Honorable Mention, 1934
“The Balance of Power”—Horace Walpole
In 1935 the naval treaties come up for renewal. Should they and can they be renewed on substantially their present terms? That is, I believe, one of the most Important of-all the questions which face a sorely troubled world in which events may shape themselves toward an intensification of the hatred and confusion which has marked the past two years, or toward an era of better understanding.
Of all the high hopes and the diplomatic bloodiest against war which followed the bloodiest conflict in history, of all the compromises designed to stabilize world politics, only the naval treaties remain substantially intact. Their object was to lessen the most dangerous and costly features of naval competition and to provide a balance of sea power giving security to each nation and conversely to none the strength for immediate victory. Through these treaties it was hoped that the suspicion and fear incident to greatly expanding navies would be forever allayed. At Washington the maritime nations sought to create, not in terms of high-sounding words, but rather in practical terms of ships and forts, an international equipoise at once so moderate and so just, that national policy would no longer seek nor need the backing of aggressive arms nor would growing armaments again be able to sustain the most disturbing features of imperialistic policy.
These were the great resolves of 1922, “the avowal of a world conscience refined by the consuming fires of war and made more sensitive by the anxious aftermath.” To the realization of these ideals we sacrificed the almost completed ships of our greatest naval program. We deliberately chose the path of faith rather than the path of definite preponderance at sea. Some few voices were raised in protest, but, for the most part, our sacrifice was hailed throughout the country as bold, generous, and withal practical. By it we seemed immediately to realize a level of naval strength which well suited our position as a great nation, harboring no dreams of conquest, asking only peace for ourselves and an independence of action to throw the weight of our influence toward a speedy liquidation of the problems left over from the tragic years of the Great War. The temper of our national idealism was never more clearly evidenced than in our readiness immediately to lay our almost completed naval superiority as an offering on the altar of international accord.
To the student of foreign relations it is well known that these seemingly ideal achievements were the results of give and take, of the clash of policies in conference, of the pride, the hopes and fears of sovereign nations, each seeking greatness and security along the inevitable paths of its peculiar historical development. In discussing the problems of naval armaments and naval policies, it is usual to refer to a kind of harmless “national defense,” the rightful prerogative of all nations, rather than to speak boldly of relative strength for war against any particular enemy. This natural reluctance to discuss the naval problem in terms of perfect honesty is sure to lead to confusion. It is with absolute if unvarnished frankness that we must speak if we are to attempt clearly to determine whether or not the results of the treaties were good, whether the subsequent levels of war strength were fair and just, and finally whether these levels should be continued in the future, or modified to meet changed conditions, or completely discarded.
Public opinion in Europe and the Orient is fast forming on this most vital question. The tendency, especially in Japan, seems to be toward a repudiation of the results of the Washington and London conferences and a return, if need be, to the unlimited competition which was temporarily halted, or at least retarded, in 1922. Shall we also accept this thesis or is there, not only for us but for the other naval powers as well, an inherent virtue and justice in the arms limitations of today which warrants our standing firm for their retention and perpetuation. This is in brief the problem of tremendous portent which will face the world in 1935.
The 5:5:3 ratio which formed the basis of the Washington treaty, and slightly modified in favor of Japan the basis of the London treaty, had its origin in an attempt to stabilize navies at the levels of 1922. Existing strength seemed the only possible basis for agreement. In his report to the President, Secretary Hughes wrote:
It was obvious that no agreement for limitation was possible if the three powers were not content to take as a basis their actual existing naval strength. General considerations of national need) aspirations and expectations, policy and program could be brought forward by each power in justification of some hypothetical relation of naval strength with no result but profitless and interminable discussion. The solution was to take what the powers actually had, as it was manifest that neither could better its relative position unless it won in a race which it was the object of the conference to end.
The resulting naval ratios were reached after an insistence on our part to count ships under construction in terms of the progress made toward their completion and the desire of Japan to save the new and mighty battleship Mutsu. The original idea was left substantially intact. There were, however, two important modifications. Types smaller than capital ships and carriers were left unrestricted in the now unrealized hope that they would not be greatly increased in individual size and would reach in numbers what was then considered a natural level proportional to the limited battle lines. Finally, as the price of Japan’s acceptance of a lesser fleet than that of Britain or the United States, it was mutually agreed to abide by the status quo in the fortification of Pacific naval bases.
