FOREIGN RELATIONS: Rupture

How many diplomatic breaks add up to a diplomatic break?

The State Department announced that it had severed relations with French-owned Martinique, the green, blockaded Caribbean island which lies spang across the Atlantic approach to the Panama Canal. In his umpteenth sharp note, long-suffering Secretary Cordell Hull told the island's Governor, Admiral Georges Robert, that he was, in fact, a tool of Hitler. The U.S. would stand his obstinacy no longer; it recalled its consul general. (But the vice consul and a naval observer were left on the island.) The white-bearded, intransigent Admiral did not reply.

Once more, as during the days of Vichy appeasement, U.S. editorialists dragged out the simile of the long, thin thread which soon must snap. Wrote New York Times Managing Editor Edwin L. James: ". . . If he defies Washington, there will be created a situation which, to repeat, could scarcely be allowed to continue."

But the situation, ever since the fall of France, had been one that could scarcely be allowed to continue. The game of diplomatic cat & mouse between the U.S. and the doughty Admiral was becoming a classic of diplomacy.

For almost three years the State Department and the Admiral had been a finger-snap away from the brief act of violence in which the U.S. would take over Martinique. By cunning diplomacy on each side, by inexhaustibly ingenious tactics, the relations were prolonged again & again & again. Each time editors harrumphed: this is it. Each time one side or the other had managed to think of one more démarche, one more protocol, one more possible avenue of negotiation. Even the cutting off of food supplies had failed to shake Admiral Robert. For 35 months he had forced the U.S. to keep vigilant patrol over his domain. The 105 U.S. planes which had failed to reach France in 1940 had long since rusted into disuse; the aircraft carrier Béarn, the cruiser Emile Berlin and 140,000 tons of merchant shipping—which the United Nations could well use—rode listlessly at anchor, fouled with barnacles.

Perhaps a handful of U.S. marines could capture the island. But the U.S. was still reluctant to win by force anything that might be won by suasion.