A Thought Experiment, the Nation That Disarmed to Prove It Meant Peace

Let us invent a country. It does not exist, which makes it the only country in the world qualified to try the policy we are about to give it. To be plain: this is a thought experiment, a piece of satire. The nation below is imaginary, its leaders are imaginary, and nothing in the fable is a news report or a prediction about any real government. We are following one idea, that disarmament is itself a form of virtue that will be rewarded by the virtue of others, to the place where its logic ends. After the fable comes the part that is not made up: the treaties, dates and resolutions of the 1920s and 1930s that show how closely real history tracked the joke.

The fable of Serenia

Serenia sits on a pleasant coast with good harbors, rich farmland and an enviable amount of what its neighbors would like to own. For three hundred years Serenia has maintained an army and a navy, and for three hundred years a certain kind of Sereni intellectual has found this embarrassing. One spring a new government is elected on a platform of moral clarity. Its slogan is a single word: "Enough."

The Minister of Peace, a thoughtful person with a degree in the study of conflict, makes the case to parliament. Armies, she explains, are the cause of wars. Every war in history had an army in it. Remove the army, and by simple logic you remove the war. This is the kind of reasoning that wins prizes and loses countries. It is like observing that every house fire has a fire truck in attendance and proposing to abolish the fire trucks.

Parliament votes. The army is disbanded on a Tuesday. The rifles are melted and recast as a very large sculpture of a dove, which the Ministry of Culture describes as "a statement." The navy is converted to a fleet of ferries and a floating university. The generals are retrained as consultants on conflict resolution, a field in which, to be fair, they have a great deal of experience of the conflict.

Next comes the diplomacy. Serenia sends every neighboring government a letter. It is a beautiful letter, printed on heavy paper and signed by the entire cabinet. It says that Serenia has laid down its arms, that it wishes nothing but friendship, and that it expects the neighbors to respond in kind. The letter ends with the phrase "we are deeply concerned," a phrase that has never in history stopped anything but has been used on every occasion.

The neighbors respond promptly. One writes back to express its admiration. Another sends a note of congratulations. A third, ruled by a government that has long had its eye on Serenia's harbors, does not write at all. It reads the letter, notes that the army has been turned into a sculpture, and begins to look at its maps with new interest.

Here the experiment arrives at its decisive step. The third neighbor moves a small force across a border province on a Thursday morning. Serenia's government convenes. The Minister of Peace holds a press conference. She says that the invasion is "unacceptable" and "a violation of the spirit of the age." She announces that Serenia will send a stronger letter. The cabinet, to show seriousness, adds a second signature to each page.

The neighbor is not moved by the second signatures. The province falls by the weekend. The sculpture of the dove, perched on the old parade ground, is now the first thing the new garrison sees. The Ministry of Culture issues a statement noting that the sculpture "remains a powerful symbol." It is, in a way, the only part of the national defense that is still operating.

The fable has a moral, and the moral is not that peace is bad. It is that peace is something you have to be able to defend, and that your enemy's decision to leave you alone depends on his calculation, not on your sincerity. The Minister of Peace's mistake was not caring about peace. It was believing that peace is a message that can be sent, when it is a condition that has to be held.

The argument

Let me put the fable's logic in plain steps, because satire works best when the argument underneath it can stand on its own.

1. Armies do not cause aggression; they deter and answer it. The thing that starts a war is a government that decides it will gain by attacking. An army in the hands of the attacked party changes the calculation. Remove it and you have not removed the aggressor's ambition. You have removed the price.
2. Disarmament by one side changes behavior on the other side only if the other side wants peace already. Where it does, you did not need to disarm. Where it does not, the disarmament is a gift.
3. Moral gestures are not strategy. A strongly worded letter is a communication. A strategy is a capability plus the will to use it. The first without the second is an expression of feeling.
4. Treaties bind those who honor them. An agreement to renounce war is a promise from signers who mean it and a decoration for signers who do not.
5. History keeps the receipts. We do not have to guess how this experiment ends, because it was tried.

