The phases of the future grow longer as we progress. We will celebrate the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year, because in that time we are going to create the organization which will bring us peace for a century—or for ever. This middle period is the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin thinking of the future of the world—and at the same time think about demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next election—by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world—for which there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old one.
We can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal nations, we will bring on an event in Europe beside which the rise of Hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act of destruction which Hitler began. And whatever comes out of it, fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing the start of another European war, which will spread more rapidly to Asia and ourselves. Those of us who went through the first World War, and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire, may be resigned to a third act in the 1960's; but the men who fight this war may be as revolutionary in England and America as they turned out to be last time in Russia or in Germany. They may want assurance, the day after the war ends, that we have been thinking about them and the future of the world. They will give us the choice between world organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions will help us. We will have to choose and to act; fascism may be destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized world will not lack leaders; we can have modified Communism or super-fascism, all beautifully Americanized, if we have nothing better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. And by the time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad will mean starvation and plague and repression and death.
Seven New Worlds
Forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of different alternatives to revolution and chaos. Some of these are based on political necessity or the desire to punish the Axis; some correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more inclusive. They can be summarized so:
Re-isolating America;
Collaboration with Fascism;
Collaboration with Communism;
Anglo-American domination;
American imperialism;
Revival of the League of Nations;
A federal organization of the world.
To some people in the United States, none of these seems possible, all of them disastrous. If the confusion of propaganda continues, these people will fall back on the principle of isolation; it is a fatal backward step, but it is better than any of the seemingly fatal forward steps; it is in keeping with part of our tradition; and if Europe as always, with Asia now added, goes forward to another war, the centre and core of America will say "we want out", and mean it. But isolating America cannot be an immediate post-war policy; if we plan to withdraw, we virtually hand over the world to revolution and hand ourselves into moral and financial bankruptcy. Isolation can only be a constant threat to the world, that we will withdraw unless some of our basic terms are met. We have to know our terms, or our threat is meaningless.
There is much to be said for isolation, or autarchy; I pass it over quickly because I am not attempting to criticise each sketch of the post-war world; only to note certain aspects of them all—notably their relation to the America which I have described in earlier pages. The next two programs are also easy to assay: they are at the opposite extreme; they rise from no part of our basic tradition, and collaboration with either fascism or communism would have to come either by revolution after defeat or by long skillful propaganda which would disguise the fact and make us think that we were converting the world to our democracy.
It is, nevertheless, childish to assume that the thing can't happen. Given a good unscrupulous American dictator we could have made peace with the Nazis, and the Japanese, by squeezing Britain out of the Atlantic and Russia out of the Pacific; our gain would have been the whole Western Hemisphere; this would have gratified both the isolationists and the imperialists; it would have preserved peace and the Monroe Doctrine; the only disqualification is that it would destroy freedom throughout the world—which is the purpose of fascism. This was possible; it may become possible again. Unless Britain shows more intellectual strength in the final phases of the war than she did in the earlier ones, the chance to scuttle her will appeal to any anti-European American dictator; liquidate Hitler, make peace with the anti-Hitlerian Nazis, especially the generals, send our appeasers as ambassadors, and in five years we can re-invigorate a defeated Germany and start world-fascism going again.
The alternative is not so remote. It is a distinct and immediate possibility.