“La Politique Des Etats Est Dans Leur Geographie.”—Napoleon
There have been so far few practical suggestions made as to the way in which the peace for which we now have to fight is to function, permitting ordered change without general conflagrations and world wars. The declaration of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill sheds no light upon the subject. The mechanics of any instrument are as important as the principle on which it is to operate or the moral objective it is to achieve.
It will, therefore, be the purpose here to consider how a peace can be realized that will make the world safe for America and other nations at the lowest cost. One by one, therefore, we will appraise the possibilities of a world league of nations, of regional leagues or federations of nations, a league of world sea powers, a world balance of power, regional balances of power, and even the relapse into the chaos of 1919—39, in which each nation fended for itself in splendid isolation.
The lesson of 1919—39 is that small states cannot survive singlehanded against the unbridled economic and political power of neighboring large states. The problem posed by that lesson is to reconcile the desirability of cultural and political self-determination with the absolute necessity for economic and military integration. The need for larger economic units has been squarely faced by Germany and the solution she proposed is to create a single economic unit of the entire world, but for the benefit of Germans alone.
In 1918 we had the options that we face now, but lacked the realism to make any clear-cut choice at all and follow through. We had then either to destroy Germany’s capacity to renew the war for the domination of Europe, hence the world, by detaching the entire left bank of the Rhine, or we had to set up a system of international order that could keep Germany, or any other nation, in check from attempting to dominate the world we live in.
But we did neither, and so political anarchy and economic depression set in as soon as it became evident that Germany would not abide by the decision of 1918.
If now again we choose, however, for anarchy or world laissez faire, it should entail the annihilation of Germany by a “super-Versailles” treaty of peace. Otherwise, Germany could again rise to plague the world in another 20 years with another bid for a pax-Germanica. Both solutions we can reject.
Even a Carthaginian peace on Germany or Japan carries no guarantee that some other nation will not in the relatively near future prove to be as great a peril as Germany now is.
So there remains the election between the various types of international systems, regional, continental, or world-wide.
Shall we erect a world order whose underlying principle is domination by one nation, or shall we have a world order founded upon military supremacy of several nations, each dominant in its own region—one for Europe, one for Asia, one for the Western Hemisphere?
We have reason to beware lest any hegemony in Europe, whether called a “new order” or a United States of Europe, carry with it military supremacy over the other continents, including our own. So we eschew schemes that would involve the creation of continental systems, irrespective of what nation creates them, or however lofty their averred objectives and methods of realization.
Finally, there is the system proposed by Clarence Streit that contemplates dominion of the world by a federation of sea powers. Mr. Streit's Union Now is in essence a proposal to dominate the world by the insular Anglo-Saxon sea powers. It appears to have but a small following in this country, or even in Britain. Mr. Streit's plan violates the strategic axiom that sea power without land power cannot establish and maintain peace and order over those sections of the world far removed from the immediate and continuous pressure of sea power plus the air power based on, or over, the sea. It is also subject to all the infirmities of a confederacy compounded by the strategical and social handicap of dispersion.
We reject all of the systems in that class. We do not want to dominate anyone for we have no need of it, but we clearly do not propose to be overawed by anyone else. Hence, we turn to a second type of system, some form of voluntary international co-operation. That can partake of only two main types: (1) A world super-state based upon a formal world constitution such as the League of Nations; or (2) an informal concert of nations similar to that which existed in Europe from 1815 to 1914.
Undoubtedly, a world state like the League of Nations has a prima-facie doctrinaire appeal, but, like many other simple schemes, it has too many defects in practice in a complex world.
For a league of nations or “a world based on law” is based on the unrealistic, collectivist fiction of equality, geographic, political, economic, and juridical, of all its component nations. In turn, this predicates machinery for the impartial judicial settlement of international disputes, and an international police force to carry out the decisions of such a court.
The day has not dawned in which the United States will accept a position of economic, political, and juridical equality with, for example, every country of whatever status.
Nor will we, or any other large nation, surrender the national sovereignty or any substantial part thereof, which surrender underlies every scheme of the “sloppy internationalist.” That is a condition and not a theory. Neither can we remake geographical and climatic conditions.
For all projected supra-national organizations would necessarily require the delegation of powers to the new instrumentalities of international law and order. Without powers a government cannot govern.
