Security in the Pacific
Article Summary and Author Biography
JOHN FOSTER DULLES, Special Representative of the President in charge of negotiating the Japanese Peace Treaty and the Pacific security treaties; U.S. Senator from New York, 1949-50; member of the U.S. Delegation at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 and at several meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers and the U.N. General Assembly
THE United States has now signed four major treaties with Pacific nations. One of these is the Treaty of Peace between 48 Allied Powers and Japan. The other three are security treaties, one with the Philippines, another with Australia and New Zealand and the third with Japan.
The Treaty of Peace with Japan has two great purposes. It is first of all designed to close an old war on terms which will not provoke another war. To that end, the victors have made a treaty of reconciliation, eliminating from it all trace of hatred and venge-fulness. They sought, both in the manner of their negotiation and in the substance of their terms, to avoid the humiliations and the discriminations which victors usually impose upon the van-quished either because passion supplants their reason or because they think that is the way to discourage a defeated nation from going to war again. History shows that such a course in fact spurs the vanquished to seek revenge.
The Treaty of Peace with Japan is designed to break the vicious cycle of war, victory, peace and war. Whether it will do so no one can say surely, because no single act of itself is sufficient to guarantee future peace. One can prophesy with confidence, however, that nothing in the peacemaking will cause Japan to turn against the victors, as Germany did after the First World War.
It is something to have made a peace which avoids grievous blunders. There was, however, a second and even more difficult task. That was to translate Japan from a defeated enemy into a positive contributor to collective security in the Pacific as against the new menace of aggression which had arisen even before the old war was formally ended.
II. JAPAN'S COMMITTAL TO THE FREE WORLD
Japan's strategic position and her human and industrial potential are such that there can be no adequate security for anyone in the West Pacific unless the Japanese sincerely desire to be sustaining members of the free world. That, happily, is now the case...
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