IVTHE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN STRATEGY(August, 1917)
(August, 1917)
Inthe absorbing business of organizing American participation in the war, public opinion seems to be forgetting the logic of that participation. It was for the purpose of realizing certain definite international ideals that the American democracy consented to be led into war. The meeting of aggression seemed to provide the immediate pretext, but the sincere intellectual support of the war came from minds that hoped ardently for an international order that would prevent a recurrence of world-war. Our action they saw as efficacious toward that end. It was almost wholly upon this ground that they justified it and themselves. The strategy which they suggested wasvery carefully worked out to make our participation count heavily toward the realization of their ideals. Their justification and their strategy alike were inseparably bound up with those ideals. It was implicit in their position that any alteration in the ideals would affect the strategy and would cast suspicion upon their justification. Similarly any alteration in the strategy would make this liberal body of opinion suspicious of the devotion of the Government to those ideals, and would tend to deprive the American democracy of any confident morale it might have had in entering the war. The American case hung upon the continued perfect working partnership of ideals, strategy and morale.
In the eyes of all but the most skeptical radicals, American entrance into the war seemed to be marked by a singularly perfect union of these three factors. The President’s address to Congress on April 2, supported by the December Peace note and the principles of the famous Senate address, gave the Government and American “liberalism” an apparently unimpeachable case. A nation which had resisted for so long a time theundertow of war, which had remained passive before so many provocations and incitements, needed the clearest assurance of unselfish purpose to carry it through the inevitable chaos and disillusionment of adopting a war-technique. That moment seemed to give this assurance. But it needed not only a clear, but a steady and unwavering assurance. It had to see day by day, in each move of war-policy which the Administration made, an unmistakable step toward the realization of the ideals for which the American people had consented to come into the war. American hesitation was overcome only by an apparently persuasive demonstration that priceless values of civilization were at stake. The American people could only be prevented from relapsing into their first hesitation, and so demoralizing the conduct of the war, by the sustained conviction that the Administration and the Allied governments were fighting single-mindedly for the conservation of those values. It is therefore pertinent to ask how this conviction has been sustained and how accurately American strategy has been held to the justifying of our participation in the war. It is pertinent toask whether the prevailing apathy may not be due to the progressive weakening of the assurance that our war is being in any way decisive in the securing of the values for which we are presumably fighting.
It will not be forgotten that the original logic of American participation hung primarily upon the menace of Germany’s renewed submarine campaign. The case for America’s entrance became presumably irresistible only when the safety of the British Commonwealth and of the Allies and neutrals who use the Atlantic highway was at stake. American liberal opinion had long ago decided that the logic of our moral neutrality had passed. American isolation was discredited as it became increasingly evident how urgent was our duty to participate in the covenant of nations which it was hoped would come out of the settlement. We were bound to contribute our resources and our good-will to this enterprise. Our position made it certain that however we acted we should be the deciding factor. But up to February first, 1917, it was still an arguable question in the minds of “liberals” whether we could best make that contribution through throwing in our lotwith the more pacific nations or by continuing a neutrality benevolent toward their better cause. For this benevolent neutrality, however strained, was still endurable, particularly when supplemented by the hope of mediation contained in the “peace without victory” maneuvers and the principles of the Senate speech.
This attempt to bring about a negotiated peace, while the United States was still nominally neutral, but able to bring its colossal resources against the side which refused to declare its terms, marked the high-water level of American strategy.
For a negotiated peace, achieved before either side had reached exhaustion and the moral disaster was not irremediable, would have been the most hopeful possible basis for the covenant of nations. And the United States, as the effective agent in such a negotiated peace and as the most powerful neutral, might have assumed undisputed leadership in such a covenant.
