The Price of War is Paid in the Currency of Power
After the folly comes the cost. We know about the lives, ended or ruined ( and any who know anything about the period know how devastating that loss was, not least because our army, alone in Europe, was initially made up of volunteers, by their nature the best we had).
Most of what follows is taken from Adam Tooze’s ‘The Deluge’ undoubtedly the history book of the year. It is far more important and revelatory than Christopher Clark’s weirdly popular pro-German volume ‘The Sleepwalkers’, which diminishes the blame most historians have rightly attached to Germany since Fritz Fischer’s devastating work 60 years ago.
If Germany hadn’t wanted war with Russia, there would have been no war in 1914. France might have been disappointed, but France wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to create a war where none was needed. And the pro-war faction in Britain were willing to seize what they madly thought was an opportunity, but also would never have engineered a war out of nothing. The poor old Russians were simply manoeuvred into a gigantic elephant trap, out of which they are still trying to heave themselves a century afterwards.
I was amused on Wednesday to see that a German historian has doubts about Christopher Clark’s book. Gerd Krumreich, Professor of Modern history at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has been attacking Professor Clark’s book, saying in the French magazine ‘L’Express’ ‘Clark likes Germans too much…He lets them off the hook and tells them their ancestors are less to blame than the Russians, Serbs and French. And the general public loves to rediscover a past which is now no longer to be deemed corrupted.’
It’s all still alive, you see. The ghosts of Bethmann Hollweg, the Kaiser, Ludendorff, Friedrich Naumann and the rest of them still walk. But only those who understand the game that was played in 1914 can see clearly that it is still being played now, in the twice-devastated bloodlands of Ukraine.
Adam Tooze’s main theme is the triumph of the USA, not just over Britain (which it indebted, out-gunned and replaced) but over the whole pre-1914 order. This wasn’t just a US victory, but a transformation. What the USA (especially Woodrow Wilson) wanted was a tamed world in which old-fashioned great power rivalries would no longer mess everything up and get in the way of its dominance.
By idiotically going to war (for no discernible purpose) in 1914, Britain gave Washington the opportunity to achieve this. The process, interrupted by the great depression and the 1939 war, was completed in 1941-48 by Placentia Bay, Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the first moves towards European Union. Tooze doesn’t say this, or probably even think it, but my own conclusion from what he writes is that, without the 1914 war, the USA would have had to contrive a war against Britain to get what it gained from our suicidal policy.
It seems to me that such a war would have been very hard to contrive. Even Britain’s political class, who emerge in history, repeatedly, as being none too bright, might have seen the risks of a war with the United States.
The book itself is so rewarding in so many ways that I can only advise readers to get hold of it and read it themselves. I shall concentrate here on those aspects of it which emphasize the stupidity of our entry into war in 1914, and the still greater stupidity of our refusal to get out of it before it was too late.
The first thing is the economic devastation which it caused. Tooze understands that the figures must never be neglected. All the combatants, he recounts on p.36, began the war with strong credit balances, specially by today’s rackety standards.
But not for long. By 1916 things were very different. Tooze gives a fascinating explanation of how the war was financed by Britain, France and Russia, and how this gradually turned into an enormous unpayable debt owned by Britain to the USA (the battle of the Somme was actually financed by American loans).
This debt was so huge that it remains unpaid to this day, perhaps the biggest single sign of our national fall from power and importance, one of the largest national defaults in world history, yet widely unknown in Britain (where many people mistakenly think it was paid off, because the 1939-45 debt has been) and not referred to in polite society.
See here : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/08/britains-vast-unpaid-debt-to-the-usa.html
and meanwhile the USA was taking advantage of its neutrality to ensure that it was equipped for the global power that we were ceding with every shipment of gold and securities across the Atlantic. As Tooze says (p.37) ‘The most powerful states in Europe became dependent on foreign creditors’ .In 1916, the year of Jutland (which everyone recalls), Woodrow Wilson authorized a huge expansion plan for the US Navy (which nobody recalls), saying to his aide Colonel House ‘let us build a navy bigger than [Britain’s] and do what we please’(p.35). In the same summer, France’s credit nearly collapsed under the strain of Verdun.
In October 1916 (p.51), a huge Sterling crisis was caused by Wilson’s unwillingness to authorize a new and enormous loan to the allies. Wilson was trying to stop the war – and he was not taking sides. In fact, the idea that the USA intervened on the side of the Allies has always been wrong. The USA joined the war to fight for itself, not to get Britain’s or France’s chestnuts out of the fire – hence its insistence on its troops being under its own control.
He nearly succeeded. German belligerence and stupidity, the decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare, literally torpedoed Wilson’s peace plan.
