By the middle of the 1920s Britain was a satiated power. As the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, told the Imperial Conference in 1923 ‘We have no further conquests that we desire to make.’1 Its empire covered 13.4 million square miles of the world’s land surface. It had a population of 491 million people, of whom only 72.5 million were of European ethnicity. About two-thirds of its total area, and 80 per cent of its people, lay in an arc of territory around the Indian Ocean stretching from Cape Town via India to Singapore and Sydney. Its land frontiers totalled about 20,000 miles, and it was linked by nearly 80,000 miles of sea routes. Its interests and influence extended still further. Trade with foreign countries beyond the confines of its formal empire represented about half of Britain’s external trade in the early 1920s, and a similar proportion of its overseas investments were held outside the empire.2 The policy objective of every post-war government was to ensure that it continued to enjoy the fruits of its past successes. On 2 November 1918 Premier David Lloyd George had written to his coalition partner and the leader of the Conservative party, Andrew Bonar Law, suggesting that they should lead their parties into the forthcoming general election on a Coalition platform. Britain was on the point of emerging as one of the victor powers in the world war, and a coalition government would be best placed to ensure that Britain reaped the full fruits of the allied victory. ‘My fundamental object’, he wrote, ‘will be to promote the unity and development of the British Empire and of the nations of which it is composed, to preserve for them the position of influence and authority in the conduct of the world’s affairs which they have gained by their sacrifices and efforts in the cause of human liberty and progress, and to bring into being such conditions of living for the inhabitants of the British Isles as will secure plenty and opportunity to all.’3 He and his successors understood that the optimum way to achieve those goals was to work to ensure a peaceful and stable world. As one of Curzon’s successors, Austen Chamberlain, told the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London in 1924, ‘Peace, My Lord, is must and ever be the aim of all our efforts.’4 Both in public and in private Stanley Baldwin, who served as Prime Minister in 1923, from 1925 to 1929 and as the leader of the National Government between 1935–7, was of the same mind. In October 1926, he told the assembled Dominion Premiers that:
It is only in the last resort, and after every means of preserving peace has been exhausted, that we can contemplate the possibility of war. We might perhaps describe our policy in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who speaks of—
‘In the first and fundamental law of Nature which is to seek Peace and follow it.
The second the summe [sic] of right of Nature; which is by all means we can defend ourselves.’5
A year later and in public he was more succinct, writing in an open letter to the Times that, ‘The whole foreign policy of His Majesty’s Government has been inspired by one purpose—the maintenance of peace and the prevention of war.’6 Chamberlain’s Labour party successor, Arthur Henderson, echoed the same sentiments in 1930: ‘More than ever before peace is the first of British interests….’7
This was not merely rhetoric designed for the consumption of a public sickened by the losses of the First World War. It was shared and echoed by the government’s professional advisers. In 1926, in a secret briefing paper they prepared for the recently constituted Chiefs of Staff, Foreign Office officials explained why peace and stability were paramount British interests. British policy was not altruistic. It was based on a realistic appreciation of British interests: ‘The fact is that war and rumours of war, quarrels and friction, in any corner of the world spell loss and harm to British commercial and financial interests. It is for the sake of these interests that we endeavour to pour oil on troubled waters. So manifold and ubiquitous are British trade and British finance that, whatever else may be the outcome of a disturbance to the peace, we shall be the losers.’ But they also understood that their single-minded pursuit of peace put Britain at odds with some other powers, for:
Obviously the ultimate, if not the immediate, aim and object of the foreign policy of countries such as Germany, Hungary and Russia is to recover the territory lost in the war. Italy has her eye on the Aegean Islands and parts of Asia Minor. Japan may well hope someday to absorb Manchuria. We, on the other hand, have no territorial ambitions nor desire for aggrandisement. We have got all we want—perhaps more. Our sole object is to keep what we have and live in peace. Many foreign countries are playing for a definite stake and their policy shaped accordingly. It is not so in our case. To the casual observer our foreign policy may appear to lack consistency and continuity, but both are there. We keep our hands free in order to throw weight into the scale on behalf of peace. The maintenance of the balance of power and the preservation of the status quo have been our guiding lights for many decades and will so continue.8
The focus of this book is on the period between the end of the First World War and the collapse of France and the British army’s withdrawal from Dunkirk in 1940. It will address three questions: what was British grand strategy, how did British policy-makers go about devising it, and why were the outcomes so much more successful in the 1920s than they were in the 1930s?
