The Deluge
Page 49
That redeployment, however, depended on the British Navy not being needed in home waters. With the German fleet at the bottom of Scapa Flow, if there was one thing on which the Dominions could agree, it was on the need to minimize any future commitments in Europe.4 The French were regarded with suspicion, the ‘restless natives’ of eastern Europe with barely veiled contempt. ‘Trouble on the continent’ was precisely what the League of Nations was designed to deal with. It was left to Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill to remind Australia and Canada that the ‘mother country’ in fact had a vital interest in the security of its European neighbours. America’s failure to ratify Versailles had left the security guarantee to France hanging in mid-air. From London’s perspective, it was precisely the intractable conflicts in Europe that made it so crucial to find a strategic fix for the Pacific. Canada, not surprisingly, was a vigorous advocate of a special relationship with the United States. But could this be reconciled with the Anglo-Japanese alliance that since 1902 had served as the eastern buttress of the empire? And what could actually be expected from America? By 1921, Lloyd George was so frustrated with America’s uncooperative stance in Europe that rather than dropping the Anglo-Japanese alliance he was tempted to reinforce it.
But quite how dangerous that might turn out to be was brought home in the spring of 1921 when Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, had one of his first meetings with the incoming Secretary of States, Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes was a sophisticated progressive Republican. But he was also famous for his short temper. When Geddes stated London’s reservations about dropping the Japanese alliance, Hughes lost his cool. ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain!’ Hughes ranted. ‘You would not be speaking anywhere! England would not be able to speak at all. It is the Kaiser (all this in a grand crescendo moving to a shouted climax) – the Kaiser, who would be heard, if America seeking nothing for herself, but to save England, had not plunged into the war and (screamed) won it! And you speak of obligations to Japan.’5 But if Britain dropped Japan, what assurances could America offer? Since 1919, Washington had resisted every effort to rope it into a bilateral partnership. The Imperial Conference concluded lamely that it would be ideal if London could somehow arrange to hustle both the United States and Japan into a tripartite alliance. But given the prevailing anti-Japanese sentiment in Washington, the chances of that were remote. Instead, in the summer of 1921 it seemed that it was London that would find itself being hustled.
On 8 July, to the dismay of Whitehall, Washington abruptly issued invitations not just to Britain but to the entire Entente to attend a conference to consider disarmament and the future of the Pacific.6 The presumption of the Americans in inviting Britain on the same terms as Italy and France caused consternation in London.7 Lloyd George and Churchill thought that Britain should refuse to attend. But given the empire’s strategic dilemma, its profound interest in cooperation with Washington, the fact that Congress was about to debate the crucial question of inter-Allied debts, and that it was those same senators who were also demanding an end to the naval arms race, London really had no option.
I
The Assembly that met in Washington from 12 November 1921 to 6 February 1922 was in many ways a more dramatic expression of the new order than the Paris Peace Conference had been three years earlier. It was the first great-power conference ever to be held in the American capital. The stage for the opening session was the palatial headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution recently constructed just off the Mall. Business meetings were conducted in the neoclassical splendour of the Panamerican Union building. Assured of their domestic ascendancy, the Republicans outdid Wilson by making a show of bipartisanship. Given their experiences since 1919, the Europeans were wary. But unlike Wilson, the Republican administration chose to launch the conference amidst a refreshingly straightforward celebration of wartime solidarity. The first day of the conference was Remembrance Day, allowing the delegations to attend the inauguration of America’s Monument to the Unknown Soldier, at which a nameless body dug from the battlefields of the Marne was solemnly reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery.
