The Washington Conference 100 Years Later: Averting Great-Power Conflict in Asia

A hundred years ago, Washington was the setting for a major international conference called to arrest an emerging competition in naval weaponry and to settle outstanding disputes threatening the peace of Asia. The Washington Conference began with high drama on Saturday, November 12, 1921. President Warren G. Harding opened the negotiations at Memorial Continental Hall near the White House with a welcome address to the conference delegates and the large audience of onlookers that included members of Congress, the well-connected Washington elite, and journalists from around the world. His short, solemn speech called for an end to the competition underway in naval armaments. The celebrated author H.G. Wells, who covered the conference as a journalist, wrote that the president “is a very big, fine-looking man and his voice is a wonderful instrument.” The American public, Wells told his readers, viewed Harding as “a sincerely modest man, determined to do the best that is in him and at once appalled and inspired by the world situation in which he finds himself among the most prominent figures.” In his opening speech, Harding declared that the United States, “Our hundred millions frankly want less of armament and none of war.” The president’s remarks received loud applause from the audience, with William Jennings Bryan, three times a candidate for president and former secretary of state, leading the cheering from the gallery.

America’s surprise diplomatic salvo took the delegates by surprise and gave Hughes the initiative in negotiations. Arthur Balfour, the head of the British delegation, called the American proposals “bold and statesmanlike.” The American initiative spurred the negotiators to achieve what had seemed impossible: an arms control agreement to curtail the naval construction planned or underway by Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. To a war-weary world, suffering from a sharp postwar economic downturn and feeling the aftershocks of the global flu pandemic, the agreement hammered out in Washington heralded a triumph of diplomacy and enlightened statecraft.

This outcome of the Washington Conference was hardly inevitable. Going into the conference, a three-sided arms race in capital ships, involving Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, threatened a return to great power competition soon after the conclusion of the First World War. The war transformed international relations. For the United States, the fighting showed that, in a dangerous world of clashing great powers, an effective foreign policy demanded an increase in the armed forces. To prepare for this new age of heightened dangers, President Woodrow Wilson called for a huge buildup of American naval power, to acquire (in his words) “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.” At the center of the American naval buildup was a new generation of capital ships, more powerful than any that existed in the world’s navies.

Despite the end of the fighting, Wilson refused to curtail the American naval buildup. Quite the reverse, the president continued to advocate a large buildup of American naval power, including new capital ships. To Wilson, the United States faced a stark choice in the postwar world: either join the League of Nations or live in a harsh world of escalating great power competition that would lead to another war. The alternative to joining the League of Nations was an American national security state. In Wilson’s view, an America that withdrew into isolation, showing restraint in providing security commitments to other countries, would need to arm itself in preparation for a return to great power competition and the violent breakdown of international order. Only when the United States and the other great powers joined the League would it be possible to reduce armaments. Wilson thus insisted on building up the navy so long as the United States did not join the League, and the naval buildup conceived as a wartime contingency continued despite the war’s end.

Nor did the change of administrations in the United States, with the election of Harding as president, result in a reduction in the naval buildup. As a candidate, president-elect, and during his first hundred days in office, Harding advocated completing the American warship construction plan put in place by his predecessor. In December 1920, upon returning from a Caribbean vacation, the sun-tanned President-elect called for “a big navy and a big merchant marine.” In Harding’s view, the United States “must be a maritime people, since no nation has ever written a complete page in history that has not taken a prominent place in maritime affairs. ... The navy is the first line of American defense. No nation can hope to be eminent in commerce in these times without a naval institution adequate to protect those rights.” The future economic well-being of the United States as a rising trading state and financial center appeared intertwined with its rise as a naval power.

Once in office, Harding found that his naval ambitions faced considerable domestic political opposition. Within Congress and across the country, voices emerged against continuing the wartime buildup of the navy. The progressive maverick Republican Senator William Borah of Idaho led the opposition in Congress. Today, Borah is best known for his staunch resistance to Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to obtain Senate ratification of the Versailles Treaty and American entry into the League of Nations. Borah refused to accept Wilson’s view that rejection of the League entailed an increase in armaments. He wanted to show that the opposite was the case. He introduced a Congressional resolution calling on the president to invite Britain and Japan to a conference that “shall be charged with the duty of promptly entering into an understanding or agreement by which the naval expenditures and building programs ... shall be substantially reduced.” His resolution captured the public’s mood, and Congress acknowledged popular opinion by voting overwhelmingly to adopt it. The action of the Congress forced Harding’s hand, and invitations were duly sent to attend a conference in Washington to negotiate limits on naval construction.

