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Show General llOH HUGH S. Johnson i I Jour: l Umuiiraiur J WNUSnvka Washington, D. C. MUST WIN MARKETS It is all right by Pan-American conferences and unions, to create as much good-will as possible, but let's not kid ourselves into any reliance on them or into heavy commitments on our side. The plainest lesson of this war is that dependence on any kind of collective col-lective security among nations is madness. Each nation will follow the path of its individual interest and its former friends must take care of themselves regardless of treaties or alliances. There is nothing new about this. George Washington said it almost a century and a half ago. It had been proved many times then. Never has it been so clearly proved as in the past seven years. The fall of the little central European Euro-pean nations of the cordon sanitaire, which vainly relied on France, as she vainly relied on them, proved it no less clearly than the fall of France and the deadly peril of Britain Brit-ain among the strongest nations on earth. In a military, economic and racial sense, the strength and the ties that bound England, Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium were many times greater than any Pan-American union could possibly be. The recorded stability and responsibility respon-sibility of those nations were far better than those of any Latin-American country. Yet that community of interest proved a rope of sand. Of course, the principle of our policy is to allay actual jealousy and ill-feeling to the south of us, to procure naval and air bases absolutely absolute-ly necessary to our defense and to make it harder for any sudden Nazi-engineered eruption in a South American country to surprise us with an axis-country in this hemisphere. hemi-sphere. O. K., but let's not deceive ourselves on its value or give away our body, soul and breeches in the process. When this war is over, the business busi-ness of this world has got to proceed. pro-ceed. If we are not going back to the Glacial age, international commerce com-merce must continue. While England Eng-land has a sporting chance to defend de-fend herself and her empire, there is going to be a new industrial situation situa-tion in Europe. It may not be the dream of Napoleon (by force) or Briand (by agreement) a United States of Europe on our model. But it will be a great industrial grouping group-ing no longer frozen into a honeycomb honey-comb of water-tight trade compartments compart-ments by tariff barriers. It needs markets and it needs raw materials especially such foodstuffs food-stuffs as South America and this country produces in vast surplus. Is it our policy to prevent this exchange of merchandise either by some vast cartel through which we buy the mountainous surplus of South American Amer-ican meat and grain and add to our own unmanageable abundance, or by diplomatic or naval quarantine? Something that points in that direction direc-tion has been suggested for the Havana Ha-vana conference. We must not rely on any military promises of that conference. We must not there engage en-gage to underwrite the exports of this hemisphere. Our job on the military and naval side is to get too strong for anybody any-body to dare to intimidate us on the economic side. The economic side is not to intimidate or subsidize subsi-dize others. It is to win and hold markets in the only way it can be done permanently and soundly by producing better goods and services at lower prices. The outlines of this proposed $2,000,000,000 cartel system are not yet clear but they seem to be a new boondoggling futility so vast as to make all the other magnificent squandering put together look like a poor piker's penny arjte. TWO-WAY DOCTRINE An editorial in the Washington Post emphasized that the Monroe Doctrine is a two-way street. The forgotten part is: "In wars of European powers relating to themselves we have never taken any part nor does it comport with our policy to do so . . . our policy in regard to. Europe . . . remains the same, which is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; pow-ers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government to us." This is much too often forgotten. The "military expert" Major Eliot has now joined our "military expert" ex-pert" secretary of war in insisting that we make our harbors bases for the British fleet. Of course, this would be war. To excuse it as "undeclared war" or "undercover war" is to adopt the very poisonous deceit we so lately condemned in Spain and China and other unfortunate lands. Why should we rush to war with many of the controlling strategic developments de-velopments still unknown? The tide of battle may turn eastward. Russia Rus-sia may collide with either Japan or Germany. The British navy is still so superior that it doesn't need ours we have no army or equipment to send. |