500.A15A4 General Committee/311
Memorandum of a Conversation Between President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister (MacDonald)45
Following from Sir Robert Vansittart.
[Page 103]Following is summary of the discussion of disarmament on April 23rd with the President:
On Parts II to V he is in general accord with the draft Convention,47 and is instructing Mr. Davis48 accordingly. He is, moreover, adding that Mr. Davis’ general attitude should be to do his utmost to minimize amendments on the part of other powers, and in particular to oppose all amendments tending to weaken the Convention. President thinks however that the chapter on supervision should be strengthened and is inclined to think that inspection should be continuous and automatic.
The general American line will be—like ours—that no country can expect to put in everything it likes and take out anything it dislikes. Parts must necessarily be unpalatable to all; for example, the chapter on supervision which, while likely to be unwelcome in many quarters as going too far, will probably be unwelcome to the French as not going far enough. Indeed M. Herriot49 has already made this plain in his first conversation with the President.
As regards Part I, the President is again in full general sympathy with and support of the proposal. He has, however, his own difficulties to contend with, and would propose to accomplish the same thing—indeed with a marked addition—but in a different way, in order to ease the passage of the principle here.
Beginning with the minor amendments to Part I: In Article 3 the President wishes “Kellogg-Briand Pact” to be put in brackets after “Pact of Paris”, otherwise he fears some misunderstanding as the former expression is not familiar here. In the same paragraph he would like to substitute the Secretary of the Permanent Disarmament Commission for the Secretary General of the League. The meeting place should be not specifically at Geneva, but at such place as the Contracting Parties may decide. This would probably come to the same thing, but would ruffle no susceptibilities here.
The President’s more serious difficulties begin with Articles 4 and 5. Briefly put they are that he could accomplish in the form of a declaration or unilaterally signed note what he would have difficulty, for obvious reasons of internal politics, in doing by a multilateral treaty, which would have to go to the Senate. Both the President and the Prime Minister feel that this should be equally satisfactory to the French for, as the President put it, such a declaration would have the validity of a Monroe Doctrine. The difficulty, however, may be to persuade the French that this form of procedure would be just as good [Page 104] from their point of view as a multilateral treaty. We hope, however, that you and Mr. Davis may be able to convince them of this, particularly as the President, judging from his first conversation with M. Herriot, thinks that the latter would be of this opinion. This procedure would only apply to Part I. The United States Government would, of course, sign the rest of the Convention on the same basis as other powers. It goes without saying, however, that the United States would not be willing, to adopt Part I to the foregoing extent unless other governments were prepared to accept Parts II–V. in something reasonably near to their present form.
The declaration which the President envisages would take the following form:—
“Following a decision by the conference of the Powers in consultation in determining the aggressor—a decision with which on the basis of our independent judgment we agreed—, we would undertake to refrain from any action and to withhold protection from our citizens if engaged in activities which would tend to defeat the collective effort which the States in consultation might have decided upon against the aggressor.”
The Prime Minister suggests that you should communicate foregoing at once to our representative at Geneva, and request him to put himself in immediate and confidential contact first with Mr. Davis, to whom this telegram should be shown, (it has already been shown to the President and Mr. Phillips) then Mr. Davis and M. Paul-Boncour. The French Government will, we hope, realise that the above constitutes a real and considerable step forward from their point of view.
Finally the fact that the President and the Prime Minister are at one, broadly speaking, on the rest of the Convention is a fact of real significance and hope and the Prime Minister trusts that it will be possible to turn it to good effect at this critical, and probably final, stage of the Disarmament Conference.
I should add that the President has already spoken on this subject to M. Herriot. He will also take occasion to press France again to come into the proposals of the Naval Chapter. The position of Germany under the draft Convention is now so clarified and restricted that the French Government should no longer plead uncertainty on this score as a reason for holding back.
As to Article 96 the President hopes that means can be found to avoid leaving the situation uncovered. I have said that the only suggestion that had so far occurred to us as a possibility was that of prolonging the present convention if so desired by a majority of the signatories, but that there is an obvious difficulty in this.
- Prime Minister MacDonald was in Washington primarily for discussions preliminary to the London Economic Conference (see pp. 452 ff.); he was accompanied by Sir Robert Vansittart, British Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. This document, transmitted to the Department by the British Embassy, April 25, 1933, is apparently a copy of a telegram sent by Sir Robert Vansittart to the British Foreign Office.↩
- League of Nations, Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, Conference Documents, vol. ii, pp. 476–493.↩
- See telegram No. 322, April 25, to the Chairman of the American delegation, p. 107.↩
- M. Herriot was in Washington for conversations preliminary to the London Economic Conference.↩