My Amazon Review of William Walker's "War Ups the Ante"

Europe Goes to War

 

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, the western democracies were not interested in war, but war was interested in them. This is the fifth in a series of Paul Muller books written by William Walker. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of William Walker's "If War Should Come:....."  )  Yet again, Walker does not disappoint. Muller is a banker/diplomat/spy working for the Swiss government immediately preceding and at the start of World War II. As usual Muller is up to his eyeballs in the diplomatic intrigue of that era.

 

The book opens with Muller in Finland where his acclaimed for helping to fight off the Russian invasion. This notoriety does not sit well with neutral Switzerland, so he is farmed off to the League of Nations where he is instrumental in getting the Soviet Union kicked out because of its invasion of Finland. There he meets his Hungarian “spy” girlfriend.

 

Muller soon gets involved in a British plot to block iron ore shipments from neutral Sweden through a planned attack on the Norwegian port city of Narvik. As Alan Furst noted in his “Blood of Victory” novel the British and French plotted to block Danube oil traffic from the Ploesti oil fields in Romania and seriously planned to bomb the Russian oil fields in Baku which were feeding Hitler’s war machine. Walker notes that the “phony war” between October 1939 and April 1940 wasn’t so phony after all. So afraid were Britain and France in confronting Germany on the western front, they planned these peripheral actions. Needless to say, they did not succeed, and they would soon meet the full weight of the German blitzkrieg in May 1940.

 

As in his prior novels Walker gives us a window into the diplomacy of the era. He is especially acute in discussing the role of William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France. It makes for an enjoyable read.

For the full Amazon URL see: Europe goes to War (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Robert Kagan's "The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse................."

 America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts

 

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written a sequel to his “Dangerous Nation” Japan to cover American foreign policy from 1900-1941. In 1900 fresh after defeating Spain in 1898 the U.S. had the largest economy in the world and was viewed as a non-entity as far as the great powers of Europe were concerned. Domestically there was a strong anti-imperialist lobby against the American occupation of the Philippines, but Kagan reminds us that the freeing Cuba from Spanish colonialism was highly popular across the political spectrum. Using terms of today, it was viewed as a “humanitarian intervention.” Further the takeover of the Philippines was accidental in that Admiral George Dewey was following a decade old plan to steam to Manila to engage the Spanish fleet where he won a resounding victory. Kagan argues that absent the U.S. intervention, sooner or later the Philippines would have been taken over by either Germany or Japan.

 

Kagan covers the Platt Amendment to the Monroe Doctrine which unilaterally granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Latin America which it does many times. Initially to keep the Europeans out and to maintain the peace, but later with less than benign motives. He spends less than time than he should have around the politics of building the Panama Canal and President Roosevelt’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War. By 1914 the U.S. has no army to speak of and has modern, but small Navy.

 

When the war in Europe broke out the U.S. position was to stay out of it, despite strong support from banking interests to weigh in on the side of the allies. There was great support for the Central Powers coming from Irish, German and Jewish Americans for their own unique reasons. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson, though indirectly supporting the allies, struggles to keep the U.S. out of the war. The pressure for U.S. entry  is led by former president Theodore Roosevelt. Ultimately as Germany resorts to unrestricted submarine warfare the U.S. enters the war as an associated power with an inflated sense of morality coming from “peace without victory” and his Fourteen Points.

 

Wilson enters the Versailles negotiations as a giant. American power is supreme, yet he gets sucked into the vortex of European power politics doing whatever he can to bring forth the League of Nations. However, while in Paris, the once internationalist Republican Party, does a 180-degree shift. The party once lead by Elihu Root, Henry Stimson and Charles Evans Hughes is now lead by the anti-league Theodore Roosevelt and Senate foreign relations chair Henry Cabot Lodge. They are backed up by “the irreconcilables” led by Senator’s William Borah and Hiram Johnson. When Wilson fails to seek a compromise, the League fails and the U.S. returns to its pre-war isolation. In a footnote three young idealist, William Bullitt, John Maynard Keynes, and Walter Lippmann become disillusioned on the shoals of European reality.

 

It is here where Kagan argues that the U.S. should have stayed in the game. Without U.S. backing both France and Britain became paranoid about future German power and therefore were less willing to compromise on reparations, something that would plague the continent for a decade. In the terms of the British diplomat Harold Nicholson, the U.S. became “the ghost at the feast.” To be sure the U.S. was present financially with both the Dawes and Young Plans, it was not really in the game.

 

With the onset of the Great Depression the world order begins to collapse, first economically and the politically. Japan invades Manchuria making a mockery of the League. Further, its naval build-up threatens the American presence in the Pacific and we have the rise of Hitler.

