Imperial Valley Press

By the Act of Havana, the 21 free nations of the New World unanimously agree that no part of that world is to be the pawn of power politics in other continents. Practical means of preventing it are set up.

This is the Monroe Doctrine glorified. What the United States once proclaimed as its own policy is now the united policy of all 21 American nations. Machinery is provided to make it stick.

The result of the Havana conference is greater and better than many hoped. A light has been raised in a dark world. A dam has been built to halt the spread of totalitarianism.

In no other part of the world would such a meeting be possible. No other great power would do what the United States has done—deliberately forbear to use its power to coerce its neighbors, yet win them by patient argument and reason to its point of view.

The Havana agreement is a triumph of reason and decency in a world which has been bowing to force alone.

Let no one think, however, that this settles the whole matter. Comment in European newspapers already shows that American unity infuriates the totalitarians. The German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese efforts to gain political influence in South America will be redoubled.

But abandonment of the grandiose cartel scheme removes the slightest legitimate objection that Europe might make to American unity.

The American countries will trade with all, but they will insist on trading on equal terms, with no special advantages to any, and no privileged positions swapped for a boatload of wheat, beef, or copper.

Havana marks a beginning, not an ending. Let there be no delusions. Having set up the rules, we must all play the game. The United States once set up a light before the world, wrote a set of rules—the League of Nations. Then it refused to play. This time it must play out the game.

As Leopoldo Melo, the Argentine delegate, said at Havana, "We all made concessions." We must all make them in future if we are to weld the Americas all the more firmly together. No change of administration, no change of personnel in the State Department, must be allowed to shake the structure that has been so painstakingly built for more than a decade.

Both parties are presumably in favor of developing Pan Americanism. It would be nationally serviceable for the opposition party to place itself squarely behind the Act of Havana, assuring our sister republics that this phase at least of American foreign relations is beyond either personality or party.