France in the Dovecot
FRANCE IN THE DOVECOT THE lot of the American delegation at the naval conference has not been a happy one, and we are edified at the patience with which Mr. Stimson and his colleagues have followed...
...We have not been able to abolish the submarine, and reduction in naval strength will be mostly a reduction in battleship tonnage...
...Now it was not up to Secretary Stimson to persuade other delegations to that hypothesis...
...but reduction as Americans understand it can mean only the scrapping of ships which would be effective in a fight today and five years from today...
...for abolition of the submarines despite well-understood opposition to it...
...Its aeeomplishments do not appear so unsubstantial when the quality of the opposition is taken into account...
...We do not suppose for a moment that the French claims are final...
...It has arranged a code for the decent conduct of submarines during war time, and while combatants may still be inclined to disregard such codes, there is a powerful check in the memory of what the ill will of the res...
...Complaint at this time would be indeed ungracious, no nation having imposed so hard a task upon its representatives as the United States, nor expected so great results from them...
...Stimson and his colleagues have followed every possible avenue toward agreement...
...France, magnanimously, will not salvage and refit certain vessels which are in the mud, and the United States will do away with its war-time destroyers, comparatively few of which are not already rusting in the shipyards...
...To carry all our points would have gone far toward guaranteeing the peace of the world, but to carry all of them it would have been necessary that every other nation at the conference accept the hypothesis of peace as willingly as did the United States...
...of the world cost Germany a dozen years ago...
...And ways had been opened toward a four-power treaty, which would be an even greater blow to French prestige, since it would mean the consolidation of Italy's recent advances into international good grace...
...But it may be that their confidence is exaggerated, just as their cruiser and battleship needs have been exaggerated, and as, we suspect, their original reluctance to attend the conference was planned to give them an advantage...
...We shall have fewer ships and doughtier ones...
...In the light of our expectations, the work of the conference to date has been sadly disappointing...
...That was work which should have been undertaken in preparation for the conference everywhere as it was undertaken in the United States...
...and for all this without political agreements...
...An Anglo-American agreement appears to have been reached on all counts, and differences with Japan are rapidly being ironed out...
...We were out for actual reduction in navies, and at the same time for parity with Great Britain...
...Considering the attitude of France, however, tfae conference is really to be congratulated...
...The policies of the various delegations at London were determined long before the conference began, and no man or group of men could hope to change them...
...Thus France returned to the conference to find a three-power treaty affecting the greatest navies on the seas by no means so nebulous an arrangement as it had appeared at the fall of the Tardieu Cabinet...
...Weak at Washington in 1922, the French adopted a simple strategy to make themselves all-important at London in 1930...
...for preservation of the ratios established at Washington in 1922...
...The cruiser problem is pretty well out of the way, and let us remember how thorny that problem appeared to be last summer...
...This may be reduction as the French pretend to understand it, and as the English, at times, have appeared to understand it...
...We expect a five-power treaty, in which limitation of fighting ships in all classes will be stipulated, simply because neither a three- nor a four-power treaty are any longer out of the question...
...We may have been surprised at the intensity of the opposition to this method, but it should not shake our faith in the merits of it...
...Two months ago, of course, it remained to be seen whether other nations were as ready as the United States to apply the strategy of peace to the work of peace...
...Now, up to the present, the French have insisted that their support at home is so strong that they can afford to remain out of a general agreement, and risk world-wide resentment...
Vol. 11 • March 1930 • No. 20
