Diplomacy for Peace
DIPLOMACY FOR PEACE TN matters of diplomacy and current history, we in •* America are still very largely in the stage of the student of medicine who has reached the point of anatomical...
...he had a definite idea as to what America might contribute to the world and found his opportunity in his close relationship to a scholarpresident of the most powerful of the neutral nations, becoming daily more powerful by force of natural circumstances as European destruction proceeded...
...he took to their study as the culmination of a lifetime of political study...
...Our "experts" do not truly become expert either from a preliminary course of post-mortem examinations or through their brief association with the Versailles negotiations...
...Colonel House was a tyro in foreign affairs...
...Where House failed in his concept was in his lack of practical knowledge...
...They do not necessarily become expert through years of professional diplomatic service, for the professional service tends to isolate men from intimate contact with the bases of American life upon which our foreign policies must be built...
...We perhaps do not feel ourselves quite capable of holding our own in matching wits, and as a natural consequence we sometimes bluster where there is no need...
...Page was also a novice...
...we seldom advance practical opinions on current history because we have but infinitesimal personal contact with the international factors which make current history, and intimate personal acquaintance with the leaders in other countries only very rarely...
...Gerard came through more successfully than other ambassadors of that particular period lay not only in an equable temperament, but very much in the fact that he was opposed to the policies of the government to which he was accredited in most things, and could THE COMMONWEAL April 21, 1926...
...From an attitude of criticism of British ways and policies and customs he had arrived at two conclusions: that the differences between the two nations were unimportant, even negligible in face of a common danger...
...Perhaps, in great part, our continued "policy of isolation" is caused by a dawning consciousness of this situation, rather than a result of deliberate reasoning and conviction...
...Another current example is the formulation of public opinion with regard to Mexico...
...to learn by postmortem examination...
...where Page failed to make his conviction felt at home was in his unlimited condemnation of the State Department, and of the purely American viewpoint it expressed...
...We are forced to wait upon dissection after the event...
...the professional diplomat grows insensibly into an academic attitude of mind toward American fundamentals as easily as the rest of us judge theoretically of Europe and the rest of the world, when we possess any opinion at all worth considering...
...We fear to lose, by contact with scheming foreigners, some of the undoubted blessings we enjoy...
...Possibly the reason why Mr...
...DIPLOMACY FOR PEACE TN matters of diplomacy and current history, we in •* America are still very largely in the stage of the student of medicine who has reached the point of anatomical research upon cadavers...
...That is well enough as to things long since dead (if anything in history be dead) but it is a system inadequate to a just study of today's problems of national life and death...
...He saw only the American side, although his unique position gave him the closest possible contacts with public men all over the world...
...that England's position with regard to the war should also be America's—and that no matter what Grey and House and (in lesser degree) Arthur Balfour might wish to bring about in the particular matter in which House was interested, the people of Great Britain would never accept it...
...his contacts were made under unprecedented conditions ; he had nothing of what is becoming so familiarly, though rather vaguely, classified among us as "background," except in the academic sense to which we have referred...
...One of the most perfect examples of this one-sided training is contained in Colonel House's Intimate Papers, in the clash of opinion between "le Colonel malgre lui" and Walter Hines Page...
...Both attitudes of mind are typical of the danger to which "experts" are exposed...
...He was distinctly a novice...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 24
