Our Foreign Policy in the Looking-Glass
AUGUST,1931
BY RAYMOND B. FOSDICK
I
FOR ten years now we have been telling each other — and telling the world — that America leads in the search for peace. Three Presidents and three Secretaries of State, backed by senatorial utterances and party platforms, have reiterated the idea; editorial writers and Rotary Club speakers have elaborated it until now it has become part of the folklore of the country — one of those unquestioned generalizations by which a nation ascribes virtue to itself, and vice, or at least unenlightenment, to its neighbors.
Briefly stated, this particular generalization runs as follows: As a peaceloving people we here in the United States have done and are doing our utmost to promote better understanding between nations. In this matter we have assumed a position of leadership which is universally recognized. Unfortunately the rest of the world, because of racial or economic rivalries which happily we do not share, has not caught up with our position. We have therefore been unable to accomplish what we desired; our efforts have been blocked; our suggestions have been misinterpreted and have frequently met with rebuff. But we have been patient and generous in our understanding, and our hope is that, with the example of America before them, perhaps in time the other nations will bring themselves abreast of our national attitude so that peace will come to the earth.
It was apparently President Harding who gave impetus to this comfortable doctrine. As one wades through the tortuous English of his messages and addresses the theme is encountered again and again. ‘It has been our fortune both to preach and promote international understanding,’ he said in 1922. ‘Cognizant of the world’s struggles for full readjustment and rehabilitation, we have shirked no duty which comes of sympathy, or fraternity or highest fellowship among nations.’
President Coolidge developed the text with infinite elaboration. His speeches and messages constantly reiterate it. ‘All the world knows that the whole extent of our influence is against war and in favor of peace, against the use of force and in favor of negotiation, arbitration, and adjudication as a method of adjusting international differences. . . . Our example has become of great importance in the world. It is recognized that we are independent, detached, and can and do take a disinterested position in relation to international affairs. Our charity embraces the earth. Our financial favors are widespread. . . . We have always been desirous not to participate in controversies, but to compose them. What a success this has brought to us at home, and what a place of respect and moral power it has gained for us abroad, is known to all men. . . . We have given freely of our counsel to the settlement of difficulties in Latin America and the adjustment of war problems in Europe. . . . We cannot make over the people of Europe. We must help them as they are if we are to help them at all.'
Copyright 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, All rights reserved.
President Hoover, upon his accession to office, made the same text his own. ‘Year by year,’ he said in his speech of acceptance, ‘ in our relations with other nations we have advanced the ideals of law and of peace in substitution for force. . . . Our foreign policy has one primary object and that is peace.’ Senator Foss, as chairman of the Republican Convention that nominated Mr. Hoover, phrased the theme as follows: ‘The attitude of the military countries of the Old World has been seriously disappointing to this country toward rational proposals for permanent peace. Declarations of peace are ineffective when drowned out by the clatter of armament.'
II
In view of this tradition which has been so sedulously preached and so widely accepted, it might be as well to examine its claims to validity. Are we, of all nations, peculiarly disposed toward peace? Has our influence been thrown on the side of understandings that make for peace? Is it true, for example, as Mr. Coolidge said recently, that the United States has become ‘a leader in limitation of armaments,’ while other nations ‘constantly think in terms of war’?
Perhaps a few figures in relation to this last question will furnish a point of departure for our discussion. In 1913 the United States had a fleet of 963,000 tons, Great Britain had a fleet of 2,222,000 tons, and France a fleet of 689,000 tons. To-day the United States has 1,173,000 tons, Great Britain has 1,378,000 tons, and France has 618,000 tons. In terms of annual cost for naval armament the United States is spending to-day $382,000,000, whereas in 1913 we spent $133,000,000; Great Britain is spending $271,000,000, as against $247,000,000 in 1913; while France is spending $100,000,000, as against $90,000,000 in 1913. In other words, the United States is to-day spending 187 per cent more than she spent in 1913, Great Britain 10 per cent more, and France 11 per cent more.
If army and air defense costs are added to navy costs, the United States is this year spending $842,000,000, Great Britain is spending $560,000,000, and France $431,000,000. In 1914 the officers and men of our regular forces, both Army and Navy, were about 164,000; in 1924 they were about 256,000; to-day they are roughly 250,000. Our citizens’ army, including the National Guard and other forms of reserves, increases these totals to about 299,000 in 1914, 672,000 in 1924, and approximately 728,000 to-day.
