While America Sleeps: Viewpoint

Z a. ? WhileAmerica Sleeps VIEWPOINT W.¿>y Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan hen Neville Chamberlain arrived in London after his meeting with AdolfHitler, Benito Mussolini, and Edouard Daladier at Munich, he held up a piece ofpaper containing an agreement signed by him and Hitler, declaring, "I'vegot it!" Later,from his residence on Downing Street, he told ajoyous crowd that he had brought back "peace with honour. I believe it ispeacefor our time." For us that scene isfilled with irony and impending tragedy,for we now know that this was the crowning moment ofthepolicy ofappeasement whosefailure soon brought the horrors ofthe Second World War. What is much less known is that the conditions that made appeasement an attractive policy in the 1930s were established in theyearsfrom 1919 to the advent ofHitler, when Britain allowed its military and strategicposition to decline drastically. The men who made and executed Britain's disastrous policies in theyears immediatelypreceding the war have much to answerfor, but their choices were sharply limited by thefolly ofthe men ofthe twenties. Theforeign and strategicpolicies undertaken by Britain in the 1920s thoroughlyjustify Winston Churchill's assertion that World War II was "the Unnecessary War." In August 1919. the British government decided that the armed services were to make their plans for the future on the assumption that there would be no major war or need for any expeditionary force for ten years.' This seemed to be a perfectly reasonable supposition. From the British perspectiw , the international sky was almost perfectly blue with no plausible enemy in sight. For the island kingdom of Great Britain, national security and prosperity meant chiefly command of the seas, and in 1919 Britain dominated the oceans as never before. The Royal Navy had more battleships than the Americans and French combined, more than twice as many as the Japanese and Italians combined. In cruisers and destroyers, the British had more than double the number of the French and Americans together and more than triple the combined fleets of Japan and Italy. What was there to fear? "Not since 1 8 1 5 . . . had England been able to survey the world with such assurance of safety and power." The ten-war rule became the guideline (or defense est mutes for 1 92 1 and remained in force until theoretically abandoned m 1 932. Less important than the surface rigidity of a projection of international relations tor a decade was the cast of mind that underlay the rule. The British gowrnment and its military advisers chose simply not to consider the real possibility of a war in the future. Defense expenditure was to Ix- drastically reduced at once and kept at a low lewl thereafter. The British cut defense spending by more than half for 1920 and by more tlian half again over the next two years. In 1922 a government committee urged the practice of setting a figure of money available for defense and "leaving the services to work things out as best they could." ' The forces to defend the empire and the nation would therefore be determined not by what the teal situation required but by what money the gowrnment chose to make available. In the 1 920s all political parties took the same approach. "Arms were discussed solely in terms of what they cost, not of what they were needed for.' The final figure was less than a quarter of the sum in 1919, and right around that fraction is where it stayed over the next decade, by which time the Japanese had conquered Manchuria, Mussolini's Italy was ready to attack Ethiopia, and Hitler's Germany was launched on a program of rapid rearmament, only a war away from demilitarizing the Rhincland. The road to World War Il was wide open. Since the end of the ("old War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has enjoyed a degree of security and predominant influence it has never known. There is no plausible enemy m sight to offer the threat posed by the Soviets' mighty military machine, and America's success in the Gulf War has left most of its leaders with the feeling that lesser powers can be handled...