The President’s Flag Day address marks without a doubt the collapse of American strategy. That address, coupled with the hints of “effective readjustments” in the note to Russia, implies that America is ready to pour out endless blood and treasure, not to the end of a negotiated peace, but to the utter crushing of the Central Powers, to their dismemberment and political annihilation. The war is pictured in that address as a struggle to the death against the military empire of Mittel-Europa. The American rôle changes from that of mediator in the interest of international organization to that of formidable support to the breaking of this menace to the peace and liberty of Europe. It will be remembered that American liberals interpreted our entrance into the war as primarily defensive, an enterprise to prevent Germany’s threatened victory on the sea. We came in, not to secure an Allied “peace with victory,” but to prevent a German “peace with victory,” and so restore the situation favorable to a negotiated peace. The strategy of the negotiated peace depended largely on the belief that a military decision was either impossible or was not worth the colossal sacrifice it demanded. But it is only as the result of a sweeping military decision that any assured destruction of Mittel-Europa could come. In basing his case on Mittel-Europa, therefore, the President has clearly swung from a strategy of “peace without victory” to a strategy of “war to exhaustion for the sake of a military decision.” He implies that a country which came only after hesitation to the defense of the seas and the Atlantic world will contentedly pour out its indefinite blood and treasure for the sake of spoiling the coalition of Mittel-Europa and of making readjustments in the map of Europe effective against German influence on the Continent. Such an implication means the “end of American isolation” with a vengeance. No one can be blamed who sees in the Flag Day Address the almost unlimited countersigning of Allied designs and territorial schemes.