towards
international peace.

It is not here proposed to discuss the value of this proposal as a
means of defending the United States. In general, its defensive value
for us would probably be less in the coming decades than for Britain
and her colonies. The British Empire has the greater number of enemies
and is the more easily assailed. Great Britain cannot protect her
colonies without maintaining her naval supremacy not alone in the North
Sea, but in the Pacific as well. As for England, she occupies the same
position towards us in any attack from the European continent that
Belgium occupies towards England. She is an outpost. Our own
continental territory could probably be protected in {235} most cases
by a smaller military and naval effort than would be required of us as
part-defenders of a British-American Union. It is true that these
conditions might change, with the result that we should need Great
Britain's help most urgently. For the time being, however, we are
discussing a British-American alliance or federation not as a possible
protection to us but as an instrument for eliminating war.

In all probability such an instrument would work badly, and to the
non-Anglo-Saxon world would look much like a sword. For the
fundamental defect of such a proposal lies in the fact that it is a
plan for the coercion of other powers by a group of nations, not at all
disinterested. If the British and Americans possessed eighty per cent.
of the military and naval power of the world, they might establish a
peace like that which the Roman Empire was able to establish. It would
be a peace dictated by the strong. In fact, however, there would be no
such superiority of power. Russia, Germany, Austria, Japan united,
would be quite capable of exerting a far superior force. Even if the
force opposed were only equal, the result would be a confrontation of
peoples in all essential respects like the Balance of Power in Europe,
but on a vaster scale. We should not have advanced an inch towards the
goal of a world peace or a world economy.

For the United States to enter into such a federation would be to take
our part in the world wars to come and the intrigues that precede and
accompany such wars. We might be called upon to halt Russia's progress
towards Suez, the Persian Gulf, or the Indian border. We might be
obliged to defend Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We
could not permit any nation to reach a po