The strategy of “peace without victory” failed because of the refusal of Germany to state her terms. The war went on from sheer lack of a common basis upon which to work out a settlement.American strategy then involved the persistent pressure of mediation. The submarine menace, however, suddenly forced the issue. The safety of the seas, the whole Allied cause, seemed suddenly in deadly peril. In the emergency benevolent neutrality collapsed. Liberal opinion could find no other answer to the aggression than war. In the light of the sequel those radicals who advocated a policy of “armed neutrality” seem now to have a better case. For American action obtained momentum from the imminence of the peril. The need was for the immediate guarantee of food and ships to the menaced nations and for the destruction of the attacking submarines. “Armed neutrality” suggested a way of dealing promptly and effectively with the situation. The providing of loans, food, ships, convoys, could ostensibly have taken place without a declaration of war, and without developing the country’s morale or creating a vast military establishment. It was generally believed that time was the decisive factor. The decision for war has therefore meant an inevitable and perhaps fatal course of delay. It was obvious that with our well-known unpreparednessof administrative technique, the lack of coördination in industry, and the unreadiness of the people and Congress for coercion, war meant the practical postponement of action for months. In such an emergency that threatened us, our only chance to serve was in concentrating our powers. Until the disorganization inherent in a pacific democracy was remedied, our only hope of effective aid would come from focusing the country’s energies on a ship and food programme, supplemented by a naval programme devised realistically to the direct business at hand. The war could be most promptly ended by convincing the German government that the submarine had no chance of prevailing against the endless American succor which was beginning to raise the siege and clear the seas.
The decision, however, was for war, and for a “thorough” war. This meant the immediate throwing upon the national machinery of far more activity than it could handle. It meant attaching to a food and ship programme a military programme, a loan programme, a censorship programme. All these latter have involved a vastamount of advertising, of agitation, of discussion, and dissension. The country’s energies and attention have been drained away from the simple exigencies of the situation and from the technique of countering the submarine menace and ending the war. Five months have passed since the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. We have done nothing to overcome the submarine. The food and ship programmes are still unconsolidated. The absorption of Congress and the country in the loan and the conscript army and the censorship has meant just so much less absorption in the vital and urgent technique to provide which we entered the war. The country has been put to work at a vast number of activities which are consonant to the abstract condition of war, but which may have little relation to the particular situation in which this country found itself and to the particular strategy required. The immediate task was to prevent German victory in order to restore the outlines of our strategy toward a negotiated peace. War has been impotent in that immediate task. Paradoxically, therefore, our very participation was a means of weakening ourstrategy. We have not overcome the submarine or freed the Atlantic world. Our entrance has apparently made not a dent in the morale of the German people. The effect of our entrance, it was anticipated by liberals, would be the shortening of the war. Our entrance has rather tended to prolong it. Liberals were mistaken about the immediate collapse of the British Commonwealth. It continued to endure the submarine challenge without our material aid. We find ourselves, therefore, saddled with a war-technique which has compromised rather than furthered our strategy.
This war-technique compromises the outlines of American strategy because instead of making for a negotiated peace it has had the entirely unexpected result of encouraging those forces in the Allied countries who desirela victoire intégrale, the “knockout blow.” In the President’s war-message the country was assured that the principles of the negotiated peace remained quite unimpaired. The strategy that underlay this, it will be remembered, was to appeal to the Teutonic peoples over the heads of their rulers with terms so liberal that the peoples would force their governmentsto make peace. The strategy of the American government was, while prosecuting the war, to announce its war-aims and to persuade the Allies to announce their war-aims in such terms as would split the peoples of the Central Powers from their governments, thus bringing more democratic régimes that would provide a fruitful basis for a covenant of nations. We entered the war with no grievances of our own. It was our peculiar rôle to continue the initiative for peace, both by unmistakably showing our own purpose for a just peace based on some kind of international organization and by wielding a steady pressure on the Entente governments to ratify our programme. If we lost this initiative for peace, or if we were unable or unwilling to press the Entente toward an unmistakable liberalism, our strategy broke down and our justification for entering the war became seriously impaired. For we could then be charged with merely aiding the Entente’s ambiguous scheme of European reorganization.