In preparations for the conference, Harding sought a diplomatic plan of action to disarm domestic political critics as well foreign governments. The president made clear the connection between internal and external politics to the team of policymakers drawing up the American negotiating proposal. The powerful head of the Senate foreign relations committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, dined with the president at the White House, where the discussion revolved around the upcoming arms control conference. Lodge found that President Harding felt “very strongly about having our six battle cruisers built.” But the President “also felt the great necessity ... of making some offer at the very outset as to a general limitation of armaments which would satisfy the desires of the country and put the question straight to the other Powers.” Lodge did “not for a moment believe that either Japan or England will accept it [the American proposal], but if they do not accept it we shall have made our position clear and will lay the responsibility [for failure] where it will belong,—with them.” A month before the opening the conference, Harding was even blunter in an off-the-record interview with a friendly journalist: “We’ll talk sweetly and patiently to them [the other major naval powers] at first; but if they don’t agree then we’ll say ‘God damn you, if it’s a race, then the United States is going to go to it.’” The United States—the country that could best afford an arms race—would call for a stop in the competition. Possessing the world’s strongest economy, the United States held the whip hand in the naval competition. If Britain and Japan refused to settle, the president would regain the initiative in domestic politics to push the naval buildup through Congress.

Harding entrusted to Secretary of State Hughes the lead in devising an ambitious arms control plan. The President’s trust was not misplaced. Before becoming secretary of state, Hughes had a distinguished career of public service. He worked as a successful lawyer in New York before being elected the state’s governor, served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court, and stood as the Republican party’s candidate for President in 1916, losing in a close race to Woodrow Wilson. Hughes dedicated himself to the task of working up the American negotiating position and refused to let the effort get derailed by opposition from within the government. Behind Hughes stood the authority of the President. Working with a small group of trusted and experienced advisors, Hughes kept secret the American plan that he would unveil at the conference’s opening. Hughes’ work paid off in achieving Harding’s intent of gaining the diplomatic initiative for the United States in the negotiations.

In Britain, domestic political motivations, as well as strategic calculations, brought the British government to accept the American invitation to attend a conference in Washington. At the war’s end, Britain’s navy was the strongest in the world, and the victory over Germany owed much to British sea power. While Britain had emerged triumphant in the war with Germany, the victory had come at a hideous cost. America’s naval buildup challenged Britain’s hard-won gains. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George refused to renounce Britain’s standing as the world’s leading naval power. In common with most Britons of that era, he considered it as a strategic axiom that Britain’s unique defense requirements called for a navy stronger than any other. Britain’s global security and commercial interests, the long sea lines of communication that linked together the empire’s far-flung territories, and the heavy dependence of the home islands on imports of foodstuffs and raw materials animated this demand for naval superiority. Lloyd George also had an emotional commitment to the tradition of Britannia ruling the waves. He “would pawn his shirt rather than allow America to dominate the seas.” Indeed, Harding’s speech trumpeting a coming era of American naval dominance so infuriated Lloyd George that “he felt like turning the Admiralty on to build all the capital ships they could as fast as possible in order to go for the Yanks.”

Britain’s admirals also did not want to lose the position of naval leadership that the British navy had won by dint of hard fighting during the just-concluded war. Germany’s naval offensives during the war underscored Britain’s vulnerability to a disruption of overseas supply chains and support from the empire. Having defeated the German naval threat, Britain’s admirals were determined to recapitalize the British battle fleet and meet head-on the American challenge by building the latest generation of capital ships. Admiral David Beatty, the uniformed head of the Navy as Britain’s First Sea Lord, vowed never to surrender “supremacy of the sea to America.” He would “resign rather than go down to posterity as the First Sea Lord in office at the time of such a shameful decision.”

