To understand his nonacquisitiveness in a hotly acquisitive world, look for a moment at the environment from which he came. Most Americans have never made anything grow with their hands; soil is to them unreal, and land is just a lot of area spread out thin. Many have never owned anything but their clothes and a bank account. When their balance went up, they were rich. When it went down, they were poor. This new American has little idea of the reproductive power of anything but money. Money makes money, he knows that. The only way for America to accept more power is to get more money. By this wholly apolitical standard, all other places the overseas American looks on are poor. Because they are poor he is not interested. If they were richer than the United States, he would want at least to pull even. But they are poor, and he wants nothing of them.
Moreover, the American has been told so often that he is fantastically wealthy that he believes it. So many things are taken from the American soil in defense of allies—so many more millions required to set both friend and enemy up again—that the American has lost all sense of bookkeeping. For a friendly official act, however small, he will award more ships and more money and more food. For a smile he will mark off the debt from his ledger. He translates all values, whether they be the rich oil from his fields or finished airplanes from his engineers, directly into cash—never into political force to his own advantage. And as soon as he has the values translated into cash, he says that it was all for nothing anyway, because cash is valueless, and wipes it off his books.
By providing materials, men, and aircraft he helps to change Britain into the greatest air base in the world. He builds roads even for the Tongan Islands, lest the smallest independent ally be without its gain. Everyone must have protection, and most can have gifts, for the great provider, the Good Guy, is abroad.
The key to the political life of the American is this: he does not care whether he is respected, so long as he is treated with a few forms of respect, but he must be loved, or at least liked, or he withers. His foreign policy represents an attempt to become popular by being benevolent, rather than to be respected by being responsible. He spends his national substance in a vain attempt to buy affection abroad, but at either political advantage or strategic consolidation, he recoils like a spinster from passion.
He is not very astute about his political interests, this new American. He knows he must fight and spend in all parts of the world. He does not like to think what he is spending—how every truck building a highway in Assam represents the value of a home for an American family. It disturbs him, but only a little, to reflect how every palm tree purchased from a British or French copra corporation to build an air field, at one to eight dollars a tree, is tax-earned money poured into an alien land, unprotected strategically or politically however its value is kept on the books. He has little interest in equity, and leaves the politics to someone else. In fact, all the Americans leave it to someone else.
To London as to famished Calcutta he bears his own rations of war, and eats, amid surroundings vibrant with history, his lifeless dehydrated eggs—triumph of the industrial mind, chemically full, organically empty, perfect for shipping, impossible for eating—American foreign policy in a spoon.
The first act of the Japanese army on arriving at a new island is to go fishing and start a garden. The first act of the Americans is to try to buy something from the natives. The American is an amasser. The German, the Italian, and the son of the Mikado die in battle to increase the power of their states. The American does so not to increase his own power, but to frustrate the aggressors from adding to theirs. Politically speaking, this is a somewhat aimless sacrifice.
The American is not a sucker; a sucker expects, by winning, to make some gain in power, not to be told simply that he has won. The American has been persuaded to renounce all gain for himself and his country as he moves under orders across this ailing world. A strange Ishmael, this dogface in his G.I. reefer, watching the burnoosed crowd around an African street bar; this mac peering under his downturned cap across the blue waters of the inner bay at Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, hoping to catch sight of a brown girl who was at the engineers' dance last night; this American saving grease in a fighter assembly unit on the Kentish coast and wondering at the reason for his thrift; this other American standing in the sun on the Via Caracciola, watching the boy beggars come running, wondering why they pass by the French and British and hasten directly up to him, avid fingers extended.
DEFEAT IN THE PACIFIC
The political defeat of the United States in the Pacific in World War I was only a fragment of its general political defeat. It was a peace in which the nation's ideals, which were immature, were upheld at the cost of the nation's advantage in the peace, which was ignored. Among the European and Asiatic secret treaties the loss to the British and Japanese Empires of key South Pacific island bases, essential now as then to security, is a capsule lesson in American self-betrayal in politics.
The neglect in the Pacific today seems aggravated because of its simple nature. The British and Germans first divided the unattached insular Pacific in 1886. The Americans allowed them to do so. Then the British and Japanese divided Germany's Pacific, in 1915, 1917, and 1919, and America allowed them to do that. The second division was more obviously injurious, for it was made during wartime, under the studied indifference of American statesmen. The German possessions obtained by Britain at Versailles outflanked America's highway to the Philippines. The German possessions taken by Japan wiped it off the map.
Unbelievable as it seems, the secret treaties—the names and numbers of the winners-to-be in the wartime sweepstakes—were divulged while the war was going on. The American government tried to sneer them down, to ignore them, and—trusted by the people—it succeeded. In that war, as in the next, it was difficult to persuade Americans to examine what they were fighting for. The secret treaties were published in Britain by the Manchester Guardian. They soon found their way to the New York Evening Post, published by Oswald Garrison Villard, a man who was unafraid. There was no one in public life with the courage to say what they meant.