It would be, therefore, appropriate to consider what powers we will consent to delegate to a new superstate. Surely less cannot be granted than the several states of the United States have delegated to the federal government, enumerated in Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution. That would entail the power to:
- Lay and collect taxes on our citizens, states, and our own federal government.
- Borrow money.
- Regulate commerce though that would carry with it the power to compel increased production, for example, of cotton to deliver to, say, Asia at 5 cents a pound, or eliminate our tariff completely so that the products of foreign field and factory may find markets here without hindrance of any sort.
- Establish a new monetary standard, that might involve the demonetization of the dollar or the fixing of its value by fiat relative to other currencies, as the Germans have done to the currencies of the nations they have conquered.
- Raise armies and navies and declare wars, which would permit the conscription of our man power and our wealth to execute the decrees of the superstate and suppress attempts to resist those decrees or efforts to secede from the “new order.”
- Make all laws necessary to carry out the above powers, which would perhaps require putting one country on home relief, another on WPA, some other on AAA, still another on RFC, and the banks of another on FDIC, all of course at our expense.
To state the proposition is to reject it. It is too costly. It would require a constitutional amendment that would probably encounter great difficulty and long delay of ratification.
Some system of regional leagues or federations is conceivable. They would have the same defects in principle as the world league and in a conflict between leagues, the American league would be inferior in power to the European.
Therefore, it may not be amiss to reexamine the system that preceded World War I.
The question of general peace or general war, up to the close of the nineteenth century, was practically entirely a European question. From the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, European order turned upon one guiding principle, that of a balance of power. With the lesson taught by Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte, it developed into a well-understood, easily grasped axiom that the possession by any single state of disproportionate power would invariably involve such nation in seeking continental hegemony, to the detriment of the peace, self-determination, self-government, and prosperity of the other peoples in Europe.
So Europe developed a means of putting that “live and let live” principle into execution, which was known as the “concert of Europe.” The concert of Europe was a nebulous, de facto authority without any attempt at organization of a legal character. It was frankly based upon the force of the greater powers, all of whom were entitled to great respect. Weaker nations gravitated as satellites of the stronger and, somehow or other, this selective concert of Europe permitted “ordered change” but prevented any of the local and limited disputes from developing into general conflagrations involving the Americas, from 1815 to 1914.
In that European power equilibrium, English sea power was decisive and enabled England to play the role of makeweight. She was able to do so because her island provided a secure base for her fleets, in a central position that enabled the British fleets to operate on interior lines as against all the great powers.
Then came the World War and with it the realization that there existed in the world two new important non-European world powers, the United States and Japan.
With their rise to world importance, the political axis of the world shifted from Europe and with that shift, the British Isles were no longer in the central position that enabled England to play the role of world moderator.
Not only was England’s central position lost to her but also the security that her insularity and surface fleets afforded her. For with the advent of the airplane her mere insularity no longer provided her fleets with secure bases nor her war industries with freedom from interruption, by enemy action. And with enemy submarines based on ports near her termini and athwart her trade routes, she no longer enjoyed the full benefits of surface superiority that had enabled her to play her decisive role in European affairs.
The errors of Versailles were of omission and commission. It destroyed Austria-Hungary, excluded Russia, took no account of Japan, and disregarded the United States by handing over to Japan the Pacific Islands that were bound to make Japan less vulnerable to either British or American sea power. It failed to re-establish political and military equilibrium, took no account of the role air power was destined to play and collaterally of the effect on smaller states of the new tactics of attack in depth which involved the necessity for a defense in depth that small nations are not equal to.
Then was born the de jure, collective concept of a world league of nations. That broke down. Now the question is posed whether we would not do better to revert to a de facto selective organization analogous to the old concert of Europe that worked, in preference to de jure collective concepts that did not work.
True, the terms “balance of power” and “concert of nations” are more or less anathema to many Americans. However, our strategic position fits us peculiarly for the role of makeweight or umpire in a world balance of power, the role that England enjoyed, because we are relatively self-sufficient in raw materials, we are separated from all other important countries of the world by oceans that make for the relative security that an insular sea power must enjoy to play such a role, and we are in a central position to the whole world.
