The Mold of History

This week the Secretary of State of the U.S. and the Foreign Minister of Great Britain are about to do business with Moscow. Cordell Hull, an honest, sincere and limited man from Tennessee, and Anthony Eden, a middle-class patrician from Britain, will go into conference with Viacheslav Molotov, a Russian revolutionary and politician who speaks for and only by permission of the toughest ruler in the modern world.

There are limits to what these men can actually accomplish. This conference is a preliminary: the positive accomplishments must be left to Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, when & if they meet. But there is no limit to what Hull, Eden and Molotov can fail to accomplish. If they do fail--and they may --their failure will be reflected in the fires of World War II, and in that war's aftermath. If they succeed, Messrs. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin will then have their historic chance to make World War II a victory for all the Allies, a prelude to a livable world for all men.

Lines of Force. Probably no aspect of the war has been the subject of as much talk, gossip, punditry, newspaper footage and parlor statesmanship as "What Will Russia Do?" Actually, Russia's basic policy is not ambiguous or mysterious: it is merely alternative. Russia is in a position to choose: 1) full collaboration with the U.S. and Great Britain if they meet her demands; or 2) a lone-wolf course, excluding the U.S.'and Britain, but including an arrangement for and with a pro-Russian Germany. The problems are not simple. Among the many specific lines of force swirling about the conference are these:

1) The U.S. and Britain apparently want Russia to share with them some sort of "joint responsibility for Europe," rather than divide Europe into exclusive "spheres of influence." The difficulty is that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill has enunciated concrete proposals for the reconstitution of Europe. Without such proposals, their Ministers will be unable to make much sense on "joint responsibility."

2) In contrast, Joseph Stalin has some extremely precise notions as to his need not only for "spheres of influence" but for actual domination of the Baltic States, much of prewar Poland and Rumania.

3) Russia is not at war with Japan. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. suggested last week that 1,000,000 American soldiers' lives would be saved if Russia let the U.S. into Siberia now. Militarily, the Senator may have been wrong, but his point cast a great shadow before it: will Russia be with or against the U.S. in the postwar Pacific? More particularly, will Russia want to come in against Japan and then seek to dominate northern Asia in opposition to the U.S. and China? This probably was not an immediate question, but half the world could not be left wholly out of the equation this week.

4) Britons' concern with Europe and Soviet policy begins with the simple fact that their home is an island off the continent of Europe. But Britain also speaks for an Empire. There is, therefore, an historic, although not necessarily a dangerous, conflict between the landmass empire of Russia and the globe-girdling, sea-&-air-knit Empire of Britain. In the Middle East the land-empire and the sea-empire meet--and where they meet, there may always be friction.

The U.S. interest in Europe is real--witness World War II. But, in any conference concerned concretely with boundaries and "spheres of influence," that interest is hard to translate into the tough realities of Moscow. One of Cordell Hull's difficulties is that, while the American people clearly recognize an actual interest in Europe, they do not recognize an immediate interest in such matters as the proper borders between, for example, Russia and Poland. Hull & Co. in Russia therefore must find some meaningful and forceful language with which to assert America's interest in a peaceful postwar Europe.

There is such a language. That language is, very simply, the language of power--the language that Joseph Stalin speaks and respects, the language in which Winston Churchill is at his best, a language which can be understood by the Americans at home who in the end must support or reject Mr. Hull.

The U.S. now has for the first time a military force in Europe which has political as well as military significance. (As events turned out, the U.S. forces in Europe in World War I had no real political significance.) The U.S. forces now in mainland Europe are not large, but they soon will be. They are advancing from the Mediterranean into Southern Europe and toward Middle Europe--the areas to which Joseph Stalin is most sensitive. The range of Anglo-U.S. air power covers all Europe. Cordell Hull, of course, cannot and will not assert that these forces are or ever may be forces opposed to the Red Army. But Joseph Stalin himself, by his intense interest in the inter-Allied Mediterranean Commission--to which he took care to appoint one of his most formidable men--has already testified to the potency of American presence in Europe.