In December 2009 the then Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, made the startling claim that Britain had ‘lost an institutionalised capacity for, and culture of, strategic thought.’9 A year later the unpopularity of the British military intervention in Iraq, and the apparent lack of public understanding for the reasons why the British government had sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, persuaded the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) to ask the question, ‘Who does British national strategy?’ Their disturbing answer was that no one did it. Neither campaign had been based on any conception of grand strategy, or a close examination of what British national interests were at stake, or how British involvement in those campaigns might impact upon its wider policy in the Middle East.10 The PASC agreed with Stirrup that policy-makers had once known how to think strategically, but they had now forgotten how to do it. During the Cold War, Britain had become the obedient junior partner of the United States, much of its defence efforts was focused on Europe, and the need to think about strategy had been passed to Washington. But, as one of the witnesses who appeared before the PASC remarked, with the end of the Cold War, ‘suddenly we’re being asked to step up to a global role at a time of great financial stress.’11 Four years later matters had apparently not improved. In July 2014 the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford, suggested politicians were ‘“making it up as they go along”’.12
Things had apparently not always been like this. The PASC learnt that in 1902 A. J. Balfour’s Conservative government had established the Committee of Imperial Defence. Its purpose was to bring together ministers, senior officers of the armed forces, and senior civil servants to devise a grand strategy for the British Empire. But what the PASC and its witnesses were not clear about was how it went about its business, what advice it gave ministers, how willing or otherwise they were to accept it, and what were the consequences of the decisions they took. It would be unreasonable to criticize either the committee or the witnesses who appeared before it for failing to explore these issues. A parliamentary select committee is not the best vehicle to conduct a sustained historical examination of the development of British grand strategy over several decades. But they are questions that historians of British grand strategy can and should examine. Stirrup’s insistence that the British had lost the capacity to think strategically implied that it had once possessed it. The CID was established in 1902, but the chronological starting point of this book is 1919. This is partly because the pre-war history of the CID, and the evolution of British strategic policy before 1914, have already been explored at length by a several authors, including the present writer. Little would be gained by rehearsing their detailed findings beyond highlighting one point.13 Before 1914 the CID failed to do what it was established to do. It did not devise and implement a single, coherent, and overarching grand strategy for the British Empire. Confronted by the possibility of a war with Germany, the Admiralty planned to fight it by blockading Germany in the expectation that if they did so the German economy would collapse, and the Kaiser would have to make peace. The role of the army would be to seize islands off the coast of Germany to use as advanced bases for their destroyers and submarines. But the army’s General Staff wanted to land on the continent and operate in cooperation with the northern flank of the French army. At a meeting of the CID in 1909 the Liberal government’s Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, deliberately decided not to decide. Whether or not his government would permit the army to go to France in the event of a war with Germany was a matter of expediency that could only be decided on the day.14 In this instance, as in so many others, politics trumped strategy. Asquith knew that the dispatch of British troops to the continent was something which many Liberal MPs would deplore. He saw no need to stir up a dangerous wasp’s nest when his government was already deeply embroiled in the political controversies surrounding the introduction of the Peoples’ Budget and all the political and constitutional ramifications into which it was leading him. But that failure has not prevented others from continuing to single out the CID as a model worthy of emulation. In his comparison of British strategy-making in the 1930s and the post-Cold War era, one author has claimed much for the success of the CID in the 1930s in preparing Britain for war: ‘Lord Chatfield and Lord Hankey gave Churchill the weapons with which to fight in 1940.’15 But such a claim might cause the sceptical reader to ask whether an institution that had helped to devise policies that had left Britain bereft of major allies in the summer of 1940 and faced by the possibility of invasion, really was a successful model that present-day policy-makers would do well to follow.