But above all, unlike Wilson who had made himself the aggressive spokesman of American naval power, the Harding administration had summoned the powers to Washington to discuss limitations on naval power. In the era before the bomber and the intercontinental ballistic missile, it was the battleship that was widely considered the great strategic weapon of modern war. With the German menace lifted from the Atlantic, naval disarmament would be coupled with an agreement on security in the Pacific, which in turn would be underpinned by an agreement between the United States, Britain and Japan to neutralize China, the decisive zone of pre-war imperialist competition. The political backing in the US for all three policies was solid. Wilson’s compromise over Shandong was widely detested. Disarmament was popular. The savage deflationary crisis afflicting the US, Britain and Japan since the autumn of 1920 added further impetus. Through naval disarmament and a China settlement, the Washington Conference would reanimate the vision of the Open Door, creating an international space swept clean of militarism in which the free flow of American capital would unify and pacify.
Operating on familiar American territory, the Harding administration showed itself rather more adept than Wilson had been at controlling the conference table and bringing public opinion directly to bear. Compared to the solemnity of Versailles, the Washington Conference was a truly spectacular exercise in public diplomacy. After Harding had welcomed the delegations, Secretary of State Hughes rose to open the business. In the space of a few moments he outlined a plan that would banish oceanic naval warfare for a generation to come. He proposed immediately to end Wilson’s battleship construction programme, to scrap hundreds of thousands of tons of capital ships, and to fix the ratio of the American, British and Japanese fleets at 5:5:3. Nor did he speak in generalities. To the amazement of the foreign delegations Hughes opened the conference by listing by name every ship in the three major navies that was suitable for scrapping, starting with America’s own fleet. America would scrap 846,000 tons of naval shipping, leaving it with 501,000 tons. Britain would scrap 583,000 tons, leaving it with 604,000 tons of comparatively old ships. Japan would cut 449,000 tons, leaving it with 300,000 tons.8
Hughes achieved total surprise. The opening session, gushed one journalist, ‘which was expected to consist only of formal addresses’, was driven by a ‘dynamic intensity such as had never been previously experienced at an international diplomatic gathering’. The contrast with Wilson’s airy generalities was exhilarating.9 ‘The unprecedented clarity, definiteness and comprehensiveness of the concrete plan for naval disarmament . . . marked a new chapter in diplomatic history . . .’10 As Hughes announced the immediate end to battleship construction, William Jennings Bryan, once Wilson’s radical Secretary of State, could be seen leading the cheers from the press gallery. Ululating rebel yells were heard from the seats reserved for senators. The Europeans and Japanese were stunned. As Hughes read out his list, the naval experts on all sides could be seen giving involuntary nods of agreement. When Hughes finished, there were calls from the gallery for the leaders of France, Japan and Italy to give an immediate reply. It was more like a revolutionary convention than an international conference.
The force of the American opening was impressive, but the response was hardly less remarkable. On 15 November first the ageing and white-haired Lord Balfour and then the ramrod-straight Admiral Baron Kato Tomosaburo-, Chief Plenipotentiary for Japan, gave their assent in principle to the terms that Hughes offered. The exact ratios of tonnage and ships and the question of Pacific fortifications were the subject of contentious discussion. But what was remarkable was the obvious willingness of two of the major contenders to settle one of the basic parameters of world power under American leadership. For Britain this meant abandoning the claim to absolute naval dominance that it had upheld for more than half a centu
ry. Scrambling to catch up with Hughes’s PR stunt, on 18 November the British delegation announced that they had given instructions by telegraph to the shipyards on the Clyde to halt all work on four modern battleships of the Super-Hood class. That cancellation alone would save $160 million, enough to cover interest payments on Britain’s war debts to America for a year.11