The whole chapter ‘Peace without Victory’ is a tremendous tour de force, and a great revelation to any who still think that the USA rode to aid of its cousins out of benevolence or sentimentality. Wilson wanted to overtake Britain, pacify Europe and inaugurate a new world order. He also, by this time, wanted to safeguard his country’s huge investment in the allied war effort, which would go down the plughole if Germany won(it was destined to go down the plughole anyway, but he wasn’t to know that).
But the fond and foolish idea that ‘America came in late’ to a quarrel in which it ought to have been a participant from the start, is sentimental drivel. The USA, like any rationally-governed nation, entered the war only when it had to, for hard-headed calculated reasons of its own advantage.
Brest-Litovsk brings Mitteleuropa into being – the roots of today’s Ukraine war
As I keep pointing out, the real war in Europe was always between Germany and Russia. everything else was secondary. And in 1917, Germany had beaten Russia, entirely thanks to Ludendorff’s employment of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks' willingness to act as German agents against their native land (which was by then a liberal republic, not a Tsarist autocracy).
So came the 1917-1918 talks at Brest-Litovsk (I have been to the ruined fortress where this gigantic event happened, and it is still scarred and riven by the terrific bombardment it withstood in 1941 during an eight-day siege by Hitler’s forces).
Germany, by December 1917, was by no means a simple autocracy. Liberal nationalists, indeed liberal imperialists of the Naumann type, were still very influential, had in fact reasserted their power, and everyone was scared of mutiny among the working class and the armed forces after the Russian revolution. The country was slowly starving under our blockade. Yet it appeared to be winning the war.
Germany didn’t want an old-fashioned empire of obviously conquered, subject peoples. Tact was to be applied. On p.113, Tooze writes ( referring to our old friend Naumann) about a ‘proposed ‘zone of German hegemony in central Europe, based on some kind of federative imperialism’.
‘Hegemony’ is a great word for avoiding the central ‘Who,Whom’ question, isn’t it? (you can always find out the answer to that by checking the treaties, the banknotes and the borders, after all). And I do love ‘federative imperialism’. The phrase seems to me to describe a certain large supranational body now swallowing most of Western, eastern and central Europe.
But here is the bit I most treasure (again on p,113) ‘Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination’. A mild version of this had already been tried in Poland in 1916, when Berlin and Vienna had tried to harness Polish nationalism by setting up a puppet ‘Kingdom of Poland’. The invading Germans, entering Russian-ruled parts of Poland, had portrayed themselves as liberators.
The Bolsheviks, still in their utopian phase, rashly agreed to this ‘self-determination’, an error they and their rougher less Utopian Stalinist successors spent many years putting right by violent reconquest of land, much of which (especially Ukraine) had been ‘self-determined’ into German, er, hegemony.
Tooze (pp114-115) says the German liberal imperialists were not just being cynical. ‘They believed that history refuted the choice, supposed by simplistic advocates of nationalism, between slavery and full, unfettered sovereignty. For most, full sovereignty was always a chimera. Even neutrality was an option only under exceptional circumstances’…
‘..for most, the real choice was one between hegemons. The Baltic states, if broken away from Russia, would inevitably fall into the orbit of another great power, if not Germany or Russia, then Britain. What the more far-sighted strategists in Imperial Germany were advancing was a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence was pooled by smaller states with larger states’.
Once again, does this sound familiar?
So will the increasingly violent struggles which followed over the status of Ukraine, with its vital strategic position, and its grain and coal (By the way, the adventures and travels of Ludendorff during this period would make a novel).
And they call this ‘The Special Relationship’
I’ll end (reluctantly, for there are so many other enthralling parts of this book, including its exploration of allied intervention in Bolshevik Russia, Versailes, Keynes, the momentous cession of British power at the Washington naval conference, as huge as any of Mikhail Gorbachev’s retreats from Superpower status, the beginnings of modern China) with the devastating material on America’s real attitude towards Britain.
On pp 268-9 you will find Woodrow Wilson, on his way to Europe, saying atht America ‘will build the biggest navy in the world, matching theirs [Britain’s]and exceeding it…and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.
Then , by the end of March 1919 ‘ relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other’ .
On page 192 you will find a description of Washington’s first known direct interference in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom. On page 395 you will find
US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raging and shouting at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.
In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all!
'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’
And on page 240, you will find words from Woodrow Wilson that should be engraved over the door of the British Ambassador’s study in Washington DC. These words were not privately spoken, as were the other quotations and events above, but for public consumption. They are the words of a master gently shoving away an over-affectionate and excessively servile dog, with the toe of his polished shoe:
‘You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language …no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests’.
And, of course, where such ideals and interests clash, we know whose will prevail.
Was the disappearance of our wealth, power and pre-eminence fore-ordained and unavoidable? I do not think so. For certain, it needn’t have been so quick. And if Burns and Morley, rather than Grey and Asquith, had prevailed in Cabinet in August 1914, I believe we would live in a better world by far than the one we live in now.
