¿Alianza secreta entre Reino Unido, Francia y EEUU en 1897?

CHAPTER X

THE SIGNIFICANT POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES

ONCE the magnitude of Pan-Germanism dawned on the English and French diplomats, once they became aware of the lengths to which Germany was willing to go, they realized the necessity of strengthening their position, and therefore made overtures to the United States, which resulted, probably before the summer of the year 1897, in an understanding between the three countries. There seems to be no doubt whatever that no papers of any sort were signed, and that no pledges were given which circumstances would not justify any one of the contracting parties in denying or possibly repudiating. Nevertheless, an understanding was reached that in case of a war begun by Germany or Austria for the purpose of executing Pan-Germanism, the United States would promptly declare in favor of England and France and would do her utmost to assist them. The mere fact that no open acknowledgment of this agreement was then made need not lessen its importance and significance. The alliance, for it was nothing less, was based upon infinitely firmer ground than written words and sheets of parchment, than the promises of individuals at that moment in office in any one of the three countries; it found its efficient cause as well as the efficient reason for its continuance in the situation, geographical, economic, and political, of the contracting nations which made such an agreement mutually advantageous to them all. So long as this situation remains unchanged, there is little likelihood that the agreement will be altered, and there is no possibility whatever of its entire rejection by one of the three parties, least of all by the United States.

The United States occupies a strategic position defensively strong, but offensively weak. She is beyond question invulnerable to the assaults of foreign fleets and armies. To be sure, her seacoast is vast in extent and for the most part unprotected. It has been truly pointed out that the Japanese might successfully land an army upon the Pacific Coast, or the Germans land an army in New York or Boston practically without opposition. Sed cui bono? The strategical and geographical conditions of the country on either coast are such that a foreign army would occupy the ground it stood on and no more. The British discovered in the Revolutionary War that the occupation of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia put them no nearer the military possession of the continent than they were before, and that marching through provinces was not subduing them. However seriously the capture of New York might cripple our commercial and railway interests, the difficulty, even at its worst, could be easily overcome by shifting the centre of business for the time being to Chicago, and the possession of New York would certainly not permit a foreign army to conquer the country, even if it were possible for any nation to maintain an army so far from its real base of supplies in Europe. The possibility of invasion is made of no consequence by the simple fact that no foreign nation possesses any inducement for attempting so eminently hazardous an enterprise. The United States possesses literally nothing which any foreign nation wants that force would be necessary to obtain, while, by making war upon the United States, she would certainly expose herself to annihilation at the hands of her enemies in Europe, who have patiently waited for decades in the hope that some one of them would commit so capital a blunder. But this very invulnerability of the United States prevents her from becoming a dominant or even an important factor in European politics. If European nations cannot menace her with armed reprisal or with wars for conquest, she is equally incapable of menacing them. The fact, which has been from her own standpoint heretofore an unmixed blessing, which has allowed her people to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, becomes her greatest weakness, once she is filled with an ambition to play a part in the affairs of the world.

Unpalatable as the fact may be, the international situation, the close balance of power between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente rather than the position of the United States has made her a factor in international politics. Indeed, if we would be truly accurate, we must admit that the inter-relation of the various parts of the European situation, more even than its delicate balance, makes the United States a factor; for the complexity of the problems of no one group of states, whether in Europe, in the Middle East, or in the Far East, could possibly allow the United States to play a prominent part. In each, the natural antipathies counteract each other. Only the fact that every nation is anxious to maintain or win power or wealth in Europe and Africa and Asia makes the United States of any value to any of them. Indeed, it is only as European questions become themselves factors in the larger problems of India, jovenlandéscco, and the Mediterranean that they can concern the United States at all. As soon as European politics became world politics and Asiatic and African problems became European, the United States began to be a factor in their solution. She has, to be sure, no vital stake in any one of these fields. She cannot, even if she would, risk in war the same stake European nations do, her independence; the Atlantic on the one side, the Pacific on the other, defend her more completely than could fleets and coalitions. Nothing short of the creation of world politics by other nations could make the position of the United States of consequence at all. The most vital fact, however, about the European situation is that no nation possesses the same natural allies in all parts of the world. England and France are one in opposing the extension of German authority in Europe; but nothing short of their extreme danger in the Mediterranean at the time of the Crimean War and the perils to which they have been exposed in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War has buried the enmity resulting from deadly strife in America and, especially, in India. Russia is the firm ally of both England and France in Europe; she is their deadliest foe in the Black Sea, in Persia, India, and China; yet, to oppose Germany, we see Russia and England amicably enough uniting in the Near East. Germany must secure French and English aid to defend herself permanently against Russia on the east, but finds her natural allies against Russia her greatest competitors in trade, and the most determined opponents to her expansion on the west. Nevertheless, at the very moment that we find Germany and England ready to spring at each other's throats in Europe, we see them guarding the railway to Pekin together and acting in concert about the Chinese loans.