Though the resultant naval strength as between the three principal maritime nations had its origin in the finally accepted tonnage total of capital ships built and building, it was immediately apparent that a real balance of naval power had been achieved. Mainly by chance the three navies had fallen into a mutual relationship which precluded the possibility of sudden victory. The statesmen seemed to have found at last the ideal formula, security for all. It is in these terms, rather than in terms of the original idea to halt the three navies at their respective 1922 levels, that we have come to think of the whole problem of limitations. We consistently defended this position at subsequent conferences. The balance, and not the chance levels of 1922 in which it originated, is the essence of the naval treaties today. Whether or not they are destined to be renewed in 1935 will rest upon the willingness of each of the participants to perpetuate this balance.
There is much thoughtful criticism today our own country, in Great Britain, and in Japan both against the present allowed levels of the treaties and against the idea of naval limitation itself. The ideals of 1922 seem sadly out of date. At that time very large fleets were in the process of construction. Yet, despite some ill-founded talk, there was no real danger of war. The world was one in the desire, nay the insistence, that the nations abandon the old paths of arms competition, of conflicting imperialisms, of alliances and counter-alliances and finally of war. The ghosts of the dead armies seemed to haunt the council chamber.
If you break faith with us who die,
We shall not rest . . .
But today we are beginning to forget. In Europe, in Asia, and to the south, there are now wars or the rumors of war. Diplomacy seems to stand hesitant at the crossroads, frankly confused and almost ready to take again the old ways of purely national interests. At such a time, any ban on armament seems at first sight a dangerous and unnecessary impediment. If we are to have war, then all nations, prospective neutrals as well as prospective belligerents, had best look to their arms. Any limits which restrict the inherent ability of the great powers to achieve material preponderance seem to the soldier, and to many a statesman as well, as unnatural and unjust. Only recently this sentiment has been voiced by those who, at Whitehall, in the dark days of 1916, faced starvation and surrender, there among the trophies of England’s glorious past.
Germany today demands “parity of security” and may yet risk war to win it. Japan asks for equality in naval arms, an equality which many of her soldiers and statesmen regard as but her just due, and which by great effort they have almost achieved while our country has long hesitated to build toward the treaty limits. And, in America, we are not lacking those who advocate directing a far greater part of our national effort toward immediately reaching the maximum fleet allowed by the treaty, and will, I believe, be unalterably opposed to any agreement on arms limitations proposed in 1935. They regard the naval treaties as a patent failure and impatiently wait the day when we shall be forever free from the shackles of restricted navies.
Those who take this point of view often speak of armaments as the concern of sovereign nations, each alone the rightful judge of its own needs. This is to a limited extent true of armies, for armies have a certain internal police purpose and a historical existence independent of the strength or disposition of prospective foreign foes. Navies, on the other hand, and especially the larger navies, partake only vaguely of these general national characteristics. For Britain centuries ago there might have been a reasonable naval strength independent of the power of her enemies and merely sufficient fully “to protect the King’s honour in the Narrow Seas.” But today, whether she will or no, she faces definite fleets whose threat to her as possible enemies dictates herown fleet strength. As a young republic whose commerce was harried over the seas by European belligerents, blockader and blockaded alike, we might well long for the tranquil stability inherent in “a just and liberal policy with twenty sail-of-the-line at sea.” But today our naval power is of necessity based on other and less vague purposes. Modern fleets are definitely built and sustained for war, one against the other, alone or in combination. Their war strength is their only strength, and their war purpose their only purpose. Even the oft enunciated preparation against war, for the defense of commerce or for the vindication of neutrality, is in the last analysis identical to preparation for war, despite the fact that it springs from an opposite national policy. Every naval limitation then, in a time when war seems likely, can easily be regarded as a dangerous and self-imposed abnegation of sovereignty, and is so regarded in some quarters today.
This philosophy fails, I think, to give due weight to the fact that the limitations were designed eventually to bear somewhat equally on all participants. At Washington, ours was the sacrifice of splendid ships, almost completed. Ours was the bold adventure, the generous gesture. In return, however, we secured the stoppage of battleship building abroad, actual and prospective, and effected the dissolution of a naval alliance that even our completed fleet could not have successfully opposed. The idea back of the succeeding London treaty was that its signature left the odds on the outcome of the next war about as they would have been without the treaty, and, by limiting the new cruiser competition, made that same “next war” a little less likely to come. As against the criticism that the treaties have called an unnatural and unfair halt to the growing preponderance of the strong, it can be justly claimed that the upper limits were fixed so high that they gave, and still give, ample range to naval effort of the strong nations.
