793.94 Conference/256a: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Chairman of the American Delegation (Davis)
68. Press reports from Brussels, especially during the last few days, have given and are continuing to give the impression that the other states there represented are willing and eager to adopt methods of pressure against Japan provided the United States would do so. [Page 198] The tenor of these reports is that the United States is solely responsible for determining what attitude the Conference will take in this respect.
I invite your attention to the fact that some 50 nations represented at Geneva are parties to a political instrument which provides expressly for the adoption, under certain circumstances, of means of pressure and when these nations met recently at Geneva to consider the present conflict between Japan and China, they definitely discarded the adoption of any such means and even took steps to avert public discussion of them. I invite your attention also to the purpose for which the Conference at Brussels was convened and to the fact that questions of methods of pressure against Japan are outside the scope of the present Conference.
I am giving such guidance as I can discreetly to the press at this end, but this would be inefficacious unless the character of the newspaper reports from Brussels is changed. I hope that you and your staff will do what you can to counteract what I am convinced is a general effort on the part of some of the states represented at Brussels to put the entire responsibility for action in the present situation upon this Government, in spite of their own unwillingness, made apparent to us repeatedly in private, to take definite action.
This entire situation is so much broader and more important than the specific responsibility for action taken or not taken that the only ones who will profit by an evidence of disagreement between us will be the very states whose action the peaceful minded states of the world are desirous of circumventing.