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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 20, 17 May 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Two important moves were made on the chessboard of foreign diplomacy during the first week of May. One, by the State Department in Washington; the other by Winston Churchill at the Hague in the Netherlands.
In Washington on May 5, Secretary of State Marshall and Warren R. Austin, U.S. representative to the United Nations, appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to stymie Congressional plans for a revision of the UN Charter which would, in effect, expel Moscow from the UN. Marshall, echoed by Austin, vigorously opposed the contemplated “revisions” and insisting on letting things rest as they are, so far as the UN is concerned.
At the Hague, on May 7, Churchill addressed the “first Congress of Europe” and called for the immediate setting up of a European Assembly as the initial step toward the ultimate constitution of the “United States of Europe.” Gathered were representatives of 22 countries, none of them government officials, but many former dignitaries, including exiles from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Finland.
Authoritative American newspapers, like the N.Y. Times, hitherto cold to Churchill’s post-war campaign for a “unified” Europe, greeted his efforts, this time, with unconcealed enthusiasm. Churchill’s pronouncements likewise had the tacit approval of the U.S. State Department, as Churchill himself implied in his speech.
These two moves in Washington and at the Hague, outwardly unrelated, are actually intimately connected. Palmed off as measures designed to “guarantee peace,” they are in reality designed to set the stage for the next world war.
Both Marshall and Austin made it amply clear that their objections to the breaking up of the UN were based purely on considerations of expediency. Such a breakup would be premature at this stage. Marshall candidly admitted that there was “very great fear” abroad that the U.S. would act to break up the UN organization. Left with the choice today of joining either of the two “rival military alliances,” many of the European countries, especially the weaker ones, would be driven to a “desperate neutrality” — to the advantage of the. Soviet Union, said Marshall.
The primary consideration, from Washington’s standpoint, Marshall explained, is the need to alter the existing military relation of forces. Russia today dominates the European and Asiatic continents as the greatest military land power in the world, with Russian troops standing poised in the very middle of Europe and on the frontiers of Italy. This military position of Russia has not been altered by the U.S. policy of bolstering regimes on the Soviet periphery (Greece, Turkey, Iran, China).
This has necessitated a different orientation, long advocated by such outspoken critics of the Truman Doctrine as Walter Lippmann. He has been demanding a concentration not on the weak and “unreliable” Soviet borderlands but on Western Europe.
Instead of concentrating the “cold war” in the borderlands of the Soviet Union, it should be concentrated among Wall Street’s “natural allies” in Western Europe. That is the main thesis of Lippmann’s strategy as outlined in his book The Cold War, A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (Harper & Bros.).
This strategy has obviously been adopted by the leading circles of the American capitalists and warmakers, since the promulgation of the Marshall Plan. It is in the light of this reorientation of Wall Street’s foreign policy that we can best understand all the recent moves, in particular Marshall’s intervention in Congress and Churchill’s maneuvers at the Hague.
In his statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Marshall, in effect, pleaded for time until the so-called European “aid” program gets under way and helps Washington “redress” the existing military “disequilibrium” on the European continent. Austin added that “we should strengthen the military posture of our friends.”
Commenting on the testimony of Marshall and Austin, the Times editors, on May 6, hammer home the fact that the UN provides an indispensable pacifist cloak for the promotion of Washington’s foreign policy; and that the immediate aim is “to restore an international equilibrium, or balance of power,” or, in plain language, to secure the most favorable relation of forces in Europe for the unleashing of World War III.
On the other hand, Churchill’s maneuvers for “unifying” Europe supply the diplomatic and political cover for preparing Western Europe as a drill-ground for Wall Street’s assault on the Soviet Union. That is why the Times’ editors endorse “this undertaking” and,cynically declare that it “deserves the support of our own people and our government, and, in fact, cannot succeed without such support.”
Thus Washington’s main efforts will henceforth be directed not so much to bolster border countries on the Soviet periphery as to achieve a “settlement” in Europe. This policy envisages the greatest military strengthening of Western European countries within the shortest possible time through the medium of “aid” plus a modified “lend-lease.” In the meanwhile, the organization of the UN is to be preserved as s mobilizer and manufacturer of favorable “public opinion.”
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