CAN WE ACHIEVE PEACE BY FORCE?
Borchard, Edwin
Can We Achieve Peace By Force? By EDWIN BORCHARD THE PUBLIC has lately been favored with a series of Resolutions, voted at Washington, Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran, all looking broadly toward unity...
...It is, therefore, just as well and more realistic for the actual wielders of force, the three victor Great Powers, to assume responsibility for their armed supremacy...
...Unless its implications are appreciated before long, the lot of the American people can hardly prove a happy one...
...Like the House Resolution, it adopts the "hue and cry" theory of the League Covenant by which "peace" is to be enforced by a combination of the "peace-loving" nations (i.e., the satisfied) against the "aggressor" (the dissatisfied...
...Nothing but the force of the victors...
...By EDWIN BORCHARD THE PUBLIC has lately been favored with a series of Resolutions, voted at Washington, Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran, all looking broadly toward unity in the war and a postwar period in which "peace and security" shall prevail...
...Back Where We Started The more complicated the machinery, the less likely is it to work at the crucial time...
...That seems an unnutritious diet, and hardly a tangible inducement to the American people for even greater "international cooperation...
...The State system itself dictates the limitations on international agencies...
...Yet the United States is committed to this program...
...The hue and cry theory is a mechanistic device which overlooks the human considerations which motivate international relations...
...Even bribes, boycotts, and bombs, the new instruments of national policy, cannot solve the problems that the cessation of hostilities will present...
...If now again, the preservation of the status quo against "aggressors"—a provocative, undefinable term indicating a disfavored nation manifesting its dissatisfaction with the status quo—should prove to be the aim of the peace-makers, the outcome is predictable...
...As a formula for peace, it seems hopeless...
...Not only does the threat of force produce hostility and antagonism, but it also produces profound distrust...
...But as soon as it tried to become a guardian of the status quo, misnamed peace, rather than a means for effecting changes in the status quo, it became inevitably an agency for war...
...Instead of enlisting cooperation in the national self-interest, its advocates frustrate cooperation by inciting fear...
...For example, Article 10 of the League Covenant cements the 1919 status quo...
...Force, or the threat of force, arouses resistance, not acquiescence...
...Thus have spoken all victors in history...
...What is really meant is that the League policy of intervention, so popular in certain quarters, has divided the American people and is likely to continue to divide them so long as their interests remain primarily American...
...Collective Insecurity In the Far East, Japan is to be reduced to powerless sterility and disunited China propelled into dominance...
...It is the keynote of the current crop of resolutions and of Administration policy...
...What is apparent from the Resolutions recently adopted is that Russia is to emerge from the wars greatly strengthened if not expanded both East and West, whereas Central Europe is apparently to become a kind of chaotic, devastated area, with puppet governments but without participation in the determination of its own fate...
...Article 16 provides for sanctions (starvation) and military force to preserve it...
...No important power is frightened into submission by the momentary opposition of superior force...
...How all this can be made to stick, in view of the President's Christmas promise to bring the American troops home at the earliest possible time, is still unrevealed...
...But peace by force has other disadvantages, which the founders of this country, even in a closely knit union like the states of the United States, seem to have known better than their political successors, dealing with the disparate nations of the universe...
...The Danaher Amendment, designed to give it a constructive meaning, was rejected...
...The war will be won, but evidence of "peace and security" is peculiarly unsatisfactory and unconvincing...
...But how the humane aspirations of the Atlantic Charter can flourish in such an oppressive climate it is hard to see...
...Can all that really be in the British interests...
...Perhaps through an abiding faith in the League of Nations, perhaps by drawing a totally false analogy to the maintenance of law and order internally, peace by force seems to have captured the imagination of many...
...So far as concerns international cooperation for sensible ends, the American government and people have been in the forefront of nearly every international effort and until 1914, if the record is read correctly, enjoyed the moral respect of other nations...
...Who, for example, is to disarm Russia or the United States, or is to determine their tariff or commercial policies...
...we are merely told that they will be obtained by the force of the victors...
...They cannot be controlled by any "international police force," a mythical conception except for local, temporary purposes, as in China or other weak countries...
