DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY
Who was the dramatist of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament?
Mr. Hughes? I would never have believed it. I could never have conceived
of his deliberately staging his diplomatic achievements with an
appreciation of the time, the place and the world at large which was
really amazing. It did not need Mr. Balfour’s delicate and humorous
understanding to point out to those who were present at the opening on
November 12 that the dramatic quality of Mr. Hughes’ great speech
rivaled, if it did not outstrip, its splendid matter. But who would have
believed that he would repeat himself? Yet he did it. Just four weeks
from his first great coup he pulled off another that had every element
of drama which characterized the first—and it had more—strains of
genuine emotion and one scene of biting satire. (Not for a moment,
however, do I believe that Mr. Hughes intended _that_.)
The surprise of the opening day of the Conference, November 12, lay in
the unexpectedness of what Mr. Hughes had to say. The first surprise, of
December 10, lay in the fact that there was to be a full session. It was
not until nearly midnight of the 9th that it was announced. A few diners
lingering late heard of it. The press of course was informed. But to
most of us the news came when we opened our morning paper over our
coffee—a full headline across the top of the page—
PLENARY SESSION TO-DAY
Of course we realized that it was going to be a big day. For days there
had been hidden in the mists about the Conference something which those
who were able to penetrate near to the center of things declared to be a
treaty. Watching this treaty emerge was like watching a ship come out of
a thick fog. There were warning signals, faint at first, but growing
more and more distinct—the Anglo-Japanese pact was dying. If the United
States wished it, it should go; and it was certain that the United
States had for a long time wished it,—also Australia and other parts of
the British Empire. Then we began to hear more and more from another
direction—signals that had been sounded at intervals for weeks before
the Conference convened. Japan was uneasy about the naval bases in the
Pacific. She would like to have them dismantled. As one listened one
began to understand that Mr. Hughes’ program of naval limitation would
stay where it was until something had been done about both the
Anglo-Japanese Pact and the Islands of the Pacific.
The logic of the situation began to be clear. The fair-minded began to
ask themselves, “Well, now, after all, how can we expect Japan to strip
herself of ships, if she must, as seems to be inevitable, give up her
understanding with England? How can we expect her to weaken her defenses
and take no exception to the fortifications in the waters near her? She
is the member of this Conference that is being asked to sacrifice until
it hurts, and the only one. Is it fair to ask her to sacrifice without
guarantees? Is there any way out but a treaty—a treaty in which we
join?”
Moreover, if you ask her to sacrifice without a guarantee, will she do
it? Not Japan. Thus it became more and more clear that the success of
the naval program depended on some kind of a pact which would satisfy
Japan that she could agree to what Mr. Hughes had asked and still have
no reason to feel herself in danger.
The first definite black-faced, full-width-of-the-page headline came, as
I remember, on December 5—“Four Power Entente to Replace Anglo-Japanese
Alliance.” The morning after this bold announcement it was not quite so
sure. The newspapers were keeping a line of retreat open. As they now
put it: “Discussions of the proposals have reached a well-advanced
stage,” none of the governments concerned had given final approval.
There was enough that was sure, however, to give the wicked a chance to
jeer at approaching “entangling alliances.”
By Friday, December 9, the most careful journals were saying, on what
they declared to be the best sort of authority, that the United States
was going into a pact with Japan and England and France, guaranteeing
various things. There was considerable diversity in the assertions about
what it guaranteed. Washington said nothing. The news came from all of
the capitals of the powers concerned, except our own. It was evidently
very hard for Washington to say “treaty.”
There was much entertaining gossip running around as to how Tokyo and
London and Paris had been able to give the press the news of what was
going to be done, while Washington was silent. One story was that a
clever Japanese journalist had managed to get a glimpse of the document
in preparation and had cabled what he had been able to make out of its
contents to Tokyo; that from there it had gone to Paris and London and
finally came here. That was one story. Another was a rather thin version
of that old, old device of writers of diplomatic fiction—a lively and
lovely lady lunches with an elderly diplomat, who, to win her favor,
reveals the secret that is in the air. That evening she dines with a
young journalist whom she naturally (and necessarily for the purpose of
the plot) much prefers, and to prove her devotion she tells him what her
elder suitor has revealed. Threadbare as the formula is, it was honored
the week that the treaty was coming out of the fog by at least one
important newspaper.
