East Meets West at Washington E-Book

Nathaniel Peffer

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

An article from the November 1921 issue of The Century Magazine in which Nathaniel Peffer discusses the place of Japan in America's relations with China and the impending collision as Japan strives to dominate all Far East politics at the expense of foreign powers in America and Europe

Leseprobe

EAST MEETS WEST AT WASHINGTON

Decorations from the Chinese

NATHANIEL PEFFER

Originally published in the November 1921 issue of The Century Magazine

This text is in the public domain

Modern Edition © 2022 Full Well Ventures

The publishers have made all reasonable efforts to ensure this book is indeed in the Public Domain in any and all territories it has been published.

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CONTENTS

East Meets West at Washington

EAST MEETS WEST AT WASHINGTON

TO ONE who lives in the Far East the conference of the powers at Washington is almost a last despairing hope.

I have spent recent years in the Far East and have just returned. When I first went there, China was to Americans a distant thing of pagodas and porcelain, a surviving, shadowy memory of a glorious past, a past interesting to us only historically and archaeologically; Japan was a lovely decoration on the border of the East. In five years I have seen those misty concepts take shape in the form of tough realities that touch us intimately and make friction with the touch. The Far East has emerged out of romantic remoteness into focus as a new center of world embroilment, China as a battleground, Japan as a potential enemy.

In these years, years in which in the East equally with the West forces have been making with tragic scope and swiftness, Japan has risen to imperial eminence and challenge to white supremacy, one of the three great powers. It has crushed its way to dominance over China, planted one foothold in Siberia, another on the equator, and achieved mastery over all eastern Asia. And by some strange play of circumstance in the issue that has been forced by this reshifting in world balance America has been pushed out as the protagonist of the West against the East.

That issue I have seen steadily intensified by events, and the efforts to compose it fail one by one. The Paris peace conference only complicated it by virtue of the Shantung award. The League of Nations, as far as it is concerned, is inoperative. The China consortium, a praiseworthy attempt to neutralize it by an international pooling of interests, is dying of inanition. All have failed. Japan and America stand facing each other on the naked issue. And I have returned now from China with a fixed, fatalistic conviction, rooted in instinct rather than founded on logical processes, that Japan and America in this year of 1921 are moving along the road that England and Germany trod twenty years ago, and that the magnetism of half-understood and wholly misunderstood forces draws them relentlessly to the same destination.

To us, then, of the Far East the Washington conference is more than a diplomatic conversation on disarmament, more even than an attempt to solve certain Pacific “problems.” It is an opportunity to avert war—a war that may draw to its flame the whole civilized world, yellow and white. The conference may fail and war yet not come, but the conference is a positive chance to avert it, and if it fails, then war is brought menacingly nearer.

To us also there is a fitness in the heralding of this international assembly as a second Paris peace conference. It is equally important. In complexity and scope its tasks are as formidable. Its prime, basic task also is not the solution of specific problems, not the arrangement of boundaries, the redivision of concessions and spheres of influence, or the affixing of definite limits on the number of war-ships afloat, but, just as at Paris, the laying down of a new morality, the making of a new faith. Not Shantung, not Yap, not the Twenty-one Demands, has made this situation in the Pacific, but the operation of the old tradition of empires, specially of white empires in non-white territories.

The conference has two different aspects, two distinct issues, rather: limitation of armament and the political status of the Far East. These are interrelated and interweaving in cause and effect, but they demand examination singly to determine their bearing on the whole. The simpler, though the simpler only by comparison, is limitation of armament.

On the desirability in the abstract of a halt in the armament race it is unnecessary to dwell. The arguments both moral and economic are too familiar for analysis. The inescapable end of such races has been written innumerable times in the pages of history in the blood of innumerable peoples. There is no reason to look for a different end to this one. The effect on the already strained economic structure of the world of a progressively increasing expenditure for armies and surface, undersea, and aerial fleets is predictable with mathematical certainty now. Already the race is gathering ominous speed. Japan counters America’s 1916 naval program with its eight-and-eight program. In 1928, when the eight-and-eight program is completed, it will have only two capital ships fewer than America, and its ships will be newer. American naval men feel, with considerable justice, and already say with emphasis, that America cannot afford to have its margin of superiority so thinned. There will be another American building program. And so on.

On the practicability in the concrete of armament reduction it is necessary to dwell at greater length. I for one do not hold the prevalent belief that it is contingent upon a previous settlement of political differences. Assume that there be deadlock on all political differences, even that the conference adjourn in complete disagreement and there be left no means of settlement but the bloody decision of war. Even with that granted and a mutual acceptance of war as fated, there is yet the possibility of a mutual restriction on the weapons with which we shall fight.

If the present military strength of Great Britain, the United States, and Japan be represented, just for illustration, as five, four, and three, it will have availed them little if they frantically match new ship with new ship, plane with plane, gas with gas, until they stand at ten, eight, and six, as always happens in armament races. Their relative position in a test of strength by battle will have remained the same. The burdens will have been borne by their taxpayers, and national resources and energy deflected from production to no purpose. True, the whole trend of modern warfare has been toward the integration of whole nations as single fighting units. Nations now go to war with whole populations. But it is not a foreordained trend. It is possible of arrest; in fact, it must be arrested if future wars are not to mean virtual extermination. If we cannot yet permanently and irrevocably outlaw war and, on the other hand, are to escape extermination, I do not see any alternative to the knighthood theory of warfare, arbitrarily limiting employment in warfare to definitely specified and mutually agreed upon resources, both human and material.