Our air power securely based on Alaska is in a position central to all the great centers of population and industry of all the nations that are really factors in the power organization of the world. That combined with our central maritime position and great resources appears to be the crucial geopolitical factor of the next few centuries.
Before England followed the policy of power balance, she too had the misgivings we are wrestling with today. She too had many sincere citizens to whom the term was anathema. As the English historian, Seton Watson, put it in 1937, throughout her history, “The desire for isolation, the knowledge that it is impossible—these are the two poles between which the needle of the British compass continues to waver.” However, in every crisis her ultimate decision was that expressed by Defoe in 1690:
Some people talk so big of our own strength that they think England able to defend herself against all the world. I think the prudential course is to avoid the trial.
With her command of the seas, she developed a co-ordinated national policy and strategy we would do well to consider, since they made Britain great, secure, and wealthy and spared her man power from bloody, costly land war until 1914.
Liddell Hart says of the English strategy prior to the World War:
Our historic practice . . . was based on economic pressure exercised through sea power. This naval body had two arms: one financial, which embraced the subsidizing and military provisioning of allies—the other military, which embraced sea-borne expeditions against the enemy’s vulnerable extremities. By our practice we safeguarded ourselves where we were weakest and exerted our strength where the enemy was weakest.
Of the two ways of fighting, increasing the military strength of allies or reducing the strength of the enemy, England preferred the former. She never lost a war.
The expeditions against the enemy’s extremities were always relatively small, and made up mostly of volunteers. The typical examples are Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign, the Crimean War, and the Saloniki Campaign in 1918. The English used their armies as mobile reserves; not for field army purposes, until the World War; but to turn the scales on the enemy’s flanks and communications.
Her foreign policy of “live and let live” was adapted to her strategy: (1) Never to allow a European nation to acquire sea power equal to her own, to maintain a navy superior to any combination likely to be formed against it; (2) never to permit any single state on the Continent to acquire such land power that if British sea power were thrown into the balance against it, England would not eventually prevail.
Albion never allowed an aggregation of land and sea power to develop either within one nation, or by a coalition of nations, which could make her insecure.
For such a hostile hegemony would become so rich, and freed from so much expenditure on its land forces, that it could have afforded to outbuild Britain at sea and thus defeat her in armed conflict and ruin her economically as well. It could close markets and stop raw materials going to Britain, that is, boycott and blockade her, and so ruin her, as Napoleon tried with his “Continental System.”
The second integral element of British policy involved, therefore, parallel action with nations having parallel interests, guided by the often quoted, and more often misunderstood, injunction of George Washington:
’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world .... Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies. (Italics ours.)
The British have been careful to distinguish between temporary and permanent alliances, and between those alliances which are purely conventional, artificial, and based on cleverly constructed treaties on the one hand, and, on the other hand, parallel action, based on the realization of peoples that their respective countries had parallel vital interests.
Britain always kept friends in Europe to supply her with land power and a safe beach head to the Continent for English expeditionary forces. She realized that only where sea power, such as England’s, has been in alliance with adequate land power, has it been effective in war or to prevent war. And then only because it was demonstrably ready and willing to operate offensively and by preventive action.
For no wars have ever been won by wearing out an enemy with an impregnable defense. Sea power alone, like air power, has never defeated a great land power; it cannot conquer or hold territory. Sea power only utilizes the command of the seas which its superiority confers, to send military forces and materials where they can do the most good. Nor has air power shown its effectiveness to do more than protect or deny production and the communications, maritime and internal, that are indispensable to the application of force. But it has not shown that the era of pure air war has yet arrived any more than there ever was an era of purely naval effectiveness except in the minds of those who misread Mahan. Thus, the British Navy performed the function of denying to the enemy its ability to supply itself, while conveying or feeding military forces which imposed vast expenditures on the blockaded enemy, designed to exhaust it if, in fact, the friendly land powers’ army and air forces did not first succeed in penetrating the enemy’s country and destroying its power to resist.
Thus Britain constituted herself a strategic reserve, to throw into any fray involving her vital interests, as the decisive element or makeweight.
But always she made certain that those to whose succor she came could help themselves, had the staying power to hold, until she arrived on the field. She negotiated in advance the terms on which she engaged herself, being careful to have a voice, and something concrete to obtain, relative to objectives, military and political. That positive policy deterred potential aggressors, since it meant war, involving the risk of territorial loss. It also deterred other nations from unreasonable reliance on Britain to pick their chestnuts out of the fire.