Mr. Hughes seems to have concluded by the end of Friday, the 9th, that
unless he acted quickly his reputation for dramatic diplomacy might be
shaken, and so the hasty summons, the thrill at the breakfast table, the
quick readjustments of plans, the rush to make sure that your
credentials were all right and your ticket waiting you.
From the beginning of the Conference, sun and air were in league with
those who were staging it with such a sense of dramatic values. Never
was there a morning of lovelier tenderness than that on which they
carried the Unknown Soldier to his grave; Mr. Hughes’ big gun was fired
under a perfect morning sky—it was only when we came out that things had
grown stern and the clouds were dark, as if to give us a sense that a
serious thing had been done that morning and it was well to get down to
work, if it was to be made good.
The morning of December 10 there was frost on all the Washington roof
tops, the sky was clear, there was an air that put a spring in your
heels and it was a joy to hurry down with the crowd to get your ticket;
it put you in mood for something exciting, helped enormously the keen
anticipation that stirred the town.
The scene in the Conference was what it had been at the three previous
open sessions: each delegate in his place, the advisory board banked
behind them, the boxes overflowing with ladies, the press in their usual
seats, the House gallery even more amusing than on the opening day. It
was quite full, for somehow the House had obtained permission to bring
its family along, and there were many ladies sprinkled through the
gallery. They made it more animated but not a whit more dignified in its
behavior.
And then, on the tick of the hour, Mr. Hughes arose. What an orderly
mind! A mind that must know where it is headed, how it is going to get
there, the exact point it has reached at the given moment! He must know
himself, and he never fails, when he presents his case, to make sure
that you know. Again and again in his talks to the press he would
carefully point out to the correspondents who were given to jumping to
the future, running back to the past, wanting to know this or that that
was not on the agenda by any stretch of the imagination, just what “the
muttons” were in this particular Conference. “The agenda is our chart,
here is where we have arrived to-day. We are moving in this or that
direction. I shall have nothing to say about what we find when we arrive
until we are there, then you shall know everything.” That is, Mr. Hughes
did his utmost to keep the mind of press and public concentrated on the
actual problem under his hand. He started the Plenary Conference of
December 10 in the same fashion.
The session, he said, was to be devoted to that part of the agenda which
concerned itself with the Pacific and Far Eastern questions. The
committee charged with these questions had taken up first a
consideration of China; certain conclusions in regard to China already
given out to the public had been reached. It was the business of the
full Conference, however, to assent to these conclusions. In turn, Mr.
Hughes reviewed them, and in turn the Conference assented to them:
(1) The four resolutions which will go down in history as the Root
resolutions; they are, as Mr. Hughes pointed out eloquently, a
charter given China by the eight powers at this Conference,
protecting her sovereignty and independence and guaranteeing that no
one hereafter shall seek within China special advantages at the
expense of the rights of others.
(2) The agreement between powers not to conclude between themselves
any treaty affecting China without previously notifying China and
giving her an opportunity to participate.
(3) A pledge given by all the members of the Conference not to enter
into any treaty or understanding either with one another or with any
power which would infringe the principles laid down in the Root
resolutions.
This business done, Mr. Hughes sprang the second surprise of the day:
“I shall now ask Senator Lodge to make a communication to the
Conference with respect to a matter which is not strictly within the
agenda, but which should be made known to the Conference at this
first opportunity.”
It was the treaty that had been lurking so long behind the fog. A simple
enough treaty in form, brief, only 196 words, but how portentous for us,
the United States. Those few words bind us to Great Britain, the French
Republic, the Empire of Japan in a contract to respect one another’s
rights in relation to all insular possessions and dominions in the
region of the Pacific Ocean. We agree to settle quarrels, if any there
should be, by conference, when it cannot be done by diplomacy. We agree
also if the rights of any one of the four associates are threatened from
the outside “to communicate with one another fully and frankly as to the
most efficient measures to be taken jointly and separately to meet the
exigencies of the particular situation.”
Article X of the League of Nations! I pinched myself to be sure I was
not asleep. Swift glances right and left reassured me, for I could see
sly little smiles—and some looks of disgust—on near-by faces. And then I
fixed my eyes on the American delegation. They were taking it like
gentlemen, though it did seem to me that Mr. Hughes was not sitting
quite so straight and looking quite so proud as usual. Article X read by
Henry Cabot Lodge! Was the dramatist for the Conference for the
Limitation of Armament also a great satirist? Surely you must search far
in American history to find another scene so full of irony.