Any author writing about grand strategy ought to define their subject. Stirrup had no hesitation in defining it as ‘where, in true Clausewitzian fashion, politics and the military art intersect.’16 The PASC hesitated even to use the phrase ‘grand strategy’, claiming that the phrase was associated with empire, and that in the twenty-first century it might be seen as hubristic. They preferred to employ the term ‘National Strategy’.17 But as the period examined in this book was a time when Britain was a major imperial power, the term ‘grand strategy’ is appropriate because strategy extended far beyond the boundaries of the British nation state. Defining it is, however, problematic, not least because the meaning of the word ‘strategy’ changed over time.18 The most succinct definition of grand strategy, and one that avoids the pitfall of wrenching the concept from its historical context, was provided by the future Field Marshal Lord Wavell. Drafting the final pre-war edition of the army’s basic doctrinal manual, the Field Service Regulations, he stated boldly in 1935 that ‘Grand strategy is the art of applying the whole of the national power in the most effective way towards attaining the national aim.’19 It had not always been so regarded. Until the eve of the First World War the phrase was rarely used, and when it was, it served merely to define the conduct of purely military or naval operations in a particular theatre of war. In 1896 the journalist H. W. Wilson welcomed the Royal Navy’s recent naval manoeuvres because ‘whereas our fleets are at work on minor tactics all the year round; the manoeuvres represent their sole opportunity of studying the grand strategy of a campaign.’20 The first major thinker to argue that strategy went beyond military operations and encompassed the whole resources of the nation was another naval writer, Julian Corbett.21 Addressing an audience of officers at the Royal Naval War College at Portsmouth in 1909, he made a distinction between ‘major strategy’ and ‘minor strategy’. Minor strategy encompassed plans of operations, the selection of objectives and the direction of the forces assigned to them. But major strategy:
…has also to deal with the whole resources of the nation for war. It is a branch of statesmanship which regards the Army and Navy as parts of one force, to be handled together as instruments of war. But it also has to keep in constant touch with the political and diplomatic position of the country (on which depends the effective action of the instrument), and the commercial and financial position (by which the energy for working the instruments is maintained). The friction due to these considerations is inherent in war, and is called the deflection of strategy by politics. It is usually regarded as a disease. It is really a vital factor in every strategical problem. It may be taken as a general rule that no question of major strategy can be decided upon apart from diplomacy, and vice versa.22
The experience of the First World War showed that Corbett was right. Grand strategy encompassed far more than the operational conduct of armies and navies. Every belligerent discovered that it also involved social, economic, and political factors in ways hitherto unimagined. By 1920 Lloyd George recognized that:
One of the principal lessons learnt during the last few years was that war was not a purely naval or military matter, and that it was of the highest importance that the work of the Admiralty and War Office should be closely coordinated with that of the Foreign Office and other Government Departments. Questions such as that of equipping our forces and the maintenance of food supplies were of great importance. There was also the question of sustaining the moral[e] of the people. Practically all the books which had been written since the war by German writers such as Tirpitz, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, pointed out that the German collapse was due to the spirit of the people not being maintained more than to anything else.23
It was the British who did more than anyone else to give a new meaning to the concept of grand strategy. Within the opening weeks of the war the Germans had occupied much of France’s industrial heartland and the war would have been over quickly were it not for the economic support that the British were now able to offer their French allies. Possessing the world’s largest navy they were able to use their control of the world’s sea lanes to impose an increasingly tight economic blockade on the Central Powers, with the result, as Alexander Watson has argued, that ‘the conflict ceased to be a purely military affair. Instead, it became a grinding attritional contest that assailed whole communities and turned civilians into targets.’24 As the Naval Staff explained in December 1918, ‘Nothing can be clearer than the fact that modern war resolves itself into an attempt to throttle the national life. Waged by the whole power of a nation, its ultimate object is to bring pressure on the mass of the enemy’s people, distressing them by every possible means, so as to compel the enemy’s government to submit to terms.’25 Writing in 1921 Sir William Robertson, who had served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the government’s most senior military adviser between 1915 and 1918, explained the consequences of this: ‘It is much too commonly supposed’, he wrote, ‘that war is a matter solely for armies and navies, and that a statesman’s duties are concerned almost entirely with those services. This is as wide apart as the poles from being the truth. War draws into its vortex every element of the national life, nothing escapes it, and upon the statesman devolves the responsibility, once war is declared, for combining the whole diplomatic, political, financial, industrial, naval, and military powers of the nation for the defeat of the enemy.’26
