Washington Conference

Washington Conference, (1921–22), international conference called by the United States to limit the naval arms race and to work out security agreements in the Pacific area. Held in Washington, D.C., the conference resulted in the drafting and signing of several major and minor treaty agreements.

The Four-Power Pact, signed by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and France on December 13, 1921, stipulated that all the signatories would be consulted in the event of a controversy between any two of them over “any Pacific question.” An accompanying agreement stated they would respect one another’s rights regarding the various Pacific islands and mandates that they possessed. These agreements ensured that a consultative framework existed between the United States, Great Britain, and Japan—i.e., the three great powers whose interests in the Pacific were most likely to lead to a clash between them. But the agreements were too vaguely worded to have any binding effect, and their chief importance was that they abrogated the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902; renewed 1911), which had previously been one of the principal means of maintaining a balance of power in East Asia. Another supplementary document defined the “insular possessions and dominions” of Japan.

The Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty, which was signed by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy on February 6, 1922, grew out of the opening proposal at the conference by U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to scrap almost 1.9 million tons of warships belonging to the great powers. This bold disarmament proposal astonished the assembled delegates, but it was indeed enacted in a modified form. A detailed agreement was reached that fixed the respective numbers and tonnages of capital ships to be possessed by the navies of each of the contracting nations. (Capital ships, defined as warships of more than 10,000 tons displacement or carrying guns with a calibre exceeding 8 inches, basically denoted battleships and aircraft carriers.) The respective ratios of capital ships to be held by each of the signatories was fixed at 5 each for the United States and Great Britain, 3 for Japan, and 1.67 each for France and Italy. The Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty halted the post-World War I race in building warships and even reversed the trend; it necessitated the scrapping of 26 American, 24 British, and 16 Japanese warships that were either already built or under construction. The contracting nations also agreed to abandon their existing capital-ship building programs for a period of 10 years, subject to certain specified exceptions. Under another article in the treaty, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan agreed to maintain the status quo with regard to their fortifications and naval bases in the eastern Pacific.

The Naval Limitation Treaty remained in force until the mid-1930s. At that time Japan demanded equality with the United States and Great Britain in regard to the size and number of its capital ships. When this demand was rejected by the other contracting nations, Japan gave advance notice of its intention to terminate the treaty, which thus expired at the end of 1936.

The same five powers signed another treaty regulating the use of submarines and outlawing the use of poison gas (see chemical weapon) in warfare. A Nine-Power Pact signed by the above five powers plus the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and China affirmed China’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity and gave all nations the right to do business with it on equal terms. In a related treaty the nine powers established an international commission to study Chinese tariff policies.