Of the present world expenditure on armament, — a total of about four and a half billion dollars a year, — 60 per cent represents the expenditure of all the European countries put together, 20 per cent is spent by the United States, and 20 per cent by the rest of the world. In the United States the expenditure attributable to war (service of war debt, war pensions, and current cost of armaments) constitutes 80 per cent of the total Federal budget. In Great Britain this expenditure is 77 per cent of the budget; in France it is slightly less.
‘While other nations have felt that they were forced to prepare for war,’ said Mr. Coolidge in his Memorial Day address in 1928, ‘our situation has been such that we have always been preparing for peace.’ ‘While we have had wars in the Western Hemisphere,’said President Hoover in his inaugural address, ‘yet on the whole the record is in encouraging contrast with that of other parts of the world. Fortunately the New World is largely free from the inheritances of fear and distrust which have so troubled the Old World. We should keep it so.'
III
We are accustomed to refer with considerable pride to the achievements of the Washington and London naval conferences and to the initiative which came from America. It is true that in both these conferences forward steps were taken in limiting naval competition, in declaring a ‘ battleship holiday,’and in reducing the tonnage in certain categories of auxiliary vessels. But it must not be forgotten that the significant result of these conferences in terms of American policy was the recognition by Great Britain of our right of parity with her in combat fleets. In the perspective of history this is a stupendous event. We have climbed to the throne of naval supremacy which, in the three hundred years from the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Jutland, was occupied by Great Britain alone. We have successfully asserted our right to have a navy second to none, and that right is now written into the body of international law. Hereafter we can, without question, build ton for ton and gun for gun with an empire whose far-flung commonwealths and dependencies have seemed until now to place its naval needs in a special class. Not what we need, but what Great Britain thinks she needs, is now our basis of measurement. What this will cost us if we build up to the treaty levels cannot with precision be determined. The chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee estimates an outlay for this purpose of $500,000,000 by 1940, which, added to the cost of ships already authorized, will bring the total building cost to roughly $936,000,000.
It is true that these increases are optional and not mandatory, but the big-navy people now have the whip hand; a definite goal has been legally established; and the campaign which has already been initiated to drive the United States to exercise the right which it won at the London Conference will be increasingly difficult to resist.
The London Conference was significant in another way. It was initiated with expressions of lofty purpose on the part of the United States. Ambassador Gibson, speaking for President Hoover before the Preparatory Commission at Geneva, in April 1929, urged the nations to make a new approach based on the recent signing of the Briand-Kellogg Pact for the renunciation of war, and to ‘take the bold course and begin by scrapping the term “limitation” in order to concentrate upon a general reduction of armaments.’ President Hoover in his Armistice Day address of the same year went even further. ‘We will reduce our naval strength in proportion to any other,’he said. ‘Having said that, it only remains for the others to say how low they will go. It cannot be too low for us.'
But when the pinch came, the lofty purpose was considerably deflated. Because it could not be reconciled with our claim to parity, the word ‘reduction’ was forgotten, and ‘limitation’ was restored to favor. The tentative suggestion of Great Britain looking toward the ‘ eventual abolition ’ of battleships was summarily turned down by the United States for the reason, explained by Secretary Stimson, that the battleship constituted ‘the core of the fleet.’ Similarly the American delegation declined to consider the reduction of aircraft carriers from 135,000 tons to 100,000 tons, and rejected the formal proposal of Great Britain to extend the age limit of vessels, a proposal which would have permitted substantial savings in replacement costs. With President Hoover’s fair words still echoing, and with the ink scarcely dry on the Briand-Kellogg Pact, we spent weeks jockeying for advantage with four other great naval powers — each of the five endeavoring to obtain for itself the best relative position for coming battles which they had all sworn were never to be fought.
When it was all over, and the parity that we were determined upon had been secured, the complacent chorus began again. The theory of other nations, wrote Mr. Coolidge in his daily column, is to ‘arm for security’; the theory of the United States is to ‘disarm for security.’ Said President Hoover: ‘It [the London Naval Conference] is an accomplishment which I believe will appeal to the moral and spiritual sense of the American people. Through this agreement we have strengthened the forces of peace. It is an accomplishment that has great material advantages to all its participants, but I prefer to have it judged on the far higher grounds of its contribution to the moral and spiritual welfare of our people and the world.’ Senator Robinson, who helped negotiate the London Treaty, was more realistic. ‘The result of the limitations imposed by this treaty,’ he told the Senate, ‘ will give the Government of the United States, in so far as the Navy is concerned, far more sea power than it possessed during the period when there was no limitation.’