Britain, despite her reasonable and continuous building, will not fully complete her allowed quota until a year or two after the expiration of the treaties. So long and so dangerously have we already delayed our construction, hoping vainly that others would also be content with less than their full treaty fleets, that the relative sea strength we demanded in conference cannot now be attained before 1939. It is significant that only Japan will enter the 1935 conference with a fleet actually built up to the very last ton allowed. The naval agreements cannot be justly criticized as an arbitrary slowing down natural and necessary construction. The years since 1922 have been years of peace, albeit years occasionally shadowed by the clouds of future wars. The amount of new building during this period seems to bear a proper relation to the temper of the times. What the treaties did was to liquidate the mutually abnormal programs which were part and parcel of the world m arms. There was in 1922, and will still be in 1935, a belief, stronger than logic, that a world in arms bids fair soon to become a world at war, and that it is only natural to hold navies, either by agreement or by abstinence from excessive building, to levels of national effort which seem proper and even inherent to a world civilized and at peace.
While the treaties have left the rate of peace-time construction substantially unhampered, except for long postponing the eventual replacement of the battleship class, technically they have proved both a blessing and a curse to those charged with the difficult task of creating maximum strength for war within their limits. For unfortunately navies are not standardized. They consist of collections of different types, differently grouped into fleets under the stimulus of current ideas of war strategy and old national traditions. Unless we are willing to allow to each nation the types of fighting ships it desires, thus leaving the path open for all kinds and conditions of vessels and of fleets, some effort must be made to restrict not only the size but the composition of rival navies. Types of combatant vessels must be defined. And here we have yet to find a better limit than weight. But restriction by weight, or displacement, has led us into some confused and abnormally costly building.
The first so-called "treaty cruisers," frankly built up to the very top limit of the allowed displacement (10,000 tons), are by many experts today considered as unsound ships. These light vessels with their great hitting power, fast and fragile, are dangerously vulnerable to enemy fire. They are already being superseded by sturdier types, more likely to prove themselves under the terrible test of battle. We have finally learned the technique of treaty building. No longer do we press for impossible speed and gun power on a limited hull. And yet, in a larger sense, the ideas of the treaties continue to warp our conception of fighting ships. The 1,000-ton cruiser has taken on virtue totally aside from her power in battle or even her strategic use in war. She has become a political ship, an index of naval strength, overshadowing the other units of the fleet, a kind of symbol of technical triumph in the face of the annoying restrictions imposed by the statesmen. Without the treaty we might have preferred smaller and more numerous cruisers, or perhaps larger but fewer ships. In either case we would have built only those types dictated by purely naval considerations. We would not have aimed at great fighting strength crowded at large expense into a fixed displacement. We would not have struggled so painfully up what has been called "the vertical section of the effort and attainment curve." Our designs would probably have been more conservative and less costly. Our tactical conceptions of the use of ships in battle would have been less confused. But all this we would have had at the cost of meeting the ever increasing pressure of purely competitive building.
For despite the technical difficulties which result from the restriction of ships to arbitrary displacements, the treaties have had a very welcome stabilizing effect on naval construction. Unrestricted building is inherently and fiercely competitive. It partakes in an exaggerated form of “keeping up with the Joneses,” or rather keeping well ahead of them. The ultimate purpose of all fighting ships is to go into action against other fighting ships, in a battle in which the outcome is usually sink or be sunk. The naval designer is dealing, not with dollars nor even with tons of hull, but with victory or defeat, with the life or death of his shipmates. He therefore looks to his likely target, some known or imagined class of foreign ships, and seeks to create a vessel that gives promise of victory against them. But, alas, in other admiralty buildings, foreign designers, equally skillful in their art, are bending over the plans of their own future ships and themselves carefully designing for victory. As there are only two sure means of attaining superior fighting strength, an increase in the size of individual ships and an increase in the numbers built, the vicious spiral of competition is forced up and up. Types lose their original conception as they are increased in size. The light cruiser evolves into the heavy cruiser, and the heavy cruiser into the battle cruiser. Again the problem of numbers enters, for the seas are large, and, especially in the initial dispositions of war, ships of some type must feel out enemy movements along the far-flung trade routes. Squadrons of light cruisers are reintroduced to give necessary numbers for scouting and also for screening the heavy forces against torpedo attack in battle. Under the stimulus of unhampered evolution, the battleship grows in bulk and fighting strength. The 16-inch-gun ship would have been soon outclassed by the 18-inch-gun ship, and she herself been in turn outclassed by the 20- inch-gun Incomparable, sketched by Admiral Sir John Fisher, blind and forceful apostle of the ever mounting spiral of technical development. There is no rest, no limit in the compelling logic of competition save the size of the dockyard forges and the depth of the public purse. Such is bound to be the outcome of the naval laissez faire in a time when war seems even vaguely possible and the professional skill and pride of rival designers meet in a race for future victory. The treaties gave a halt to this exaggerated and useless competition for ever bigger fleets of ever mightier ships. From purely technical considerations, it has proved most welcome. Even the keenest constructor would hesitate to advise our Navy to re-enter the inevitable contest for size and for numbers which was temporarily abandoned with the signature of the Washington treaty.
