The new balance in East Asia
The three Pacific powers
World War I also overthrew the power structure in East Asia and the Pacific. Before 1914 six imperial rivals had struggled for concessions on the East Asian coast. But the war eliminated Germany and Russia from colonial competition and weakened Britain and France, leaving the United States, Japan, and China in an uncomfortable triangular relationship that would persist until 1941.
Americans, largely ignorant of Asian realities, harboured a mix of attitudes before 1914. Contemptuous of what seemed to some of them, at least, as a barbaric and frozen Chinese culture, they nevertheless saw China as an unequalled opportunity for both Christian proselytizing and commercial exploitation. American investment in China in 1914 was only a quarter that of Japan and a 10th that of Britain, but moralism and manifest destiny both seemed to endow the United States with a special mission in China. On the other hand, Americans admired Japan for its mastery of modern technology but by the same token feared it as the primary obstacle to U.S. hopes for China. In 1899, a year after American acquisition of the Philippines and a year before the Boxer Rebellion, Secretary of State John Hay circulated his two “Open Door” notes imploring the Great Powers to eschew the dismemberment of China and to preserve free commercial access for all. The growing Japanese fleet worried American naval planners, who drafted at the time of the Russo-Japanese War the “Plan Orange” contingency for war with Japan. (They also conceded the impossibility of defending the Philippines against Japanese attack.)
The Chinese Revolution of 1911–12, inspired by the democratic principles of Sun Yat-sen (educated in Hawaii and British Hong Kong), expelled the Manchu dynasty and elevated the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), to power. But Sun quickly gave way in 1913 to General Yüan Shih-kʾai, whose failure to unify the giant land of 400,000,000 condemned China to a struggle among rival warlords that kept it in turmoil until at least 1928. Even as the Chinese revolted against foreign influence and exploitation, they remained nonetheless vulnerable to imperial predations or, conversely, dependent on foreign protection. In 1913 the Wilson administration entered office with a decidedly pro-Chinese leaning, and at the same time many Americans on the West Coast had become alarmed about the growing presence and success of enterprising Japanese immigrants and had begun to seek, in Washington and California, to legalize various forms of discrimination against them.
Japanese expansion during World War I only magnified American concern. After seizing Germany’s Pacific islands and Chiao-chou Bay on the strategic Shantung Peninsula, Japan imposed on China the “Twenty-one Demands” (January 1915), claiming greatly expanded economic privileges and rights in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia (September 3, 1916). After U.S. entry into the war, the Peking regime (but not the Nationalists in Canton) declared war on the Central Powers (August 14, 1917) in hopes of defending its interests at the peace conference. The United States moved to end the embarrassment stemming from its co-belligerency with both China and Japan through the Lansing–Ishii Agreement of November 2, 1917, in which Japan paid lip service to the Open Door while the United States recognized Japan’s “special interests” in China. Wilson also sent troops to Vladivostok to monitor the Japanese intervention in Siberia.
The Paris Peace Conference exposed the two branches of Japanese expansionism, rooted in a bursting population and a booming industry in need of raw materials and markets. Delegate Saionji Kimmochi demanded the inclusion of a clause in the League of Nations Covenant proscribing racial discrimination, a principle that would have obliged the United States, Canada, and Australia to admit immigrants from Japan on equal terms with those of other nations. This was politically impossible for Wilson and Lloyd George to accept. The Japanese also demanded the rights formerly held by Germany at Chiao-chou, which Peking resisted vehemently. Finally Saionji agreed to drop the racial-equality plank in return for the granting of Japan’s Chinese demands and threatened to reject the League of Nations if they were denied. Against Lansing’s advice, Wilson acquiesced. Announcement of the terms provoked the anti-Western May Fourth Movement in China and caused it to be the only state that refused even to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Japan’s triumph was an inauspicious precedent for diplomatic extortion by imperialist states from liberal states at the expense of helpless third parties.
The organization of power in the Pacific
In the United States, liberal internationalists, balance-of-power realists, Protestant churches with Chinese missions, and xenophobes all decried the cynical expansionism of Japan and what they took to be Wilson’s capitulation. The Republican administration of Warren G. Harding in 1921 therefore determined to continue an ambitious naval construction plan dating from before the war and to pressure London to terminate the Anglo-Japanese Alliance dating from 1902. War debts gave the United States financial leverage over the British, as did American influence (based in a large Irish-American segment of the electorate) in the Irish question then reaching its climax. In June 1921 the British Commonwealth Conference bowed to this pressure and decided not to renew the alliance. This in turn confronted the Japanese with the prospect of a Britain aligned with Washington, not Tokyo, as well as a costly arms race against the world’s two leading naval powers. A postwar business slump and worker unrest also suggested to Tokyo the wisdom of a tactical retreat.
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited the Great Powers to Washington, D.C., to forge a new order for East Asia and the Pacific. A Four-Power Pact negotiated at the conference (November 1921–February 1922) enjoined the United States, Japan, Britain, and France to respect each other’s Pacific island dependencies for 10 years. A Nine-Power Pact obliged all parties to respect “the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of the state of China” and the commercial Open Door. A separate Sino-Japanese agreement provided for Japanese evacuation of Shantung. In a Five-Power Treaty on naval armaments, Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy agreed severally to maintain the naval balance of capital ships in the ratios 5:5:3:1.67:1.67 and agreed not to fortify their Pacific possessions. The latter three powers protested, but the United States frankly threatened to use its superior resources to dwarf the Japanese fleet, while France and Italy could not afford to compete with the British. France was also hoping for British support at this time in the struggle over German reparations (see below The postwar guilt question). Still, domestic displeasure with the treaties forced both the French and Japanese cabinets to resign.