The success of this strategy of peace depended on a stern disavowal of the illiberal programmesof groups within the Allied countries and a sympathetic attitude toward the most democratic programmes of groups within the enemy Powers. Anything which weakened either this disavowal or this sympathy would imperil our American case. As potential allies in this strategy the American government had within the enemies’ gates the followers of Scheidemann who said at the last sitting of the Reichstag: “If the Entente Powers should renounce all claims for annexation and indemnity and if the Central Powers should insist on continuing the war, a revolution will certainly result in Germany.” It is not inconceivable that the American government and the German socialists had at the back of their minds the same kind of a just peace. The fact that the German socialists were not opposing the German government did not mean that any peace move in which the former were interested was necessarily a sinister Hohenzollern intrigue. The bitterest enemies of Hollweg were not the radicals but the Pan-Germans themselves. It is they who were said to be circulating manifestoes through the army threatening revolution unless their programme of wholesaleannexations is carried out. Whatever liberal reservoir of power there is in Germany, therefore, remains in the socialist ranks. If there is any chance of liberal headway against the sinister Pan-German campaign it is through this nucleus of liberal power. American strategy, if it has to find a liberal leverage in Germany, will have to choose the socialist group as against the Pan-Germans. It is not absolutely necessary to assume that the support of the Chancellor by the socialist majority is permanent. It is unplausible that the Scheidemann group coöperates with the Government for peace merely to consolidate the Junker and military class in power after the war. It is quite conceivable that the socialist majority desires peace in order to have a safe basis for a liberal overturn. Revolution, impossible while the Fatherland is in danger, becomes a practicable issue as soon as war is ended. A policy of aiding the Government in its pressure toward peace, in order to be in a tactical position to control the Government when the war-peril was ended, would be an extremely astute piece of statesmanship. There is no evidence that the German socialists are incapableof such far-sighted strategy. Certainly the “German peace” of a Scheidemann is bound to be entirely different from the “German peace” of a Hindenburg. This difference is one of the decisive factors of the American strategy. To ignore it is to run the risk of postponing and perhaps obstructing the settlement of the war.
It is these considerations that make the refusal of passports to the American socialists seem a serious weakening of the American strategy. A conference of responsible socialists from the different countries might have clarified the question how far a Russian peace or a Scheidemann peace differed from the structure of a Wilson peace. By denying American participation in the conference, the Administration apparently renounced the opportunity to make contact with liberal leverage in Germany. It refused to take that aggressive step in cleaving German opinion which was demanded by its own strategy. It tended to discourage liberal opinion in Germany and particularly it discouraged the Russian democracy which was enthusiastic for a socialist conference.
This incident was symptomatic of the lessenedadjustment which the Administration has shown toward the changing situation. It was the hope of the American liberals who advocated American entrance into the war that this country would not lose thereby its initiative for peace. They believed that our entrance would make our mediating power actually stronger. That hope has been disappointed through the unexpected radicalism of the new Russian government. The initiative for peace was bound to lie with the people that most wanted peace and was willing to make the most peremptory demands upon the Allied governments that they state the war-aims that would bring it. This tactic was an integral part of the original American strategy. The American liberals trusted the President to use American participation as an instrument in liberalizing the war-aims of all the Allied governments. In the event, however, it has not been America that has wanted peace sufficiently to be peremptory about it. It has been Russia. The initiative for peace has passed from President Wilson into the hands of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies. It is the latter who have brought the pressure todeclare democratic war-aims. It is their dissatisfaction with the original Allied statement that has brought these new, if scarcely more satisfactory, declarations. In this discussion between the Governments regarding the restatement of war-aims, it was not upon Russia’s side that this country found itself. The President’s note to Russia had all the tone of a rebuke. It sounded like the reaction of a Government which—supposedly itself the leader in the campaign for a just peace—found itself uncomfortably challenged to state its own sincerity. The key to our American strategy has been surrendered to Russia. The plain fact is that the President has lost that position of leader which a Russian candor would have retained for him.