The crucial question, however, is whether a power equilibrium can be carried on with the sudden shifts in party control that under democracies have made it appear hard to maintain continuity in foreign policy, priority of foreign over domestic issues, and privacy of diplomatic bargaining.
The answer is that such a balance can be administered if the people are aware of the facts of international life and are educated to accept them in lieu of the effete sophisms of wishful thinkers.
The great tragedy of American education during the period 1918-40 has been its surrender to feeble and dishonest intellects that have deliberately distorted the facts of history and camouflaged the beneficial effects on America of the balance of power in a conspiracy of silence on behalf of their fine-spun fancies.
But democracy and the balance of power method, far from being mutually exclusive, are actually parts and parcels of one and the same principle and process of American government.
The principle of balance of forces is that upon which our own constitution is founded, the principle of separation of powers, and checks and balances; and since the foundation of the Republic it has been our practice to condition our naval policy, our diplomacy, our foreign wars, and all our important territorial acquisitions on circumstances overseas.
From the earliest days of the Republic our naval policy has been founded on a fair balance of power in Europe, requiring our having only a navy of such size as might be necessary to deal with such part of European navies as might be spared from European waters with safety to their own potential European enemies. For instance, Jefferson, that isolationist idol, wrote: "They can attack us by detachment only; and it will suffice to make ourselves equal to what they may detach.” Hamilton, too, held that we needed a navy which “could at least hold the balance of power.” Patrick Henry stated that the even balance in Europe would make it “unsafe for them [the European powers] to send fleets or armies against us.” Representative Harper of South Carolina said that even Great Britain, then mistress of the seas, could send against us only such part of her Navy “which she can spare from Europe after securing her preponderance there.”
The principle of power balance has been the criterion of our naval policy down to the present, as evidenced by the statement of the United States Naval Advisory staff to our representatives at the Peace Conference of 1919:
In the past our naval position has derived great strength from the potential hostility of the British and German fleets. Neither the German nor the British fleet could venture abroad without grave risk that the other would seize the opportunity thus presented to crush a rival. This condition gave to America a position of special strength both in council and in decision because her navy was so strong that no other navy could neglect its influence.
Our diplomacy has acted throughout with at least one eye on transoceanic power circumstances and opportunities.
Until 1795 Spain stopped our navigation on the Mississippi, when her troubles in Europe induced her to grant our ships rights to navigate our great river.
It was only in 1796 that England evacuated posts in our territory that the Treaty of Paris (1783) required her to give up, because then she was busy with the French revolutionary war.
In 1821 Russia claimed all that was then known as the Oregon territory reaching down from Alaska. When in 1823 Canning proposed that England and the United States issue a joint proclamation to forestall further encroachments of European powers in this hemisphere, Monroe seized the occasion to make the proclamation unilaterally that is now known as the Monroe Doctrine.
France had only recently been conquered and disarmed. Spanish power was on the wane. Prussia was not yet a great power, she had little sea power at all. Austria had likewise little sea power. All were subject to English sea power.
Only Russia, operating from Asia, could implement her policies with both sea and land forces. Moreover, since the Czar was, in 1823, the strongest protector of the “European system” it is now recognized that it was against the Czar that Monroe’s fling at that system was particularly directed.
So from 1823 on, American foreign policy was largely concerned with the elimination of the seaward tendencies of this Asiatic land power. The agreement with the Russians in 1823 kept them north of 54o-40”. The Monroe Doctrine served notice on them, with others it is true, to make no effort to extend their efforts on this continent. And this policy was implemented by the force of the British Navy. For, in 1824, when Russia remonstrated against the new policy, the United States was in no position to fight, whereas Canning was quite ready for war, said so, and Russia, realizing it, backed down.
Then the English compelled the Russians to evacuate Hawaii. The opening of Japan by Commodore Perry was largely anti-Russian in purpose. President Fillmore sent Perry in 1853, in order to check the encroachments of Russia on land as well as on sea in the Far East, while Russia was hard pressed as a result of events in Europe, for she was fast superseding China as the great power of Northern Asia. It is not even clear whether Perry was sent to open Japan and induce it to become the nation it now is, or merely develop American advanced bases from which we could stop, or at least closely observe the actions of the Russians. It is most significant that many islands now owned by Japan were put under the American flag. The Bonins were annexed and the Ryukyun Isles were occupied by American naval forces.