Mr. Lodge read the treaty through in his fine, clear voice; digested it
in a few simple words; followed it with a nice little literary talk on
the romance that hangs over the isles of the Pacific, which we were
protecting from all future aggressors; said some hard things about war,
quite justified—but I was incapacitated for appreciating his eloquence,
for all I could see was the United States climbing into the League of
Nations through the pantry window, while Senator Lodge held up the sash.
But it was a fine climb for the United States!
In the week thus opened there followed more agreements, more
settlements,—all necessary to round out the Four Power Pact. These were
presented to the public not in open sessions of the Conference but
through the press in what might be called private rehearsals. Standing
at one end of the long audience room, opening from his own office in the
State Department, a hundred or more newspaper folk of various
nationalities, pressing close to him, Secretary Hughes read on Monday
afternoon, December 12, the text of an arrangement with Japan concerning
Yap, an arrangement hanging since last June and now settled and settled
rightly by a fair give and take on both sides.
He followed this by reading the written consent of the United States to
another chunk of the League of Nations. What it amounted to was that the
United States agreed to the mandate given Japan by the Versailles Treaty
over the islands in the Pacific north of the equator, late the property
of Germany. The United States also accepted all the terms of the mandate
as laid down by the League of Nations. Excellent terms they are, too. We
are even to get a copy of the annual report of her stewardship which
Japan, like all other League mandatories, is obliged to make, showing
that she is really developing and not exploiting the territory which she
is being allowed to administer. This was a good deal for one day!
What did it mean? Why, most important of all, that the delegates of the
United States had seen that limitation of armament means sacrifice. It
was unwillingness to sacrifice that had prevented the disarmament
proposed at Paris.
England must have her navy; her security required it.
France and Italy must have their armies; their security required it.
Each one of the little new nations that one would have supposed to have
been so fed up on war that they never again would have been willing to
spend a dollar on a soldier, must have their armies; their security
required it.
Japan must have her army, her navy, her war loot; her security required
it.
That is, no one of the allied nations was ready to make a sacrifice to
carry out the plank of disarmament they had adopted. They insisted on
applying the plank to the enemy they had beaten, but not to themselves.
This was not in any large degree because of greed or revenge, it was
because of fear—fear of the vanquished. There was utter lack of
confidence in the plan of peaceful international coöperation which they
had written into their program. Force alone spelt security in their
minds. They had no sense of safety in a mere covenant, though all the
nations of the world did commit themselves to its provisions.
It has been our boast that we alone asked nothing at Paris. But was this
true? When it came to working out the code which the world had acclaimed
as the true path to permanent peace, we refused to accept the one point
on which all the rest hung; that for an association of nations looking
to the continuous peaceful handling of international difficulties. Such
an association we saw would invade our isolation and that isolation we
have come to believe to be our chief security. That is, in essence, the
United States was no more willing to make a sacrifice for permanent
peace than were the distracted and disheveled nations of Europe. We and
they all held on to the particular device which we had come by national
experience to believe essential to safety—England her navy, France her
army, Japan her army and her navy, we our freedom from entangling
alliances.
The Four Power Pact proved that we were willing to sacrifice something
of our isolation—just how much the future would have to show. But would
we be willing to sacrifice anything of our naval program? There had been
rumors of changes asked by both England and Japan. The ugliest gesture
seen in Washington in the early days of the Conference had greeted these
rumors. We were not going to tolerate tampering with the great work. It
must be accepted as it was laid down, and if it was not, we would build
the biggest navy on earth; we had the money; moreover we would call our
foreign loans and then we’d see!
Various rumors of objections to the naval program, now that it had gone
to the committee for detailed examination, were said to have been made.
There was a disturbing rumor that England wanted the submarine banished
from the navies of the world, and that we flatly refused to consider a
request which could not but be welcome to the mass of the country,
anxious to see not only capital ships scrapped, as had been proposed on
the opening day, but auxiliary craft of all sorts. The chief irritation,
however, had been over Japan’s strenuous objection to doing away with
the greatest of her ships—indeed, the greatest ship afloat, the _Mutsu_.