Can a people be excused because its leaders are asleep? Not so long as it has a free press with able minds to perceive what is happening. The guilt of those who do not hold office, who are free to speak, who know truth, and who nevertheless are silent, is more ineradicable than the guilt of those rendered dumb by responsibility.
In the last war we established no fewer than 52 American bases on the Atlantic coast of France alone. We had bases in the Mediterranean and in Siberia. But that was the war that would end war. So we wrote off these bases and came home from Europe, leaving behind only our cemeteries. The result? Another war came, fought for the spoils and mastery of the last, with the sides the same and the forces heavier. And it required more than 2½ years of accumulating men and arms before we could risk our first offensive in France. The war was a year and a half old before we achieved our first continental beachhead in Italy.
This is the second half of the other war. It is bigger, costlier, will last longer, and is worldwide.
In the first half the Pacific was not a battleground. But as soon as Wilson's February 3, 1917 message committed the country's course toward war, the British and Japanese, anticipating an American claim, reserved Germany's strategic Pacific islands all for themselves by a secret treaty signed two months before Congress actually declared war. The American people, including the President, were ignorant when they voted for war that their route to the Philippines had been endangered by this secret treaty. And today in the ex-German mandates of New Guinea and the northern Solomons, and in the four Japanese archipelagoes, American cemeteries testify the price of political blindness.
The United States, to correct its diplomatic carelessness, has now built in the third of its overseas wars an overpoweringly large fleet that has broken through the phalanx of mandated British and Japanese islands. There emerges in the American government a tendency to offer its people the satisfaction
of victory, without revealing that victory in this case is merely the remedy of a prior political defeat. The jubilation at winning the central Pacific islands in such costly fashion can be tempered by study of how cheaply they were lost.
It is a characteristic of American foreign policy that it often wins by force the points it could have taken in a prior war by right of victory. This defect is most characteristic in the Pacific, perhaps because American policy is Europe-oriented, and Americans east of the Rockies stubbornly decline to understand this ocean.
What are bases overseas worth? Secretary Morganthau, opening the June 1944 bond drive, said it had cost taxpayers $6 billion to overpower the Marshall Islands. The Marshalls are one of the four strategic archipelagoes Japan took by the secret 1917 treaty.
What would American bases in the Mediterranean have been worth, if we had kept any? The Secretary says that to progress from Naples to Rome cost the United States $6.7 billion. Would a base in Corsica or Sardinia have improved that figure, giving us the same aid Malta gives the British?
AN AMERICAN SYSTEM OF BASES OVERSEAS
Bases outlive weapons. As cities gather where lines of commerce intersect, bases gather power at the intersection of lines of strategy. The trireme gives way to the galleon; the attack plane takes over some of the functions of the artillery. Yet the defile in the mountains, the strait between the seas, remains decisive. A channel, armed, is mightier than an ocean. Most precious have always been the bases where sea and land meet.
A great base endures whether its walls be wood stakes, granite blocks, or fighters humming overhead. When a base passes away in power, it is either because a civilization has wrapped around it, like the Indian forts of the American West, or the central power has disintegrated. The gun-flanked Straits of Messina must still be taken by him who would cross from Africa to Italy. He who would go from Italy into Germany must still find the key to the Alpine passes.
The wars for possession of natural resources and raw materials go on today, a holdover from the nineteenth century. Beneath them fluctuates the sterner struggle for strategic position. Strong in peace, costing little to uphold, a well-located base can be armed for offensive war in quick order; defensively it is armed already by the advantageous spot where it stands. It menaces only the menacer. Even when almost unarmed, it fixes the attention of the enemy-to-be and diverts his attack. A base is a warning, a reminder against strategic aggression, a memorandum of commitment. Demanding little of the citizen but his consent, of the statesmen little but political foresight and willpower, the outlying base returns to the nation decades of peace as dividend. Like thermometers set in the scattered geysers of the world, the base gives notice that war is coming; it feels the heat and testifies immediately to the pressure.
Any nation which engages in a worldwide war and makes worldwide political commitments without securing permanent worldwide bases is wasting its substance.
It is possible to overwhelm an enemy through excess of production or superior weapons. This shortsighted aim has governed American military action in three overseas wars. The aim was always merely military victory, not its strategic consolidation. The fact that the United States has been successful by massive inundation of the enemy with materials has saddled this people with a pragmatic faith: the cult of production. This cult, which dominates American strategy, believes that nothing is too costly to gain victory; and because burying the enemy under sheer quantity has always met the pragmatic test—it obtains victory—there should be no experiment with any other method. The largest army, the largest navy, and the largest industrial plant in the world: such are the unthinking aims of strategically incurious minds. There is no one to tell them that in war the greatest advantage is position, and that position, if held in peace, is a far cheaper commodity than arms.
In a nation dominated by this cult of production, the where of its conflicts are nothing. It will fight anywhere, for anybody. It has no sense of acquisitiveness; it is gawkily grateful for being allowed to “use” bases to attain the shortsighted aim of temporary victory. By lend-leasing power overseas it buys temporary bases at fifty times their cost, and greets victory still strategically empty-handed.