IV
In the last decade American foreign policy has been profoundly influenced by the fact that fifty-four nations have grouped themselves into a League in which we have declined to accept membership. Whatever the seven millions of voters who constituted President Harding’s majority may have desired at that time, successive administrations have since interpreted the election as a final determination of the question whether the United States should join the League. Although Mr. Hoover was among the thirty-one who signed the manifesto addressed to the American people in 1920, urging them to vote for the Republican ticket as the best method of getting the United States into the League of Nations, in his speech of acceptance as a candidate in 1928 as well as in his inaugural address as President in 1929 he acquiesced in the doctrine that that election had closed the issue.
In ten years, however, the relationship of the United States to the League of Nations has undergone extensive modification. President Harding’s statement with which he started his administration, that ‘in the existing League of Nations, world-governing with its super-powers, this Republic will have no part,’ was followed by the Guildhall speech of Mr. George Harvey, our Ambassador to London, in which he said, ‘Our present government could not without betrayal of its creators and masters, and will not, I can assure you, have anything whatsoever to do with the League, or with any commission or committee appointed by it or responsible to it, directly or indirectly, openly or furtively.’ Nevertheless, despite this truculence, the United States is today represented, officially and unofficially, on many committees and at many conferences of the League; a plank in the Republican platform of 1928 endorsed our ‘coöperation in the humanitarian and technical work’ at Geneva; and Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Hoover have both given cordial approval to a relationship that is far removed from that of a decade ago when we followed Mr. Harvey’s doctrine so literally that the State Department would not even answer the letters received from the League.
But the relationship is still undefined and haphazard, and our foreign policy is in a state of continuous embarrassment in its attempt to work with other nations through the machinery which they have developed at Geneva, and at the same time avoid what Mr. Coolidge always referred to as the ‘entanglements’ of the League. The result is uncertainty and capriciousness.
A few random examples will suffice. Our Surgeon-General, Dr. Hugh S. Cumming, sits as a member of the League’s health committee, but for the sake of appearances he represents, not the Government at Washington, but the International Public Health Office in Paris, created in 1907 and long outlived in usefulness. We have been represented ‘unofficially’ on the League’s permanent committee dealing with the suppression of the traffic in women and children, but Miss Grace Abbott, our delegate, has been unable to attend its sessions since 1925, because permission has not been granted by the Department of Labor of which she is an official. In the League’s International Labor Office we play no part whatever, and the vast work of that organization, with its world-wide implications, is carried on with no voice raised on behalf of the United States. Although sixty leading professors of international law in American universities recently petitioned the Secretary of State to cause our treaties and international engagements to be registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series, thus facilitating the work of students and obviating confusion and delay, the result was a timid note from an assistant in the State Department to the effect that the United States was not a member of the League.
In spite of the fact that we participate on varying bases of collaboration in many of the League’s committees and conferences, in ten years we have contributed toward the expenses of this work only $25,000, approximately. We have paid nothing toward any share in the general overhead expenses of the League, such as salaries, printing of documents, headquarters at Geneva, and so forth, nor toward those conferences of a ‘ humanitarian and technical ’ nature — to quote the language of the Republican platform — in which we are represented by private citizens like Jeremiah Smith and Professor Millikan, who have been nominated by the League rather than by the State Department. During this same tenyear period Great Britain and France have contributed to the League roughly $4,000,000 each — and even Liberia and Haiti have given $67,000 and $118,000 respectively.
Illustrations such as these could be given almost endlessly. Even when we coöperate whole-heartedly and completely with the League’s commissions — such as the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament — the nature of our relationship necessitates a search for formulas and face-saving devices to disguise the fact that fifty-four nations have an organized method of consultation in which we do not participate. Occasionally the awkwardness of our relationship is the result of friction between the State Department and the Senate. For example, a protocol prohibiting the use of poison gas and bacteriological warfare was drawn up in Geneva in 1925, largely on the initiative of an American, the late Senator Theodore Burton. It was duly signed by the United States, but ratification was defeated in the Senate as the result of efforts by the American Legion, the Chemical Warfare Service of the War Department, and commercial chemical companies. The United States and Japan arc the only great powers which have failed to ratify this ban. Incidentally the United States has spent over twelve million dollars in the last ten years in furthering the development of gas warfare.
