A PLEA FOR REALISM
IT SEEMS NOW time for America to turn from romance to reality in international relationships. For the last quarter century this nation has been craning toward the white stars of idealism in foreign affairs while clenching its toes deep in the fertile muck of business materialism. Like a man balanced with a foot on the back of two diverging horses, America has fallen between two divorced and divergent policies. Internationally, this nation has held malice toward none, charity—and better, lucrative patronage, for most. Internally, America makes use of every rotten and questionable trick of business within the strict margin of the law. The few important incursions of vivid and realistic private business into the international scheme have been blindly made: progressive and suffocating extension of the tariff hurled into the teeth of the struggling cogs of reparation, fatuous and uncritical paternalism toward Pan-American investments, marines-landed-situation-well-in-hand stuff. This bifurcate course of hungry internal materialism and mystic international idealism pulled us into an unwanted war, the conclusion of which found us holding a seam-creaking sack of foreign promises to pay. This was bad. Then the limited vision of several generations of Departments of State allowed these governmental loans abroad to be called in stalemate by a tremendous ejaculation of private loans, all properly and profitably brokered by investment bankers. Worse. Then business got the bit in its teeth and the rum in its gullet and tore through several years of a mythical prosperity for all the loot and glory that was in it. Now, at the end of its enormous jag, business has passed out, folded up, blown, departed.
International relationships have been as dangerous Sober, as business drunk. The starry-eyed undiplomatic altruism— (what Frank Simonds calls "the evangelical urge" in American foreign policy) which startled France out of her wits with the Hoover Moratorium has been carried over into baiting an angry Japan. This is not realism. Diplomacy is not flicked like a whip. Diplomacy cannot be chopped out on the typewriters of a Wilson or a Stimson and flung in a phrase directly to the people. Diplomacy works under cover of say-nothing communiques behind closed doors: there is motive to be taken into account, and motive is very often intimate and unholy. Diplomacy means making it easy for a person to do what one wants him to do, not creating a situation in which he will lose face if he does.
And so, unless war is wanted, we must come to one reality: we can no longer afford the luxury of emotion toward the nations of the world. Our future international relationships must be grounded on policy, not on sentiment. If it seems expedient for our export trade that we recognize Red Russia, we must do so, even though gentlefolk wince at a word like Communism. We must temper diplomatic policy to the hardness of business policy, burn the carbon out, and weld both into a single instrument of undivided national benefit. We must recognize that realism means pursuing a course of action which looks designedly and honestly to its agent's advantage; whether that agent be a man or a nation. Realism dictates that this country pull every string and work every wire to secure maximum advantage from the ascendency which reparations give us to secure reciprocal tariff reductions, to restrict armament to a point proportional with our own, to obtain cooperation on international issues.
But a realistic policy for America cuts deeper than mere attainment of our aims. It implies recognition and understanding of the aims of others. It postulates a philosophy tough enough not to bleat at prima facie evidence of sundered treaties and ruptured covenants. It infers a diplomacy far more profound than mere Grotian etiquette because it takes into account inimical points of view. Realism finds three answers to every problem: the right, the wrong, the desirable! And if cynicism comes with realism it is well to remember that cynicism is preferable to despair.
Editor, The Dartmouth