The maintenance of strong bases, on the far side of the world, is a difficult concept for a nation self-hypnotized by the cult of mass production to grasp. But war is the great demonstrator. At the beginning of the war the American people lived in a security upheld by bases. When Crete fell and Malta tottered they were troubled. Yet Malta, down to three fighter planes, held out. Was she helpless? No, for her bombers denied safe passage across the Mediterranean by daylight to Nazi and Italian convoys. Rommel was replenished by night but not by day; Malta halved his supplies. A time came at Cairo's doors when he did not have enough.
Corregidor, if the American people ever understand its meaning, will be a turning point of American foreign policy. When all the famous bases that were not fortresses—Hong Kong, Singapore, Soerabaya—fell to the Japanese, Corregidor held. The Rock held more than twice as long as mighty Singapore, with an equally strong Japanese force against it, and forced the enemy to break up their convoys. They had captured Manila early, but for five months the city was useless to them in a military sense because the guns of sick, starving Corregidor denied them entrance to Manila Bay. This tiny penknife delayed Nippon just enough to save Australia and Pearl Harbor; just enough to prevent Tojo from drawing down from the Aleutians to the Antarctic that iron screen intended to bar America from Asia.
Those priceless months of resistance cost America $49.5 million—less than a single major raid over Berlin. For the cost of five hours of climbing war bill, the American people received six months of unaided resistance. Does that look as though bases overseas were worth paying for?
BASES FOR STABILITY
The Depression—never solved, but plowed under into a new war effort—was the bill for winning bases overseas in World War I. Yet we wrote off the bases.
There have been no reliable studies of the cost of different means of waging war besides comparing manufactured weapons—a torpedo equals so many shells—at the end of the assembly line. But a 20-mm shell in Burma has many times the value of the same shell at the end of the factory belt. An American soldier in good health on the road north from the Persian Gulf is worth a half dozen just out of their dogface days in a training camp. Where weapons are determines their value.
A worldwide system of bases involves placing stores of men, food, weapons, and matériel in locations where their value will be at its highest in the moment of war, being near to the enemy early on. Thus it cuts down the cost and losses of distribution. The overseas base not only guards the peace but shortens the war. It strikes at a rising enemy, and checks him before he is dangerous. Two fighter planes peacefully cruising the coast of a potential enemy beyond the three-mile limit, but in sight, are worth fifteen heavy bombers grounded 600 miles away.
A single base, standing alone, is weak because it can be isolated. A system of bases is strong because it is impossible to isolate. Even cut off from its mother country, it is still able to fight by reason of the power shared among its members.
Any system of bases may be measured by how completely it dominates its area; by whether it is connected with the homeland by the most direct means; and by whether it neutralizes politically any other bases in the same area. Had there been a dozen strong American bases in Mediterranean Africa, had the United States owned a dozen Bataan-Corregidors from the Aleutians to Penang, the American situation would have fallen into a perspective of world dimensions immediately. It would have been clear that though the danger to American outposts was real, no energy should be wasted in the United States on futile alarmism against coastal attacks. Energy could have been directed into holding the bases already under fire, and establishing new ones as long as the outermost were defending themselves.
Cities are cowardly places. All geography comes to their doors, yet their apprehensions of distance are weak and fumbling. Whe
n the Japanese were at the gates of Moresby, the press of Melbourne groaned its fear, and in London and New York straphangers trembled in premonition. In Moresby itself all was calm; the Japs had not been able to take tanks or heavy artillery over the Owen Stanleys, and that meant Nippon had lost.
So in any urbanized society like the American, neurotic anxiety over remote dangers is unavoidable. But if, at the far end of the chain of military command, out where the sentry stands peering into the dark, the citizen knows that he possesses a well-built fortress with flanking air fields and mined approaches, and knows this outpost is garrisoned by men strong, intelligent, and practiced in war, he wastes less time worrying over the old political riddle (the only question of international affairs an American ever asks), “How long will it take them to cross the ocean?”
AMERICAN INERTIAS
Every man is bound by his allegiances. Only the rare man can see over the wall of his own home, much less over the parapet of the nation. Home is enough.
Why should a man ever go beyond his national wall? Other nations do not seem to want visitors. A million muzzles deny them welcome. Assurances are demanded on a hundred sheets of paper—this being a world ruled half by guns, half by documents, the instruments of quick and slow death—that the stranger will not remain long, and will return home as soon as his purse gets thin. Few men can go abroad and see, and still fewer know the meaning of what they see.
The American is endowed with a statistical sense of other countries. His ideal is a foreign policy rung up on a cash register. The effect of geography on foreign affairs escapes him. He is not capable of standing imaginatively in the political shoes of another people and seeing things momentarily as they do. He does not, even when it would be to his own advantage to do so, spontaneously place himself in Oslo or Ankara and see the world with the eye of a Norwegian or Turk.
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