Search

Copy specific notes

Bookplate inserted; signed in black ink on front endpaper: “Robert Menzies 1944”; underlining and lines in margins in pencil throughout, including: [p. 5] “For the return from a state of total war to a state of peace which no one trusts will raise catastrophic issues in our midst. Rent by domestic controversy, for want of a settled foreign policy we shall act not upon reflection and choice but under the impulse of accidents and the impact of force.”; [p. 7] “But in foreign relations we have habitually in our minds divorced the discussion of our war aims, our peace aims, our ideals, our interests, our commitments, from the discussion of our armaments, our strategic position, our potential allies and our probable enemies. No policy could emerge from such a discussion. For what settles practical controversy is the knowledge that end and means have to be balanced [… p. 8] “This is the time of the reckoning. We are liquidating in sweat blood and tears, and at our mortal peril, the fact that we made commitments, asserted rights, and proclaimed ideals while we left our frontiers unguarded, our armaments unprepared, and our alliances unformed and unsustained.”; [p. 17] “For the Founding Fathers understood the realities of foreign policy too well to make commitments without having first made certain they had the means to support them.”; [p. 20] “But it is clear from Monroe’s correspondence with Madison and Jefferson that this bold commitment was made only because the three Virginian Presidents were sure, after studying Rush’s report from London, that Britain in her own political and commercial interest would not permit the Holy Alliance (France, Spain, Austria, and Russia) to intervene in South America.”; [p. 22] “[This affair demonstrated how serious was the] commitment of the Monroe Doctrine, and how difficult it was to sustain the commitment in the absence of a clear and dependable agreement with Britain. For if Britain had opposed Napoleon at the outset, he could not have ventured into Mexico. If Britain had supported him effectively, the United States could not have forced him out.”; [p. 28] “It is too late to debate it now. What cannot be gainsaid, however, is that the subsequent foreign policy of the United States has never been equal to the size of the commitment. From the day Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Bay until the day when General Wainwright surrendered Corregidor, the United States never made a sustained and prudent, or remotely adequate, effort to bring its obligations and its power into balance.”; [p. 31] “Both [Taft and Wilson] disliked Armaments. In them the idealism which prompts Americans to make large and resounding commitments was combined with the pacifism which causes Americans to shrinks from the measures of force that are needed to support the commitments. Neither promoted the preparation of armaments in time of peace. Both accepted reluctantly and tardily the need to arm. Both abhorred as inherently vicious and unnecessary, and as contrary to American principles, the formation of alliances. But both favoured a League of Nations in which the United States assumed the obligation to enforce peace.”; [p. 32] “The verbal battle of the propagandists, of which so much was made in later years, was fought in this vacuum of the American mind. It was fought because the American nation lacked even the rudiments of a settled foreign policy which could make [p. 33] clear whose victory and what kind of victory would best serve the vital interests of the United States.”; [p. 37] “Mr. Wilson failed to make this demonstration. He failed because in leading the nation to war he had failed to give the durable and compelling reasons for the momentous decision. The reasons he did give were legalistic and moralistic and idealistic reasons, rather than the substantial and vital reason that the security of the United States demanded that no aggressively expanding imperial power, like Germany, should be allowed to gain the mastery of the Atlantic Ocean.”; [p. 38] “[The Senate] saw that the League imposed upon the United States the unprecedented commitment to help enforce the peace of Europe. They saw only what they were asked to contribute. For they had not been taught to understand what British and French power meant to the security of America’s vital interests all over the world. They had not had it demonstrated to them how much the defense of the Western Hemisphere depended upon having friendly and strong partners in the British Isles, in the French ports on the Atlantic, at Gibraltar and Casablanca and Dakar; or how much the defense of the Philippines depended upon French Indo-China, and upon British Hong Kong, Malaya, and Burma, and upon the attitude and the strength of [p. 39] Russian and upon China in Eastern Asia. The legalistic, moralistic, idealistic presentation of the war and of the League obscured the realities – caused it to appear that for what we were asked to give our allies, we were to receive nothing from them. It was made to seem that the new responsibilities