 

What is the newly elected President Roosevelt’s response to the deteriorating international situation? More isolation. Kagan, in my opinion underplays Roosevelt’s blowing up the July 1933 World Economic Conference where it is understood in no uncertain terms the U.S. will focus on domestic recovery. This did not go unnoticed by Mussolini and Hitler. To me one failing of the book is that is lacks an economic context, particularly on the role of the gold standard and the collapse in world trade.

 

Later in the decade Roosevelt has to fight off the isolationists to deal with the growing challenges coming from Japan and Germany. He highlights the trigger for the change as the September 1938 Munich Conference and the November 1938 Kristallnacht explosion in Germany. Kagan reasons, correctly in my opinion, that the reason France and Germany caved into Hitler is that they rightfully believed that the U.S. did not have their backs. Thus had the U.S. been more involved with Europe in the 1930’s the horrors to come might just have been avoided. And if the war in Europe did not start, Japan might not have embarked on its aggression in Southeast Asia.

 

Kagan’s conclusion is that there is a straight line from America’s holiday from international affairs in the 1920’s and 1930’s to the agony of the 1940’s. It is a lesson that should be remembered by those today who see few reasons for America’s involvement on the world stage.

For the full Amazon URL see: America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Paul Jankowski's "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War"

 

From Postwar to Prewar

 

Brandeis University history professor has written a very dry academic book about the origins of World War II through the twin lenses of the 1932-34 League of Nations Geneva Disarmament Conference and 1933 London World Economic Conference. He spends most of the book on the disarmament conference. He not only covers the major powers, but he also covers Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

 

By mid-1932 the Versailles settlement was breaking down. Germany was given the right to rearm and reparations, for all practical purposes, were eliminated at the Lausanne Conference. Thus, before Hitler Germany was free to become a great power once again in Europe.

 

The lynchpins of the postwar era were the notion of collective security via the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty which formalized borders in the west and the Kellogg-Briand Pact which in principle outlawed war. On the economic side the Dawes and Young plans of 1925 and 1929 established an orderly process, at least temporarily, for German reparations payments and the recycling of capital through American loans. This gives lie to the notion that the United States was isolationist in the 1920’s. Further the U.S. with observer status was an active participant in the disarmament talks in Geneva.

 

Nevertheless in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League sat idly by and allowed it to happen, so much for collective security. With Mussolini’s Italy hellbent to seize Ethiopia and Stalin’s Russia beginning to develop a major armaments industry, the disarmament conference was in major trouble. A rearmed Russia and Germany force the states in between to rearm as well. Simply put everyone is going their own way.

 

The fatal conceit of the disarmament conference was that if Europe could not agree with a Locarno in the east that would confirm the borders there, how could it possibly agree on a general disarmament. The coup de grace, is of course Hitler coming to power with his very aggressive aims towards eastern Europe.

 

The World Economic Conference does not get the attention it deserves. Faced with a global depression the leading countries of the world got together in London in June 1933. Britain left the gold standard in 1931, the U.S. had just left it in May 1933, and under the weight of the economic collapse and worldwide protectionism international trade went into a tailspin. The goal of the conference was to restore trade and some form of the gold standard. It failed miserably when President Roosevelt blew up the conference with a telegram and sent the American delegation home. Keynes applauded Roosevelt’s decision because any return to gold, would have put the global economy into a straitjacket by preventing the needed reflation. From the point of view of economics Keynes was correct, but from the point of view of politics it sent a signal to Hitler and Mussolini that the U.S. had withdrawn from Europe. Collective security was done for with the U.S. withdrawing from the world. America’s true isolation was in the 1930’s, not the 1920’s. As a result, the world moved decisively from a postwar to prewar world.

 

Jankowski’s lessons for today are obvious. America’s withdrawal from the world and Britain’s from Europe contain the same seeds of destruction we witnessed in the early 1930s. An all against all world ends badly. I only wish Jankowski wrote with more drama.

For the full amazon URL see: From Postwar to Prewar (amazon.com)

Reliving the 1930s - Part 4

Yet again it looks like we are reliving the 1930s as we watch the U.N. sit idly by as the Assad government in Syria continues to make war on its own people with poison gas. The Obama red line of 2013 has come and gone and now President Trump stated yesterday that Assad went well beyond it. We'll see what Trump's apparent reversal of U.S. policy actually means. Hopefully the leadership of U.N. ambassador Niki Haley will prod him in the right direction.