However valuable to navies themselves these limitations have proved in leading us away from the worst features of unrestricted rivalry for larger and more numerous ships, treaties which assign a position of seeming inferiority to any nation are almost certain to be criticized by the people of that nation as an intentional slight to their national pride. Countries do not regard the problem of armament purely in the light of logic. They do not value their arms solely for the strength they give against defeat in any probable war. Military might has ever seemed a prerogative of greatness. Whether or not a state speaks with authority in the councils of the world has all too often depended on the size of its fleets and armies, even though the question under discussion was one involving areas into which its armed forces could not possibly be injected. The great powers of Europe are so considered because of their strength for war. And in the Orient, area of chronic disturbance, ready armaments alone seem to give weight and stability to national policies.
Yet despite these considerations, Japan cannot logically protest that she has been assigned a slighting or intolerable inferiority. Fleets are not a correct index of maritime strength. Strategic position is even more valuable in war than added tons and guns. It is well known to all naval students that the position of Japan is one enviable security. No power possesses an adequately defended and fully furnished base within striking distance of her vital sea areas. Hong-kong is but weakly defended. Manila contains no base facilities fit m the least for the maintenance of a fleet) nor can they be introduced without an abrogation of the naval agreements. The treaty that assigned her a lesser fleet) guaranteed to her the mastery of the Orient. Here her position is secure. Singapore is far to the south and Pearl Harbor far to the east. There is no Brest nor Lorient athwart her trade routes, no Bermuda nor Halifax, untouched by the naval treaties, at her door. She fronts n° two oceans. Hers is a defensive strategic position without parallel. Secure in her own sphere, she is free to work out her destiny, which no naval nation alone can readily dispute. Hers is a security which Britain, victor in so many a hard-fought war at sea down the troubled centuries, might well envy. Surely it would seem unnecessary substantially to alter the naval balance in order to provide even further security for a compact island empire already so adequately guarded, not alone by the bravery of her fleets and armies, but, like Henry’s England, seemingly “designed by nature for herself, against infection and the hand of war.”
So evenly balanced are the treaty fleets of Britain and the United States that, from the purely naval point of view, a war between them would be sheer madness. Its mutual and equal destruction would resemble the famous fight between the China Dog and the Calico Cat. Mimic campaigns over the Atlantic charts and the bloodless battles of their toy ships on the game board clearly show how tragically indecisive would be the purpose less clash of their equal arms. In the Atlantic, there is neither cause for war, nor gage of battle, nor prize of victory.
But, in the Orient, both America and Britain still retain historic interests and established territories that neither is yet willing to leave completely and utterly defenseless. If old friendships and the recent association of arms must be forgotten, if all the wisdom and moderation of postwar diplomacy must eventually fail, these territories might conceivably become the battle ground of empire. A Pacific war will inevitably call hostile fleets to the Far East. It is there that geography and the course of past events would compel the war to be fought. Conscious of the vast distances involved, the slightly superior naval ratio of either Britain or America seems to their strategists merely a partial equating of either of their fleets to the strength of the gallant enemy it would meet in far-distant waters.
In fact, once the revision of the treaties is contemplated, many confusing problems are certain to arise. It seems likely that Germany must be included and will old for a much larger share of the world's fighting ships. What will the reaction of this be on the naval policy of France and on the policy of Italy, firm in her resolve to have a fleet second to none on the Continent? How will all this react on the naval policy of England? The whole theory of the 1922 levels as justly embodying not only equality of strength for defense, but also such power as to make ready victory by any one nation impossible, seems destined to be lost in a welter of claims and counterclaims. Instead of the natural and beneficial maritime independence that has characterized the post-war years, we would probably see a return to naval alliances tacitly threatening those against whom they might be directed. No treaty restrictions would then be possible. We should be forced to cast aside both the limitations and the resulting balance and breast again the ever ascending path of frankly competitive building. For a world so troubled with the talk of war and still struggling to repair the ravages of the last conflict such a future seems little less than suicidal folly. Surely no nation will force the others into another armament race like that which led to August, 1914. For substantially within the limits of naval might bequeathed by the Washington and London conferences each can continue justly and moderately to realize its own historical destiny.