The variety of the interests of these nations makes it impossible for them permanently or entirely to trust or distrust each other. England, who needs Russia's aid in Europe in the Near East, cannot act too determinedly in opposition to Russian advance in Afghanistan and Manchuria. Germany, whose quarrels with Hapsburg and the Pope fill the history of the Middle Ages, must have their assistance to protect herself in Europe. In all this the United States has unquestionably no part. Not her strategic position, not her military strength, but her economic position makes her an ally particularly indispensable to England and France. Not their economic position but her desire for colonies, her ambition to play a part in the politics of the world, makes an alliance with England and France indispensable to the United States. But she can enter world politics only with the consent of European nations.

The economic position of the United States in the modern world is commanding. Her area is so vast and its productivity so great, her natural resources so nearly unlimited and so great in variety, that scarcely a country in the world, one had almost said no continent in the world, can hope to rival her. While her population is not yet numerous enough to make her dangerous, it is none the less amply sufficient to render her in potential military strength one of the greatest of civilized countries. She possesses, in fact, precisely what England and France lack --- almost inexhaustible natural resources; arable land almost without limit; food sufficient to feed all Europe; great deposits of gold, copper, iron, silver, coal; great supplies of cotton sufficient for the Lancashire cotton mills; in short, she possesses the very resources needed to make the economic position of England and France fairly impregnable. Allied with her, they could not be starved into submission nor bankrupted by the lack of materials to keep their looms running. In addition, she possesses the second greatest steel manufactory in the world, which owns the patents and secret processes upon which Bessemer steel depends, a product surpassed for war materials only by the Krupp steel. The width of the Atlantic effectively prevents any interference by European Powers with the continuance in time of war of her agricultural and industrial activities. Whatever happens in Europe, she can continue to produce the raw materials and finished products they need, and, what is more important, she will furnish them in time of war a huge market for the sale of such manufactured goods as they can continue to make.

The United States, furthermore, is the third financial power in the world. Not only is her wealth vast, not only is her surplus capital considerable, but the organization of business has, most fortunately from the point of view of international politics, concentrated the control of the available capital for investment in the hands of comparatively few men. The trusts, the banks, and the insurance companies have made available for investment huge sums, only less in size than those controlled in London and Paris. It is highly essential that Germany should not be allowed to establish relations with any such capital. It would provide her with precisely that financial backing which she needs. At all costs the United States and Germany must be kept apart. England, too, is anxious to turn this capital into her own colonies, and is willing and anxious to invest her capital in the United States, for both would gain from this mutual dependence, and each would furnish the other fields for investment on whose reliability they could both depend. The English are naturally anxious to shift their investments from Germany to some country where they will not be exposed to destruction by war or to confiscation based upon war as an excuse.

Fortunately for England and France, the United States, whose economic assistance is positively imperative for them, finds their assistance equally imperative. In the first place, the United States depends upon the English merchant marine to carry her huge volume of exports, and, should she not be able to use it, would suffer seriously, even if the inability to export continued only a few weeks. Again, a market as certain and as large as that of England and France for her raw materials and food is absolutely essential to her, and the outbreak of a war, which might close those markets to her, would precipitate unquestionably a financial crisis, whose results could not fail to equal in destructiveness the effect upon private individuals of a great war. The United States has come to realize, as have other nations, that there are many ways in which a modern country can be forced to suffer which are as deadly and, in many cases, more deadly than invasion. Furthermore, she needs a market in England and France for her own manufactured goods, and has grown to depend upon receiving from them in return many varieties of manufactured goods. She simply cannot afford to take any chances of losing her markets in those two countries, nor has she ceased to hope for privileges of some sort in the English and French dependencies, which other nations do not have, and which, should worst come to worst, she could undoubtedly obtain from them as the price of her continued assistance. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the prosperity of the United States so much depends upon the preservation of her relations with England and France that in time of war only an alliance with them would save her from almost certain bankruptcy.

