Fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes on; as we fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting. The vengeful articles of the treaty of Versailles were written after the Armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been accepted by Americans if the United States had fought longer and therefore thought longer about them.
We shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. But we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an Axis peace means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field and revolution at home, the Axis powers had to go to war on the United States.
If we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on Pearl Harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by Axis standards, Pearl Harbor was the final incident of one series of events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose, the destruction of American democracy—which, so long as it endured, undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers.
Why? Why are Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo insecure if we survive? Why were we in danger so long as they were victorious? The answer lies in the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the reason has to be found in the character of those involved; the war is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it was inevitable—and how we will win.
Our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our present crisis, and so creates our future. That is the sense in which character is Destiny.
We know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war began we knew the treachery of the Japanese military caste, the jackal aggression of Mussolini, the brutality and falseness of Hitler; and the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these leaders.
But these things do not explain why we are a danger to the Axis, and the Axis to us.
"Historic Necessity"
The profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new, but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as the Feudal Order. Democracy destroyed Feudalism; and Feudalism, returning in a new form as Fascism, must destroy democracy or go down in the attempt; the New Order and the New World cannot exist side by side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one another and only one will survive. We might blindly let the new despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force since 1776; but it cannot let us live. We could co-exist with Czarism because it was a shrinking force; or with British Imperialism because its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. We could not have lived side by side with Trotskyite Communism because it was as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the German Nazis.
As it happened, Stalin, not Trotsky, took over from Lenin; Socialism in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". Stalin made a sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of propaganda; he allowed German Communism to be beaten to death in concentration camps; and, as Trotsky might have said, the "historical obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the bearded old Marxian enemies of Capital, but by Capital's own young sadists, the Storm Troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and manufacturers of Italy and Germany. That is why, since 1932, realist democrats have known that the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding. The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography demanded a continent for a military base.