Regional Pacts Strong Points or storm cellars

Regional Pacts: Strong Points or Storm Cellars? Author(s): Hamilton Fish Armstrong Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Apr., 1949), pp. 351-368 Published by: Council on Foreign Relations Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20030188 Accessed: 30/04/2009 01:05 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cfr. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Affairs. http://www.jstor.org FOREIGN AFFAIRS Vol. 27 APRIL 1949 No. 3 REGIONAL PACTS: STRONG POINTS OR STORM CELLARS? By Hamilton Fish Armstrong THIRTY years have passed since "the great debate" over the League of Nations after one world war, and less than four since we hailed the United Nations as promising at least sonre compensation for the sacrifices of a second. Yet today we find ourselves facing again the question that seemed settled ? whether the interests of the United States are as wide as the world or can be narrowed to particular areas? The debate has already begun, with men of good will ranged on both sides, precipitated by the announcement of a treaty for the mutual defense of the United States and certain countries of Western Europe. This treaty, if adopted, may prove to be one of those great occasional acts which determine the whole course of a nation's foreign relations. There is every propriety, then, and indeed an overwhelming necessity, that it be examined with care, discussed at length, and acted upon with a full consciousness on the part of those concerned ? namely, all the American people ? of the special significance of each possible course of action regarding it. The sponsors of the treaty evidently have both military and political aims in view, both heavy with psychological overtones. The question in the minds of some observers as to the precedence which should be given each will doubtless be a factor in the debate. Can any recommendation be made that might reconcile them? Another question is what effect the adoption of a regional security pact among the strongest western Powers will have on nations which are not included, and, more important still, on the universal security system of the United Nations. Finally, there is the question how these considerations affect the long view interests of the United States, especially its paramount in terest in establishing security and peace. I shall take the questions up in reverse order, beginning with the last and largest. 352 FOREIGN AFFAIRS II. NEUTRALITY VERSUS COLLECTIVE SECURITY Any tendency to replace the general United Nations commit ment to oppose aggression by a series of limited pacts for defense within arbitrary geographical boundaries can hardly fail to re habilitate the ancient concept of neutrality which the Charter was supposed to have finally discredited. For while the signa tories of the Charter understood that the Security Council pro cedure for deciding that an armed attack had occurred was subject to veto by any one of the five permanent members, the substantive obligation to help the victim was clearly set forth and was not the less binding morally for being stated in general terms. In 1932, Mr. Stimson, then Secretary of State, argued that in accepting the Briand-Kellogg Pact renouncing aggres sive war the 63 signatories had extended the concept of "a community spirit which can be evoked to prevent war" already accepted by the signatories of the Covenant of the League of Nations. "Henceforth," he wrote, "when two nations engage in armed conflict either one or both of them must be wrongdoers ? violators of the general treaty. We no longer draw a circle about them and treat them with the punctilios of the duelist's code. Instead we denounce them as lawbreakers. By that very act we have made obsolete many legal precedents and have given the legal profession the task of re?xamining many of its codes and treatises." x Fifteen years later, Mr. Stimson, having meanwhile directed our War Department in another world war, developed his thesis that the Briand-Kellogg Pact had not been "an isolated inci dent." He noted that repeated resolutions in the League of Na tions and elsewhere had denounced aggression as "criminal," and that the question whether this term was accurate had come up specifically in connection with the proposal to try the men responsible for the recent war. Had there in fact been a war of aggression and, in that case, were those who ordered the aggres sion punishable? The Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal held that the responsible leaders of Germany were subject to trial ; and they were in fact tried and convicted. Appraising the Nurem berg judgment, Mr. Stimson wrote: 1 Address before the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, August 8, 1932 (Foreign Affairs, October 1932, sup.). REGIONAL PACTS 353 What happened before World War II was that we lacked the courage to enforce the authoritative decision of the international world. We agreed with the Kellogg Pact that aggressive war must end. We renounced it, and we con demned those who might use it. But it was a moral condemnation only. We thus did not reach the second half of the question : What will you do to an aggressor when you catch him? If we had reached it, we should easily have found the right answer. But that answer escaped us, for it implied a duty to catch the criminal, and such a chase meant war. It was the Nazi confidence that we would never chase and catch them, and not a misunderstanding of our opinion of them, that led them to commit their crimes. Our offense was thus that of the man who passed by on the other side. That we have finally recognized our negligence and named the criminals for what they are is a piece of righteousness too long delayed by fear.2 The belief against which ex-Secretary Stimson argues is that neutrality is compatible with international justice and the real ities of international security. He might have added that it is in compatible with the national interest of a World Power. I remember asking Lord Bryce 25 years