It was just what we might have expected of Japan; her acceptation of the
program at the opening of the Conference was a pretense. She was going
to object at every point. What the public was still not realizing in
regard to the _Mutsu_ was that to Japan it had become a tremendous,
almost sacred, symbol. It was a ship designed entirely by the Japanese
naval architects, built of materials prepared by Japanese workmen, named
for a beloved emperor. The delegation feared to consent to her
destruction. So much national pride had been aroused by the great ship
that to consent to her destruction might ruin the whole naval program
with Japan.
It was hard for Americans to understand any such feeling as this. We
have little or no sentiment about any ship, big or little. They mean
nothing to us but taxes. We don’t depend upon battleships for safety as
an island nation does. There is Japan, a little land all told, Formosa
and Korea included, not as large as the state of Texas, with a sea front
of over 18,000 miles. Ships mean food, contacts, security to her. When
we asked her to sacrifice them we must remember that we were asking much
more of her than we were of ourselves though our ratio might have been
larger. We must remember the world is not ruled simply by tons of
material. Symbols weigh more with nations than tonnage. We could give up
our ships without a sigh; but when Japan scrapped hers, something of her
heart went with the scrapping.
So far as the _Mutsu_ was concerned, the answer came three days after
the agreement over Yap and the Caroline Islands had been made public. On
the 15th of December, at six o’clock in the evening, Mr. Hughes staged
one of his private rehearsals for the press. It was the decision as to
the capital-ship ratio which had been so long expected and which had
been settled on the basis that had been proposed on November 12—5–5–3.
But, while the ratio had been kept, the details had been changed. Great
Britain and the United States had had the good will and the wisdom to
recognize that Japan’s feeling about the _Mutsu_ was genuine.
One has only to read the revised agreement to understand what pains the
two countries took to readjust the calculations of the United States in
such a way that the desired ratio would be preserved and Japan’s pride
and sentiment saved. When nations come to the point that they are
willing to try to understand and to consider one another’s feelings as
well as one another’s force, there is some hope for the peace of the
world.
There was no gainsaying the fact that the great triumph of this dramatic
week was Japan’s. It was a legitimate triumph, honestly won. She
understood what she gained. As the session of December 10 broke up, one
of the ablest members of her delegation—a bitter critic of what had been
doing—came out from the Conference hall with tears in his eyes, though
they do say that no Japanese knows how to shed tears. “It is the
greatest day in the history of the new world,” he said. And that was
true,—if Japan would now be as generous toward the rights and
aspirations of her great neighbor China as she had been tenacious of her
own safety and dignity. The world had recognized her power and her
diplomatic skill. Would she now win its confidence in her moral
integrity?
But if December 10 was the beginning of Japan’s week of triumph, it was
Mr. Balfour’s day. He made a little speech which will stick long in the
minds of those who heard it.
“It so happens,” said Mr. Balfour, “that I was at the head of the
British administration which twenty years ago brought the great
Anglo-Japanese Alliance into existence. It so happens that I was at the
head of the British Administration which brought into existence an
entente between the British Empire and France, and through all my life I
have been a constant, ardent and persistent advocate of intimate and
friendly relations between the two great branches of the
English-speaking race.
“You may well conceive, therefore, how deep is my satisfaction when I
see all these four powers putting their signatures to a treaty which I
believe will for all time insure perfect harmony of coöperation between
them in the great region with which the treaty deals.”
That little speech gave one a clearer sense of what through all these
years Arthur Balfour has been doing than anything that ever has before
come to me. There is something supremely brave about a man of such fine
understanding, such humorous and distinguished cynicism, standing by
through all of the disillusions, disgust, deceptions, forced evil
choices of public life, never quitting whatever the temptation. For
forty years now Arthur Balfour has stood by. He is, I believe, 73 years
old. He has never had so much reason in all his long political career to
believe that the good will of men can be mobilized for the world’s
service.
It was a great week, noble in its undertaking, dramatic in its planning,
the just triumph of a people who know what they want and are willing to
wait to get it. And for us, America, it was a week of brave deeds. We
were coming to our senses, realizing that we are of the world, and if we
are to enjoy its fruits, we must bear our share of its burdens; that if
we would have peace, the surest way is to use our strength and our good
will to guarantee it.