Our envoy to Japan, Townsend Harris, explained our policy as to Japan very succinctly in 1858 when he said: “If you accept my proposals Japan will become the England of the Orient.” At that time England was the makeweight in the European balance of power and had relinquished all aspirations for political and military control on the continent of Europe.
While we were engaged with our Civil War two European countries saw an opportunity to get footholds again in the Western Hemisphere. France supported a puppet government in Mexico and Spain attempted the reconquest of Santo Domingo. She also made war on Peru in 1864.
After the Civil War ended, our higher army officers wanted to drive the French out of Mexico, but Seward, then Secretary of State, found it possible to extract a diplomatic victory from the plain necessities of France in Europe. Germany was fast growing to power, she had beaten Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866. The last French troops left Mexico in 1867. Almost simultaneously Spain withdrew from the Peruvian operations.
In 1895 we had a dispute with Britain over the Venezuelan frontier. This issue was settled to our satisfaction, because of the trouble then brewing in South Africa, to which the German Kaiser contributed by his message to Kruger. That cable made England realize that a formidable enemy was developing across the North Sea and that friendship with America was indispensable.
In 1904 Russia had a naval force in the Far East that was far superior to the naval forces we then had in the Pacific; she had back of her the land power in resources and man power of a great continental nation, and was building up advanced positions on the continent in Manchuria and Korea, served by the Trans-Siberian Railway. Then the Russo-Japanese war broke out, and France and Germany threatened to aid Russia, whereupon President Theodore Roosevelt notified
France and Germany . . . that in the event of a combination against Japan ... I should promptly side with Japan and proceed to whatever length was necessary on her behalf.
It is difficult to reconcile that threat to France with instructions to America’s representative at the conference of Algeciras a few months later to see that France should “get what she ought to have.” Some think Roosevelt feared the destruction of the German Navy, leaving France and England free to partition China. Others attribute it to his fear that the German Army would wipe out the French Army and then impose terms on England. Whichever way it is viewed, his interest in the distributions of power, transatlantic and transpacific, is obvious.
The United States saw the Japanese wipe the Russian fleet off the sea in 1904-05, with a sense of real satisfaction and relief. But when Japan began to wipe out the Far Eastern Russian Army too, Theodore Roosevelt “suggested” peace. For, since 1902 and until 1909, under Theodore Roosevelt, this country had been a “silent and unsigned member” of the Anglo-Japanese alliance.1 Nevertheless, that bond was not strong enough to induce him to stand by in acquiescence while Japan was building up a large measure of land power, in addition to the dominant sea power she acquired by destroying the only other fleet in those Asiatic waters capable of making itself felt by us.
In 1914 Japan made her 21 demands on China, the effect of which would have put Japan in control of the vast land power that was China’s in man power, resources, and markets. Then we became alarmed.
When, in 1917, a powerful political Party, the Kensai Kai, urged the Japanese, after taking Kiao Chou from Germany, to desert the Allies and join Germany, which was then winning the war, to eliminate Russia from Asiatic waters, by more than a coincidence, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies.
When Russia blew up internally, the United States joined with Japan and others in sending an American expeditionary force into Russia, avowedly to prevent large stores of arms and munitions sent to Vladivostok from falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks, and to help a body of Czechoslovakian troops fighting its way through Siberia, but actually to forestall Japanese seizure of Vladivostok. Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok in 1921.
1 Tyler Dennett Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War p. 2
We were then not even in diplomatic relations with Russia. Yet we compelled our late ally, Japan, to evacuate Vladivostok, that “dagger pointed at her heart,” on the principle of “maintaining the territorial integrity” of a nation we did not recognize and actually were hostile to, and to prevent any “impairment of then existing treaty rights.”
It seems rather that we evidenced a determination to resist any Japanese trend towards the acquisition of land power by the domination of China, or towards the expulsion of Russia from any point such as Vladivostok, whence Russia could exert a restraining influence on Japan by land, sea, or air.
