THE QUEST FOR AIMS
LI VERY month or so some leading personality in Great Britain 12/ or the United States—Russia and China seem to think it sufficient for Anglo-Saxon spokesmen to attribute desires to them —demands an official statement of war-aims. The latest is Mr. Wendell Willie, who has just returned from a lightning tour of Russia and parts of Asia with a mass of convictions, of necessity a little tentative, which perhaps he has not yet quite sorted out. Admirable as was the impression Mr. Willie made when he visited this country last year, it is not quite clear what influence political ambitions are having on his public utterances in the United States at the moment. Mr. Willkie was the Republican candidate for the Presidency last time. He is the obvious choice for two years hence. And the biennial elections to Congress take place next week. So dependable a commentator as Mr. Raymond Gram Swing has stated unequivocally that open or covert opposi- tion to the present Government and its works is a political necessity to Mr. Willie. That may or may not be. In any case Mr. Willkie is perfectly entitled to say what is in his mind about war-aims, and it will certainly be listened to with respect, even though with some element of perplexity, on this side of the Atlantic. With the demand that we should plan now for peace on a global basis there will be general accord. General Smuts has already emphasised that in different language, and even before he spoke the principle might be said to have been generally conceded. It will, moreover, be found when the right moment comes that much more has been done in this direction in White- hall than is commonly suspected, and the Allied Nations at their meetings in London have by no means left the subject unexplored.
But some of Mr. Willie's contentions are hard to follow. The Chinese and the Russians, he affirmed, were sure what they were fighting for, but they were not so sure of us ; and he added that many of them had read the Atlantic Charter, but they were not satisfied ; they asked what about a Pacific Charter, what about a World Charter. This, surely, is strange perversity. The Atlantic Charter has no local significance or limitation. It took its name from the fact that it was drafted and promulgated in the first instance on a warship in the Atlantic by the representatives of two Atlantic Powers, but it has since been endorsed by Russia and a dozen other of the United Nations. It is precisely the World Charter which Mr. Willie and his friends demand. To regard it as something which called for a Pacific Charter as complement would be definite retrogression ; principles are not dependent on geography. As for the suggestion that Russia and China were not sure whether we knew what we were fighting for, and that we ought, in order to set all doubt at rest, to produce a detailed pro- gramme of war-aims; such a view implies a serious misconception of the situation. Russia and China are both fighting because the soil of their country was wantonly invaded, the United States because her fleet, lying in a harbour of one of her oversea possessions, was made the object of outrageous and treacherous aggression. We, as a plain matter of history, entered the war because not our own territory, but that of Poland, which we had pledged ourselves to defend, was attacked by Hitler. Having entered it we have bound ourselves to make no peace till Hitler, and all he stands for, is swept away, and till Japan is finally crushed. That is a simple and sufficient statement of war-aims.
Peace-aims are another matter. We did not go to war, and never should have, to reconstruct the world, but so ,much of the structure of the world as it existed before 1939 has been destroyed by war that reconstruction is essential, and the task of planning that enterprise and carrying it out will tax all our wisdom and all our energies. Here it is a question of proceeding from the general to the particular, from agreement on principles to their application. The difficulty of even making a beginning is illus- trated by the vigour of some of the protests against the apparently innocuous statement that we are fighting for the defence of Christian civilisation. That, it might be supposed, was of the nature of a truism, or near enough to a truism to be incapable of being an irritant. A Christian civilisation is not a con- dition of life in which (to quote from last week's debate in the House of Commons) belief in the Athanasian Creed is forcibly imposed. It denotes rather a regime, based on common convic- tion and consent, in which the virtues, Christian but by no means exclusively Christian, of justice and truth and good faith and freedom of conscience and defence of the weak—the very antithesis of the qualities inculcated in the Germany of today— are accepted as the guiding principles of national as of individual- life. It is hard to believe that any of our Muslim fellow-citizens or allies could seriously take exception to that aim. The same virtues are inculcated by their religious faith no les3 than by ours, and in their countries neither we nor they would be likely to speak of them as specifically Christian. But as the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs remarked, it is hardly strange that speakers who are Christian men, representatives of a Christian king and, an at any rate nominally Christian country, in addressing a Christian audience should use Christian terms. There surely that aspect of the question can be left.
Since some of our Allies would vigorously repudiate anything in the nature of Christian dogma it will no doubt be well to distinguish between terminology appropriate for the like-minded and language of more catholic character. The Atlantic Charter embodies many principles that might properly be called Christian, but its phraseology is purely political, as it should be. As the first agreed statement of peace-aims it is the natural basis for any larger programme, though the scope of the Charter as it stands is so wide that we need be in no due haste to press for its expansion. Take, for example, the clause which foreshadows "the establishment of a peace which will afford assurance that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want." The implications of that are almost limitless. There are many fears that beset humanity, the fear of war among them. What is meant here primarily is some form of settlement which will banish finally the danger of waf. The Atlantic Charter clearly contemplates that, when it stipulates for the disarmameni of the aggressor nations "pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security." Here are aims suffi- ciently ambitious for the most insatiable of reconstructors. Germany and Japan must be disarmed, and steps taken to keep them disarmed, a task which must be undertaken in the first instance by the forces, in particular no doubt by the air forces, of the United Nations, and ultimately perhaps by whatever inter- national organ—presumably a new or reconstituted League of Nations—is charged with the maintenance of a wider and per- manent system of general security. This is a definite, a specific, and an agreed peace-aim. It remains to work out in detail plans for its realisation—a by no means inconsiderable task.
In no way less formidable, though it falls in the economic rather than the political sphere, is the realisation of the associated aim, the establishment of a peace that will assure to all men in all lands freedom from want. With such a purpose proclaimed to the world the suggestion that Britain and America have been slow in formulating their peace-aims is grotesque. The only ques- tion is whether the proposal does not soar too high into the realm of pure idealism. Is such a programme practical? Hitherto it has been accepted that every nation is responsible for protecting its own citizens from the fear of want. Some have succeeded up to a wint, some have failed catastrophically, often through no fault of their own. Does the Atlantic Charter mean that the fight against famine in countries like Russia or China, or against want falling short of famine in a score of other countries, great and small, is to be waged in future by the world as a whole, and at the world's expense? On the face of it that is the only meining to be attributed to the clause, and almost impracticably vast though such a programme may appear, the constructive work which the League of Nations has been doing for some years past in the matter of minimum nutrition standards and the means of bringing them within the reach of all peoples everywhere shows that the task is not too large to be tackled resolutely. What is immediately needed, difficult though it may be, is sonie means of initiating practical discussions on the already agreed peace- aims between the principal United Nations, including essentially Russia and China. Till that has been done, and the discussions have reached practical conclusions, the quest for aims may reasonably be suspended.
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