New World, New Colossus

The U.S. and the New World--the challenging New World now emerging from War II--met face to face in old Mexico City last week.

The impact of the meeting produced a historic change in Pan-American policy. Latin neighbors who had always feared, baited and resented "the colossus of the North" suddenly begged the colossus to move south with money and arms, promise far more "intervention" than the U.S. wanted to offer.

Before Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. and his U.S. associates got their wits back, the Latin Americans ganged up and almost put over a proposal for permanent mutual guarantees of their boundaries and independence. At this critical juncture, the U.S. delegation seemed to have an impossible choice: accept something which it could not legally approve without the Senate's consent, or grievously offend the Latin republics.

Into the breach stepped Vermont's Republican Senator Warren R. Austin. While Stettinius & Co. were gasping for air, smart Warren Austin announced that he could not read the Spanish text of the resolution, made delay a point of Latin courtesy. This stratagem gave him and Texas' Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, time to work out a compromise.

The result was the Act of Chapultepec (named for the castle where the Conference met, and where U.S. soldiers invading Mexico died for "Yankee imperialism" in 1847). By this declaration, the U.S. and its Latin sisters ditched a cardinal Pan-American principle (often violated in fact but never in theory): that American nations should not intervene, singly or together, in each other's external affairs. In the Act of Chapultepec, the signers agreed to fight anybody, whether within or outside the Western Hemisphere, who attacks or threatens their territory or "political integrity" during the remainder of World War II.

By limiting the pledge to the duration. Senators Austin and Connally got around the necessity of immediate Senate approval (the President's emergency powers are enough). By promising to write the pledge into treaties and submit them for ratification later, the Senators gave the Act of Chapultepec a fair chance of becoming permanent policy.

Chapultepec v. San Francisco. The declaration's first purpose was to put an iron halter on Argentina, the only Latin American country not a member of the United Nations and not represented at Mexico City (see LATIN AMERICA). If Argentina's jingoes went mad and attacked fearful Uruguay or Chile, the Act of Chapultepec would bring the U.S., Brazil, the rest of the Pan-American system solidly into line against Buenos Aires.

So said the declaration. But would it be so?

The world-security proposals drafted last fall at Dumbarton Oaks encouraged regional handling of regional affairs. But the same proposals said that no punitive action could be taken under regional agreements without the approval of the new World Security Council. In advance of the World Security Conference in San Francisco next month, the Big Three had agreed that any one of the Big Powers could veto such action (see above).

This might mean that Britain, as a member of the World Security Council, could prevent intra-American action against its old commercial friend, Argentina. Or that the Soviet Union, the object of much concern at Mexico City, could check an intra-American move against an American aggressor.

One solution discussed at Mexico City was to limit the World Security Council's authority to matters of obvious world concern, exclude the Council from primarily regional affairs. In Big Power practice, the U.S. would then decide where the World Council's interest begins and ends. But--could the U.S. reserve this right without granting Soviet Russia's right to similar jurisdiction in western Asia or in eastern Europe? Pondering this question, close to home, the U.S. may view parallel British and Russian anxieties in a new light.

Practically, both Britain and Russia may be glad to leave primary responsibility for the Americas to the U.S. At Mexico City, the U.S. delegates evidently hoped so. They limited the Act of Chapultepec to matters "appropriate for regional action." And they specified that action even in these matters" shall be consistent with the purposes and principles of the general international organization."

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