Foreign Policy Between the Wars
SIR,—I have read Mr. Harold Nicolson's interesting comment on Lord Vansittart's article The Decline of Diplomacy. As regards the period between the two wars there is a point which Mr. Nicolson seems to me to have passed over. In his criticisms of Lord Lothian, Mr. Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax and in his reference to Sir Horace Wilson, yes-men in general, and the ignoring of his own advice as Chief Diplomatic Adviser, Lord Vansittart seems to me to have failed to bring out the fact that the situation which had arisen in the year 1938 was in main degree due to the change in the orientation and tactics of our foreign policy at Lausanne—the abandonment of the basis of the policy, which had been pursued in the years from 1924-1931 following on the exchanges between Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and M. Poincare when Mr. MacDonald became Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Nowhere is the point of the not unsuccessful British foreign policy of 1924-1931 better brought out than in Colonel Arthur Murray's Reflection on Some Aspects of British Foreign Policy in the Period Between the Two Wars. published some three years ago, as well as a chief cause of the entangle- ment and failure of so many of our statesmen after 1931, as well as one and all of those involved up to the disaster of 1939.-1 am, Sir, your
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