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2) Keep a boot wedged in the Open Door. This would mean taking a strong line against Japan—not only by keeping the flag above the Philippines but by resisting every Japanese advance in China and the East Indies; and would presuppose a willingness to oppose Japan with arms if necessary. After two years as High Commissioner to the Philippines, Paul Vories McNutt returned to the U. S. as a burning apostle of this view. The present High Commissioner, Francis Bowes Sayre, is a rabid convert to it. And it is a good bet that some time soon Filipino President Manuel L. Quezon will publicly beg the U. S. to postpone Philippine independence beyond 1946 and keep Japan out.
3) Appease the aggressor. Businessmen (who want quick turnover) and cynics (who deride quixotic sympathies) think the U. S. should make a new, and better, trade treaty with Japan when the abrogated Treaty of 1911 expires next month. Japan has no better customer than the U. S., and is the U. S.'s third best. To get on Japan's good side, argue the protagonists of this plan, it would be worth swapping away spheres of interest in China, which, they say, are already lost anyhow.
4) Wait and see; not abandon interests, but not provoke Japan in holding them; sit tight on the status quo. This policy, for many reasons, is the one which the U. S. is most apt to follow. It is what the indispensable, kindly, wise adviser of the State Department, Stanley K. Hornbeck, calls "a course of self-denial and restraint." It is certainly the course which Ambassador Johnson represents.
Career Diplomat is the phrase to remember about Nelson Trusler Johnson. Born in Washington 52 years ago, he studied at Friends School and George Washington University. He was such a whiz at Latin, Greek and German that one of his professors casually said he ought to get a language appointment in the foreign service. He liked the idea, got a list of required subjects for the diplomatic exams, borrowed some books, read without instruction, passed in a walk, and before he knew it was at the end of the world.
He loved China. He was like a blotter for the language, and soon he was reading both newspapers and classics. His early changes of post gave him a habit of restlessness from which he has never relaxed: from Peking to bleak Mukden, Russified Harbin, hilly Hankow, busy Shanghai, river-girt Chungking, remote Changsha.
At 24 he was made judge in a Shanghai court. He was lenient to a fault. One day he freed a coolie accused of having stolen four ducks because evidence was insufficient—and the next day found four ducks missing from his own duck pond.
In 1918 he was called back to F. E. (as State Department officials call the Far Eastern Division). Here he learned for the first time what the State Department really is: not a policy-making machine, not a stable of thoroughbred cutaway-horses, not a mess of pigeonholes, but an extremely expert research body for the use of one man, the President. He found it full of extraordinarily well-informed men, was delighted to learn that State's Far Eastern representatives, both at home and in the field, are traditionally among the best. And he learned how heartbreakingly slow the action of U. S. foreign policy is.