But what is happening is Syria has an eerie parallel from the 1930s. In 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and the League of Nations instituted sanctions. However in 1936 the British and French in the Hoare-Laval Pact chose to appease Italy and lifted sanctions. Meantime with the war on the ground not going well for the Italians, Italy resorted to the use of banned poison gas on the hapless Ethiopians. The war soon ended, but not before Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie made a dramatic plea before the League of Nations in Geneva. The delegates sat in silence because they knew that collective security and the League were dead. 

It looks like the U.N. is going down the same path unless America acts alone as we did with respect to the slaughter in Kosovo twenty years ago.

My Amazon Review of William Walker's "Danzig:A Novel of Political Intrigue"

To Die for Danzig

Cameron Watt in his “How War Came” devotes an entire chapter to Danzig: “Hitler Steps up the Pressure: “Die for Danzig.”” The events in William Walker’s book occur prior to 1939; more specifically the period between 1934 -1936 when Sean Lester was the League of Nations High Commissioner for the “free city” of Danzig. Walker places Danzig at the fulcrum of the growing struggle between Hitler and the rest of Europe.

The mostly German city of Danzig (pop. 400,000) was established by the Treaty of Versailles as a “free city” that would give Poland an outlet to the Baltic Sea. Today it is the Polish city of Gdansk. The League of Nations was responsible for maintaining its constitutional safeguards which would have worked well in more harmonious times, but with the rise of Hitler the German majority of the city moved sharply in the direction of the NDSAP (Nazi Party) thereby creating a crisis for the League.

Although this is far from the best written historical novel Walker integrates the actions of some very real people with his protagonist, Paul Muller an upper-class League diplomat of Swiss-English parents.  In the novel he is Lester’s chief aide and we find him fighting battles in Geneva, the League’s headquarters and on the streets of Danzig. He sees up close the role of Nazi thugs intimidating their opposition and the appeasement policy of Anthony Eden in Geneva as he continually sells out Lester. Eden would later break with that policy, but early on he was an appeaser.

Through Muller we become a fly on the wall in meetings at the League and in Danzig where Lester tries to negotiate with NDSAP leaders Arthur Greisser and Albert Forster who are following direct orders from Berlin and we also get a sense of the opposition Social Democrats who are fighting a losing battle. We also see which is timely for today, the very real risks diplomats and their families take in difficult environments.

I recommend William Walker’s book to those readers who want to get a sense of what dealing with the growing Nazi threat diplomats faced on a day-to-day basis as they struggled to maintain a semblance of collective security.

For the complete Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R31HBKYKCACO1T/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Adam Tooze's "The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

America as Economic Super Power

Unlike most histories of World War I and the early inter-war years which have a European focus, Yale professor Adam Tooze trains his keen eye on the growing ability of America’s economic power to reshape the world in its own image. To him Wilson’s liberal internationalism is a cloak to extend the power of the United States. He views America’s role in the world as that of “privileged detachment” that began in with Wilson’s formulation of “peace without victory” in early 1917 and ends with Hoover’s reparations moratorium which was designed to bailout Wall Street’s loans to Germany.

He believes that it was Wilson’s goal to make America the arbiter of the world which Wilson and his Republican successors largely succeed at. The only difference between the Wilsonians and their Republican critics was that Wilson wanted to do that from within the League of Nations and the critics from without. Nevertheless the goal was the same.

Tooze chooses 1916 as the start date because it was in that year the Entente power were being bled dry in France in both a physical and economic sense. It was also in that year where the economic output of the United States for the first time exceeded that of the British Empire. The Entente had nowhere else to turn and from then on America became the banker to the world. And it was this financial power that forced all of the major powers to take into account the role of the United States. After the war German statesman Gustav Stresemann realized that the road to German recovery ran through Wall Street and it was Wall Street credits that triggered Germany’s rebound in the mid-1920s.

Tooze also notes that the U.S. was far from being isolationist in the 1920s; isolationism was more a creature of the 1930s. There was the Washington naval arms limitation conference in 1921-22, the Dawes Plan in 1924 and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.

Tooze’s book covers far more that Europe as he pans the world to include the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, upheaval in China, Britain’s struggle to hold on to India and the shifting coalitions of Japanese politics. My one criticism of the book is that it promises too much. There is far more discussion of the 1916-21 time period than that of the balance of the 1920s. It is far different from, say, Zara Steiner’s “The Lights that Failed” which is very Eurocentric, but that work covers far better the roles of the Locarno Treaty and the League of Nations in Geneva. Nevertheless, “The Deluge…” is a very worthy history of the time when America interposed itself on to the world scene. 

The full Amazon url is:

 http://www.amazon.com/review/R1YUL2VZXIVZBB