Collective Security in the Pacific

THE JAPANESE ATrACK on Pearl Harbor ended a period during which the United States had attempted to guarantee its security by various means short of war. Prominent among these were: 1. Disarmament. 2. International agreements to refrain from war. 3. A policy of attempting to guarantee neutrality through legislative act. 4. A policy of giving material assistance to nations engaged in war and whose victory would be conducive to the security of the United States. Neither together nor separately did these policies succeed in preventing war from breaking out in Asia and Europe, or in preventing the United States from being drawn into the conflict. As a result, she abandoned disarmament for rearmament. In addition she backed up her lend-lease policy by providing armed escorts for her shipments, and made lend-lease completely and openly one-sided by embargoes on trade with Japan. She thus virtually nullified her previous policy of neutrality, and abandoned all previous effort to refrain from war as a means of guaranteeing national security. Taken together, disarmament and neutrality represented the American wish for peace in the absolute, that is, peace with a minimum of power implementation. A desire for peace on such terms was understandable after the last war, but this should have been less the case with the United States than with others of the major combatants, as her losses in the war had been proportionately smaller than theirs. As we look backward, however, the real error seems to have been in mistakenly identifying peace with security, or rather, in mistaking peace for security. One of the causes for this lay perhaps in the fact that the United States entered the last war only after a somewhat highly dramatized effort to maintain a largely fictitious neutrality. This seemingly left her with the impression that the reason she entered the war was because of some

Collective security · Computer security · International relations · Political science · Politics · Computer Science · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Maritime Security and History · Military History and Strategy