We are at war today because a sea power in the Pacific is pursuing a policy of acquisition of land power that could make it supreme in its area, and because that sea power, Japan, is co-ordinating its efforts with those of a land power, Germany, that is pursuing a policy of acquisition of sea power, to conquer the sea by the land.
The consistency of our historic practice and statements of leaders of American policy are all but conclusive evidence of a definite American power doctrine. Typical of such statements was that made by Admiral Mahan in 1910:
In looking to the future it becomes for them [the United States] a question whether it will be to their interest, whether they can afford, to exchange the naval supremacy of Great Britain, for that of Germany. A German navy supreme by the fall of Great Britain, with a supreme German army able to spare readily a large expeditionary force for overseas operation, is one of the possibilities of the future.
However, our interest in the world distribution of power has not been so much a matter of preserving a balance of power in the sense of a perfect equilibrium, as it has been a matter of separation of power elements, sea power and land power. The principle is analogous to that underlying our constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, to forestall the rise of self-perpetuating political absolutism, domestic or international.
Practically all the important territorial acquisitions made by us were bought, conquered, or negotiated for, thanks to opportumties offered when the European powers opposing, or likely to oppose, us were otherwise and elsewhere more seriously occupied; making it unsafe for them to detach the forces necessary to prevent us from enforcing our demands for such territories.
Our first acquisition was Louisiana. In 1800 it belonged to Spain, and Napoleon sought its cession to France. Jefferson opposed such cession by threatening Napoleon that we would “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Napoleon nevertheless obtained the territory from Spain and Jefferson began negotiation with Napoleon for its purchase. But the Peace of Amiens between England and Napoleon made us bide our time, while James Monroe, our minister to London, was instructed by Jefferson, in case of failure to convince Napoleon, to seek an alliance with England.
Then, just before the rupture of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, while Napoleon and England were busily engaged in commercial war, Napoleon gave in and for a pittance sold us what we wanted.
Subsequently Jefferson turned around and exerted pressure on Spain, then owner of Florida, to recognize our claim to West Florida as part of Louisiana by the threat of war with Spain, at a time when that country, at war with England, was unable to send forces overseas to prevent us from taking what we wanted.
The next opportunity to enlarge our territory came when France was engaging the entire attention of England. For in 1812 we made war on Britain mainly in order to conquer Canada. We failed because Napoleon was beaten at Leipzig and England was able to send forces overseas that all but brought our independence to an end.
Our acquisition of Florida in 1819 came only when Spain was weakened by war and torn by revolution at home and in her colonies of South America.
Previously, in 1813, unsuccessful expeditions were organized in Georgia, to invade and conquer Florida. Subsequently, in 1815, the Holy Alliance was formed. The balance of power in Europe, previously favorable to England, was threatened, to England’s peril. Canning feared that by that alliance, Russia would ride to military hegemony in Europe. Hence Canning, who really was no friend of ours, decided not to object to our seizure of Florida, since the force that we could bring to bear upon the seas would have been decisive in a war that would have been waged for the tenure of Florida. Only by reason of these power factors was it possible for us to induce Spain to “sell” Florida to us for a mere five million dollars.
Our next accretions of territory all took place between 1845 and 1848, when we annexed Texas, settled our Oregon dispute with Great Britain, fought our war with Mexico, and conquered our entire great southwest territory.
Texas had revolted from Mexico and declared her independence in 1837 and immediately requested the United States to annex her. We refused on the ground that it was inexpedient under “existing circumstances.” Then Europe was at peace and France and England objected to such a step.
France and England were still opposed, in 1845, to the American annexation of Texas, on account of the greater weight that that acquisition would give to this country. But the economic troubles in Europe, arising from poor harvests and later leading to the revolutionary outbreaks in 1848, prevented these countries from taking the stand which they might otherwise have taken to frustrate the territorial aspirations of the United States. Great Britain had her troubles with the Irish. There was the 1848 revolution in France. There were other revolutions in Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Denmark, and on top of all, Great Britain and France were entangled in a difficulty in the La Plata region.
Likewise, it is doubtful whether Alaska would have been "offered for sale" for a mere seven million dollars by Russia to the United States in 1867 if it had not been for the fact that Alaska was too far distant from Russia—then without a trans-Siberian railway—to defend. Moreover, Russia at that time had her hands full with the Polish insurrection, and was warned as to American expansionism by the revival of interest in a conquest of Canada and the lesson taught her by the Crimean War.