Similarly a convention signed in Geneva in 1925 for the supervision of the international trade in arms and ammunition has never been ratified by the Senate. The convention relating to the traffic in women and children, drawn up in Geneva in 1921, was never even signed by the United States although it is now in force in more than thirty other countries. Nor have we signed the Opium Convention of 1925. The Convention for the Suppression of Obscene Publications, drawn up in 1923, has been signed but not ratified by the Senate. The same is true of the Convention for the Suppression of Counterfeiting Currency in 1929. The Convention of 1928 relating to Economic Statistics, although drawn up with the assistance of American representatives at the conference, has not even been signed. Altogether there are about twenty League conventions of a humanitarian or non-political character to which the United States has not given its assent, although for the most part they have become the recognized policy of the rest of the world.
V
Our relationship with the League has other unsatisfactory aspects. For example, the United States participated officially in the League’s Economic Conference in 1927 and in the two conferences of 1927 and 1928 on Import and Export Prohibitions and Restrictions. In vital subjects like these, where the interests of the United States are so deeply and directly involved, it would be inconceivable for us to allow fifty nations to take action in our absence and without our collaboration. We could not afford to be away when fifty other governments were determining issues that affected us. But the difficulty is that the United States is not represented on either the Council or the Assembly of the League. Consequently we have no part in controlling the work of any of these conferences and committees. We have no voice in deciding what shall be initiated, or how the recommendations shall be carried into effect. Other governments decide what is to be undertaken; they determine what conferences are to be held and what subjects each is to consider. The United States has none of the initiative; it has no part in shaping the agenda; and its representatives arrive at a League conference to find a chairman already chosen by the Council and preparations made by League committees over which our government has no control. When the work of the conference is completed and the report is submitted, it is the Council or the Assembly that determines what shall be done with it, and in the ensuing debates there is no voice to represent the United States. American representatives on the committees may work vigorously for the adoption of a particular proposal, only to have it defeated or forgotten when the matter comes before the Council. Our situation is precisely as if Massachusetts, for example, were represented on the committees of the United States Senate, but had no voice and no vote in the Senate itself.
This state of uncertainty, with one foot in the League’s door, makes our foreign policy fumbling and inconsistent. Our representatives on the Geneva committees are oppressed by the anomaly of their status and by the futility of the whole arrangement. No one knows at what conferences the United States will be represented, and frequently our delegates have appeared at the last moment, breathless and unprepared. An atmosphere of unreality and pretense hangs over the whole relationship. We advance and draw back, attend one conference and stay away from another. The State Department is afraid of the Senate and the Senate is suspicious of the State Department. A policy toward the League and its work that might be honest and forthright is consequently whittled down to furtiveness, and vacillation characterizes our whole approach.
Meanwhile fifty-four governments, sitting around a table, have for ten years been reaching conclusions on all sorts of problems that overflow national boundary lines. A new method of international legislation has been developed, a new technique of continuous conference. In the blazing of this trail the United States has had no part. In only a few instances in an entire decade have we taken any initiative. In health, in child welfare, in questions relating to communication and transit, in the opium traffic, in double taxation, in intellectual coöperation, in the codification of international law, — and in a dozen other difficult matters where common counsel is necessary, — it is Geneva that has set the ’pace, while the United States has trailed along behind, dimly conscious of the new interrelated world in which she must live, but bound by outworn methods and the slogans of old battles.
VI
It is scarcely necessary to speak of the World Court. Here is an institution which Chief Justice Hughes has called ‘the absolute minimum of intelligent effort for the promotion of world peace.’ Supported by forty-five other nations, accepted by 90 per cent of the civilized world, it has demonstrated over a ten-year period its fundamental usefulness in substituting the authority of law for the authority of force. Although it has received the endorsement of four Presidents and six Secretaries of State, the United States still remains aloof, fearful of some infringement upon its sovereignty. In spite of the fact that three distinguished Americans have served as judges on its bench, not a cent has been contributed from our Treasury to its support. Although America assisted in giving the original impetus toward a world court in the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, we have allowed the leadership in this great movement to pass to other hands, and to-day, with Honduras, Afghanistan, Mexico, Turkey, and two or three other nations, we stand on the side lines, mere spectators in one of the most significant developments in human history.
