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July 02, 2010 |
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Filed Under: Book Reviews

by John
Chamberlain

A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1969/9

By John
Chamberlain • July 2010

Posted July 02, 2010
Print This Post • 0
comments

If, as President Richard Nixon has said, the Era of
Confrontation is giving way to the Era of Negotiation, it would seem to
follow that we are in for a period of treaty making. The conventional wisdom is
that treaties are highly desirable. But Laurence W. Beilenson, a Los
Angeles lawyer who was a U.S. liaison officer with the Chinese army in World War
II, thinks that "treaty-reliance" is a "disease." In an elaborate study called
The Treaty Trap: A History of the Performance of Political Treaties by the
United States and European Nations (Public Affairs Press, $7.00), Mr.
Beilenson proves that the "paper chains" of treaties between sovereign nations
have never succeeded in holding "against interest." The "bad guys" (Kaiser
Wilhelm, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler) have cynically regarded treaties as
"scraps of paper." But the "good guys" (democratically elected
governments) have had just as lamentable a record of performance—or maybe
we should say nonperformance. Some statesmen, of course, have been more
hypocritical than others. The least hypocritical ruler was Joe Stalin, who
wrote in 1913 that "a diplomat’s words must contradict his
deeds—otherwise what sort of a diplomat is he? Words are one thing—deeds
something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A
sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden
iron."

Since we are apparently about to enter into some sort of
nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union, the most immediately relevant chapter in
Mr. Beilenson’s book is the one which details the record of the Bolsheviks as
members of the "diplomatic club." The communists began by repudiating both
the debts and the treaties made by the Czars and the Kerensky regime,
although they subsequently claimed the benefits of the older Russian treaties.
In the first important Bolshevik treaty, that of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin
promised the Germans that his government would engage in no agitation against
the German State. But the minute the Soviets had opened an embassy in Berlin
they began to carry on subversion, dispensing "grossly underestimated" sums of
money to provoke a Bolshevik revolution inside Germany. "Yes, of course, we are
violating the treaty," said Lenin, "we have violated it thirty or forty
times…. Napoleon hunted the Germans for violating the [Tilsit] peace treaty, and
the present [Napoleon] will hunt us for the same reason. Only we shall take care
that he does not catch us soon."

The 1933 U.S.-U.S.S.R. treaty of recognition included
antisubversion promises. So did Soviet treaties with Estonia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Iran, Italy, France, Japan, and other nations. Meanwhile the Comintern,
the Soviet trade missions, the various Russian embassies and the local
communist parties, all went about the business of "subversion as usual."
Even during World War II, when it was to Stalin’s interest to keep on good terms
with his Western allies, there was a history of Soviet treaty breeches. Despite
the promise to England to render "assistance… of all kinds," the
Soviets refused the use of their airfields to enable the British to drop arms
and food to the Polish Home Army in Warsaw in 1944. At Yalta Stalin promised to
apply the "principle of the Atlantic Charter"—i.e., the right of free
elections—to East European nations. But the Yalta document was systematically
violated from the start. It was perfidious of the Soviets to make their deal
with Hitler to carve up Poland in 1939. But here Stalin trapped himself; he
trusted Hitler to keep his bargain. It was the only known instance of Stalin’s
succumbing to the "disease of
treaty-reliance."

A Tradition of Broken
Treaties

In the matter of "breeches of treaties not to subvert,"
says Mr. Beilenson, the Soviets have "made a new high." But in other types of
breech the U.S.S.R. has merely emulated the West. The ancient Greeks were
chronic treaty breakers. After years of exhausting war Athens and Sparta
and their respective allies swore in the Treaty of Nicias to refrain "for
fifty years" from bellicose activities including "fraud or damage by land
or sea." What followed was "seven years of cold war" in which neither Athens nor
Sparta gave back the territories they had promised to return. After seven years
of subversion Athens and Sparta were at each others’ throats once more. It did
not matter that Athens was a democracy and Sparta a tyranny; both city
states violated their agreement from the day it was
signed.

