Dorothy Thompson

Charlotte News/January 1, 1946

IN A DEMOCRACY such as ours, where the failures or achievements of officials have an effect on the political attitudes of the voters, bad news is bad politics. For Mr. Byrnes to have returned from Moscow as he returned from London to announce another deadlock or breakdown would have been bad news and bad politics. The State Department would then have had to come forth with a dynamic program on such questions as the revision of UNO to meet the requirements of the atomic age, the future organization of Europe, and security for small nations asking for the peoples’ confidence and support of an intelligible objective, or Mr. Byrnes would have had to resign.

He comes back, however, as the headlines tell us, “highly elated” that the “Big Three Re-establish Unity in Wide Accord.” So it is good news and good politics. But a careful study of the long-winded communique makes one conclude that Mr. Byrnes’ must be a peculiarly sanguine and volatile nature easily elated. For the issues that split the London Conference were either avoided or settled exactly as the Soviets wanted them settled in London. Moscow was Mr. Bvrnes’ Canossa. After London, he said he was a man of compromise. He bids fair to become the greatest compromiser of the American position and prestige.

A Soviet Victory

France and China were excluded. This concession was accorded the Soviets in advance. The Conference upholds the Soviet thesis regarding the framing and signing of the peace treaties, which was an issue in London. At London the Soviets indicated that they would not budge on the matter of consolidating their Balkan “Lebensraum,” while the Westerners held out for free and representative governments. Now Mr. Byrnes has come back with a face-saving device, which in view of experience is not even that. The Rumanian and Bulgarian governments must each be enlarged to include two representatives of other “democratic” parties than those now represented, and must give various “assurances” regarding elections. Then the United States and Britain will “recognize” the Governments.

There is no guarantee that the additional representatives will even be kept in the Governments. Marshal Tito, under similar directives, took in Mr. Subasitch and we all know what happened to him. Tito defied the Big Three recommendations regarding elections. Nothing happened. It is not words but deeds which count—and the memory of deeds not done. No minor country today can have the slightest respect for American “assurances.”

Official Double-Talk

On Japan and the atom bomb, the communique is double-talk, but the concessions are to the Soviets. All nations with Far Eastern interests will participate in a Far Eastern Commission for Japan to formulate policies; a Big Four Council including China will be set up in Tokyo; both can be stalemated by the American Supreme Commander but the Council can make things difficult and complicated for him. It is a fine setting for confusion.

On the atomic bomb it was decided to appoint a committee to try to decide what the Big Three couldn’t decide and nothing it recommends may affect the present structure of UNO. On China, a previously enunciated policy was affirmed.

Undefined Question

None of the immediate burning issues were touched. Those are the future of Germany—over which the war was fought—and the position of France in regard to Germany, the Middle East, and the coup in Iran; Soviet pressure on Turkey.

Azerbaijan directly connects Turkey and Iraq with the Soviet Union on the direct route to Palestine and Suez. While the Conference was in session, Turkey was boiling with alarm and the Soviet press was conducting the identical sort of campaign with which we became familiar under Hitler. I recall the headlines in the Voelkische Beobachter during the Sudeten crisis, “Small State Menaces World Peace.” Now it is Turkey who is menacing the Soviet Union by objecting to giving up about a third of her territory.

The question of what is aggression is still undefined but it becomes increasingly clear that aggression is any protest of a small state against a great power.

Don’t Blame Jimmy

Mr. Byrnes came home with peace—peace for our time. But if the pattern of American policy has become to advance one pace in order to retreat two, do not blame Mr. Byrnes. The same papers that reported the results of the Conference reported the march of a hundred GI Joes on GHQ in Frankfurt, right before the eyes of the Germans, in protest that they had not been re-deployed. Backed by the clamor from home, our men are unwilling to stick by and consolidate that for which hundreds of thousands of their comrades lie forever far from home. Our Army and fleet disintegrate. Our internal affairs disintegrate. No one can powerfully represent a country in such a state at any conference.