It is to be hoped, of course, that in the forthcoming session of the Senate the protocol of the Court will at last be ratified. What is perhaps not generally understood in this country is that the protocol represents far less in the way of commitment than most other countries have agreed to. All the great powers except Japan, together with many of the small ones, — thirty-eight in all, — have ratified the so-called ‘optional clause’ by which they have accepted the jurisdiction of the Court as compulsory, ipso facto and without special agreement, in four broad classifications of legal disputes. The protocol which we propose to sign, if the Senate gives its reluctant consent, limits the jurisdiction of the Court, as far as the United States is concerned, to such cases only as we may specifically refer to it. We will not allow ourselves to be sued in the Court unless we so agree, and in each such case the Senate by a two-thirds vote would have to concur.
We look upon the Court — to use the words of Secretary Stimson — ‘as a carefully chosen and experienced tribunal to which the nations of the world, if and when they choose, can refer their disputes for settlement, without the ordinary delays and difficulties which accompany the selection of arbitrators.’ On the other hand, the thirty-eight nations that have signed and ratified the ‘optional clause’ have declared their willingness to submit their policy to the rule of law as interpreted by the World Court. Consequently they think of the Court in terms of compulsory jurisdiction, while we think of it merely as a convenient method of arbitration. Countries like Great Britain and France have taken the bold step of making the Court a real court as far as their disputes are concerned; with us the struggle in the forthcoming session of the Senate will be, in effect, merely to determine whether the United States will ever use the World Court as an arbitrator in those particular cases in which we voluntarily choose this method of settling difficulties.
But complacency has not deserted us. ‘We wish to see all the world relieved from strife and conflict, and brought under the humanizing influence of a reign of law,’ said President Coolidge. ‘We wish to discard the element of force and compulsion in international agreements and conduct, and rely on reason and law.’ ‘Our ideals and our hopes,’ said President Hoover, ‘are for the progress of justice through the entire world. We desire to see all humanity relieved of the hideous blight of war and of the cruelties and injustices that lead to war.’
VII
This World Court situation brings up the large question of our attitude toward arbitration and conciliation as a method of settling international disputes. In the minds of many people this method has constituted the American substitute for the machinery of the League of Nations and the World Court, and the popular impression prevails in this country that in this field the United States has a position of recognized leadership. This impression has been confirmed by official words emanating from Washington for over a decade. In a communication to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1927, Secretary Kellogg stated that ‘the Government of the United States welcomes every opportunity for joining with the other Governments of the world in condemning war and pledging anew its faith in arbitration.’ In the same year the American representative on the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference, meeting in Geneva, stated that ‘the United States has always championed the idea of international arbitration and conciliation, both in principle and practice,’ and ‘welcomes the extension of the practice’; but at the same time he announced the refusal of the United States to participate in the work of an international committee on arbitration.
Similarly President Hoover, in his address on Armistice Day of 1930, said, ‘It is our purpose to develop in every way the use of arbitration and conciliation agreements in our relations with foreign nations.’ In pursuance of this policy the United States has within two years signed such treaties with forty-five nations, at least twenty-six of which have already been ratified by the Senate.
An examination of these bilateral treaties is illuminating. The so-called Root arbitration treaties, negotiated in the first decade of the century, followed the pre-war model of limiting the arbitration to differences which did not ‘affect the vital interests, the independence, or the honor of the two contracting states.’ While the new treaties no longer contain these limitations, other limitations have been substituted, notably questions within the domestic jurisdiction of the parties, and questions involving the Monroe Doctrine. In other words, these new treaties represent little if any advance over pre-war ideas. They are so full of conditions and allow so many loopholes for contention that it is difficult to see how, in a crisis of heated public opinion, they could be made to work at all. They leave both parties free to claim that the subject matter of any dispute is within its domestic jurisdiction, and no method is provided for determining whether the claim is well founded. For the first time they introduce in our arbitration treaties the uncertainties of the Monroe Doctrine. They provide for no definite arbitral body; instead, disputes are to be submitted to tribunals to be created out of the old Permanent Court of Arbitration, ‘or to some other competent tribunal, as shall be decided in each case by special agreement.’
