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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 23, 8 June 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A government cannot shift one of its key policies as fast as a newspaper can. But when important newspapers make such shifts it can be taken as an almost certain indication of the way the wind is blowing.
For ten years the bluntest partisan of an aggressive anti-Japanese policy by the U.S. has been the New York Daily News, largest-circulating paper in the country. Especially since 1937 the paper has been demanding an embargo against Japan and a long-range blockade backed up by the navy. Its famous slogan “Two ships for one” closed every Monday morning editorial warning the government that Japan and the Pacific, not Germany and Europe were the main concerns of Yankee imperialism.
Last Monday morning the News came out suddenly for a policy of ‘’‘appeasement” with respect to Japan to checkmate the creation of a Berlin-Tokio axis directed against the U.S. after a German victory in Europe.
The News quotes the Chicago Tribune, paper owned by the influential Republican leader Col. Knox, as urging a policy designed to convert Japan from a potential enemy into a friend by letting it have its way in China and, if need be, in the Dutch East Indies.
“The United States may be able to help China more effectively by being polite to Japan than by persistently hurling threats and moral reproaches at Japan,” the News said with characteristic cynicism. “If we keep on reproving Japan for what it is trying to do to China and keep on threatening „ a break off of trade with Japan, we may drive Japan into the German-Italian camp. That would make Japan more dangerous to ms than it now is. If Hitler should win the war, and especially if he should grab the British Navy ... we might easily find ourselves menaced with urgent trouble in the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time. We can avert this by making friends with Japan ...”
In effect, as the News went on to explain the next day, the U.S. has to try to be as Machiavellian as Germany and to avoid the “stumblebum diplomacy” displayed by Britain in the period preceding the outbreak of war. “Diplomacy is preparation for war,” the News said, and the idea is to proceed along that line without continuing a policy that can no longer be backed up with arms.
As the News said, it is a question of being “realistic.” It is plain that the most serious observers in Washington have calculations on an Allied defeat in Europe. In their column on June 4, Pearson and Allen wrote that “a careful study of confidential war bulletins received by the Army and Navy gives no grounds for ... optimism. In the bluntest language, it will take a military miracle to prevent overwhelming German victory, including occupation of London. And miracles in modern warfare occur on the side with the most tanks and plans.”
Once this fact is accepted as the axis of American war policy, a total shift in strategy is to be expected. Organization of hemisphere defense means that the U.S. will embark on a lengthy and vast rearmament program, will descend with a heavy hand on all of Latin America, will probably seize or “take over” all foreign-owned bases and base sites – Greenland, Bermuda, the Dutch, French, and British West Indies – and will probably extract “grants” of base rights from Brazil and other Central and South American countries.
An unavoidable corollary of this policy is abandonment of Asia to Japan. This is what the News foreshadows. In the diplomatic preparation for war, we can now expect a wide tack in American policy toward Japan. And Japan, we may be sure, will not be long in taking full advantage of it.
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