500.A19/99: Telegram
The Ambassador in Italy ( Phillips ) to the Secretary of State
[Received May 27—3:35 p.m.]
248. My 244, May 25, noon. The newspapers this afternoon under New York dateline and with conspicuous headlines publish Mussolini’s [Page 659] statements to Simms as well as accounts of the foreign comment which has appeared to date.
Gayda21 in an editorial says that this invitation to the President to convene a world conference for the limitation of armaments made by a well-armed and disciplined state is the result of “conscious will not of necessity” and that it realistically indicates the limitations within which such an initiative could prove successful. Gayda continues that “it is from Roosevelt that there have recently come not without polemical tone denunciations of Europe for the folly of its armaments race; and it is in Roosevelt the leader of a great power whose own vital interests demand solidarity with the rest of the world that this race may find a supreme force for moderation through the initiative for a meeting among all the responsible nations”. The United States being extraneous to all European conflicts “to such a point as to base her foreign policy on deliberate absence from the League of Nations and on neutrality” and having no need for huge armaments since she is stronger than all her neighbors together, is the only country to which can fall “the legitimate work of arbitration among the opposing interests of Europe and the world and the competitive armaments in which those interests are expressed. With the initiative mentioned by the Duce the United States would augment her prestige as a world leader and would without incurring any of those dangerous entanglements which she refuses strengthen the vital interests that unite her to Europe.”
After expatiating on the grave political and economic perils of the present armaments race which President Roosevelt is in the best of positions to realize, the writer says that world economic collaboration which the President is promoting is inconceivable so long as the armaments race continues and that anyone who rejects Mussolini’s “frank and documented warning to the United States and the whole civilized world voluntarily places himself outside the road to real peace.”
- Virginio Gayda, editor of Giornale d’Italia.↩