Finally, the newr treaties reënact the Senate’s ancient claim, against which Presidents Roosevelt and Taft protested vigorously and in vain, that in each particular case that body, by a two-thirds vote, must pass on the terms of the proposed arbitration. This waters down the obligation to arbitrate and makes it a mere agreement to agree. It means that we covenant to arbitrate when the President and the Senate, two thirds of its members concurring, are willing to consent to arbitration when the time comes. The decision whether a particular dispute falls within the scope of the treaty, or is excluded by its limitations, lies in the last analysis with the Senate, which means that one third plus one of the Senators may, if they are opposed, prevent recourse to arbitration. It was in regard to this provision that President Roosevelt said in 1905, ‘We had better abandon the whole business rather than give the impression of trickiness and insincerity which would be produced by solemnly promulgating a sham. ... As far as I am concerned I wish either to take part in something that means something or else not to have any part in it at all.’
Yet this provision still finds a place in our new treaties, and with their other weaknesses they have been launched with colorful words of praise from the White House and the State Department. What President Hoover and Secretary Stimson have not told us is that these treaties fall far short of the standard of recent arbitration agreements among other powers. Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, France, and a score of other nations have concluded an amazing network of treaties under which they have agreed to settle by arbitration or recourse to the World Court all differences of whatever character which they are unable to settle by diplomacy or conciliation. These treaties provide for the automatic submission of disputes to arbitration without the necessity of a special agreement, in each particular case. Moreover the General Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, which was the work of the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1928, has now been ratified by France and Great Britain as well as by a growing number of the smaller powers. According to this General Act all justiciable disputes come under the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court, and the ‘optional clause’ is thus reënforced. But the General Act deals also with non-justiciable disputes, and definite binding arrangements are made by which in this troublesome class of difficulties the contracting parties agree without qualification to resort to conciliation. The Act is well defined by the London Times as ‘more comprehensive than the “optional clause,” more precise and specific than the Pact of Paris, and more rigid than the Covenant.’
In all this new forward movement by which nations are trying to build up definite machinery for the pacific settlement of controversies, the United States lags far behind. We are still thinking in pre-war terms. The arguments by which the Senate defeated the Olney-Pauncefote treaty between Great Britain and the United States in 1897 are still the arguments in force to-day. Our recent arbitration treaties represent little more than a gesture toward peace — an attempt to create the impression that we are marching in the procession. And they do give us a talking point. In his recent PanAmerican Day address President Hoover expressed himself as follows: ‘In this respect [conciliation and arbitration] the Western Hemisphere has placed an enviable record before the nations of the world. From the earliest period of their history the governments of the republics of this hemisphere . . . have demonstrated their willingness and even eagerness to adopt and apply mediation, conciliation, and arbitration. The common purpose to eliminate war and the determination to achieve peace and security represent a major contribution of the Americas to modern civilization.’
President Hoover neglected to add that the Inter-American Arbitration treaty, which with nineteen other American nations the United States signed with such a beating of drums on January 5, 1929, is still sleeping in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate. It is more progressive in its terms than any similar treaty to which our signature has ever been attached. Among other things it does not require participation by the Senate in a special agreement in each particular case. For that reason it will doubtless sleep for a long time to come.
VIII
Our foreign policy, as it has developed over the last decade, boils down to this generalization: the United States does not intend to make commitments in advance as to what course it will adopt in any particular contingency. This principle, launched somewhat timidly in the Harding réegime, has been given explicit and repeated expression by Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Hoover. ‘In case of danger,’ said Mr. Coolidge, ‘we can join in any consultation that seems necessary to us when it arises. No agreement about it in advance is necessary or desirable, . . . It would be more practical to await the event. Our position can then be ascertained.’ President Hoover in his last Armistice Day address phrased the idea as follows: ‘We believe that our contribution can best be made in these emergencies, when nations fail to keep their undertakings of pacific settlement of disputes, by our good offices and helpfulness free from any advance commitment or entanglement as to the character of our action.’
How far this doctrine is a rationalization of our failure to keep step with other nations in their development of alternatives for war, or to what extent it represents the sense of frustration and impotence of the executive branch of our Government, faced with a rigid constitutional provision under which it must share with the legislative branch responsibility for our foreign relations, is perhaps impossible to determine. Certainly every President of the United States since Benjamin Harrison has crossed swords with the Senate over this divided function, and the bitter words of John Hay have been echoed by every Secretary of State: ’The thing that has aged me and broken me up has been the attitude of the minority of the Senate which brings to nought all the work a State Department can do.’ In all our diplomatic history there is perhaps nothing so revealing as the letter written by Secretary Hughes to President Harding advising him of the uselessness of submitting to the Senate the ‘optional clause’ of the World Court statutes, which, as we have seen, would make the Court a real court instead of a casual method of arbitration.
