793.94/11983: Telegram
The Ambassador in France (Bullitt) to the Secretary of State
[Received January 6—3:15 p.m.]
25. In the course of conversation today Blum19 said to me that he had authoritative information on the present point of view of the Soviet Government with regard to the Chinese-Japanese conflict. The Soviet Union would continue to assist China with supplies but would not enter the war unless either the United States or Great Britain should be drawn into war with Japan. He was certain that if Great Britain should be compelled to fight Japan the Soviet Union would make war on Japan at once.
[Page 7]Blum said that he had read only a précis of Van Zeeland’s report20 but that there was enough in the précis to convince him that no progress could be made along the lines suggested by Van Zeeland. He felt certain that neither Germany nor Italy would stop its movement toward autarchy and he believed that any proposal which involved negotiations between England, France, Germany and Italy, even with the addition of the United States, smacked too much of the old Four Power Treaty to be acceptable to democratic opinion anywhere in Europe. He said that he would expect great opposition to this in Europe to say nothing of the opposition from Poland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.
- Leon Blum, Vice President of the French Council of Ministers.↩
- For correspondence concerning this subject, see Foreign Relations, 1937, vol. i, pp. 671 ff.↩