The Washington Naval Treaty, 1922

The first modern attempt at the Serenia plan was respectable and, within limits, sensible. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and 1922 brought together the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy. The resulting treaty set ratios for capital ships, the big-gun battleships of the day, at 5 for the United States and Britain, 3 for Japan, and about 1.75 each for France and Italy. It ordered ships scrapped, halted construction, and was widely celebrated as a triumph of reason after the slaughter of the First World War.

I will say plainly that this was not a foolish treaty. The cost of a naval race among the great powers was enormous, and a limit on the largest ships had real attractions. Conservatives and liberals both supported it. The point is not that the treaty was wicked. The point is what happened to the principle behind it, which was that restraint on paper would be matched by restraint in practice.

It was not. Treaties of that kind depend on every party honoring the spirit as well as the letter. Japan's government moved through the following decade from cooperation toward a military-dominated expansionism, and it withdrew from the naval limitation system in the mid-1930s. Meanwhile the country that had been the champion of the limitation, America, let the force it was allowed to keep decay below the ceiling the treaty permitted. The one party that was building toward the limit, and then past it, was the party that had decided the limit was an obstacle.

The lesson here is a modest one, and it matters because it is the best case for the other side. Arms limitation is not foolish in itself. It is foolish when one side limits what it builds and the other does not. That is the argument in The INF Treaty Proved Arms Control Works Only When You Hold Cards, and it is the thread this whole story pulls.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928

Now we come to the real-world version of the strongly worded letter, and it deserves to be told straight.

On August 27, 1928, in Paris, fifteen nations signed what the world called the Pact of Paris, known in history by the names of its sponsors, American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. The signers solemnly renounced war "as an instrument of national policy." The Senate ratified it in January 1929 by a vote of 85 to 1. The fifteen original signers included, and I ask you to take a moment with this, Germany, Italy and Japan, and dozens more governments joined later. Kellogg received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929.

The pact had no enforcement clause. It had no army behind it, no sanction in it, no mechanism at all. It was a letter, signed in good faith by some and with a straight face by others, and it contained one of the great unfunded promises of the century.

Then the record began. Japan, a signatory, seized Manchuria in 1931 and installed a puppet state. The American response was the Stimson Doctrine, which declared that the United States would not recognize territory taken by force. A doctrine of non-recognition is a very elegant thing to say and a very small thing to do. Italy, a signatory, invaded Ethiopia in 1935, using aircraft and chemical weapons against an army that in places carried spears. Germany, a signatory, marched into the Rhineland in 1936, absorbed Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, and invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Every one of those powers had put its name to the renunciation of war. The Pact of Paris did not prevent a single one of them.

I do not mean this as a cheap point about naivety. The pact was signed by serious men who had just seen the Western Front. The error was assuming that the horror of the last war would restrain the next aggressor. It did not. In the governments that wanted war, the memory of the last one did not produce restraint. It produced a better plan.

The Oxford Union, 1933

Satire has a hard time competing with this one.

On February 9, 1933, the Oxford Union, the famous debating society, debated the motion "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country." The motion passed, 275 votes to 153. It was a student debate and it should not be mistaken for a national policy, and I want to be careful here, because it has been overread. Historians have argued over how representative it was and how much it mattered. What it was, undeniably, was a signal: that among some of the best-educated young people in the most important democracy in Europe, a refusal to fight was respectable enough to win a vote.

Ten days earlier, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. Germany left the League of Nations that October. Imagine, if you like, a man across the Channel reading the Oxford result in a newspaper. What would he conclude about the staying power of his future opponents? You do not have to be certain what he thought. You only have to ask what any rational aggressor concludes when a free people debates whether it will defend itself and the answer is "perhaps not."