ago why England had come around in 1908 to a concept of the freedom of the seas which accorded broad rights to neutral shipping in time of war ? a concept which, when war actually arrived only six years later, undermined the logic of British replies to protests against the naval blockade of Germany. Bryce, a man of lofty ideals as well as high intelligence, answered very simply: "We expected to be neutral." Today in the atomic age there is less excuse to make that sort of mistake, but the credulity of isolationists in all lands dies hard. In England today we see a group of left-wing Laborites placing the same emphasis on expediency that Lord Bryce did, and neglecting in addition an issue in international morality which hardly existed in a day when idealists often thought the proper aim was to keep out of war rather than prevent it. The argument of this group of Labor extremists is that Britain should be neutral as between the United States and Soviet Russia. It is well expounded in The New Statesman and Nation, nearly every issue of which prints their fervent attempts to rationalize the view that Britain is equally in danger from American capi talism and Soviet Communism, that she should not enter into the question of which would be the more to blame if war should come, and that she would have no stake in the outcome. All of us can recall somewhat similar phenomena on our side 2 "The Nuremberg Trial: Landmark in Law." Foreign Affairs, January 1947. 354 FOREIGN AFFAIRS of the Atlantic. In 1912-14 President Wilson launched the pro gram of domestic reform known as the New Freedom; and understandably enough, on purely domestic counts, he hoped against hope that it would not be interrupted by any need to participate in the war which broke out in Europe in the second year of his Administration. Our social progress was in fact set back very seriously by our concentration of energies on winning that war and by the reaction which followed; and the ground lost was only made good ? and then at far greater cost because belated ? in the first years of the New Deal. But the challenge to the United States in 1914-16 on the world stage transcended the challenge in the field of social reform, important as that was. As the war progressed, Wilson saw that Germany's attack on Britain and France, her invasion of neutral Belgium and her campaign of frightfulness on land and sea constituted an attack on western civilization; and when Germany contemptuously wrote off our protests against the sinking of American ships on the high seas as simply more scraps of paper, he realized that if the assumption that necessity knows no law were not defeated there would not merely be no social reform in the United States but eventually, perhaps, no United States. If Wilson was astigmatic in failing to see earlier that we would not be immune to the results of Germany's conquest of Europe, and hence must abandon the concept of neutrality in thought and deed, his political opponents in 1919 and 1920 made a more profound and less excusable mistake of the same sort. By then we had played a decisive part in winning a world war which we had tried by every means to avoid. Yet they imagined that we could retreat behind our two oceans, escape responsibility for the ensuing settlement and refuse any part in organizing a world security system. The same illusion persisted 15 years later. In 1935-39 ^c American Congress made painstaking efforts to legislate the American Government into a position where it would have to remain neutral, whereas of course it should have been devising legislation which would warn the threatening aggressor that if war came the United States would not remain neutral. Contemporary counterparts of the English leftists who take refuge in the hope of remaining aloof while the future of the world is being settled between Moscow and Washington are the American commentators who recently were advising that the REGIONAL PACTS 355 United States take a neutral position between Britain and Russia in the Mediterranean and Middle East, specifically in connec tion with the British effort to help the Greek people and Govern ment resist a Soviet-sponsored Communist revolution. The Truman Administration did not adopt the advice. It decided that (as permitted by international law) it would help the legally elected Greek Government maintain itself ; and it joined in the decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations to try actively to prevent the fighting on the northern frontiers of Greece from developing into full-scale war by investigating it on the spot and baring the truth about it to the world. Both the Englishmen who see no British stake in a contest between American democracy and Russian Communism, and the Americans who find some new reason each week to limit the interests of the United States to a particular area to suit a particular solution of some threatening situation, are deluding themselves. Even in the realm of theory, aggressive war is an international crime only if at best the whole of the civilized world community, and at least the majority of it, are willing to define it as such ; and progress is made toward giving the defini tion concrete significance as they become ready to back up their profession of faith with, if need be, the force of their arms. Concretely, war in the Middle East between the Soviet Union and Britain as a result of a Soviet attack will involve us inevitably on the British side, not in defense of "British imperialism" but for the same reason that war in Alaska between the Soviet Union and the United States as a result of a Soviet attack will inevitably involve Britain on our side. One thing certain is that if the greatest and most fortunately situated member of the civilized community holds back, the assertion that aggressive war is a crime falls to the ground, in theory and practice, reduced automatically to the level of the protestations of virtue without valor and good intentions without force which issued from Geneva in the thirties while the armies of