...An Unjustified Charge No one can predict with certainty the nature of the coming status quo...
...It renders, therefore, less than no service, and Moscow Declaration or not, will hardly abolish the natural mores of balance of power, coalition, or sphere of influence...
...Since then the United States has been accused of having no foreign policy...
...But the issue of maintaining peace in the postwar world, to speak only of machinery, goes deeper than form...
...Collective insecurity will have been promoted...
...Under the loose terms of the Lend-Lease and other acts, whenever the President thinks that the defense of the United States requires the defense of other countries, he alone can determine who is our friend and who our enemy, and Atlas, the American taxpayer, must act accordingly...
...An alliance, which seems now contemplated, is a product of fear but, in the absence of real confidence in peace, it does have a temporary stabilizing utility—temporary only, since it gives rise to counter-alliances and since coalitions never last...
...If actually used, it merely produces war...
...Russia and Great Britain may have good reasons for supporting it, since it apparently assures them of United States' help to maintain their supremacy...
...Because the United States Senate refused in 1919 to sign a less formidable blank check, it was unjustly condemned by those who thought that Utopia, or even peace, lay in such a contract...
...This in turn forecloses that cooperation, economic and political, which is so essential...
...What methods for preserving the peace are we promised...
...Neither the military aim of bringing down Germany to "unconditional surrender" nor "stripping Japan" of her "stolen" territory—a precarious idea to promulgate—implies any peace aim...
...But little that has been said or intimated justifies great hopes of its producing wide satisfaction...
...There will be a competition for satellites...
...The country is ostensibly fighting for the old-fashioned, primitive purpose of defeating an obnoxious and dangerous enemy, without any concrete indication of "what for...
...The League, in spite of its speedy creation, achieved some useful results and acquired prestige, notably in the non-political field...
...But we ought not to identify this supremacy with real peace or base upon it unfounded expectations...
...Thus, we have the paradox of making war to preserve peace and are back where we started, except that now the so-called civilized states have at their disposal the means of destroying their western civilization...
...Perhaps the American people would vote today as they did in 1920—not because they are uncooperative but because they are cautious in entering upon reckless commitments...
...The hue and cry theory, which lies at the root of the idea of preserving peace by force, is thus fundamentally inconsistent with voluntary cooperation among the nations...
...But the Connally Resolution is not without significance...
...As William Henry Cham-berlin so ably pointed out recently in this magazine, the charge of "isolationism," directed against the American people as a term of opprobrium by some of its highest officials, was never justified by anything more than a popular reluctance to sign blank checks promising to make war abroad, an objective which did not seem to serve an American interest...
...One thing seems certain: there is little likelihood of tranquillity in it, and less of democracy...
...Where there is a will and understanding for harmonious relations, as in marriage, there is little need for machinery, certainly not for enforcement...
...Whether more frightful war casualties and motion pictures will supply such inducement remains to be seen...
...Important nations, the only ones now in question, cannot be coerced, only persuaded...
...Congress has never before committed itself to such a course—a course well calculated to keep the United States in more or less perpetual war...
...In fact, the threat of force to preserve the peace is a contradiction in terms and ideas...
...The problem of change, so inexorable in all human relations, was foreseen in Article 19 of the Covenant, but that Article was rendered unworkable in practice...
...The Connally Resolution, committing the United States to support "international authority" for the enforcement of peace against the "aggressors," was approved by so many Senators, it is said, because it seemed to commit them to nothing...
...Presumably the Western Powers are to be restored, largely by American arms, in their former vast imperialisms...
...But unless the peace produces stability rather than unrest, unless the inevitable resentments and desperation are dissipated rather than accentuated, we shall have laid the foundation for more, not less war...
...An assurance, therefore, of holding down the status quo is not an assurance of peace, but quite the contrary...
...If the theory and its progeny, peace by force, should prevail as the modus Vivendi of the nations, the world and the United States are likely to suffer badly...
...They are not adept in foreign affairs, for a good reason...
...What the Connally Resolution and recent official statements really mean is that the United States is to be asked to issue—and redeem—a blank check to hold down by force of American arms any status quo the victorious powers might arrange...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 3