Hughes’s balance-of-power diplomacy for the Pacific seemed to reflect a realist turn in American statecraft in reaction to Wilson’s idealism insofar as the United States flexed its muscle to compel the British and Japanese to keep hands off China and limit armaments. But in so doing the United States assumed responsibility as the balancer and container of Japanese power, for the naval agreement still left the Japanese fleet dominant in Asian waters. Moreover, the Japanese had clearly bowed to force majeure and, while resigned for the time being, would shrug off these constraints as soon as the Great Depression began to sap American resolve. In the long run, East Asian stability could come only through a strong and united China, for a weak and divided China represented constant temptation to a Japan bursting with strength, anxious for outlets, and resentful of Anglo-American containment.
The postwar guilt question
Looking back on 1919–21 from the perspective of World War II, historians easily concluded that the Paris peacemakers had failed. In fact, debate over a “postwar guilt question” began even before the Big Three had completed their work. Anglo-American liberals felt betrayed by Wilson’s failure to fashion a new diplomacy, while exponents of traditional diplomacy ridiculed Wilson’s self-righteous intrusions. As Harold Nicolson put it: “We had hoped to call a new world into existence; we ended only by fouling the old.” In other words, the peace amounted to a self-defeating mixture of contradictory ends or of tough ends and gentle means. Many Britons said the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh, would destroy Germany’s economy and fragile new democracy, and would drive the bitter Germans to embrace militaristic revanche or Bolshevism. Many Frenchmen replied that the treaty was too mild, that a united Germany would resume its drive for hegemony, and that German democracy was sheeps’ clothing put on for Wilson’s benefit. Historians persuaded by the former argument often cast the peace conference as a morality play, with the messianic Wilson frustrated in his lofty mission by the atavistic Clemenceau. Those persuaded by the second argument speculate that the French plan for a permanent weakening of Germany might have made for a stabler Europe but for Wilson’s and Lloyd George’s moralizing, which, incidentally, served American and British interests at every turn. Clemenceau said: “Wilson speaks like Jesus Christ, but he operates like Lloyd George.” And Lloyd George, when asked how he had done at Paris, said, “Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.”
Such caricatures skirt the facts that the war was won by the greatest coalition in history, that the peace could only take the form of a grand compromise, and that ideas are weapons. Once taking them up to great effect in the war on Germany, the Big Three could not cynically shrug them off any more than they could their constituents’ interests, hopes, and fears. A purely Wilsonian peace, therefore, was never a possibility, nor was a purely power-political one on the order of the Congress of Vienna. Perhaps the new diplomacy was revealed as a sham or a disaster, as many professional diplomats claimed. Perhaps Wilson’s moral insinuations only gave all parties grounds to depict the peace as illegitimate, one man’s justice being always another’s abomination. But it was still the old diplomacy that had spawned the hideous war in the first place. The pursuit of power without regard to justice, and the pursuit of justice without regard to power, were both doomed and dangerous occupations—such seemed to be the lesson of Versailles. The democratic states would spend the next 20 years searching in vain for a synthesis.
In the 1960s this portrait of the peace conference as a Manichaean duel gave way to new interpretations. New left historians depicted peacemaking after World War I as a conflict between social classes and ideologies, hence as the first episode in the Cold War. Arno J. Mayer wrote of 1919 as an “international civil war” between the “forces of movement” (Bolsheviks, Socialists, labor, and left-Wilsonians) and the “forces of order” (the Russian Whites, Allied governments, capitalists, and conservative power-politicians). While this thesis attracted overdue attention to the domestic political concerns of the Big Three, it imposed an equally dualistic set of categories, derived from the “primacy of domestic policy” paradigm, on the convoluted events of 1919. Perhaps it is most accurate to describe the Paris Peace Conference as the birthplace of all the major tactics, confrontational and conciliatory, for dealing with the Bolshevik phenomenon that have reappeared time and again to the present day. Prinkipo was the first attempt to get Communists and their opponents to substitute negotiations for force. Bullitt made the first stab at détente: direct negotiation of a modus vivendi. Churchill was the first “hawk,” declaring that the only thing Communists understand is force. And Hoover and Nansen first acted on the theory that Communism is a social disease for which aid, trade, and higher standards of living were the cure.
Thus, to say that the democratic, free-market statesmen at Paris were anti-Bolshevik is to state the obvious; to make this the wheel around which all else turned is to ignore the subtle. As Marshal Foch observed in counseling against exaggeration of the Bolshevik threat: “Revolution never crossed the frontiers of victory.” That is, Communism was a product not just of privation, but of defeat, as in Russia, Germany, and Hungary. Perhaps, as Churchill thought, the Western democracies were not obsessed enough with the Bolshevik threat. They also understood it poorly, differed as to tactics, and were continually absorbed in other issues. Yet the failure to reintegrate Russia into the European order was as poisonous to future stability as the German peace.
Whatever one’s interpretation and assessment of the personalities and policies that collided at Paris, the overall settlement was surely doomed, not only because it sowed seeds of discord in almost every clause, but because all the Great Powers scurried from it at once. Germans denounced Versailles as a hypocritical Diktat and determined to resist it as much they were able. Italians fulminated against the “mutilated victory” given them by Wilson and then succumbed to Fascism in 1922. The Russian Communists, not privy to the settlements, denounced them as the workings of rapacious rival imperialisms. From the start, the Japanese ignored the League in favor of their imperial designs, and they soon held the Washington treaties to be unfair, confining, and dangerous to their economic health. The United States, of course, rejected Versailles and the League. Only Britain and France remained to make a success of Versailles, the League, and the chronically unstable successor states. But by 1920 British opinion was already turning against the treaty, and even the French, bitter over their “betrayal” at the hands of the United States and Britain, began to lose faith in the 1919 system. It was a new order that many yearned to overthrow and few were willing to defend.
