in the event of any closing of the Mediterranean.

On top of all this came two official admissions about Britain’s post-war defense dilemma: the Government’s White Paper on the need to create a new and single defense ministry, and the Government’s overdue confession that post-war recruiting programs for the Army and the Royal Air Force were almost two-thirds behind schedule.

So grave was the lag in recruiting that the Government was considering not only lengthening the scheduled period of service for draftees but also compulsory part-time service for ex-draftees in the territorial militia. Since the Government’s objective for all post-war armed services was set at just over a million men, of whom only half were in training, the news of this lag had two immediate effects.

Britain’s grand strategy

First, it threw a more comprehensible, if to Britishers more alarming, light on the Government’s policies and positions and actions relating to Greece, Palestine, India, Egypt, Burma, and the Far East. Second, it led Churchill in the October foreign affairs debate to make a grandstand play with the figure of 200 Russian divisions strung across Europe alone (an estimate later whittled down by Stalin to 60 understaffed divisions), and to demand from the Government what it proposed to do to meet British defensive weaknesses.

Nine months ago the General Staff reportedly advised the Cabinet to pull out even the mere three or four British divisions locked up in Greece and Palestine. If military experts viewed this as too great a commitment, if the new Indian-run Indian Army must be left to look after affairs around the Persian Gulf, if British forces were unable in the future to operate in the mainland of Far Eastern Asia because of inability to maintain major bases there, the logical conclusion was inescapable even for Britishers themselves. It was that, in the age of the atom bomb and guided missiles and bacteriological warfare, Britain’s vulnerability in the home islands cannot be exaggerated.

Britain’s forty-eight millions are packed in the little islands within rocket range of the Continent. They are dependent for food and raw materials and oil (now replacing Britain’s dwindling coal) on shipping and ports and railroads and cities. They are now coming to view the geographical limits of their home defenses as running from the North Cape in Norway down across Europe and ending at some hitherto undefined terminus in the Middle East. At that terminus Britain’s defense sphere meets that of the new India and the new Egypt.

If these are the defense boundaries of Britain, they naturally tend to become the boundaries of British foreign policy, especially as far as any initiatives go. For a defense policy still underlies and underpins a foreign policy for modern nations.

The Palestine imbroglio, which Churchill now proposes should be handed over to the United Nations, the ferment throughout the Moslem and Arab world, the Anglo-Egyptian accord for full alliance, the Turkish vulnerability around the Straits, and the Russian thrusts everywhere, simply underline for the British their great need to ensure orderly and peaceful political and economic developments, however new and strange they may be, on the fringes of an area more vital to Britain than ever.

With fewer able-bodied males in civilian work than before the war, with armed forces double the prewar figures yet insufficient for commitments, with Lord Beveridge’s “full employment” already overtaken by manpower shortages everywhere, with paramount post-war needs of three-quarters more exports than pre-war and double the output of new industrial apparatus, Britain is steering her defense and foreign policy through perilous waters.

America’s loan will help for another two or three years. But then the sellers’ markets may have disappeared and Britain will face a highly competitive world after great domestic, political, and economic convulsions.

Can Britain go it alone?

The Government’s quandary is obvious in the White Paper on a new defense ministry. “The higher defense organization which His Majesty’s Government has decided to introduce” rightly aims to secure the utmost economy in resources. It is a plan “for defense to be dealt with as a single problem in the light of the economic position and strategic requirements of the country.” It elevates the wartime Chiefs of Staff Committee to an independent and permanent status with over-all powers.

But if the country’s resources are to be limited in the post-war period, so are its defensive strategic requirements. The country is now thrown back largely on its own position and resources as a European power. In the debates on the White Paper it was obvious that all the Dominions except South Africa had made clear in London early in 1946 their inability to contribute much to the defenses of the mother country.

In the post-war world of power politics Britain is unable to play her traditional dual role: namely, a great power in Europe up to the borders of Asia and Africa, and also the leading member of a worldwide — but not “regional” in the United Nations Charter’s sense — association of like-minded nations with a common defense interest.

The White Paper admits this. Speaking of coöperation with the Dominions, it says: “Regional questions shall in the first place be studied in the appropriate regional center.” In view of the Imperial General Staff’s decision to decentralize parts of strategic industries and proving grounds to locations in the Dominions, and in view of the Canadian integration of defenses with those of the United States, many Britishers in the mother country feel that the Imperial defenses have improved but the United Kingdom’s defenses have deteriorated — which is not comfortable thinking.

Over a century ago Tocqueville saw the impossibility of organizing the British Commonwealth for Britain’s defense in Europe, because of the rise of two great powers to dominating positions in the world: Russia and America. Eighty years ago Walter Bagehot tried to make Britishers see it. War, Wallace, and the Republicans have brought it home to them. But to bring home is not to solve.

The fate of Britain is bound up with that of Western Europe and its extension to the Middle East. But the fate of Western Europe is bound up with what America does or does not do, on one side, and with what Russia does or does not do, on the other. So even under the new notion of a United States of Europe the dilemma of British defense and foreign policy is unresolved. But with Western Europe marches Britain henceforth, for good or ill.

Britain develops psychoses

Hence the current feelings of exasperation, frustration, and apparent apathy (only apparent) among Britishers. As many privately admit, these are signs of a strange new British feeling of inferiority in the world. It is even felt by the British authorities. Mr. Bevin does not relish being constantly placed by the brutal facts of Britain’s position in the post-war world in a situation where he must appear on the defensive, apologetic, lacking in initiative, and playing second string to Mr. Byrnes.

In addition the Russians have played on Britain’s weaknesses and developed almost as great a persecution complex in British minds as they suffer from themselves. Whenever Mr. Bevin bangs his fist at a conference, whenever he repeats, as he did in the October foreign affairs debate in Commons, that Britain “cannot and will not be dismissed” and that she is “entitled to a proper place and adequate consideration of her views in t he councils of the nations,” these are outward symptoms of Britain’s changed fortune and position in the world.

The British Government’s policy is still based on the motto laid down by Churchill in days only a little more critical than now: “Westward look!” Even if the land in that direction no longer looks so bright, the direction is still the same. The Bevin policy remains keyed to the Byrnes policy. Butthoughtful Americans should find these facts — postwar Britain’s facts of life — mighty sobering.