The fact that Robertson included political considerations in his list of the factors that governments had to consider was significant. The war had demonstrated the vital importance of mobilizing and maintaining popular consent for war. As the experience of Tsarist Russia in 1917, and Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918 demonstrated, if the people withdrew their support for their country’s war effort, defeat was inevitable. By the end of the 1930s this was an increasingly pressing concern for the British themselves. ‘The capacity which a country possesses to wage war depends not only upon the strength of the efficiency of the fighting forces’, the members of the Joint Planning Staff told ministers, ‘but also upon the organisation of the whole of the industrial resources and of the available man power of the nation and on the maintenance of civil morale.’27
A second point they emphasized was that Britain could not hope to win a great power war without outside help. That help could come from two sources. Britain would not have emerged amongst the victor powers in 1918 had it fought alone. In was on the winning side because the skill of its diplomatists ensured that it fought alongside France, and Russia (until its collapse), and the USA after its entry into the war in 1917. Simultaneously, it was also able to draw upon the resources of its own empire. As Sir Ernle Chatfield, the First Sea Lord, wrote in 1934:
We have always had, and we cannot get away from, our Imperial responsibility and it is our Imperial position which gives this country its great voice in the world. Unless we are willing to maintain that Imperial position we shall become once more nothing but an insignificant island in the North Sea secure from air attacks and sea attack and should carry as much weight in the councils of the world as Italy or Spain.28
The study of British grand strategy between the world wars must focus, therefore, on the ways in which British policy-makers sought to orchestrate all the elements of power at their disposal so as to achieve their political objectives. Such a study must also emphasize that British grand strategy was not made by military intellectuals like J. F. C. Fuller, or journalists like Basil Liddell Hart, sitting in front of their typewriters. They might try to influence, advise, or criticize those who were responsible for making it. But they were commentators, not actors. British grand strategy was made, as Chapter 2 shows, by a small group of politicians, diplomatists, senior service officers, and senior civil servants. They worked on the basis of often incomplete and contradictory information which they filtered through their own particular preconceptions and against a background of a host of often tangential events and outside pressures that they could not afford to ignore.
A book exploring the development of British grand strategy between the world wars cannot avoid the tangled and contested history of appeasement.29 The story began as a morality play. Hitler planned a war of conquest to dominate Europe, and then the world, and the timorous democracies, led by such ‘Guilty Men’ as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, tried and failed to appease him by shamefully bowing down to his demands.30 In the 1940s and after they were attacked from the right for failing to rearm and from the left for failing to work with the League of Nations to make a reality of collective security. The opening of the British government’s archives in the late 1960s paved the way for a series of revisionist studies. They suggested that appeasement was not based on fear. Rather it represented an acceptance that Germany had genuine grievances that deserved to be assuaged. Furthermore, it was a policy that had widespread public support, and it was underpinned by the fact that policy-makers knew that Britain just did not have the wherewithal to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously. Appeasement was, therefore, a rational response by men who were aware that British power was in long-term decline.31 But this consensus was itself subsequently challenged by several post-revisionist studies suggesting that the policy-makers who chose appeasement could have chosen differently. They might have created a powerful front to designed to deter Hitler by accelerating their own rearmament programme, giving a clear promise of support to France, and looking to the USSR for support.32 What all this suggests is that John Ferris was right when he wrote in 2008 that, ‘many key matters remain inexplicable.’33 The existing literature has become so fragmented that a new synthesis is necessary if we are to understand how those people who made British grand strategy saw their world and why they made the choices that they did.
The evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk may have been a great deliverance, but it also represented a catastrophic failure of strategy. The most common explanation for that catastrophe is exemplified by the first volume of the official history of British grand strategy by N. H. Gibbs. Britain disarmed rapidly after World War One. The ‘Ten Year Rule’ hamstrung the armed services until the early 1930s. The impact of the Great Depression made it impossible for the British to rearm in time. Neville Chamberlain’s government pursued its disastrous efforts to appease the dictators. The focus, and the teleology, are plain. The motif that distinguished British grand strategy throughout the inter-war period was ‘appeasement’, and everything led to the disaster of the summer of 1940.34 The same ideas are echoed in more popular literature. One textbook writer asserted that by 1924 ‘Britain was by now firmly set on a course of appeasement’. Another labelled the whole period from 1919 to 1939 as, ‘The Politics of Appeasement’.35 But opting to see the period between 1919 and 1939 as an era in which appeasement was the keynote of British grand strategy is the product of a tendency to view the whole period through the distorting and narrowing image of Anglo-German relations, and to assume that Germany and its ambitions was almost the only major problem with which British policy-makers had to wrestle.36 That was not so. The British policy-making elite had to maintain the security of an empire that spanned the globe. Germany might at times constitute a threat to its future and stability, but so, according to the estimates of those same policy-makers, might other great powers such as France, Italy, Japan, the USSR, and the USA, as well as a host of regional powers ranging from Afghanistan to Spain. The British did prefer peace to war, and where possible they did try to manage potential threats to their security by negotiations. Overt threats had to be reduced to manageable proportions, preferably by diplomatic negotiations. In any case effective armed forces were essential to give the necessary backing to diplomacy. Governments always had to be able to muster the economic and financial wherewithal to sustain their efforts, while simultaneously they also had to generate the popular support they needed, for without it they could do nothing. What they did not do was consistently prefer appeasement to all other options. Until the second half of the 1930s they were more likely to choose one or a combination of three other policies. They might try to contain potential enemies by working to prevent them from expanding their hostile influences and co-exist with them in a state of mutual antagonism that fell short of actual armed conflict. They might try to deter them from taking actions that were inimical to British interests, or they might try to coerce them into acting in ways that were consistent with those interests. They also customarily sought working relationships with other powers to spread the burden of pursuing whatever policies they chose to pursue if they believed that doing so would not come at an unacceptable cost.
Gibbs’ book also exemplifies two other distorting tendencies in the historiography. He focused on the 1930s at the expense of the 1920s, devoting fewer than one hundred of his 859 pages to the 1920s, and he paid scant attention to the impact that domestic party politics had in determining the choices that policy-makers felt it right to make.37 His was a world that civil servants might have wished for, one in which the electorate could be ignored. But it was a world that politicians knew did not exist. The seventy-fifth anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 brought forth two major studies that did accord a more prominent place to the role of domestic politics in shaping grand strategy. Their authors understood that there was a symbiotic relationship between domestic politics and British external policy. But, in seeking to show how Winston Churchill supplanted Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940, any sustained analysis of grand strategy took a definite second place to explaining who got to the top of the greasy pole of British politics.38 Furthermore, dismissing as they did the 1920s as no more than a sorry prelude to the mistakes and failures of the 1930s does less than justice to what policy-makers actually achieved in the 1920s.39 If the ‘appeasers’ of the 1930s are to be condemned for their failures, they—for in some instances they were the same men—ought to be accorded a measure of recognition for the successes they achieved in the 1920s. But to do that it is essential to understand the magnitude of the problems they faced. In 1919 they were confronted by the same kind of geopolitical revolution that their successors faced at the end of the Cold War. Old enemies, the Kaiser’s Germany and its allies in 1919, and the Soviet Union and its East European satellites in the early 1990s, had suddenly disappeared. But in both cases hopes for a stable and peaceful world proved to be a chimera. Policy-makers then had to recalibrate their thinking to understand and devise solutions to the new problems facing them.40 In reality, far from being merely the precursor to disaster, the decade after 1919 was a period of outstanding British success. The men responsible for constructing and steering British grand strategy played a major role in stabilizing the international system that had been torn apart by the First World War.41
