THE TRIPOD OF PEACE
By WILSON HARRIS The fact that Mr. Lippmann is writing primarily for his own countrymen about his own country's foreign policy does not appreciably diminish the importance of his argument here. There are two reasons for that. Mr. Lippmann begins by basing himself firmly on first principles—principles so general that they apply as much to the position of Great Britain as to the position of the United States ; and for the rest, since his main thesis is that the fortunes of the United States and of Great Britain in the world of the future are inseparable what he has to say clearly concerns one country as much as the other. The basic principle is prima fade too obvious to need emphasis, but the neglect of it has caused most of the wars of the past and continued neglect will cause more in the future. It is simply that a country's commitments must not exceed its defensive resources—a danger that can be avoided only by limiting the commitments or by expanding defensive armament (not in modern warfare to be distinguished very sharply from offensive). For the neglect of that canon by our own country we need go no further back than the middle thirties, when the re- armament of Germany at once created a gaping disparity between our own armaments and the commitments undertaken under the League of Nations Covenant, the Locarno Treaty and various par- ticular understandings and alliances, notably with France.
But it is with America's commitments, not ours, that Mr. Lippmann is concerned, and he has no difficulty in demonstrating that America's foreign policy has been what he terms " insolvent " (in that commitments exceeded resources) during almost the whole of her history,—certainly since x823, when by the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine she professed to throw a protective mantle over all Latin America, and much more since 1898, when the acquisition of possessions like the Philippines extended the area needing protection 7,000 miles across the Pacific. How can American blindness to such a situation—expressing itself in an impregnable isolationism—for a century and more be explained? The ex- planation Mr. Lippmann gives is the foundation of his whole thesis. The idea behind the Monroe Doctrine, he recalls, was con- ceived in London, not in Washington. It emanated from the brain of Canning ; it was originally to have been an Anglo-American
* Since this was written Messrs. Hamish Hamilton have announced the early publication of Mr. Lippmann's book declaration ; and its whole force and substance derived from the fact that Canning assured the American Minister, Richard Rush, that in case of need Britain and the. British Navy would join in defending it. Even so President Monroe's pronouncement was only made after the fullest discussion with his wise and experienced predecessors, Jefferson and Madison, who gave it their full approval. Thus for seventy-five years, Mr. Lippmann argues, Americans who boasted of America's isolation in fact owed their security to what was nothing less than a tacit Anglo-American alliance. In that connexion he recalls usefully that the familiar warning against " entangling alliances " was not uttered by Washington, who in fact contracted an alliance with France, but by Jefferson, and that Jefferson more than once made it clear that he would not hesitate for a moment to contract an alliance if necessary.
That then, is the first argument—that a nation's resources must be equal to its commitments. The second is that no Great Power today can assure its own protection, and that, as has been shown, America, in fact, never has. Least of all could she rely on her own strength today. She could not secure complete protection against an Asiatic Great Power without an ally on the mainland of Asia. She could not secure complete protection against a European Great Power (the idea of Britain being that Power is ruled out of account) without forward air-bases and command of the seas. That, and other arguments, point to the conclusion (which needs little elaboration on this side of the Atlantic) that an indissoluble and permanent union of moral and material force between the United States and the British Commonwealth—what Mr. Lippmann calls the Atlantic Community—in the post-war world is indispensable. The form such a union should take is an important, but subsidiary, question.
But that alone is not enough. America could not protect Britain in Europe against a resurgent Germany. For that Russian co- operation is necessary, as necessary as it is for the protection of American interests (and British) in Asia against a resurgent Japan. China is not forgotten, but the potentialities of that great country are in the future, not in the present. Her industrialisation has hardly begun, and a Great Power must be an arsenal to be able to intimidate an aggressor in the fifth decade of the twentieth century. It is therefore on a complete and unchequered understanding between the United States, the British Commonwealth and Russia that the peace of the world must be based, and round these three Great Powers that the society of nations must be rebuilt. That is no new doctrine, but it is very much to the good that it should be reinforced by arguments so massive and. cogent as Mr. Lippmann assembles behind it.
Yet it is just here—and almost only here—that I find myself questioning, not Mr. Lippmann's conclusions, but some of the reasoning on which he bases them. He seems to me to take an idealistic rather than a realistic view of Russia, and even to slip up sometimes on fact where Russia is concerned. It is not true that Russia was deliberately " ostracised " at the Peace Conference in 1919. The trouble was that among the contending Russian factions there was then none that could be said to represent Russia as a whole ; an Attempt was actually made to bring them together. It is easy to judge the past in the light of subsequent history, and it is true, of course, that in the end the Soviet revolutionaries emerged victorious, but that was not and could not have been foreseen when the Peace Conference assembled nine months after Brest-Litovsk. Still more questionable does it seem to me to say that " At Munich in 1938 Hitler compelled Great Britain and France to separate themselves from Russia. . . . In sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Britain and France were really sacrificing their affiance with Russia." Witat Mr. Lippmann means by " their " alliance is not clear. There was no alliance, nor even any conspicuous rapprochement between Great Britain and Russia, and if Mr. Lippmann means "the alliance that might have been achieved " it would have been better to use language that indicates that. Could it, moreover, in fact have been achieved?
It is necessary, indeed, to be perfectly clear on this question of Russia. Mr. Lippmann identifies himself with those who in 1919 " held that a system of collective security could not be maintained
unless within it there existed an alliance of strong and dependable Powers." It cannot be argued that at the time of Munich we, or America, regarded Russia as " a strong and dependable Power," and there need be no hesitation about saying that, because she had just as many reserves about us as we had about her—and voiced them much more freely. The trial of the British engineers and the various treason trials had created an atmosphere very alien to an implicit faith (such as Mr. Lippmann seems to profess in retrospect) in Russia's good intentions ; and since then there have been the agreement with Hitler, the attack on Finland and the invasion of Poland.* All of that, no doubt, belongs to the past ; events have taken a new turn ; a new chapter has been opened ; the past has only a limited relevance in discussions of the present and future. But in discussions of the past, e.g. of the situation in 1938, it has a very obvious relevance, and Mr. Lippmann seems to me to have taken too little account of that. It would not have weakened his argument, for it can be contended that Russia felt it necessary in her own interest to do what she did, and Mr. Lippmann's thesis is that it is primarily in their own interests that his country and ours and Russia must work together inseparably in the future. There will be room for some altruism in their co-operation, but it will be in no conflict with the instincts of self-preservation. There is a clear and decisive identity of interest between all three Powers.
Mr. Lippmann throughout his sagacious and suggestive volume keeps his feet planted firmly on the ground. " I have written," he says, " in the philosophical conviction that the behaviour of nations over a long period of time is the most reliable, though not the only, index of their national interest. . . . We can most nearly judge what a nation will probably want by seeing what over a fairly long period of time it has wanted ; we can most nearly predict what it will do by knowing what it has usually done." On the day on which I read in Mr. Lippmann's book the statement that at Munich " Hitler compelled Great Britain and France to separate themselves from Russia " I happened by pure chance to be reading in Lord Newton's Lord Lyons, regarding the Franco-German tension of 1875, that " it had, of course, been the object of Bismarck to sow dissension between England and Russia," and I recalled a passage a little earlier in that book from a despatch of March, 1873, by Lord Odo Russell, British Ambassador at Berlin : " The two great objects of Bismarck's policy are, the supremacy of Germany in Europe and of the German race in the world." Just seventy years ago. " We can most nearly judge what a nation will probably want by seeing what over a fairly long period of time it has wanted."
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