If one may make a generalization based on Mr.
Beilenson’s evidence, the most peaceful periods in the world’s history have
been those in which the fewest treaties have been negotiated. Louis XIV of
France was always forging new "paper chains" and breaking them at his
convenience. Despite his own perfidies, Louis XIV suffered from the "disease of
treaty-reliance," says Mr. Beilenson; "it would be tiresome to recount all
the promises for which Louis paid Charles II of England, which Charles regularly
broke." In the "Humpty Dumpty period" of the eighteenth century Charles VI of
Austria, who had no sons, entered a whole series of treaties designed to protect
the lands he was leaving to his beautiful daughter, Maria Theresa. He gave
up trade advantages and territory to guarantee the "Pragmatic Sanction"
that was to defend the "female heirs of the House of Austria. But if Maria
Theresa hadn’t been a woman of mettle she would have been done in by her
"guarantors," including the Prussian "monster," Frederick the Great, who made
agrab for Austrian Silesia the moment that Charles VI died. Maria Theresa
"turned to those from whom she had no promises," and they saved her for reasons
of "sentiment and interest," which proved "more dependable than
treaties."

Peace Without
Treaties

Comparatively few treaties were signed during the
nineteenth century, which Mr. Beilenson calls "the peaceful century." The
U.S. behaved badly toward its French ally in the years after Yorktown, when John
Jay "purposely deceived France" in his efforts to reach a satisfactory
peace agreement with Britain. But thereafter the U.S. kept relatively clear
of "paper chains" for more than a hundred and forty years. We did break our word
to Colombia when President Theodore Roosevelt used a U.S. cruiser to prevent
Colombian troops from interfering with the Panamanian revolution. This
particular treaty breech was in our "interest," for it gave us the Panama Canal.
We owned up to our own duplicity when we paid Colombia $25 million in 1922 in
settlement of Colombia’s claims.

Since we refused to sign the Versailles Treaty, we
weren’t party of acquiescing in many of the treaty breeches of the twenties and
the thirties. But the KelloggBriand Pact did link us in a general way to
the "Versailles system." "The paper structure" of those years, says Mr.
Beilenson, "was the strongest ever erected." But, despite the "paper chains,"
the Japanese invaded Manchuria, the Germans rearmed secretly, the Italians
seized Ethiopia, the British let the Germans build submarines in
violation of the naval clauses of Versailles, and nobody bothered to stop Hitler
when, in defiance of treaty obligations, he invaded the Rhine demilitarized zone
in 1936.

The moral of the tale is to sign treaties "selectively,
sparingly, and cautiously." And when you do sign them, be skeptical of their
value; even "inspectors," watching for breeches of arms limitation guarantees,
can be bribed. Above all, be wary of electing rulers who are prone to attacks of
the "disease of treaty-reliance." Even Stalin got caught in that
particular trap.

ENEMIES OF THE PERMANENT THINGS by
Russell Kirk (New Rochelle, N. Y.: Arlington House, 1969, 311 pp.)
$7.00.

Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton

The tone of this Kirk miscellany is more positive than
the title indicates; the accent is on such friends of the permanent things
as T. S. Eliot, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and
Eric Voegelin. Intelligent commentary on the work of such men is cheerful
reading for those who are tired of being told over and over again that this is
an age of change, and that we must adapt to the new. Of course things
change—sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. It is absurd,
therefore, to discard tested ways of doing things—religious beliefs, moral
codes, customs and manners—simply because they are old. Age, as a matter of
fact, counts in their favor, indicating that the belief or practice has survival
value.

Kirk argues persuasively against the modern inclination
toward the abnormal in art, literature, and politics, and against the new style
men "who think in slogans and talk in bullets," the "terrible simplifiers"
who "reduce politics to catch-phrases;… who promise social, rather than
personal, salvation." "A norm," he explains, "means an enduring standard.
It is a law of nature, which we ignore at our peril. It is a rule of
human conduct and a measure of public
virtue."

Happily, the agony of our time is producing books that
point the way ahead, and this is one of
them.

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A
Reviewer’s Notebook – 1969/9

Reviewed by John Chamberlain

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