Republican Turnabout

The day before yesterday the Republican Party publicly repudiated its former isolationist stand. Ever since Pearl Harbor, responsible Republicans, in Congress and out, have cooperated unstintingly in efforts to help the Administration prosecute the war. For many, who had been stumping the isolationist cause, the about face must have been difficult. But with few exceptions, the former stay-at-homers ungrudgingly pitched into the fight of which, for years, the Administration had been warning them.

Now with the formal declaration framed by the Republican National Committee, the G.O.P. and the Democratic Party agree, for the first time, on a similar foreign resolution--a resolution not to ignore the rest of the world when the war is over. Both Parties in their own time and in their own way have accepted the same general formula for post-war America, the Democrats clearly realizing twenty-five years ago that America would be unable to remain divorced from the rest of the world for long. Today the Republicans, at least in the name of their Party, have realized the same thing.

Yet there is no room for false complacency among Republicans, who don't want to see their Party fall back into the morass of isolationism. Many of their most prominent and respected colleagues still cling to that ideal as a panacca that once given a chance will right all America's wrongs.

More dangerous than these groups to future Republican foreign policy are those anti-democratic forces that have attached themselves to the G.O.P. bandwagon during the last two or three years. The Hitler-sympathizing leaders in this country, from Coughlin to Pelley, have joined Republican ranks at election time thinking that the best way to foster their cause, for the inoment, was to back the most isolationist major Party. This was a marriage few Republicans liked, and now, at least for the time being, they have broken it. But these same insidious forces will be watchfully waiting to use the Party best suited to serve their purposes in the future.

For the peace to come there is much greater chance that it will be lasting if both Parties agree at the start on a basic international policy. The step Republicans have just taken adds immeasurably to internal unity and moreover, to hopes for the future.