of the League flowed from President Wilson’s philanthropy and not from the vital necessity of finding allies to support America’s vast existing commitments in the Western Hemisphere and all the way across the Pacific to the China Coast.”; [p. 40] “At the Peace Conference in Paris, President Wilson agreed to let Japan retain them under a theoretical and unenforceable mandate from the League of Nations.”; [p. 41] “Knowing that Japan was the only possible enemy we had to consider in the Pacific, we nevertheless turned upon our natural partners, Britain and France, and treated them as rivals whose armaments it was a diplomatic triumph to reduce. Though we observed scrupulously our own promise not to fortify Guam or to reinforce the defenses of the Philippines, we submitted to the Japanese refusal to let us know what she was doing in her islands. But the more we disarmed ourselves and our natural allies in the coming Pacific war, the more vehemently we committed ourselves to oppose Japanese expansion.”; [p. 42] “It would be hard to find a more perfect example of total incompetence in guiding the foreign relations of a people. The Senate Committee invited a war in the Pacific while it deliberately refused to take measures to fortify our ancient defenses in the Atlantic. This monstrous imprudence was what passed for American foreign policy at the outbreak of the present war.”; [p. 44] “[This is another way of saying that the American people would] not agree to protect their vital interests because they had no foreign policy which disclosed their vital interests.”; [p. 45] “The isolationist party adhered, on the whole, to our vast trans-oceanic commitments. They devoted their efforts to opposing the alliances which, as is not obvious, we needed in order to validate the commitments. They argued that only by doing nothing to save our present allies from defeat would we be able to stay out of the war.”; [p. 46] “The case of the “interventionists” rested on a correct appreciation of the situation – that alone and without allies the United States could sustain its commitments against the combined power of the totalitarian alliance.”; [p. 47] “The elementary means by which all foreign policy must be conducted are the armed forces of the nation, the arrangement of its strategic position, and the choice of its alliances.”; [p. 49] “The idealistic objections to preparedness, to strategic precaution, and to alliances came to dominate American thinking in the hundred years which followed Monroe’s declaration. The objections flourished, and became a national ideology, owing to the historical accident that in that period Asia was dormant, Europe divided, and Britain’s command of the sea unchallenged. As a result, we never had to meet our obligations in this hemisphere and in the Pacific, and we enjoyed a security which in fact we took almost no measures to sustain […] It caused us to forget that man has to earn his security and his security and his liberty as he has to earn his living. We came to think that our privileged position was a natural right, and then to believe that our unearned security was the reward of our moral superiority.”; [p. 50] “So we must examine our national prejudices, and we may begin by asking ourselves whether peace, as so many say, is the supreme end of foreign policy. Merely to ask the question would have sounded shocking a while ago. At the moment, it is obvious that the survival of the nation in its independence and its security is a greater end than peace. For we can see now that a surrender to Japan and Germany would give us peace, and the more absolute the surrender, the more absolute the peace […] For national ideals should not express amiable but unconsidered sentiments. They should express the serious purposes of the nation, and the vice of the pacifist ideal is that it conceals the true end of foreign policy. The [p. 51] true end is to provide for the security of the nation in peace and in war.”; [p. 52] “This is the error of acting today on the assumption that you have already achieved what you dimly hope you may be able to achieve tomorrow. For until all the nation’s rivals and potential enemies are irrevocably committed to the pacifist idea, it is a form of criminal negligence to act as if they were already committed to it. The course of events from the seizure of Manchuria in 1931 to the invasion of Poland in 1939 has proved how the pacifist ideal in Great Britain, France, and the United States permitted and even encouraged the ambitions of the aggressive states. The example of the British, who were sincerely opposed to war, and of the Americans who had their neutrality law, did not persuade our present enemies.”; [p. 53] “The surrender of the Rhineland in 1936, and that of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, were the strategic preliminaries to the neutralization of Russia and the conquest of Poland in 1939. What was surrendered by our allies in the name of peace became our strategic foundation upon which Hitler prosecuted his war.”; [p. 55] “The disarmament movement was, as