Furthermore, the Pacific may also be a source of U.S. power. The U.S., Britain and China together may, if they will, confront Russia with the kind of war and postwar combination which Russians respect. Given the assurance that the anti-Japanese coalition intends to beat Japan to her knees, and then to consolidate that victory, the Russians may well ponder the postwar position of the U.S. in the Pacific.

These are tangibles of power politics. No matter how little taste the American people may have for power politics, their representatives must speak to the occupants of a stronghold of power politics, the Kremlin.*

The Soviet interest in Europe is very real, very hard--the realistic one of self-protection. With some qualifications (see below), it is not the interest of a communist state in communizing the rest of Europe. The root fact of 1943 Soviet Russia is that in the late '205, under Stalin, the U.S.S.R. turned from international Communism to an internal policy as nationalistic and almost as introverted as was that of the late America First Committee. Russia sees Europe on the west and Asia on the east as parts of a world totally surrounding the Soviet Union. Her first interest is to secure herself from any form of attack from that world, and even from the liabilities of any unnecessary friendship with or obligations in that world.

But the Russians, being realists of a particularly chilly kind, believe that the best insurance of national safety is: 1) effective understandings, coldly reached, with all the powers far or near which might imperil that safety; and 2) an army and an air force strong enough to repel any military threat.

In the west, the Soviet Union therefore is determined to have a territorial "security belt.". In all probability these areas--the Baltic States, old Poland's "White Russia," prewar Rumania's Bessarabia, the northern lands taken from Finland in 1940--will not be subject to discussion at the conferences.

But beyond these areas are lands which may well be subject to discussion: Poland, the Balkan countries of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia; the remainder of Poland; Hungary; Czecho-Slovakia. It is there that Messrs. Eden and Hull may find both their greatest dangers and their greatest opportunities for immediate, concrete discussion with Molotov.

Friends in Waiting. In these countries and elsewhere the Soviet Government has no more interest in "democracy" as such than it has at home. But it does have--and will undoubtedly assert--an interest in the governments eventually set up in those countries.

It happens that the people and politicians most anxious for what ordinary Americans and Britons would call "democracy" are also Russia's friends in those countries. It also happens, on the public record to date, that people and politicians who do not represent what ordinary Americans and Britons would call "democracy" at home are precisely those toward whom the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office have shown the most warmth. Washington and London have been--to say the least--out of touch with the tremendous democratic resurgence which sprang from the pressures of war and oppression in German Europe. Perhaps Washington and London now recognize the facts of 1943 life in Occupied Europe.* But to satisfy the Russians, Messrs. Eden and Hull must submit believable evidence.

Question in the East. The most immediate, perhaps the most urgent question is: 1) Soviet Russia's military design for victory or peace on the Western Front; and 2) her postwar design for Germany. By a calculated series of statements from Moscow, the U.S.S.R. has cultivated what would once have been denounced as an "anti-Soviet" suspicion--the suspicion that the Red Army may halt its advance on or near Russia's borders and free the German Wehrmacht for the defense of western and southern Europe.

That the suspicion exists, there can be no doubt. That the danger to the U.S. and Britain is as actual as it seems, there may be a real doubt. Joseph Stalin may mean exactly what he has allowed the National Committee of Free Germany and the German Officers' Union to say repeatedly from Moscow--I.e., that Germany can find a quick and safe peace simply by overthrowing Hitler. Or he may intend merely to hasten the disintegration of Nazi Germany and to provide himself with a strong bargaining point.

"Crisis Is Upon Us." A sense of his-tory-in-being gripped the Allied world. Said the London Economist: "A few right or wrong decisions taken in these times can mould the history of a century. . . . Such a crisis is upon us now."

* For centuries the Russians said: "Above Moscow there is nothing but the Kremlin; above the Kremlin, nothing but the sky." In the palaces hidden behind the so-foot-high, 1 1/2-mile-long wall, the Czars played power politics. In 1918 the Kremlin became Bolshevism's heart & pulse, and in it Joseph Stalin weaves Russia's policy. * A typical fact about 1943 Europe was A.P.man Daniel De Luce's discovery in Yugoslavia that the only army visible on the Adriatic coast was an army of Partisan guerrillas. The Soviet hammer and sickle is a favorite emblem of that army.

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