Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1944, General, Volume I

500.CC/11–2744

The Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant) to the Secretary of State

No. 19,499

London, November 27, 1944.
[Received December 9.]

Sir: I have the honor to refer to the Department’s circular telegram of October 18, 1944, regarding the reactions in Great Britain to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, and to enclose a memorandum of conversations held by the Hon. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, American Minister and Special Assistant to the Ambassador, with the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, M. Eelco van Kleffens; Dr. Josef Lipski, former Polish Ambassador in Berlin; and President Eduard Beneš, of Czechoslovakia, on the subject of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. It will be noted that Dr. van Kleffens and Dr. Lipski are hostile to these proposals, while Dr. Beneš is favorable to them.

Respectfully yours,

For the Ambassador:

Robert Coe

Second Secretary of Embassy

[Enclosure]

Memorandum of Conversations, by the Special Assistant to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Armstrong)

[London,] November 25, 1944.

Between: Mr. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and

1) Foreign Minister Eelco van Kleffens, of the Netherlands;

2) Dr. Josef Lipski, former Polish Ambassador in Berlin;

3) President Eduard Beneš, of Czechoslovakia.

Subject: The Dumbarton Oaks Program.

The Department has expressed a desire to obtain as many and as varied reactions as possible to the plan for an international organization worked out at Dumbarton Oaks. In view of this I have introduced the subject into a number of conversations which I have had recently, and have held out the resulting expressions of view from various memoranda already submitted to the Department. Of the three persons listed above, Dr. van Kleffens and Dr. Lipski are hostile to the Dumbarton Oaks program, while Dr. Beneš is favorable. In each case, the date of the conversation follows the name of the person whose views are set forth.

1) Eelco van Kleffens, Foreign Minister of the Netherlands (November 3, 1944).

Dr. van Kleffens was quite clear that the Netherlands Government will not be able to take any decision regarding a matter so important as joining a world organization before it has had a chance to consult the Dutch people through the medium of Parliament. Like the other members of the Netherlands Government, he intends to resign on returning to his country, and personally he does not intend to tie his successor by even informal commitments to any permanent international policy. This is particularly so, he says, in the case of a matter like the program agreed upon tentatively at Dumbarton Oaks; for the proposed organization is not to be based on law but on policy, and the policy involved will be the policy not even of the members of the Assembly as a whole, and not even of the members of the Security Council acting as a body, but of certain members of that Council, namely the Great Powers. He does not deny that the Great Powers have greater responsibilities than the lesser ones, but he does deny that they are right in asking the lesser ones to give them a blank check and to promise to honor whatever is written on it.

Dr. van Kleffens thinks that in future as in the past wars will come in three ways: (1) by an attack by a large Power on a smaller one; (2) by an attack by a small Power on another small Power; (3) by a dispute ending in war between two large Powers.

The proposed Security Organization does not propose to deal with any dispute involving one of the Great Powers holding veto power in the Security Council. In connection with (1) and (3), then, the only sort of war which might be dealt with would be one resulting from an attack by a large Power not holding veto power in the Security Council on another such Power or on a smaller Power. A case in point might be an attack by Germany on, say, Czechoslovakia, just as happened before the present war. What security would Czechoslovakia have that the two Powers which would naturally have to deal with Germany most directly, namely Britain and Russia, would do so? Might not one hold back, and if it did would the other act alone? The example may not be a good one. The point is that there is no law which would justify Czechoslovakia in calling on the Great Powers involved to protect her, nor in fact any undertaking on their part to do so. Their decision when the time came would be based on current political considerations and appraisals of risk and advantage.

There is the same lack of insecurity [security?] in the event of wars between two small Powers. If, say, Greece is attacked by Bulgaria, what reason is there to believe that the latter country, being a protégé of Russia’s and under Russian protection, will not be supported in the Security Council by the vote of Russia’s representative? There is no agreed law binding Russia not to support Bulgaria or binding the Security Council or the Security Organization as a whole not to stand by while Bulgaria defeats Greece. The only consideration would be one of policy. We saw at the time of Munich⁷¹ to what lengths mistaken considerations of policy can lead even Great Powers.

“No,” remarked Dr. van Kleffens, “if I were the Greek Government I would scratch my head three times before signing the pledge of membership in an organization of any such sort. Certainly the Netherlands Government will do so.”

Dr. van Kleffens said he had not consulted formally or informally with the representative of any other Government about any agreed course of action. He said he would wait till after the American election even to give the Dutch public an indication of what the Netherlands Government might consider the pros and cons of the proposed security set-up; certainly he had no intention of waging anything like a campaign against it. He said he understood perfectly the considerations which had made agreement on any more ambitious scheme impossible. He did not blame anyone nor did he think any nation had arrière-pensées or washed to keep open the avenues for waging war with immunity [impunity?]. He merely thought that if no real organization could be devised on the basis of law it would be preferable not to raise false hopes that anything really effective had been done on a general and universal basis, and that instead more limited organizations had best be formed to deal with the two culprit nations against which everyone was willing at the present time to promise to act, Germany and Japan. Each for at least a generation and a half, say thirty years at the least, would be dominated either by men who were confirmed Nazis or by fanatical Shintoists and worshippers of the Mikado: to arrange to cope with them was not enough to secure peace in the world for that length of time, but it would at least secure peace from two potential aggressors for that length of time.