What is more serious is that the note to Russia implied not only his loss of the initiative for a negotiated peace but even the desire for it. “The day has come when we must conquer or submit.” This has a very strange ring coming from a President who in his very war-message still insisted that he had not altered in any way the principles of his “peace without victory” note. The note to Russiadid not attempt to explain how “peace without victory” was to be reconciled with “conquer or submit,” nor has any such explanation been forthcoming. The implication is that the entire strategy of the negotiated peace has passed out of American hands into those of Russia, and that this country is committed to the new strategy of the “knockout blow.” If this is true, then we have the virtual collapse of the strategy, and with it the justification, of our entrance into the war.
Whether American strategy has changed or not, the effect upon opinion in the Allied countries seems to be as if it had. Each pronouncement of America’s war-aims is received with disconcerting unanimity in England, France and Italy as ratifying their own aspirations and policies. Any hint that Allied policies disagree with ours is received with marked disfavor by our own loyal press. When we entered the war, the Allied aims stood as stated in their reply to the President’s December note. This reply was then interpreted by American liberals as a diplomatic programme of maximum demands. They have therefore called repeatedly upon the President to secure from theAllied governments a resolution of the ambiguities and a revision of the more extreme terms, in order that we might make common cause with them toward a just peace. In this campaign the American liberals have put themselves squarely on the side of the new Russia, which has also clamored for a clear and liberal statement of what the war is being fought for. Unfortunately the Administration has been unable or unwilling to secure from the Allies any such resolution or revision. The Russian pressure has elicited certain statements, which, however, proved little more satisfactory to the Russian radicals than the original statement. Our own war-aims have been stated in terms as ambiguous and unsatisfactory as those of the Allies. Illiberal opinion in the other countries has not been slow in seizing upon President Wilson’s pronouncements as confirming all that their hearts could wish. Most significant has been the satisfaction of Italian imperialistic opinion, the most predatory and illiberal force in any Allied country. The President has done nothing to disabuse Italian minds of their belief. He has made no disavowal of the Allied reactionary ratification. Thesharp divergence of interpretation between the Allied governments and the Russian radicals persists. In lieu of any clear statement to the contrary, opinion in the Allied countries has good ground for believing that the American government will back up whatever of their original programme can be carried through. Particularly is this true after the President’s chiding of Russia. The animus behind the enthusiasm for Pershing in France is the conviction that American force will be the decisive factor in the winning back of Alsace-Lorraine. It is no mere sentimental pleasure at American alliance. It is an immense stiffening of the determination to hold out to the uttermost, to the “peace with victory” of which Ribot speaks. Deluded France carries on the war to complete exhaustion on the strength of the American millions who are supposedly rushing to save her. The immediate effect of American participation in England and Italy as well has been an intense will to hold out not for the “peace without victory” butpour la victoire intégrale, for the conquest so crushing that Germany will never be feared again.
Now the crux of American strategy was the liberalizationof Allied policy in order that that peace might be obtained which was a hopeful basis for a League of Nations. American participation has evidently not gone one inch toward liberalizing the Allies. We are further from the negotiated peace than we were in December, though the only change in the military and political situation is the Russian revolution which immensely increased the plausibility of that peace. As Allied hope of victory grows, the covenant of nations fades into the background. And it is Allied hope of victory that our participation has inflamed and augmented.