Most British policy-makers would have been surprised to be told in the 1920s that they were committed to a policy of appeasement. In 1919 members of the British delegation at the Paris peace conference were somewhat uneasy at the apparently harsh terms imposed on Germany, and there was some talk amongst them of the need to appease German grievances if Europe was to find lasting peace.42 But thereafter the word was hardly in common currency. A survey of the usage of ‘appease/appeasement’ in the Times indicated that it appeared in print on only 194 occasions between 1919 and 1931 (or on average just fifteen times annually), and on just 260 occasions between 1932–6. It was only between 1937 and 1939 that it passed into more common usage, appearing in print no less than 897 times.43 Its usage by ministers in the Cabinet followed a similar trajectory. Between January 1919 and the formation of the National Government in August 1931 its use was recorded in the Cabinet minutes on just seven occasions, and even then not always in the context of state-to-state relations.44 In March 1922, for example, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Robert Horne, used ‘appease’ in the context of satisfying the demands of members of the Royal Irish Constabulary left disgruntled by their severance terms following the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty.45 Thereafter it appeared in the minutes just four times between September 1931 and May 1937. It was only during Neville Chamberlain’s peacetime premiership between May 1937 and September 1939 that the word was used with any real frequency, appearing in the minutes on no fewer than twenty-seven occasions. If the inter-war period was an age of appeasement, contemporaries, both inside and outside the Cabinet, did not know it. It was not until Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister that it became the dominant motif, and only then can it be used accurately to describe what policy-makers were trying to do.
A proper understanding of British grand strategy between the world wars also requires us to ditch the idea that Britain had entered into an inevitable state of decline in the early twentieth century, a process that accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s, and that as a consequence the overriding goal of British policy-makers after 1919 was to appease potential enemies because ministers and officials believed that Britain was too weak to oppose them.46 Neither of these propositions was true. The notion that British power was in ‘decline’ rests heavily on the assumption that power in the international sphere is synonymous with economic performance, and that British power had ‘declined’ because after 1919 it no longer possessed the economic predominance it had before 1870.47 The reality was different. Economic strength was important. It was necessary to generate the wherewithal both to protect British interests and project British influence beyond its own shores. ‘Without our trade and finance’, a Foreign Office official wrote in 1926, ‘we sink to the level of a third-class Power.’48 But trade, finance, and the wealth they generated were never the be all and end all of the instruments of British power. Power, that is the ability to persuade, deter, or coerce others to act in ways that would further British interests, was the product of far more than just material factors. British policy-makers had first to interpret correctly the world within which Britain and its empire existed. They had to understand the shifting ambitions and capabilities of other states, both near and distant, and identify both potential allies and potential enemies. They then had to decide how to secure the support of the former, and how best to prevent the latter from harming their own interests. Wealth alone was of no account unless it could be transformed into the instruments of power, that is armies, navies, and air forces and effective intelligence gathering and diplomatic services. Policy-makers therefore had to decide to what extent they could call upon their own people to make sacrifices in order to generate and sustain those instruments.