2) Br. Josef Lipski, Polish Ambassador in Berlin 1933–1939 (November 4, 1944).

After the last war, said Dr. Lipski, the chief emphasis was laid on self-determination of small peoples; perhaps the procedure was carried too far. Now the tendency is to swing the pendulum too far the other way; small peoples are dismissed as negligible, or at any rate though told that their interests are being taken into account are not told how, why or when. The Dumbarton Oaks proposals are a case in point. There is to be a sanction for the small Powers; but there is to be none for the great. The small are to be bound to obey the great; the great do not take any explicit obligation to protect the small.

The world cannot be organized permanently, Dr. Lipski considers, on any such formula. Either there is to be international collaboration or there is to be dictation. The war has not been fought to establish the right of anyone, even nations or statesmen with the highest motives, to dictate to others. They may justifiably decide that international collaboration is impossible under present circumstances, and they may substitute for it agreements between the Great Powers for maintaining the peace in their own way. They then should not invite, persuade or coerce other Powers to submit to their dictates and to promise to fulfill their orders.

The secondary Powers will prefer to await a time when world conditions will permit international collaboration in the real sense of the word, meanwhile holding themselves free to secure as much safety as they can by suiting their current policies to the current requirements of the Great Power or Powers in their immediate neighborhood. That would be a sad upshot from a war such as this, and one which the promises of many representatives of the Great Powers had not led the world to expect; but without blaming anyone for the deterioration in the spirit and moral basis of the war, the fact must be faced that it has deteriorated and that the Dumbarton Oaks program is evidence of how far the process has gone.

3) President Edward Beneš, of Czechoslovakia (November 21, 1944).

President Beneš said that since we last talked (see this Embassy’s despatch No. 19166 dated November 10, 1944)⁷² he had studied the document issued at Dumbarton Oaks and was now prepared to give an opinion of it. In view of his long service at Geneva, where he was President of the Assembly once and President of the Council nine times, it was natural for him, he said, to compare it with the Covenant. He saw both disadvantages and advantages in the new instrument.

The chief disadvantage in Dr. Beneš’ eyes was that the Dumbarton Oaks program did not have sufficient ideological content to arouse the interest and enthusiasm of the public. Offsetting this lack was the fact that it was simpler and more clear-cut in approach and put the responsibility for action or inaction squarely where it belonged, on the Great Powers. In the League, those Powers used often to hide behind their little colleagues. Under the new plan, if one of the Great Powers is unwilling to join in collective action it will have to assume the full onus before the world.

A second defect might be that no orderly course of action has been laid down in advance. The Dumbarton Oaks proposals almost entirely omit to prescribe procedures. On the other hand, said Dr. Beneš, he had to admit that the old League procedure could and did become attenuated to such a degree that action never seemed required at any specific point and one more vista of inquiry and discussion was continually opening up. Furthermore, he said, he supposed that procedures were bound to develop in any event. In this connection he said that despite his criticism of League procedure as a whole he hoped the League experience would be taken into careful account and that where the League had developed good methods they would be copied. He gave as an example the course usually followed when a minorities complaint was presented to the League. A committee of three was usually appointed to study it, the appointees being delegates of countries not in any way involved in the dispute. The committee would not merely inquire into the facts; it would attempt informally to reconcile the two sides, and at the least would suggest a compromise which the Council might, in the last resort, press the contestants to adopt. Dr. Beneš felt that the new organization ought to be encouraged to develop procedures of this sort.

This led him, Dr. Beneš said, to a third criticism, or rather to point out another danger. An international organization which is to ameliorate and not to exacerbate international relations must not be “too open” to the presentation of complaints, and if it is ready to receive all complaints should be careful not to discuss them all in public. He wondered if the new organization might not have this fault. Most complaints that come to an organization are minor and should not be magnified by being discussed in the Assembly or Security Council. The very simplicity of the Dumbarton Oaks scheme will encourage the filing of all sorts of complaints. The Secretariat will have to counteract this by developing a method of sifting and handling most of them without letting them reach the stage of public debate.

I asked Dr. Beneš how he thought some of the other smaller nations would feel about the Dumbarton Oaks program. He said he had been told that the Dutch, the Belgians and the Norwegians were critical of it. He was bound to note, he said, that though these nations had always behaved as respectable members of international society some of them could not claim to have been very energetic or useful when difficult conflicts had to be dealt with. Some of them might perform better since they had learned that neutrality did not necessarily spell security; but he was not sufficiently impressed by their role at Geneva in the past to feel under the necessity of bowing to their opinions now. In addition, there had been other League members, some of them with regular seats on the Council, who never “pulled their own weight”. He was thinking, he said, of certain Latin American states which refused to take a position on any subject that did not touch them directly. Consequently, he said, he strongly favored the Dumbarton Oaks provision that the Security Council is to be small.

On balance, Dr. Beneš found the Dumbarton Oaks program “not unsatisfactory” and he said he would be glad to try to work on the basis of it.

H[amilton] F[ish] A[rmstrong]

71. For correspondence pertaining to the agreement effected at Munich, September 28–30, 1938, between France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, and accepted by Czechoslovakia, see Foreign Relations, 1938, vol. i, pp. 657 ff.
72. Not printed.