500.A15A4/2461: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Great Britain (Bingham)
Washington, April
2, 1934—7 p.m.
130. For Norman Davis.
- (1)
- Many thanks for your telegram 143, March 31, 2 p.m. Before commenting in detail, I shall await your later telegrams. Meantime, however, I feel I should point out that your offer of May 22 [23]86 in which, under certain circumstances, we agreed not to assert our neutral rights in the case of an aggressor is a very different thing from a similar offer not to assert our neutral rights in the case of a violator of the Disarmament Convention. In the first contingency, collective action would be the result of a diplomatic consultative conference, the opinion of which as to the aggressor we would be entirely free to accept or reject. In the second contingency, however, the fact of a technical breach of the Convention would presumably be certified by the Permanent Disarmament Commission after it had been established by a fact-finding commission of military experts. Even if our independence of judgment and action were reserved in theory, this freedom [Page 38] would be non-existent in practice since its exercise might involve our contradicting the findings of fact of an expert body, which might even include an American technician. Moreover, we must face the fact that your offer of May 22 [23] represented the maximum degree of cooperation with Europe which American public opinion would support. This offer was based upon the Kellogg-Briand Pact and presupposed the actual outbreak of a war of aggression. I believe public opinion here would make a distinction between sacrifices it was prepared to make if a country actually invaded another country and similar sacrifices in the event of a violation of a treaty which did not necessarily involve an immediate threat of war.
- (2)
- While I incline to believe that the time will come soon to make a statement somewhat along the lines suggested in your paragraph 3, I doubt if we should emphasize so strongly the inter-relationship between disarmament and real peace. It would, I think, be a mistake to reiterate that the failure to achieve disarmament would necessarily result in a future war and so depress further public opinion in the event that no agreement is reached. All our information from the Embassy in Paris leads to the conclusion that the French are not jockeying for position, but in the face of a disintegrating domestic situation have resolved on an intransigent foreign policy.
Hull