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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 14, 6 April 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Signs of a new British deal with Japan are beginning to appear. If it is actually signed, sealed, and delivered, the results will be of the utmost importance in the further development of the war.
It is a notable fact that although Washington came out with a declaration of non-recognition within a few hours after the launching of the new puppet government of Wang Ching-wei in Nanking, neither London nor Paris have as yet followed suit. In Tokyo there is already quiet rejoicing on what is taken as a virtual split among Japan’s three principal imperialist rivals for the exclusive rights to plunder China.
Other signs of a British diplomatic shift are not lacking. On March 28 in Tokyo the British ambassador, Sir Robert Craigie, declared in a speech to delighted Japanese dignitaries that Japan and Britain are “ultimately striving for the same objective – namely, lasting peace and the preservation of our institutions from extraneous and subversive influences.” He saw no insuperable obstacle to the establishment of “full harmony” in the national policies of the two countries.
On March 31, the financial pages of the New York Times carried a report unpublished elsewhere of a remarkable deal between the British and Japanese governments Involving the sale of about 1,000,000 barrels of crude oil produced by British companies in Iran to Japan. One cargo of 100,000 barrels is already en route, the Times said. Since up until now Japan has done most of its oil buying in California, news of the transaction has produced angry mutterings in Washington.
It seems very definitely to suggest that the British and the Japanese are striking a new bargain, partly at the expense of China, and partly at that of American imperialism. Oil is one of the most important elements in the American threat of an embargo against Japan, and Britain is already displaying an indecent readiness to fill in the threatened gap in Japan’s sources of supply.
What the British want is clear enough. They are ready to forego, TEMPORARILY, their resistance to Japan’s continental policy in return for aligning Japan with Britain’s more immediate war concerns. This would involve, mainly, Japanese compliance in the extension of the blockade to the Pacific, aimed primarily against Soviet ports which have become the trans-shipment point for goods bought in the United States and destined, the British believe, for Germany.
The Japanese, for their part, have much to gain and little to lose. They will be able to continue unseating Britain from strategic positions in China and at the same time play off the British against the Americans, and the Russians against both the others. For the Japanese it is a break in the almost total diplomatic isolation in which they have been languishing since the Stalin-Hitler pact was signed.
For the American war-planners, It is another dose of the British double-cross which they had to swallow in 1932, when the British supported the Japanese invasion of China for the same reason that they helped nourish Hitler – as a weapon against the Soviet Union.
In these circumstances, the spring maneuvers of the U.S. Pacific fleet may constitute a warning to Britain no less than to Japan, a warning that American imperialism this time intends to play its own hand in its own way.
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