Grand Strategy

President Roosevelt has . . . suffered a decisive defeat. ...

So gloated the German newspapers early last week. Yugoslavia had joined the Axis. That move would determine the course of life inside Yugoslavia (see p. 31), would shift the military balance in the Balkans. All over the world it would stand as another sign of the growing power of Hitler's new order and illustrate to Greece the folly of resistance. But the editors of Germany chiefly exulted in this:

President Roosevelt had been set back. Day later, the Yugoslav leaders who had signed with Hitler were out of office, under arrest; King Peter II was on the throne. Crowds stood cheering, waving U. S., British and Yugoslav flags, before the U. S. legation in Belgrade. Youngish, thin-lipped Arthur Bliss Lane, U. S. Minister, had to push his way through overjoyed celebrators to carry his message to the new Government. Hitler, not Roosevelt, had been set back. But still bigger news for the long term was that U. S. foreign policy had begun to prove effective.

In Washington, Constantin Fotitch, short, shy and excitable Yugoslav Minister, rushed to see Sumner Welles, came out shining-eyed to cable his joy to King Peter II over "Your Majesty's ascent to the noble throne. . . ." Mr. Welles, less austere than usual, received the press, told the newsmen of the latest message to the U. S. Minister to Yugoslavia: that under the terms of the Lend-Lease Act, President Roosevelt would be able to send material aid to nations resisting aggression. It was a promise to the new Yugoslav Government that it could count on U. S. aid.

Effects. The exultant editorials vanished from the Axis press. While strategists debated on what Yugoslavia could do, in the event of a German attack, Washington's diplomats took stock of the power that the Lend-Lease Act enabled President Roosevelt to exercise. The U. S. had not engineered a coup in Yugoslavia. It had merely held out an incentive, there as elsewhere, to governments that followed policies compatible with its own. The first experiment had worked with terrific effect. But State Department officials were already thinking of future moves.

Russia was involved in one of them. Constantine Oumansky, Soviet Ambassador, has felt the chill of official displeasure for a long time in Washington. But last week he too was in Under Secretary Welles's office, hard on the heels of Constantin Fotitch. And last week when Russia agreed not to take advantage of Turkey's difficulties if Turkey went to war,

Sumner Welles, Acting Secretary of State during Cordell Hull's vacation, said at once: The U. S. was pleased when a great power like the Soviet Union reaffirmed its intention of maintaining its neutrality in the event that a neighboring country suffered attack. Not since the Bolsheviks took over has the U. S. called Russia a great power. But if Joseph Stalin was willing to release Turkey to help check Hitler in the Balkans, the U. S. could say friendly words, might even act upon them.

The fact that the Yugoslav news overshadowed the arrival of Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka in Berlin also had its importance. Last week Washington opinion was that the Yugoslav coup had tipped the scales against a Japanese move toward Singapore and the South Pacific. Said hopeful Senator George, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Japan will not make the mistake made by Italy in assuming a prompt end to the war, and a termination altogether favorable to Germany, in view of the events of the last 30 days." U. S. foreign policy was at any rate beginning to take an active part in the development of the world struggle.

Questions. Heretofore the pattern of U. S. foreign policy has been uninspired:

With each new advance of the Axis, the U. S. condemned aggression, froze the assets of the invaded country, repeated again its insistence on the rights of small nations, and then, when the Nazi war machine had rolled over another one, recognized the Government in exile. So it was with Norway, The Netherlands, Luxembourg; so it threatened to be for many more. It was a grim, unvaried procession, that at its best made U. S. policy seem well-meaning, unimaginative, unreal.

Many a critic condemned U. S. policy as too plodding. Many more thought it saddled the U. S. with moral commitments that it could not fulfill, or could fulfill only by an expenditure of blood and treasure out of all proportion to the gain. How could the many Governments in exile be restored to power? How could Hitler be overthrown without a U. S. expeditionary force? Colonel Lindbergh asked: What plan did the U. S. have for making itself effective in Europe? Other isolationist writers put a sharper question: How could supplying Britain with the "tools" do more than prolong the war? How could 2,000,000 British soldiers, even supplied with U. S. arms, "somehow plough their way through the Balkans and conquer 6,000,000 German soldiers?"

Last week the combination of Lend-Lease and Yugoslavia suggested an answer to Pundit Walter Lippmann: Britain could not have landed in Greece without the assurance of U. S. aid. Without the promise of supplies, the prospect for Yugoslavia would have been so hopeless that no national resistance could have been organized. He wrote:

"Those who talk about an 'invasion' of Europe are imagining an absurdity--they are imagining Great Britain's and America's Armies trying to fight their way across Europe while the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Poles, the Czechs, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs, the Bulgars, sat quietly in their homes. . . . The problem is not how to invade Europe, but how to provide Europeans with the means and the opportunity to liberate themselves. . . .

"If the will to resist did not exist in the souls of Europeans, it would, be vain to suppose that an American Army could provide freedom for peoples who will not fight for it. If, on the other hand, the will to resist is there, as indeed it is and ever more fiercely, then we can rest assured that the best troops for fighting in Europe will be Europeans fighting for their own homes, their own altars, their own flags, their own hope of life itself. . . . For every British soldier landed in Europe a thousand other soldiers come forward from among the invaded and threatened peoples themselves. And that is how the army for the liberation of Europe, and of the world, is going to be recruited."

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