Respect for ”international law” is akin to that of a female in a policeman’s uniform. Her authority, and the means to implement it (outside the use of a weapon or intimidation from her male colleagues) ends with the first drunk and hardened criminal.
The end of war really meant the beginning of a self-righteous appeasement in which decadent states besotted with their own moral high ground sacrificed the weak to the strong in exchange for maintaining the moral illusion of their peacemaking. The rhetoric of the illusionists of peace hasn’t changed. Diplomacy must be given time to work. The invaded countries brought it on themselves. The invaders have a legitimate territorial claim. Does anyone really want to die for Manchuria, the Sudetenland and Abyssinia? They didn’t. Instead they ended up having to die for Hawaii, London and Paris.
The End of International Law
“There has been no greater advance than this, gentlemen,” the President of the United States said. “It is a definite guaranty of peace. It is a definite guaranty by word against aggression.”
“If you look back upon the history of the world you will see how helpless peoples have too often
been a prey to powers that had no conscience in the matter… Now, the world, expressing its conscience in law, says there is an end of that.”
The year was 1919. The speaker was President Woodrow Wilson and the tremendous advance in human history that he was talking up was the League of Nations.
Thirteen years later, Japan seized Manchuria and turned it into a puppet regime. China turned to the League of Nations which ordered Japan to withdraw from Manchuria. Japan instead withdrew from the League of Nations.
The United States declared that it would not recognize the new government. Japan replied that its puppet regime was “the necessary act of the local population”. Five years later, Japan invaded China. China asked for help from the League of Nations. The League proved to be just as useless again.
Western sanctions against Japan were erratic. Chamberlain vowed that Britain would never submit to Japanese threats, but tacitly recognized Japan’s conquests. He called Japan’s repeated humiliations, “almost intolerable”.
Almost.
Japan told Robert Craigie, the British ambassador who urged appeasement and would go on to chair the UN War Crimes Commission, to apologize for Britain’s opposition to the Japanese conquest and its acceptance of all future Japanese conquests as a pre-condition to further negotiations.
The UK had accepted the annexation of Austria and abetted the seizure of the Sudetenland. Japanese officials knew that behind British diplomacy lay not strength, but fear of provoking the rising power of the Rising Sun.
A few months before WWII, British negotiators had finally convinced the Japanese to stop stripping British subjects naked, but by then the forcible stripping of British men and women had served its purpose of stripping British power naked.
“We lived on bluff from 1920-1939, but it was eventually called,” Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, wrote.
Wilson’s “definite guarantee of peace” had failed miserably. International law had been exposed as magical thinking. When confronted with aggression, the diplomats who had talked boldly of ending war crawled on their bellies and proposed territorial partitions, desperately trying to appease Japan, Germany and Italy.