The President’s Flag Day address marks without a doubt the collapse of American strategy. That address, coupled with the hints of “effective readjustments” in the note to Russia, implies that America is ready to pour out endless blood and treasure, not to the end of a negotiated peace, but to the utter crushing of the Central Powers, to their dismemberment and political annihilation. The war is pictured in that address as a struggle to the death against the military empire of Mittel-Europa. The American rôle changes from that ofmediator in the interest of international organization to that of formidable support to the breaking of this menace to the peace and liberty of Europe. It will be remembered that American liberals interpreted our entrance into the war as primarily defensive, an enterprise to prevent Germany’s threatened victory on the sea. We came in, not to secure an Allied “peace with victory,” but to prevent a German “peace with victory,” and so restore the situation favorable to a negotiated peace. The strategy of the negotiated peace depended largely on the belief that a military decision was either impossible or was not worth the colossal sacrifice it demanded. But it is only as the result of a sweeping military decision that any assured destruction of Mittel-Europa could come. In basing his case on Mittel-Europa, therefore, the President has clearly swung from a strategy of “peace without victory” to a strategy of “war to exhaustion for the sake of a military decision.” He implies that a country which came only after hesitation to the defense of the seas and the Atlantic world will contentedly pour out its indefinite blood and treasure for the sake of spoilingthe coalition of Mittel-Europa and of making readjustments in the map of Europe effective against German influence on the Continent. Such an implication means the “end of American isolation” with a vengeance. No one can be blamed who sees in the Flag Day Address the almost unlimited countersigning of Allied designs and territorial schemes.
The change of American strategy to a will for a military decision would explain the creation of the vast American army which in the original policy was required only “as a reserve and a precaution.” It explains our close coöperation with the Allied governments following the visits of the Missions. An American army of millions would undoubtedly be a decisive factor in the remaking of the map of Europe and the permanent garrisoning of strategic points bearing upon Germany. But this change of strategy does not explain itself. The continental military and political situation has not altered in any way which justifies so fundamental an alteration in American strategy. American liberals justified our entrance into the war as a response to a sudden exigency.But the menace of Mittel-Europa has existed ever since the entrance of Bulgaria in 1915. If it now challenges us and justifies our change of strategy, it challenged us and justified our assault a full two years ago. American shudders at its bogey are doubly curious because it is probably less of a menace now than it has ever been. President Wilson ignores the effect of a democratic Russia on the success of such a military coalition. Such heterogeneous states could be held together only through the pressure of a strong external fear. But the passing of predatory Russia removes that fear. Furthermore, Bulgaria, the most democratic of the Balkan States, would always be an uncertain partner in such a coalition. Bagdad has long been in British hands. There are strong democratic and federalistic forces at work in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The materials seem less ready than ever for the creation of any such predatory and subjugated Empire as the Flag Day Address describes. Whatever the outcome of the war, there is likely to result an economic union which could bring needed civilization to neglected and primitive lands. But such a union would be ablessing to Europe rather than a curse. It was such a union that England was on the point of granting to Germany when the war broke out. The Balkans and Asia Minor need German science, German organization, German industrial development. We can hardly be fighting to prevent such German influence in these lands. The irony of the President’s words lies in the fact that the hopes of Mittel-Europa as a military coalition seem to grow dimmer rather than brighter. He must know that this “enslavement” of the peoples of which he speaks can only be destroyed by the peoples themselves and not at the imposition of a military conqueror. The will to resist this Prussian enslavement seems to have been generated in Austro-Hungary. The President’s perspective is belated. If our fighting to crush this amazing plot is justified now, it was more than justified as soon as Rumania was defeated. The President convicts himself of criminal negligence in not urging us into the war at that time. If our rôle was to aid in conquest, we could not have begun our work too soon.