aggression were openly gathering for the projected step-by step conquest of the world. The conclusion ? so simple as to be banal, but not on that account less than everlastingly true ? is that any nation, and above all a World Power, must in its own interest look at its long-range problems not with a hope of securing an isolated advantage here, a tactical success there, but with a view to estab 356 FOREIGN AFFAIRS lishing more firmly in the world the principles of justice. For the course which strengthens the security of a world society based on freedom and peace will correspond in the long run to the highest interest of any free nation which is bent on retaining its freedom and hopes not to have to fight for it. But on what basis can the security of a free and peaceful world society be built if the strong are to be neutral in the face of wrong? III. REGIONALISM VERSUS COLLECTIVE SECURITY President Truman has told us that the proposed North Atlan tic Pact (the text of which will doubtless have been published by the time this appears in print) is "a collective defense arrange ment within the terms of the United Nations Charter;" and the State Department has said 3 that it finds its basis in Article 51 of the Charter, which permits U.N. members to join in meas ures of self-defense against armed attack in cases where the Security Council fails to act, and in Article 52, the first para graph of which permits them to form regional arrangements "for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action," and the second and third paragraphs of which spe cifically describe those matters as "local disputes." The reference to Article 52 limits rather than strengthens the authority supplied by Article 51. At San Francisco, Article 51 was deliberately placed in Chapter VII, entitled "Action with Respect to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggres sion," instead of in the following Chapter, entitled "Regional Arrangements." Since all the authorization needed to make a general treaty underwriting the defense and security provisions of the Charter is contained in Article 51, the additional invoca tion of Article 52 indicates our intention to increase our com mitment to collective action on a regional basis but not at present to move to strengthen the United Nations procedure generally. Now it should be recalled that nowhere in the United Nations Charter is any geographical limitation on the rights and duties of members imposed or implied. The only limitation is the one as to method which is contained in the right of veto granted the five permanent members of the Security Council. The American people gave every sign of approving the uni versal nature of the United Nations commitment; and when 3 State Department Bulletin, "Building the Peace," January 14, 1949. REGIONAL PACTS 357 the Senate ratified the Charter by 89 votes to 2 the United States was taken to have legally come of age as a World Power. What were the duties of U.N. membership which seemed to justify that belief? One in particular, set forth in the very first article enumerating the organization's purposes ? "to take effec tive collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace." And the second article bound members not only to "fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter," and not only to "settle their international disputes by peaceful means," and not only to "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," but also to "give the United Nations every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the present Charter." United Nations enthusiasts created some dangerous illusions by "overselling" the organization to the American public; it was not, as they hoped, a completely efficient instrument for en forcing the peace, and could never become that while the right of absolute veto existed. But by describing the United Nations as they would like it to be they did in a way accustom the Amer ican people to the grander conception and established a pre sumption that the United States was more unambiguously committed to preserving world peace than was actually the case. Later, as Soviet Russia resorted again and again to the veto, and particularly when she used it to exclude qualified new members from the organization, Americans acquired a dislike and con tempt for the device in itself and began asking whether some thing could not be done to modify it or at least by-pass it. Why should the Soviets be permitted to thwart the world's dream of peace? Thus, somewhat ironically, Americans came progessively to accept the idea that the United Nations should be enabled to reach decisions more easily, even on questions involving the use of force, while its ability to reach decisions on anything was growing less and less. Unhappily, moreover, an increasing num ber of Americans arrived at the dangerous conclusion that before U.N. can become efficacious in any respect the Soviet Union must be forced out. The fundamental damage done the United Nations by the veto has been that it stopped the Security Council dead in its 358 FOREIGN AFFAIRS tracks when it tried to create the very basis from which it might be able to act in time of crisis. The "everlasting no" of the Soviets prevented the creation of the enforcement machinery called for in the Charter and the designation of the military and other forces which would make possible that machinery's operation. It did this by paralyzing the Military Staff Committee, which was supposed to arrange what armed contingents or other facili ties should be provided by members for the international police force. At the same time it increased world tension by blocking the Atomic Energy Commission, created in 1946 to work out a fair system of controlling the production of fissionable materials and atomic weapons. This paralysis of the Security Council in its two most important constructive functions has more than anything else caused the present sense of insecurity to spread through the world and raised the cry that a way must be found to break the stalem