If, on the charts of the world, one carefully plots the naval bases of the powers, their repair facilities, their fortified ports, their usual fleet dispositions, and indicates in graphic form the trade routes of the Seven Seas, through which the lifeblood of empire ebbs and flows, it is immediately apparent that the oceans today are divided into three definite naval spheres. From England to the east, over the old, old paths of the sea, run the vital lines of her naval power and her imperial communications, down the Channel and across the Bay, where, as in the days of Rodney and Nelson, they are dangerously flanked by the French naval ports. East they turn, through the straits under the sheltering guns of Gibraltar, into the Mediterranean where they again cross the French lines to North Africa. On past Malta, set in opposition to the bases at Toulon and Taranto, and east again to the security of Suez. They stretch ever to the east, no longer even vaguely threatened by Russia expanding southward toward the Persian Gulf. North they go to tap the once fabled wealth of India, then east again to gather strength from the new base at Singapore, whence they turn triumphantly south to the great Anglo-Saxon commonwealths of Australia and New Zealand.
But north of Singapore they soon penetrate a confused zone leading to an insecure Hongkong. Immediately beyond they meet the first fortified bases which mark the southern limits of Japan’s definite naval sphere. Beyond Singapore to the north, the White Ensign flies in another nation’s waters, like the Stars and Stripes at Manila, a relic of naval power that is but a vestige of the past and a hostage for the future.
Out from Japan’s Inland Sea run the arteries of her maritime might, west through secure and sheltered waters, past the crumbling fortifications of once threatening Port Arthur, to Dairen, there to reach the wealth of northern Asia. Secure they run to the north, past Vladivostok, for Russia no longer enters the waters of the Far East. North still they go, until they meet that zone of impenetrable fog and storms, which a kindly nature has erected as a barrier in the narrow waters where Asia turns toward Alaska in the high latitudes. From the busy ports and gardened terraces of the Inland Sea, her naval zone reaches to the south, to the Pescadores and Formosa, within ready striking distance of Manila, our purposely neglected base, an outpost once injected into her naval sphere. East again her lines run, east and south, past defenseless Guam and among islands whose names recall delightful romances of the South Seas, until they lose themselves in the broad no man’s land of the mid-Pacific. This is her empire of the sea, her natural fortress, her rightful bastion of defense.
In colder waters, from New York and Narragansett to the north, reach our own lines of communications, to be guarded if need be by our battle fleet, lines flanked by the once hostile Halifax, and meeting soon in mid-ocean the North Atlantic areas Britain stands ever ready to defend. To the south they run, flanked here by an almost abandoned Bermuda, toward the undisputed and unoccupied area of the South Atlantic. Or, turning west, they pass through the American Caribbean, our inland sea, with naught to gainsay our naval preponderance here, save possibly the British naval anchorages at Kingston and Trinidad. South from the canal down the coast of South America our fleet would meet no enemy. North to the great ports of our own west coast, our sea power rules supreme, and west beyond our base at Hawaii, west still, until, like Japan’s sea strength reaching east from the Orient, it loses itself in the unfortified vastness of the mid-Pacific, ere it can meet an enemy.
These are the spheres which history herself seems to have set aside each to be controlled by one of the naval powers unthreatened by either of the others. Such in their broad outlines are the geographic and strategical implications of the balance of power writ large in the naval treaties. Surely it would seem that the cause of world peace and world happiness can best be served by a perpetuation of this balance. Despite its small technical difficulties in the limited field of ship design, despite its disputes over new and at first seemingly disturbing naval types, it has in a for larger sense allowed to each of the three great naval powers strength sufficient to defend its own historic sphere. Success m war, if indeed war must come, will not be won by any small advantage in naval ratios. It will be won by the aroused might of the entire nation consecrated to a cause and sustained by the friendly neutrality) if not by the active support of those who are willing to ally themselves in a common cause against an aggressor. Not lightly then will any nation draw the sword and plunge the world again into a welter of useless destruction.
Under the naval treaties, fleets have reached just and natural levels, levels inherent in the inevitable policies of the powers. Were all restrictions to be withdrawn, it is unlikely that the relative strength of the maritime powers would be substantially altered, even after a period of mutually competitive building.