24 AUGUST 1944, Page 18

Britain and the World

British Foreign Policy. By Sir Edward Grigg. (Hutchinson. 75. 6d. ) BY his title Sir Edward Grigg inevitably challenges comparison with Walter Lippmann's now classic American Foreign Policy, and though Mr. Lippmann is in his own class as a political writer -and thinker Sir Edward has no need to wish he had called his book something different. It is a forceful and convincing piece of work, which everyone would be the better for reading. Its essential thesis is the imperative necessity of the guarantee of future peace by a close understanding, and binding pledges of specific action in case of necessity, between Britain, the United States and Russia, and most partiCularly between Britain and Russia as the bastions of peace in Western and Eastern Europe respectively. Sir Edward Grigg is not against a League of Nations ; on the contrary, he postulates it ; but he distrusts general engagements, and is convinced that for a future to which at present no term can be fixed there must be precise undertakings between the Allied States who hold the power in their hands as to action in the event of threatened aggression by Germany. None of this argument is new, but it is well worth having it restated in Sir Edward Grigg's clear and cogent language. He is a realist, and has no faith in anything short of realism.

The execution of such a policy depends of course, on certain conditions. In Britain certainly, and in the united States if possible, there must be a continuity of foreign policy achieved by its com- plete removal—subject to the general function of an Opposition to oppose—from party controversies. Sir Edward adds that there must be no secret engagements, and recalls that Mr. Eden has given the House of Commons a pledge that he would never make one. (Here, by the way, I think Sir Edward slips into error. He suggests that our moral commitment to France before the last war was, down to the last week of peace, known "neither to the Cabinet as a whole nor to Parliament nor to the public." Actually, all the facts were laid before the whole Cabinet in 1912.) Another condition, the fulfilment of which it is legitimate to count on, is that Russia will pursue a reasonable and disinterested policy, seeking neither imperialist expansion nor ideological interference in the affairs of other nations. Given these policies on the part of Britain and Russia, and assuming that Britain resists its congenital inclination to sit back in carpet slippers in an armchair when the war is over there is good hope for the fulfilment of Sir Edward Grigg's stipulation that "Britain's first consideration must henceforth be a working Concert of Europe, with herself and Russia for its leading players, but with real freedom for all the individual instruments which that ancient orchestra contains."

It is not, of course, necessary to agree with Sir Edward Grigg at every point. For reasons which it would take too long to set cut fully here, I think it is a pity he included a chapter insisting with emphasis on the necessity of Imperial Preference and the Ottawa agreements in particular' a great many foreign countries. not only the United States, are keenly alive to the anomaly of a collection of States, completely independent politically, with their own envoys in foreign capitals, claiming at the same time to be a single indivisible economic unit knowing nothing of any such thing as the most-favoured-nation principle. As to one or two other points, it is not the case that "the Wilsonian League . . . divided Europe ,between a greater number of independent sovereignties than it had ever before contained " • the League had nothing whatever to do with dividing Europe up after the war. And when Sir Edward says "I would not question the view that the British and French delegates [at the Paris Peace Conference] were themselves to blame for staking so much on the word of an American President who had neglected to provide himself with adequate Senatorial support," he compels one to ask what he would have had the British and French delegates do? Refuse to negotiate with the head of the American delegations at all? But these are points onty incidental to the main argument. As I say, this book should certainly be read.

WILSON HARRIS.