The reaction of the Japanese was even more surprising. In 1921, Western perceptions of Japan remained stubbornly simplistic. Earlier in the year John V. A. MacMurray, chief of the Far Eastern division of the State Department, had opined that the real power holders in Japan were an ‘oligarchy of military clansmen’ ‘... differing among themselves only in the degree to which their nationalistic aspirations are tempered by considerations of prudence in dealing with the rest of the world’.12 A week before the Washington Conference opened, on 4 November 1921, Prime Minister Hara, himself a lifelong advocate of a cooperative relationship with the US, was stabbed to death. But it was an act of desperation, by an embittered loner. The conference itself provided further proof of the remarkable shift underway in Japanese politics. The advocates of pan-Asian aggression were in retreat. Hara was replaced as leader of the Seiyukai and as Prime Minister by Takahashi Korekiyo, who was even more firmly committed to cooperation with the West. Takahashi was a former governor of the Bank of Japan and former Finance Minister with close connections to banking circles both in London and on Wall Street. In the wake of the deflation of 1920–21 he was profoundly convinced that Japan must find a place for itself in a world order shaped by economic and financial power rather than military force. By the time of the conference, all the major parties of Taisho Japan favoured curbing military spending.13 With naval expenditure accounting for almost a third of the budget it was a prime target.14
After much careful staff work the Japanese Navy, unlike the Japanese Army, had come to accept the principle of arms limitation, so long as it respected a minimum 70 per cent ratio between the Japanese and American fleets. In preliminary discussions over the summer of 1921 Admiral Kato- Kanji, the chief technical advisor to the Japanese delegation, who was fluent in English and had extensive experience of inter-Allied cooperation during the war, expressed the view that a future great-power war was ‘unthinkable’ and that disarmament would be a great ‘boon’ given the stretched finances of both Japan and Britain. To the British attaché he rather unguardedly remarked that he hoped financial constraints would soon bring about the fall of the ‘Military party’ in Japan which continued to support the exorbitant demands of the army.15 The problem at the Washington Conference was the gap between Hughes’s scrapping list, which implied a 10:10:6 ratio, and the Japanese Navy’s insistence on 70 per cent. Admiral Kanji put up stubborn resistance on this point, but he was overridden by the government in Tokyo that was willing to accept a ratio of 10:10:6, so long as it was offset by the addition of the cruiser Mutsu, a symbol of popular nationalism that had been paid for by popular subscription, and an American agreement not to establish menacing new naval bases in the Philippines or Guam. In light of Takahashi’s strategic outlook, Japan had everything to gain from accepting a world order in which America and Britain acknowledged it as a third global power. This spared them the ruinous costs of an all-out military competition that Japan was, in any case, bound to lose.
Given this attitude in Tokyo, it seemed that Britain’s strategic dilemma had been resolved. America’s disarmament initiative opened the door to precisely the trilateral agreement that had seemed out of reach at the Imperial Conference only a few months earlier. The British Empire had escaped the choice between Japan and the United States, which in the summer of 1921 had appeared to hold the potential for disaster.16 With Japan’s position in the Pacific having been internationally acknowledged, the Anglo-Japanese Treaty could quietly be allowed to lapse. Instead, Britain and Japan collaborated in drafting an agreement providing for peaceful arbitration of all Pacific disputes.
Once more, however, this image of harmony was marred by the European question. The Pacific arbitration agreement was signed by a fourth power, France, which found itself in a far less satisfactory strategic position than the three main parties. From the French point of view it seemed, not without reason, that following the failure to create a stable North Atlantic system at Versailles, the British Empire was using the Washington Conference to escape its commitment to France in favour of sharing global hegemony with the United States. Wilson had withdrawn the security guarantee promised at Versailles. With the question of security on the Rhine and reparations unresolved, was France now to be expected to match the naval pact by accepting comprehensive restrictions on land armaments? The French were not assuaged by the American view that they should be satisfied with a third-tier navy, because that was all they would be able to afford for the foreseeable future.17 It was Washington, after all, that was demanding a first claim against France’s financial reserves.
