Is America really serious in the stand thus made? Or is she going to avow by her future policy, if not in words, that she will take no real risk nor assume any real obligation in support of the principles she has been maintaining diplomatically and by her clearly expressed public opinion. Is she going to submit lamely, to the indignities and violation of right involved in the massacre of her innocent non-combatant citizens at sea?
I put the question in that form because it is generally a rhetorical prelude to the demand for warlike action. And yet the American who is moved by his country’s dignity and right to have thought this thing out, as well as to have become angry about it, knows that warlike action is perhaps the very last thing—though it may be the last thing—which the situation calls for; and that warlike action alone would be a betrayal of his country’s highest interests in the matter. If America is really serious she must prepare herself—in public opinion, in political education—for action of a different kind: for the abandonment of certain traditions about freedom from entangling alliances, for the assumption of risks and obligations which to most Americans is to ask a great deal more than the mere act of going to war.
Why will war of itself not suffice?
Suppose this country goes to war, over, for instance, the submarine issue; and is finally entirely successful, so far as defeating Germany is concerned. How do we then know that America has got what she has been fighting for? Our demands at the end of the war will be that American rights at sea shall be respected; that, most particularly, non-combatants shall not be drowned by attacks on merchantmen. Very good. Germany gives us her promise. She has given it before. How do we know that it will be kept—either by her or any other nation that in a future war may find a ruthless use of the submarine the only weapon left to it against a power commanding the sea? Can we hope that if we show now that we are ready to fight “at the drop of the hat,” in future a hard-pressed belligerent will be overawed by the great American navy? Then why is not the belligerent we now propose to deal with held in check by the combined navies of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan and Portugal? Again, when we have that promise at the end of our victorious war how do we know that it will be kept, that we shall have got what we have been fighting for?
And what of the American case against the Allies? Is America now to surrender rights upon which she has insisted ever since she became an independent State and which she once fought a war and twice very nearly came to war to defend? Is America, in fighting Germany to make the British Order in Council the basis of future sea law, so that when say Japan goes to war with some other nation America will have to submit to Japanese control of her trade and communication with neutral States—even to mail and banking correspondence—as she now submits to British control?
It is quite obvious that American claims have this difference from those of the Allies: they, in so far as they are territorial can at the peace be satisfied on the spot. America’s cannot. Hers depend absolutely upon the establishment, after the war, of a different and better international order; upon agreement as to what shall constitute international law and some method of ensuring its observance.
Now has it not become evident that the present German-American situation contains the elements of a great opportunity for America: not only of putting an end to a situation humiliating for herself but of creating a new state of world affairs out of which might grow—would almost inevitably grow—the restoration of general peace on conditions that civilization could accept?
But that result is certainly conditional on one thing: that American diplomacy is great enough to make precedent, to be dangerously honest to the point of dropping diplomatic make-believe and breaking with diplomatic usage.
Germany says in effect that she will make military sacrifices for the purpose of respecting American neutral right, if America on her side will reciprocally fulfil neutral obligation by insisting on the military sacrifice from both belligerents; so that American rights are not made a means of handicapping one party as against the other; are not invoked in what Germany regards as so one-sided a fashion as to become an arm for the use of one belligerent against the other.
Now it is quite within precedent, right and usage, to reply, as in the past, to such a demand by diplomatic punctilio: “America cannot discuss the behavior of one belligerent with the other,” and so forth and so forth. The American government could make excellent debating points and be diplomatically entirely correct.