British grand strategy in the inter-war period never consisted of the single-minded pursuit of appeasement. It was merely one of a number of options that policy-makers might choose. They understood that the world was too complex to allow them to pursue a one-size fits all policy that could constitute their grand strategy. Instead, they adopted a mix and match approach in which they employed the instruments they deemed most appropriate. The first of these was diplomatic engagement, that is furthering their own interests through negotiations. This was usually their policy of first-resort, not least because it was likely to be the cheapest and most risk-free. But it was not necessarily synonymous with appeasement as it was practised by British governments in the second half of the 1930s. Defining appeasement as ‘the policy of settling international (or, for that matter, domestic) quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly very dangerous’, is so broad that it robs the word of any real meaning.49 Because it takes no account of the context within which negotiations took place it could too easily be used to describe almost any attempt to settle differences between states by negotiations rather than war. This was something that contemporaries understood. In 1927 Lord Salisbury, the Lord Privy Seal in the Conservative government elected in 1924, told the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, that at an international conference, ‘in coming to an arrangement one must be prepared to give something, the skill consisting in giving relatively unimportant details in order to maintain vital principles.’50 This was just what Austen Chamberlain did when he claimed, ‘No one can be more anxious than I to meet the real need of France and Belgium for security; no one is more conscious than I am of the immense importance of doing so as a stage in the appeasement of European animosities and in our progress to a better state of things.’51 But he knew that he was negotiating from a position of relative strength and that he could, therefore, follow Salisbury’s recipe. He believed that he had identified and could work with groups inside the policy-making elites of the French and German governments who shared at least some of his own aims. His diplomacy also had the backing of sufficient credible hard power to enable him to secure most of his objectives. But, when policy-makers were confronted by more intransigent adversaries in the 1920s, they were equally ready to eschew compromise and negotiations and use hard power either to coerce their opponent by encouraging them to take a particular course of action, or to deter them, and thereby dissuade them from acting in ways inimical to British interests.52 Appeasement, as practised by Austen’s half-brother Neville in the late 1930s, was different. It did entail the surrender of ‘vital principles.’ In this instance the context mattered. Neville opted to appease the fascist dictators because he believed that Britain was too weak to resist their demands, and because he hoped that if he met them more than half-way the door might be opened to some more permanent and wider-ranging settlement.
No matter what grand strategy they opted to use, policy-makers knew that they had to have the support of the British public. Britain was a parliamentary democracy. Political leaders had to have both the will and the ability to persuade the electorate who had put them in power in the first place to follow whatever path they had marked out for them. That might mean that they had to coax them into making sacrifices to maintain the security of Britain and its empire. This latter point was doubly important because all the instruments of power described above had potential drawbacks. Both diplomatic engagement and appeasement depended for their success on there actually being like-minded people in control of the policies of the states with whom the British were trying to engage. If British policy-makers were mistaken about their existence, they were pursuing a policy likely to fail. Deterrence, and even more coercion, required the creation of credible armed forces. But creating them might spark an international arms race, and put Britain on the high road to financial ruin. And if coercion or deterrence spilled over into war fighting, and if that turned out badly, the outcome might be disastrous.
The aims of British policy-makers remained consistent throughout the period examined in this book: the pursuit of peace coupled with security. The next chapter will examine in more detail who made British grand strategy, how they viewed their world, and what were the main instruments of power at their disposal: the skills of their diplomatists, the hard power that could be generated by their armed forces, and the wealth that could be created by their economy. It will also examine how they tried to gather and process knowledge about the aims and capabilities of both their potential friends and their potential opponents, and how their choices were constrained by what they believed the British public would permit them to do. These were the elements that came together to constitute British grand strategy. They resembled a matrix in that each element was inextricably linked to every other element, and any change in one element was liable to have repercussions that would be felt across the whole. Constructing a successful grand strategy was, therefore, always going to be challenging. To analyse how British policy-makers tried to meet these challenges this book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the 1920s. Successive chapters will examine policy-makers’ efforts between 1919 and 1926 to construct a new world order, and the ways in which they managed that order in the second half of the 1920s. The second part will explore how that world order crumbled in the early 1930s, and the largely unsuccessful efforts of policy-makers in the first half of the 1930s to construct a new grand strategy to manage the growing number of threats they faced to the security of Britain and its empire. Finally, the third part will suggest that the tipping point, when British governments abandoned Salisbury’s dictum that they should be willing to surrender on unimportant points of detail but cling to ‘vital principles’, happened in 1937–9. This part will explore the reasons why the Chamberlain government opted to appease rather than contain, deter, or coerce those who sought to challenge British interests, and the consequences of doing so as they had become manifest by the summer of 1940.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press. © David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0001