England and France, however, expect to retain the alliance by permitting her to fulfill her ambitions for control of the Gulf of Mexico. Ever since the days when Louisiana was first purchased, the men of the Mississippi Valley have dreamed of the extension of the sway of the United States over Central America and the Gulf. Aaron Burr's expedition aimed probably at the creation of an empire out of the Mississippi Valley and Mexico. The Mexican War was certainly fought in the expectation that valuable territory in the Gulf might be acquired into which slaves might profitably be carried. When the war failed, a filibustering expedition led by Walker, with connivance of the authorities at Washington, was intended to secure for the United States possession of one or more of the Central American countries. There was also the scheme, in whose existence the North believed previous to the war, for the conquest of the whole Gulf of Mexico and the creation there of a slaveocracy whose wealth and independence could easily be assured by the production of cotton, sugar, and tobacco. All these schemes met a determined resistance and interference from England and France which invariably proved decisive. Nor could the United States hope to take possession of lands separated from her coast by water, with which she could communicate only by sea, so long as the English fleet controlled the seas and she herself possessed no fleet at all. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was intended to prevent the acquisition of influence in Central America by the United States without England's consent, and mention was specifically made of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. The interference of Germany in Venezuela, the evident fact that the concentration of the English fleet in the Channel would make it impossible to keep a sizable fleet in the Gulf of Mexico, the absolute necessity from many points of view of preventing the acquisition by Germany of land in South or Central America, removed the objections England and France had hitherto possessed to the extension of the influence of the United States in the Western hemisphere.

There was, furthermore, a likelihood that Germany would in some way attempt the annexation of the oldest of European colonial empires, held at this time by one of the weakest and most decadent of European states. The Spanish colonies in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Philippine Islands possessed not only commercial but strategic importance. The wealth of Cuba and Porto Rico was proverbial, the products of the Philippines considerable, and, though not altogether suitable for colonization, they would afford Germany undeniable opportunity for expansion. Moreover, Cuba in the hands of Germany would rob Jamaica of all naval importance and might actually permit Germany to overrun the whole Gulf. The Philippines as a matter of fact controlled one whole side of the China Sea and contained valuable seaports, where a naval base could be established, safe from assault by the Chinese or European nations. The islands were thus ideally fitted to become Germany's base of operations in the Far East. To allow such places to fall into her hands might entail consequences whose far-reaching effect no statesman could possibly imagine. Nor was there the slightest guarantee that by an unprovoked assault Germany would not attempt to take possession. At the same time, the general European situation and the position of Spain in the Mediterranean made it impossible for England or France to undertake a war with her, without setting fire to a train of circumstances whose eventual results might be even more fatal than those they were attempting to prevent. The colonial aspirations of the United States, her anxiety to share in the opening of China to European enterprise, her traditional hope of securing control of Cuba, all pointed to her as the natural guardian of the interests of the coalition in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Far East. Whether or not it is true, as some assert, --- a view to which certain events lend probability, --- that the Spanish-American War was created in order to permit the United States to take possession of Spain's colonial dominion, certainly such was the result of that war. To be sure, the relations between Spain and the United States were already strained; popular sentiment was aroused by the conditions in Cuba, and, if the war was "created," it was not a difficult task. Certainly, Germany and her allies suspected that such was the purpose of the war, and attempted to secure a general agreement in Europe to interfere in Spain's favor. England, however, whether because she saw its advantage now the war was in existence, or because she had caused it to be begun, decisively vetoed the suggestion of interference, and her control of the sea made action without her cooperation impossible.