Nor can the timing of our war with Spain and consolidation of our Caribbean position and taking of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam be attributed to anything as fortuitous as the blowing up of the Maine alone.
Friction with Spain, contemplating her ouster from the Caribbean, had been uninterrupted since 1830. In 1851, when the Cuban question became a burning American issue, France and England served notice on us that a naval force was en route to the Caribbean to prevent “adventurers of any nation from landing with hostile intent on the island of Cuba.” Again in Grant’s administration, a popular American demand for intervention in Cuba was resisted, because the European powers refused to grant permission.
But it was the weakness of Spain in 1898, the even balance of power between England and Germany, the weakness of Italy, as the result of her defeat in Ethiopia in 1896, the circumstances of the Turkish-Greek War in 1897, troubles in China and the preoccupations of England in South Africa, that led to the South African War, and her Irish troubles, that must account for our action at that time. Two years before the Maine was blown up, Lord Salisbury had told Henry White, Secretary at the London Embassy, that it was a matter of indifference to Great Britain whether the United States annexed Cuba or not
Hawaii had been coveted by Great Britain, Japan, and ourselves. It was only after the Asiatic equilibrium was upset by the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 that England saw fit to let us have a free hand in Hawaii as the lesser evil to giving in to Japan. And the only reason Japan limited herself to a raucous protest over our seizure of Hawaii was that she had the more pressing business at hand of preparing for her contest with Russia
Nor was Panama to fall into our hands before European tensions made it possible. In 1855 we almost went to war with England over Panama. But when the German bid for power in the twentieth century made Britain realize that she needed friends, we not only got a free hand in Panama to build our vital canal life line, but the right to fortify it we had previously relinquished by the first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty.
In 1915 we acquired the Virgin Islands from Denmark when all-important European powers were then greatly absorbed in World War I.
The next territorial advantages obtained by us came in 1940, when we acquired the right from England to construct bases on islands owned by Britain in this hemisphere. Significantly, this was after the fall of France, when England needed our help.
The same principle that even today insures our security, would preserve for all other nations their own security and independence, political as well as economic, social and cultural. It would deny to any one nation transatlantic or transpacific supremacy on both sea and land in its own region. That is to deny to any nation the power to overwhelm its neighbors and then be free to bring all its strength and theirs to blockade or invade us. That does not mean that we will wet nurse any aggregation however inconsequential aspiring to national sovereignty. Our concern is with the relatively self-reliant entities able to work out their problems without encroaching to our peril on the opportunities of other nations to do likewise.
Let England have a big fleet in Europe, let someone else have the big army there—but not so big that it can conquer all Europe again and so defeat the sea by the land. Let England be the holder of the sea and air power that in Europe will be the decisive element in strictly European affairs.
In the Asiatic scheme it will be likewise necessary to develop some means of maintaining a balance of forces, so that we can be to the world what England is to be to Europe: the balance wheel or makeweight.
The secondary Asiatic balance of power is complicated by the fact that Russia is necessarily involved in both the European and the Asiatic power systems and the fact that Japan was allowed to go too far in its acquisition of continental power.
By the dictate of geography, we shall either be the world makeweight or a vassal nation. The only practical alternatives today appear to be to let Germany dominate the world or for us to be the world’s mediator. It is we or they, their system or our own. The issue is joined between monism and pluralism. Once that power balance system is understood and accepted, its applications in detail become of relatively small moment.
It may evolve towards the creation of regional blocs or federations, on the basis of territorial proximity or contiguity, as well as economic and language affinities, and strategic frontiers. This middle of the road solution might solve the dilemma between self-determination and the need for larger economic and political units, without involving self-perpetuating worldwide absolutism.
At any rate, before continental or worldwide federations can succeed, it must be shown whether peace can be built on a regional basis better than was done with the federations that constituted the small states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, but that fell apart at the first impact of foreign force.
However, first and foremost, it is up to us to determine whether we will play a part in the world’s affairs or whether we permit the world to relapse into the anarchy to which we, in turn, must become a prey.
