Office of the Historian

500.A15A5/266: Telegram

The Secretary of State to the Chairman of the American Delegation (Davis)

Washington, November 17, 1934—4 p.m.

26. Further comments on your 41. If we understand you rightly, the substance of your recommendation is that rather than assume responsibility for permitting the conversations to be terminated, we should be willing to enter at this stage upon what amounts to the negotiation of a new treaty to replace the Washington and London Treaties. In other words, adoption thereof would mean that we accepted at this stage the Japanese contention that the ratios and principles embodied in the existing treaties should be scrapped and that merely for the sake of “keeping the Japanese bound by an agreement” we would undertake to explore the possibilities of new agreement based on other principles. We do not feel that this is within the scope of the present conversations nor do we feel that its probable naval or political consequences would ease the situation in the Far East. We are convinced that the best chance of ultimately negotiating a successful agreement would lie in letting the Japanese return home emptyhanded, without any new naval agreement or any political agreement. Any Anglo-Japanese agreement no matter how negative in form, would be used by the Japanese all over China95 as an indication of the resumption of an Anglo-Japanese partnership.

Press indications lead us to the belief that the Japanese delegation is going to reject the British proposal for face-saving device without the granting of actual parity. This would presumably dispose of the “middle course” plan, of which that is an essential feature, and by the Japanese themselves.

You will note that we have expressed our objection to this middle course on the broader grounds of political strategy and feel that you should lose no occasion to drive the points outlined home to the British. From a more technical point of view, we believe that a treaty which did not contain a statement of building programs in contractual form maintaining present ratios would not be acceptable to this country, and a treaty on naval building containing qualitative but not quantitative restrictions would seem an evasion of the essence of naval limitation.

Hull
  1. Telegram No. 29, November 19, to the, Chairman of the American delegation corrected “China” to read “Far East”.↩