The results of the war were all that could have been hoped for. The Triple Entente saw the Gulf of Mexico fall into friendly hands and the establishment in the Far East of a friendly power in the strategic point of greatest consequence. From Germany's point of view, the results of the alliance between England, France, and the United States were exceedingly discouraging, and the aftermath of the war proved even more decisive than the war itself. The United States promptly undertook the peaceful penetration of Mexico and Central America. Large loans were made to the governments and secured by a lien on the revenues; American capital rushed thither, and the number of enterprises financed or owned by Americans increased so rapidly that at the present day the United States, or its citizens, owns practically everything of importance in the Gulf, and is waiting only for a favorable opportunity to foreclose its mortgages. The possibility of German interference has been reduced to nothing. The United States also proceeded, not improbably by agreement, to create a fleet large enough to maintain control of the Gulf of Mexico and, what was of more consequence, to maintain control of the Atlantic highway between Europe and America in case of European war. The English had come to realize the improbability that enough of their fleet could be spared to patrol the seas in the event of an attack upon their forces in the Channel or in the Mediterranean. Above all, the United States undertook to create in the Philippines a naval base of sufficient size and importance to permit the maintenance there of a fleet large enough to be a factor in the Pacific. England and France obviously could not spare enough ships to maintain a fleet in the Far East; Japan would not tolerate the presence of a Russian fleet in those waters; the United States was the only member of the coalition who could, consistent with her own safety or that of other nations, undertake the creation and maintenance of such a fleet in the Far East. She became, in fact, the offensive arm of the coalition in the Pacific, and promptly strengthened her position by annexing the islands between her shores and Asia available for settlement or coaling-stations. She must not only prepare the way for the further extension of the coalition's power in the Far East, but she must prevent the acquisition by Germany of colonies, whose location or development would interfere with the control of Eastern commerce by herself and her allies.

One more thing the United States undertook, which England and France had hitherto denied her permission to do, the digging of the Panama Canal. The canal would furnish the United States with a new waterway to the East, shorter than the route she had hitherto been forced to employ via Suez, and with a route which would literally put New York in actual number of miles nearer China, Australia, and New Zealand than was London. Thus to admit the United States to the trade of the Far East by a waterway exclusively in its control, England had not hitherto considered expedient. The creation of Pan-Germanism, the antiestéticar of an attack on the English route through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, the possibility of the closing of that route temporarily or permanently by some naval disaster, reconciled England to the creation of the Panama Canal, because she saw in that waterway a new military road which she could use to her own possessions in the Far East, and which the Atlantic Ocean would effectually keep out of the hands of Germany. To be sure, it would not be as short a road to India as that through the Mediterranean and Suez; but so far as Australia and New Zealand were concerned it would not be longer; and all such objections inevitably were reduced to insignificance by its incomparable safety, so long as the English fleet could hold the seas at all. So long as the United States and England combined could maintain control of the Gulf of Mexico and of the islands in the Pacific, so long would this waterway be absolutely safe. If, then, Germany should succeed in executing the whole of her stupendous plan, England and her allies might still be able by means of the Panama Canal to contest with her the possession of the trade of the East. Especially would this be true if the United States should be able to maintain herself in the Philippines. Nor have the English lost sight of the incomparable importance of the Philippines for keeping Germany out of the Celebes. If Germany should move upon Holland, the coalition expects to take possession of the Celebes without further ceremony, and will then hold a position controlling the trade routes leading from India to China and Japan and to Europe in general, which would be as nearly impregnable as anything of the kind ever yet known in the world. The issues, therefore, with which the United States is actively concerned are vast; the importance of her adhesion to the side of England and France cannot be overestimated, and her possible part in the movements of the next two decades is certainly one which ought to satisfy the most ambitious. She holds in the East already a position second only to that of England, and should the European nations succeed in their plans of final interference in China, the United States, as the offensive arm of the coalition, might be called upon for prompt action of the most aggressive sort.

At the same time, after all has been said, it must be admitted that the United States is as yet only a potential factor in the international situation. Unless further aggression should be attempted in the Orient, or it should become necessary or expedient to change the nominal control over Mexico and Central America to actual possession, the United States will take no important share in hostilities, but will confine her efforts to the exceedingly important work, both to her allies and to herself, of keeping open the Atlantic highway and of protecting the merchant marine of England. Nor need one underestimate the importance of this task, for, should she fail to do her share, destruction might result for all concerned.

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HarryWashello dijo:

¡Recordad las Carolinas!

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De Elea dijo:

¿1897? …..para terminar de enredar la ecuación un poco de especulación:

..:: Ecos de Mantua ::.. Cuando Bismarck Quiso Comprar a Cuba

La diplomacia bismarckiana ante la cuestión cubana, 1868-1874 - Luis Alvarez Gutiérrez - Google Libros

poco después moría Prim.

---------- Post added 26-feb-2014 at 22:25 ----------

Y ahora la verdadera polémica ¿hasta que punto no fue la guerra hispano-norteamericana una farsa (traición) a primera sangre (Montojo y Cervera) para retirarse (vender o similar) de Cuba…….. Y muere Canovas

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