The new strategy is announced by the Presidentin no uncertain terms—“The day has come when we must conquer or submit.” But the strategy of conquest implies the necessity of means for consolidating the conquest. If the world is to be made safe for democracy, democracy must to a certain extent be imposed on the world. There is little point in conquering unless you carry through the purposes for which you have conquered. The earlier American strategy sought to bring democracy to Germany by appealing directly to the democratic forces in Germany itself. We relied on a self-motivated regeneration on the part of our enemy. We believed that democracy could be imposed only from within. If the German people cannot effect their own political reorganization, nobody can do it for them. They would continue to prefer the native Hohenzollerns to the most liberal government imposed by their conquering enemies. A Germany forced to be democratic under the tutelage of a watchful and victorious Entente would indeed be a constant menace to the peace of Europe. Just so far then as our changed American strategy contributes toward a conquest over Germany, it will work against our desire tosee that country spontaneously democratized. There is reason for hope that democracy will not have to be forced on Germany. From the present submission of the German people to the war-régime nothing can be deduced as to their subserviency after the war. Prodigious slaughter will effect profound social changes. There may be going on a progressive selection in favor of democratic elements. The Russian army was transformed into a democratic instrument by the wiping-out in battle of the upper-class officers. Men of democratic and revolutionary sympathies took their places. A similar process may happen in the German army. The end of the war may leave the German “army of the people” a genuine popular army intent upon securing control of the civil government. Furthermore, the continuance of Pan-German predatory imperialism depends on a younger generation of Junkers to replace the veterans now in control. The most daring of those aristocrats will almost certainly have been destroyed in battle. The mortality in upper-class leadership will certainly have proved far larger than the mortality in lower-class leadership.The maturing of these tendencies is the hope of German democracy. A speedy ending of the war, before the country is exhausted and the popular morale destroyed, is likely best to mature these tendencies. In this light it is almost immaterial what terms are made. Winning or losing, Germany cannot replace her younger generation of the ruling class. And without a ruling class to continue the imperial tradition, democracy could scarcely be delayed. An enfeebled ruling class could neither hold a vast world military Empire together nor resist the revolutionary elements at home. The prolongation of the war delays democracy in Germany by convincing the German people that they are fighting for their very existence and thereby forcing them to cling even more desperately to their military leaders. In announcing an American strategy of “conquer or submit,” the President virtually urges the German people to prolong the war. And not only are the German people, at the apparent price of their existence, tacitly urged to continue the fight to the uttermost, but the Allied governments are tacitly urged to wield the “knockout blow.” All thosereactionary elements in England, France and Italy, whose spirits drooped at the President’s original bid for a negotiated peace, now take heart again at this apparent countersigning of their most extreme programmes.
American liberals who urged the nation to war are therefore suffering the humiliation of seeing their liberal strategy for peace transformed into a strategy for prolonged war. This government was to announce such war-aims as should persuade the peoples of the Central Powers to make an irresistible demand for a democratic peace. Our initiative with the Allied governments was to make this peace the basis of an international covenant, “the creation of a community of limited independencies,” of which Norman Angell speaks. Those Americans who opposed our entrance into the war believed that this object could best be worked for by a strategy of continued neutrality and the constant pressure of mediation. They believed that war would defeat the strategy for a liberal peace. The liberal intellectuals who supported the President felt that only by active participation on an independent basis could their purposes beachieved. The event has signally betrayed them. We have not ended the submarine menace. We have lost all power for mediation. We have not even retained the democratic leadership among the Allied nations. We have surrendered the initiative for peace. We have involved ourselves in a moral obligation to send large armies to Europe to secure a military decision for the Allies. We have prolonged the war. We have encouraged the reactionary elements in every Allied country to hold out for extreme demands. We have discouraged the German democratic forces. Our strategy has gradually become indistinguishable from that of the Allies. With the arrival of the British Mission our “independent basis” became a polite fiction. The President’s Flag Day Address merely registers the collapse of American strategy. All this the realistic pacifists foresaw when they held out so bitterly and unaccountably against our entering the war. The liberals felt a naïve faith in the sagacity of the President to make their strategy prevail. They looked to him single-handedly to liberalize the liberal nations. They trusted him to use a war-technique which should consist ofan olive-branch in one hand and a sword in the other. They have had to see their strategy collapse under the very weight of that war-technique. Guarding neutrality, we might have counted toward a speedy and democratic peace. In the war, we are a rudderless nation, to be exploited as the Allies wish, politically and materially, and towed, to their aggrandizement, in any direction which they may desire.