That is the question that deterrence turns on, and I take it up at greater length in Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price. An enemy does not weigh your intentions. He weighs your signals.

How the decade ended

By 1938 the policy that had begun with scrapped battleships ended with the Munich agreement, in which Britain and France handed Czechoslovakia's border regions to Germany in the hope that it would be the last demand. It was not. In March 1939 Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. In September, Poland. By then the nations that had advertised their peacefulness had to rearm at emergency speed, which is the most expensive speed there is.

America paid its own price. The country that would become the arsenal of democracy entered the late 1930s with a small army and a navy limited by treaty and by indifference. The recovery was heroic, and it is worth studying how heroic: How America Built 2,710 Liberty Ships and Why It Could Not Do So Today tells the shipbuilding side. But heroic recovery from a hole you dug yourself is not the same as never having dug it. The same pattern, a long holiday followed by a frantic catch-up, is the subject of Peace Dividends Always Come Due, the 1990s Drawdown Reconsidered.

And the Senate story that preceded all this, the rejection of the Versailles Treaty and the League, shows that the isolationist impulse and the disarmament impulse arrived by different roads at the same place; see The Senate Killed the Versailles Treaty and Conservatives Should Know Why.

The fair objection: but some countries have no army

The best case on the other side is worth a paragraph, and it is a real one. Costa Rica abolished its standing army in 1948, and its constitution of 1949 forbids one. It has been a stable democracy ever since. Iceland has no army either. If a nation can thrive without a military, goes the argument, then Serenia was only too early.

The answer is that neither country stands alone. Costa Rica is a party to the Rio Treaty of 1947, the inter-American mutual defense pact whose weight is, in practice, the power of the hemisphere's largest nation. Iceland is a founding member of NATO and has hosted an American defense agreement since 1951. These are not countries that disarmed in a vacuum. They disarmed under the umbrella of someone else's armed force. That is a legitimate arrangement for a small state, and it says nothing about what happens to a state that is the umbrella. When a country with a continental economy and a global trading position decides to follow the Costa Rican example, who holds the umbrella? That is the question the fable asks, and the facts, in the 1930s and since, do not supply a comforting answer.

Switzerland is the better example, and it points the other way. It is the textbook case of lasting neutrality, and it has maintained a militia in which a large share of male citizens train and keep their equipment, precisely so that no one is tempted. Armed neutrality works. Unarmed neutrality is a request.

What the Founders understood

Washington's line from his first annual address of 1790 is the whole lesson in a sentence: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." The Constitution reflects this. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power "To declare War," "To raise and support Armies" and "To provide and maintain a Navy." The same document that fears a standing army enough to limit its funding to two-year terms did not write "or none at all." The Founders wanted a country able to defend itself, governed by elected representatives who answer for how.

The preamble puts "provide for the common defence" next to "establish Justice" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty." That list is not an accident. Liberty needs a defense, the way a house needs a roof. A government that cannot protect its citizens from foreign force has failed at one of the few jobs everyone agrees it must do. Disarmament as a policy of virtue turns that duty into a personal gesture, with other people's lives as the price of the gesture.

So the next time a politician offers you a bold moral statement in place of a capability, ask the question the Minister of Peace could not answer. If the other side does not honor the letter, then what?

The case in brief

1. Peace is a condition that must be defended, not a message that can be sent, and the fable of Serenia shows what follows when the two are confused.
2. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 was reasonable but depended on every signer keeping its word, and the party that wanted to break it did.
3. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 renounced war and was signed at the start by Germany, Italy and Japan, who then broke it in the 1930s with nothing to stop them.
4. The 1933 Oxford Union vote was only a debate, but it is a clear picture of a signal that aggressors read as weakness, and the decade ended in the largest war in history.
5. Small countries that have no army shelter under someone else's, which is no model for the nation that holds the umbrella.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution on the Constitution page, then ask your representative in writing how many years of funding the Navy's current shipbuilding plan actually secures.