Expediency

The clearest statement yet made on what constitutes foreign policy now that the U.S. is on the offensive came last week from the man who, except for Franklin Roosevelt, can best define it. Said Secretary of State Cordell Hull at his press conference: the U.S. is not now concerned about individual or political aims and purposes, but only with the terrific undertaking of winning the war.

Good, grey Cordell Hull, who put into effect the Good Neighbor policy, would be the first to admit that this new policy was one of frank expediency.

The argument in favor of its application in North Africa ran as follows: the U.S. had hoped to deal with General Henri Honore Giraud, but, when the time came, his name spelled little magic with civil and military leaders in North Africa. Crafty Admiral Jean Francois Darlan --either by accident or design--was on the spot: it was he who issued the cease-firing order, it was he who promised to deliver Dakar (capture of which, in the estimates of some U.S. officials, might have sacrificed 40,000 lives).

Opposition. No longer could cynics--as they had in the days of Vichy appeasement--accuse the State Department of "playing 18th-Century whist with 20th-century bandits." The U.S. was now, under the stress of war, playing somewhat of a bandits' game itself.

But as Admiral Darlan began digging in, there were some who began to wonder whether U.S. policy had really paid off. This week came news that Dakar had been opened to Allied forces. But although some French troops were fighting with the Americans, there was no record of Darlan having ordered them to do so. He had been powerless to bring the French fleet at Toulon to the side of the Allies. If he succeed in establishing himself as leader of the French, would post-war France be governed by the officers' clique and her "200 families?"

Most eloquent opposition came from Wendell Willkie. Said he: "The U.S. has lost moral force. . . and by it, we may lose the peace. . . With all my soul I hate this false finagling with expediency.

. . .The peoples of the world must be given again the conviction that the banners Americans fight under bear bright clean colors."

Those who upheld the new U.S. policy believed that President Roosevelt meant what he said when he termed the relations with Darlan a "temporary expediency." But with the shifty Admiral considering himself more & more of a permanent fixure (see p. 43). the next move, if any was up to the U.S.

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