Morocco, the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire—the present war is not really being waged to settle these problems: it is being waged because they have been settled already, and settled on such unjust and injudicious lines that all parties concerned have found it worth while to stake their existence for the reversal of the settlement. No one need have been involved by such problems in a struggle for life. They were all problems of expansion, and their solution ought at worst to have disappointed the expectation of immoderate gains: it ought never, as it has done, to have threatened the parties with the loss of what they possessed already before the problems were probed.
Such an executive could have prevented the war of diplomacy and of arms.
Why has the contrary occurred? Because, just for lack of that international executive with the sovereign authority we postulate, these issues that were not vital have been fought out, like issues of life and death, by war—not by the war of arms which has descended upon us now like some recurrent plague, into which we relapse at rarer and rarer intervals as we advance in civilization, but by the unobtrusive, unremittent war of diplomacy which is being waged year in and year out between the sovereign States of Europe, and which has increased appallingly in violence during the last generation.
In this disastrous diplomatic warfare our opponents in the present war of arms have been uniformly the aggressors. If Austria-Hungary is now struggling for existence, it is because she deliberately embarked nearly forty years ago upon a diplomatic campaign of aggrandizement against South-Slavonic nationality. If Germany is fighting back to back with her in the same ghastly struggle, it is because Germany has wielded diplomatic weapons still more ruthlessly against her other European neighbors.
The war of diplomacy.
For the terrible embitterment of the diplomatic contest Germany herself is entirely responsible, but she has inevitably exposed herself to reprisals as severe as her own provocative blows. She opened the battle over Morocco by forcibly intruding upon a sphere where she had no shadow of claim to expansion: thereby she drew France and Great Britain into diplomatic alliance against her, and laid herself open to the humiliation of 1911, when Franco-British diplomacy mobilized its financial forces and drove her to retreat by cutting off her supplies. In Turkey she might easily have satisfied her needs without any battle at all. The untenanted area was vast, the claims staked out on it were singularly narrow: when German enterprise circumvented the enterprise of Great Britain and France, and secured all the railway-concessions in the virgin hinterland of Anatolia, French and British diplomacy grumbled but did not attempt to open hostilities. Yet instead of reaping her harvest in peace, Germany again precipitated a diplomatic conflict by extending her ambitions to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf. The moment she aspired to absorb the whole Ottoman Empire, Great Britain and Russia entered into diplomatic cooperation, and opposed her purpose with all their might. Germany’s Arabian venture has jeopardized her Anatolian gains, and if she is defeated in the present struggle, she will probably be excluded from the Ottoman area altogether.
The diplomatic warfare over three secondary issues, which ought never to have been settled by fighting at all, has thus left none of the combatants unscathed. On the contrary, the wounds inflicted then have festered till their poison has threatened each combatant with the pains of dissolution, and made that quack-physician the diplomatist call out in panic for the knife of that quack-surgeon the war lord.
This diplomatic warfare is the objective of our new international organization. Upon diplomacy we can and must make a direct attack. If we can draw this monster’s teeth, we shall no longer be troubled by its still more monstrous offspring—War.