But whatever the cause, or however real and patent our difficulties may be, the fact remains that the doctrine enunciated by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover not only is out of line with the entire development of the world since 1918, but is fundamentally incompatible with the obligation which we assumed when, with fifty-nine other nations, we signed the Briand-Kellogg Pact. In that Pact we covenanted never to seek the settlement of disputes except by pacific means. But what are the ‘pacific means’? What precise methods or technique have we developed to make this clause effective? Do we intend to rely on the old practices of diplomacy that proved so futile a barrier against war in 1914? Do we seriously believe that our new bilateral treaties of arbitration with their conditions and exceptions, and with the necessity which they involve of a fresh reference to the Senate, will avert disaster when mass passion has been aroused? Yet, except for these two methods we have no answer to the question. Or, rather, our answer is entirely in the negative. We will not join the League. We have not joined the Court. We will not sign the ‘optional clause.’ We will have nothing to do with the General Act. Except in the region of the Pacific Ocean we will not agree to consult with other powers in time of danger. We even decline to say in advance that we will not act as an armory for nations that run amuck — and the Capper, Burton, and Porter resolutions, designed to give assurance to the world on this point, have been shelved in Congress these many months.
Our whole policy is that we will leave to the improvisation of the moment both our own attitude and the method to be employed. When the crisis comes and the world is in flames we will decide whether or not poison gas is to be used; we will determine whether bacteriological warfare is permissible; we will try to reach an agreement with other nations as to a proper method of liquidating the dispute; and we will get the Senate by a two-thirds vote to concur. This is our theory. Apparently 1914 has taught us nothing. We are not interested in the formation of a fire department. When the fire actually breaks out we will plan our own technique for combating it. In the meantime we ask our neighbors to trust our well-known abhorrence of fire.
To be sure, President Hoover in his Armistice Day address in 1930, speaking of the Briand-Kellogg Pact and the possibility of its extension, ventured upon an approach that can scarcely be called too daring or incautious. He remarked, ‘I do not say that some further step may not some day come about.’ And that was all. Shortly thereafter, as reported in the press, the State Department assured the public that the President had no intention of making a bid for the opening of negotiations. There the matter ended. With this show of valor the army of peace retreated to its trenches.
IX
But the matter cannot be allowed to rest there. Procrastination and extemporization are poor substitutes for the kind of foundation that the world needs to be laying at the present moment. Disaster awaits us around the corner — new wars, new methods of mass slaughter, indeed the possibility that the inheritance of civilization may become little more than a memory. We are face to face with situations which our fathers in 1787 never foresaw, and we cannot hope to muddle through, armed only with the machinery and the ideas they laid down. It will not avail us to appeal to tradition and old techniques. It will not excuse us to claim that constitutional limitations stand in the way of our participation in preventive measures. This is a time when traditions that no longer fit must be thrown aside, and practices that are no longer applicable must be scrapped. This is a time, indeed, when no country can hesitate in taking risks for peace.
Not by improvisation but by careful planning will the cataclysm of another war be avoided. No longer can we trust the inspiration of the moment or dare to gamble that some happy chance will see us through the crisis. The risk is now too great and the penalty of failure far too ruinous. The strategy of peace must be worked out with the same painstaking detail which has hitherto been reserved for the strategy of war. Conscious control must be substituted for chance, and collective planning for haphazard circumstance. It would seem as if the blood of 10,000,000 soldiers, slaughtered in the years from 1914 to 1918, had written this lesson in words which could never be forgotten. Yet thirteen years after the event the only definite strategy of defense against war which we in the United States are able to present is the bankrupt method of diplomacy and a handful of arbitration treaties of a type that President Roosevelt called ‘shams.’
Meanwhile we continue to serve peace with words. ‘The government of the United States will never be a laggard in any effective movement for the advancement of world peace,’ says Mr. Kellogg. ‘We are a people peculiarly devoted to the arts of peace,’says Mr. Coolidge. ‘We are interested in all methods that can be devised to assure settlement of all controversies between nations,’says Mr. Hoover.