Under intense pressure from patriotic opinion at home, Prime Minister Briand insisted that if France was to be barred from building the capital ships that befitted a great power, it could accept no limitations on cheap tactical substitutes, notably submarines.18 This in turn provoked the British and Japanese into demanding exemptions for cruisers and destroyers. As Balfour frustratedly pointed out, the result was utterly counter-productive. Despite the demands of its empire, London was happy to acknowledge that it had a fundamental stake in French security. But as the Great War had demonstrated, Britain’s capacity to support France depended above all on the Americans, whose patience with the old world was running out. For an American-hosted disarmament conference to have degenerated to the point at which the French and British were trading allegations about the uses of the French Navy in a cross-channel attack on Britain, was disastrous. After Versailles, it could not but seem that once again a visionary American initiative was being sabotaged by French resentment. What remained unspoken, of course, was the fact that Washington had ruled out any consideration of France’s basic interests – either of an inter-Allied debt settlement, or of a European security guarantee.
However, despite the failure to deliver a truly comprehensive disarmament deal, there was no doubting the significance of the Washington Conference. America had resumed a role of leadership in global affairs. Japan’s political class had responded constructively to the American line. Britain had accepted a profound realignment of its strategic position. Balfour described it as an event unparalleled in world history. This was no exaggeration. Never before had an empire of Britain’s stature so explicitly and consciously conceded superiority in such a crucial dimension of global power. It deserves to stand as an early twentieth-century precursor to Mikhail Gorbachev’s retreat from the escalation of the Cold War in the 1980s.
But was the Washington Conference also a disastrous miscalculation?19 The Entente between Britain and the US was underpinned, despite many squabbles, by a shared interest in the status quo in the Atlantic. By contrast, the gamble taken in the Pacific was dramatic. The Four Power Agreement did not extend the intimacy of bilateral relations under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty. Large American investments flowed to Japan after 1921, but Washington and Wall Street never held the sway over Tokyo that London had enjoyed before 1914. Nor was the Pacific pact tied to the League of Nations. It hung in the air without any enforcement mechanism. Washington much reduced the striking power of the Japanese Navy. But following Hughes’s cuts, neither the British nor the American navies would be in a position to operate in two oceans at once. The US Navy deployed three of its four task forces into the Pacific. The Royal Navy was more stretched. As a compromise, the most powerful squadron of battleships was stationed centrally in the Mediterranean.20 In the case of a crisis it would race to the Western Pacific. But this would take two months and in the meantime it would leave Britain itself exposed. By deliberately unpicking the Anglo-Japanese alliance, did Washington set the stage for the disasters of the late 1930s, when the Western Powers failed to contain either
Mussolini’s aggression in the Mediterranean or Japanese expansion in the Pacific?
It is an unfair question, but one that cannot reasonably be avoided. And it is a productive question because it points to the crucial significance of the ‘sideshow’ in Washington, the attempt alongside the global naval deal to arrive at a settlement for China. If pro-Western forces had the upper hand in Japan in 1921–2, this was in part the result of economic pressures and the changing of guard amongst the Japanese elite. But this strategic redirection was only conceivable against the backdrop of a relatively benign perception of Japan’s security environment. The Soviet Union posed no immediate threat. Japan’s intervention in Siberia was soon to come to an unheroic end. The decisive issue for Japan, therefore, was China. Whether or not the men of violence got the upper hand in Japan would depend crucially on whether it was possible to stabilize China-Japan relations.
II
After Versailles, the Washington Conference marked a further step in China’s entrance into the global arena. If China was to be discussed, its representatives would be present and its voice would be heard. The conference offered a stage on which Wellington Koo and his colleagues enacted another act in the drama of patriotic self-assertion. The Chinese delegation seized the initiative on 16 November 1921 by laying out 10 proposals on questions of sovereignty and territorial settlement as the basis for any further discussion. Beijing now wanted a more far-reaching and substantive restoration of sovereignty. It wanted to revise the unequal treaties of the nineteenth century. In particular, it demanded the restoration of control over customs revenues and an end to the legal extraterritoriality of foreigners.21 In one respect these demands were fully compatible with the American agenda. The Chinese were continuing their challenge to the spheres of interest model on which European and Japanese influence rested. With this, Washington concurred, and with the Americans appearing to set a clear course, the British hastily fell into line.