It is submitted that we could induce the peace-loving, law-abiding nations of the world to accept our leadership as makeweight in such a world system. Being nearly self-sufficient, we are unlikely to abuse our position as world chancellor to exploit any foreign nation economically. Being relatively secure and not overpopulated, we have no need—save for a few island bases in the Atlantic and islands mandated to Japan by the Treaty of Versailles that stand athwart our lines to the Philippines—of territorial expansion at the expense of any other nation.
From these Japanese islands surprise attacks can be made on our outposts, submarines can lie in wait for our ships, and land-based planes can reconnoiter and harry the movements of our forces. With secure communications to the Philippines and a base leased at the Azores, the following strategic results are obtainable with adequate mobile forces:
- Secure a continuous contact with British sea power.
- Security from distant blockade or surprise attack.
- Position from which to scout and forestall the junction of potential enemy fleets:
- Between northern Europe and the Mediterranean;
- Between the Atlantic and Pacific.
- Security to Latin America from attacks emanating from the North Atlantic or North Pacific.
Thus, we, more than any other nation, are likely to be judicially impartial and hence the most satisfactory balance wheel of world peace to be found.
This 100 per cent American policy would entail no treaty of alliance for us, merely a unilateral declaration, comparable to the historic message of President Monroe, that this country would view with concern the wielding by any potential enemy of disproportionate military and naval might, however attained or exercised. Nor will it mean “policing the world”—in the sense of involvement in every affray or skirmish anywhere in the world. It would only make us the court of last resort, the strategic reserve of the forces of freedom.
It would involve but a tithe of the cost of the last ditch all-out effort we had to make in 1917, that we are making today. It would only involve moral and material readiness to act in time. Morally, we would have to understand what nations' policies involve danger to the strategic system on which our security and prosperity are based. We would require confidence in leaders, who in turn must feel free to take necessary dispositions, if possible, of preventive diplomatic character. It would require that the clear, cool calculations of relative risks be not befuddled by doctrines untried or obsolete, ideological irrelevancies, or by historical prejudices or maudlin sentimentality. We must be unfettered from legislative enactment of self-denying ordinances such as the Neutrality Act of 1935, the Johnson Act, or the proposed constitutional amendment for a war referendum.
Materially, we would need a navy second to none, an adequate merchant marine, a two-power air force, an industry capable of turning out the materials of warfare, and an army capable of throwing into immediate action a striking force likely to be decisive in any theater where the balance appears tilted at too acute an angle for our safety.
That will not be a nation in arms. It will involve a professional army of under 500,000 men, of relatively small, compact units with great fire power and mobility, an army of armored and motorized divisions and a relatively huge proportion of mechanized artillery and aviation, with a reserve of trained man power obtained by compulsory military training periods for all our young men throughout the years.
So much for the political aspects. However, hand in hand with political and military balance must go relative economic and social equilibrium, once the war and its costs have been liquidated. That will involve neither equality of wealth and income, nor a freezing of economic standards of production, distribution, and consumption.
Differences of a fluctuating character there will always be, between nations as between individuals within the nations. But they cannot be unreasonable or unconscionable. Nor are these differences to be relieved without reciprocal effort to cure or prevent the causes that brought such disparities about. No nation or individual can be allowed to go on relief permanently or as a matter of absolute right.
In a dynamic economy of nations, as of individuals, if there will be balance, progress, incentive, and justice, so that neither nation nor individual may be parasitical or exploited, each must share in the world’s objective values in some reasonable relation to the functions they perform in production, to what it is worth-while for the world to pay to retain them in production.
Once equilibrium is attained or its attainment recognized as an objective, it will be easy enough to adopt the modalities that are effects of balanced economies, rather than the causes of them, such as free trade, automatic trade adjusters such as the international gold standard, and peaceful access to markets and raw materials for purposes of peaceful commerce.
If one could give a name to the era we should seek to build, it might well be termed the age of balance, with separations of powers and functions, and checks and balances, political, economic and social, domestic and international. With populations in relative balance with productivity, and international trade in balance, budgets in balance and decent standards of competition, domestic and foreign, we can look forward to something worth striving and fighting for. That and that alone will tend to give to the world the four freedoms, from fear, from want, of thought and of expression—that do not involve chaos or collectivism.
So let us close by urging that in all the plans that are being considered for the reorganization of the world, we do not overlook the possibility of trying the medium of a world concert of powers in which we would serve humbly as the orchestra leader.