Promise of Peace

One day last week Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden quietly told the House of Commons that Great Britain and Russia had signed a 20-year alliance, for war and for peace. It was the first post-war treaty of World War II, and, as such, would write future history. The nature of that history would depend on the present sincerity and the future wisdom of the two nations which signed it.

It would also depend on another announcement made the same day at the White House: the U.S. and Russia had agreed "with regard to the urgent tasks" of a European second front this year. For, unless the U.S., Britain and Russia defeat Hitler's Germany, post-war alliances mean nothing.

Both the pact and the agreement had been accomplished during the incognito travels of a man known in London as "Mr. Smith," in Washington as "Mr. Brown." He was the Soviet Union's affable, square-dome Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who reached London on May 20.

On May 29 the same four-motored Russian bomber which had carried Mr. Smith to Britain rolled to a stop on a Washington, D.C. airport. Mr. Brown descended from the plane and presently motored to the White House. For several days he labored with President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull. Under Secretary Welles pronounced him "charming." Molotov boarded his bomber again and flew back to London and Moscow. As soon as he reached home the great secret was out. Molotov's accomplishments:

> Britain and Russia pledged each other to fight Adolf Hitler to the end and to stand together, for the next 20 years, in "common action to preserve peace and resist aggression." They pledged each other not to make separate peace with any German Government which did not renounce aggression. They pledged each other not to seek any "territorial aggrandizement" after victory.

> Among the three nations "full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942."

> The U.S. extended to Russia full Lend-Lease privileges such as those already given to Britain and China.

The general assumption that the understanding about a second front in 1942 was a promise was not justified by the words; they hinted rather that one would be opened if Russia found herself too hard pressed. Similarly, the Anglo-Russian promise of no territorial aggrandizement did not necessarily mean that Russia had abandoned her demand that after the war the Baltic States (which Russia held at the time of the German attack a year ago) be given back to her as protection against future German aggression. It meant only that Russia had abandoned her demand for a formal commitment at this time.

The enormous resolves of the three na tions could not help raising questions:

> Why had the U.S. not joined in the treaty? Was it because the Administration feared debate in the Senate (whose two-thirds vote is needed to ratify a treaty)? If so, was it in the public interest to dodge the debate?

> How much of Britain's impulse toward the pact could be accounted for by recent high Tory feeling that, in a world where the U.S. was daily growing stronger, a pact with Russia was a sound move for the preservation of European weight in the world of the future?

> To what degree would the pact produce acts inspired by the high sentiments it ex pressed? To what degree might it open a post-war era of power politics? The answers to these questions would come only with the passage of history. But meanwhile, far & wide, the conviction was growing that the peoples of Britain and Russia and the U.S. had been unified in their campaign against the Axis. And, far & wide, hope was spreading that with a victorious outcome such unity would serve to make durable last week's commitments toward world peace.

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