the event has shown, tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament […] We insisted upon the rupture of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, thus isolating Japan and offering her the option of finding new allies among the vanquished states.”; [p. 66] “As we know, President Monroe made the concert with Great Britain – not “by agreement” but by implicit reliance upon the common interest. Yet in effect it was an alliance though it was unavowed publicly and never formally ratified.”; [p. 67] “The Anglo-American concert conferred such enormous benefits in keeping two countries free of imperialism and of war, and for so long exacted no payment in returned that in our times men have refused to recognize, because events did not compel them to recognize, that the effective substance of an alliance with Britain was the cardinal element in American foreign relations.”; [p. 69] “For forty years after the old order of American foreign relations had ceased to exist, the American nation clung to the illusions which had sufficed under the old order. The adherence to this old and now obsolete policy is known as “isolationism.” The name is misleading. In reality our commitments had been greatly extended, whereas our power and that of Britain had remained relatively diminished. The correct name for the policy of keeping the [p. 70] commitments without enlarging our alliances is not isolationism, but insolvency”; [p. 71] “There was a negligible minority at the time who did not share this [desire for collective security], the Wilsonian view, but held that a system of collective security could not be maintained unless within it there existed an alliance of strong dependable powers. They held that a nucleus [p. 72] of leading state, allied for the defense of their vital interests, was needed in order to enforce peace through a system of collective security.”; [p. 73] “If the historic experience of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Italy is a guide, it tells us that the large states have grown up around the nucleus of a strong principality.”; [p. 74] “Wilson identified collective security with antipathy to alliance, rather than with the constructive development of alliances. The influence of this idea played a great part in dividing the Americans from the British and the French, and the British from the French.”; [p. 75] “Thus Wilson was placed in a dilemma: if the League was a practical instrument, it contained an alliance, and all good and true men including Wilson were opposed to any idea of an alliance; if in fact the League [p. 76] outlawed alliances, and still sought to enforce peace, then it was an unlimited commitment supported by no clear means of fulfilling it. Thus the League was attacked both as a concealed alliance in the realm of power politics and as a utopian pipe dream […] Thus in the fateful period from 1898 to 1941 the United States engaged in three wars but never succeeded in forming a foreign policy. We could have [p. 77] had a foreign policy only by agreeing that since our commitments had been extended, a concert by agreement had to be extended correspondingly. But the modes of thought which Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had as a matter of course used had been forgotten though disuse. Thus the nation was unable to form any foreign policy after the war with Spain, or after the first World War. And as yet it has not been able to form a policy in the second World War.”; [p. 85] “They formulated a sound policy which the divided people came, because of its inherent virtue, to unite in supporting. This was that leadership by statesmen without which democracy is nothing but the vain attempt of men to lift themselves by their own bootstraps.”; [p. 86] “When we speak of the “vital interests of the nation” we mean those interests which the people of the nation are agreed they must defend at the risk of their lives.”; [p. 91] “In 1896 Arthur Balfour declared in a speech at Manchester that the time must come when some states of greater authority even than Monroe “will lay down the doctrine that between English-speaking peoples war is impossible.” Britain yielded and agreed to arbitration.”; [p. 117] “[Germany and Japan, we have declared, will not be allowed to become great powers for a long time to] [p. 118] come, and if this declaration is to be enforced, then the three surviving great powers – Britain, Russia, and the United States – will have to enforce it. They cannot, however, enforce it unless they are allied for the purpose of enforcing it.”; [p. 124] “Britain must go to the defense of the Americas or the British Commonwealth of Nations would dissolve. America must go to the defense of the United Kingdom and its positions on the other side of the Atlantic, or run the mortal risk of letter a hostile power establish itself in the near approaches to the Western Hemisphere.”; [p. 127] “It is not undeniable that American commitments in the Atlantic and the Pacific dictate then need for an alliance with the British Commonwealth of Nations and with the Empire?”.