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As an Empire reformer Philip Kerr edited the Round Table, a scholarly journal of political philosophy. As Lloyd George's secretary during World War I, he made two secret journeys to Switzerland to try to convince Austrians that further fighting was hopeless. As a peacemaker, he was with Lloyd George at Versailles, played a part in drafting the Versailles Treaty which he has since criticized. As Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India in the MacDonald Cabinet, he sat in the endless Round-Table Conferences on the Indian Constitution, visited Delhi (where he was greeted with a sign reading "Lothian, go back"), developed an admiration for Gandhi's saintliness when he was living in a mud hut next Gandhi's. As a firm believer in closer U. S.-British trade relations, he resigned from the Cabinet when Liberals split from the Government, over trade policy. As a close friend of Lady Astor's, he was damned as a member of the Cliveden Set during the appeasement crisis, like other members denied that there was such a set.
Business experience popped fitfully in & out of this political career: at 23 he was secretary of the Railway Committee of Central South African Railways; at 53 he was briefly Governor of the National Bank of Scotland. An improvising administrator, he works by fits & starts, grows inert and sluggish unless he has a big job to do.
The political philosophy that this career has hammered out for him is simple. His belief in a final Hitler defeat is no mere Little Englander's faith in muddling through. It comes from his faith that "what force alone constructs has neither permanence nor life." The concept of triumphant conquest he answers with Bacon's epigram: "Rome did not spread upon the world; the world spread upon the Romans." Says he: if the Nazis, the Fascists and the Japanese "had even a glimmering of this profound truth they might become centres of lasting world systems. But it is of their natures that they are blind to the eternal laws. They try to spread upon the world and the world, in due time, will cast them off."
Before he became Ambassador, Lord Lothian freely deduced future U. S. foreign policy on this basis. He told Britishers: the U. S. will never underwrite the British and French Empires, because the U. S. is traditionally opposed to imperialism, or the political control of one people by another. The U. S. attitude is likely to be similar to Britain's after Napoleon:
"We always insisted on standing uncommitted on the side lines of the European conflict, until a menace to our own interests compelled us to intervene. We long ago realized that the best and cheapest way of assuring our own security was to encourage other nations to fight for their own security, and when there was doubt about their ability to do so to assist them with finance and, if necessary, with arms." The U. S. does not aspire to a position of world responsibility and power; its desire is still for isolation without responsibility.
But world responsibility will be forced on it, as it was upon Britain, largely against her will; with U. S. strength, its higher standard of living and its larger measure of freedom, it will not be a question of the U. S. forcing itself upon the world, but of the world forcing itself upon the U. S.