 Monday, October 11, 1999
AN
UNNECESSARY WAR? by
Patrick J. Buchanan In
A
Republic, Not An
Empire, I take many
controversial stands: Indicting
Jefferson for naval disarmament,
defending Polk's war with Mexico,
decrying U.S. annexation of the
Philippines, and supporting
Harding's Washington naval
treaty. But all has been trampled under by the
hysterical reaction to two assertions:
That Britain's war guarantee to Poland was
a monumental blunder, and that after the
Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain in
1940, Germany posed no strategic threat to
the U.S.A. Why was Britain's war guarantee flawed?
Because Britain had neither the will nor
power to honor it. In 1939, only one
nation could save Poland from
Hitler: Russia. "Without Russia,"
declared Lloyd George, "our
[Polish] guarantees are the most
reckless commitment any country has ever
entered into. I say more, they are
demented." By threatening war for Poland, Britain
impelled Hitler to cut his deal with
Stalin. Result: Annihilation of
Poland, Stalin's serial rape of Finland,
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as Hitler
swallowed Denmark, Norway, the Low
Countries, and France. By mid-1940 Hitler controlled Western
Europe, Stalin Eastern Europe; and the
British had been routed at Dunkirk and
ensnared in a war that would cost
[her?] 400,000 dead and bring down
the empire. Yet, Poland was not saved! What, then,
did the war guarantee accomplish? And why
would it have been immoral for Britain to
re-direct Hitler's attack away from the
West, toward Stalin's slave empire, and
let the monsters eat each other up as
Harry Truman urged? Had Britain not declared war, Hitler
would have attacked an unprepared Stalin
in 1940. The result might well have been
the liberation of the Gulag and its 12
million souls, the eradication of
Bolshevism in Russia and China, no Cold
War, no Korea, and no Vietnam. Instead of
six years of World War II bloodletting, we
may have seen six months of a
Hitler-Stalin war, ending with one dead
and the other crippled. But, comes the cry, Hitler sought
"world domination." After Russia he would
have seized Western Europe, Britain, and
launched his final attack on us. But,
would he? According to historian A. J.
P. Taylor, "Eastern expansion was the
primary purpose of Hitler's policy, if not
the only one." To Labor Party statesman
Roy Denman, "The fear that after
Poland Hitler would have attacked Britain
was an illusion....Britain was dragged
into an unnecessary war." On August 11, 1939, Hitler had railed
to the Danzig League of Nations
commissioner: "Everything I undertake is
directed against Russia. If the West is
too stupid and too blind to comprehend
that, I will be forced to come to an
understanding with the Russians, to smash
the West, and then after its defeat, to
turn against the Soviet Union…" This, writes Henry A. Kissinger,
"was certainly an accurate statement of
Hitler's priorities: from Great Britain,
he wanted non-interference in Continental
affairs, and from the Soviet Union, he
wanted Lebensraum, or living space. It was
a measure of Stalin's achievement that he
was about to reverse Hitler's
priorities..." Yes, and an equal measure of Britain's
blunder. Challenging my contention that the U.S.
faced no strategic threat after 1940,
critics cite Nazi plans for an
"Amerika-Bomber." Berlin, they say, had
"embarked on a campaign to obtain bases in
Africa and the Canary Islands as part of
what... foreign minister Joachim von
Ribbentrop called a 'huge program...of an
anti-American character.'" But this is comic-book history. Not
only did the Royal Air Force achieve
superiority in 1940, the Royal Navy had
never lost it, as the French learned, when
Churchill ordered his ships to sink the
French fleet at Mers el-Kebir in mid-1940,
to keep it out of Hitler's hands. In November, 1940, the Italian fleet
was smashed at Taranto. "By this single
stroke," exulted Churchill, "the balance
of naval power in the Mediterranean was
decisively altered." In early '41 Hitler's
mighty surface raider, Bismarck, was sunk
on its maiden voyage; the Graf Spee had
been scuttled off Montevideo in 1939. By Pearl Harbor, Hitler was
overextended and blocked at the Channel
and Atlantic by the Royal Air Force and
Navy, and at Moscow and Leningrad by the
Red Army. By 1942, he was finished in
Africa. The idea that Hitler, with no surface
navy or fleet of transport ships, no
landing craft or seamen who had even
served on a carrier, could construct in
Africa or the Canary Islands ships to
threaten the U.S., on the other side of an
ocean the U.S. and British navies had
ruled since Trafalgar is a proposition too
absurd to require rebuttal. Mr. Buchanan,
author of A Republic, Not an Empire, is
a candidate for the Republican
nomination for President.
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