The harsh light of the postwar world, however, dampened British enthusiasm for a naval competition with the United States. Despite Lloyd George’s attachment to the creed of British superiority at sea, he feared that a new competition in the building of capital ships might presage another conflict, this time with the United States, just as the naval contest had preceded the war with Germany. In December 1920, Lloyd George held high-level discussions within the British government on how to meet the American naval challenge. In these discussions, Lloyd George asserted that the British government “had to consider what was, in his opinion, about the most important question that had ever been submitted to them—the most important and the most difficult.” In a naval competition with the United States, Lloyd George feared that Britain “should be up against the greatest resources in the world. We should be up against a growing and intensely virile population.” If the government decided “Britain must enter into competition with the United States in naval shipbuilding, it would be the biggest decision they had taken since 1914, and, conceivably greater than that taken in 1914 [for war with Germany].” Britain’s prime minister also considered that an arms race might induce the United States to hurt the British economy. The United States might take punitive steps by demanding exacting terms in the repayment of the British war debt. The discussions among Britain’s leaders echoed Lloyd George’s alarming assessment of the high stakes at risk in the contest for naval mastery. Britain’s political leaders confronted the harsh reality that, if they failed to reach an arms control agreement, “we may see ourselves outdistanced by the American [warship construction] programme unless we are prepared to incur overwhelming expenditure.”

A severe downturn in the British economy added to the urgency of avoiding a naval competition with the United States. Britain’s gross domestic product slumped by 9.7 percent in 1921, a drop in the British economy not matched until almost a hundred years later in 2020. In these hard times, the government came under immense political pressure to curb spending, according to the economic rostrums of the day. Cutting government spending was deemed essential to bring about an economic recovery and to forestall social unrest.

Even major conservative media outlets, which usually supported naval spending, demanded deep cuts in the navy’s budget as the remedy for restoring the country’s economic health, rather than building warships. The press barons, the brothers Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere, used their newspapers to denounce wasteful government spending, including expenditure on warship construction. Northcliffe asked why “should the nations waste thousands of millions on probably useless battleships, about the future utility of which the best experts are now violently divided, even if anybody wanted to fight—which, I firmly believe, nobody does.” Instead of spending money on warships, he suggested, “every million we can spare is needed for the works of real progress, for scientific research, for the cure of cancer, consumption, syphilis and the other real and deadly enemies of the United States, Great Britain and Japan.”

Lord Rothermere, in the mass-circulation Sunday Pictorial, echoed his brother’s call for economy in government spending. Rothermere demanded an end to the government’s “squandermania.” He insisted that the stakes for Britain amounted to nothing less than “solvency or downfall.” He attacked “the folly of the big battleship.” He asserted that “unless this almost bankrupt nation wakes up we may find ourselves irrevocably committed to the building of another fleet of obsolete marine monsters.”

While the barbs of hostile press barons often infuriated Lloyd George, he agreed with them on the matter of curbing the navy’s ambitions to build a new generation of capital ships. Lloyd George believed that the age of the capital ship was over. He did not trust the recommendations of the naval experts. In his view, the technology for fighting at sea was changing rapidly. He believed: “Naval construction was in a fluid state. We must ascertain how best we can spend our money.” To enforce spending cuts and rein in the admirals’ plans for a naval buildup, the prime minister even went so far as to offer Lord Rothermere, one of the government’s harshest media critics, the post of First Lord of the Admiralty, the civilian head of the navy. When Rothermere turned him down, Lloyd George turned to Lord Lee of Fareham to head up the navy. The prime minister provided Lee with clear marching orders: the naval spending “must be cut down and that, if necessary, ‘the Sea Lords must be told to go to hell’.”

Lloyd George thus welcomed negotiations to prevent a naval arms competition between Britain and the United States when the invitation for talks came from Harding. At the conference, the detailed proposal put forward by Hughes met with the quick approval of Lloyd George and the British government. The reaction of Winston Churchill, then serving in the government, captures the relief felt by British leaders when hearing Hughes' dramatic proposal. Churchill told the American ambassador: “He could not find words to express his rejoicing as an Englishman and his pride in his American ancestry. His hat was not only off but as high as he could throw it.” In the American proposal, Britain’s political leaders avoided the nightmare of an expensive competition in capital ships.

The American naval buildup was also viewed as a security threat by the leaders of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Japan’s dominant position in East Asia, in the view of the Japanese naval strategic planners, rested on the ability of the navy to deter or (if necessary) to defeat any American offensive across the Pacific. To meet the American challenge, the Japanese navy demanded a major increase in warship construction. They wanted to acquire a fleet of eight battleships and eight battlecruisers as powerful as those under construction in the United States. In the minds of Japanese naval officers, these sixteen modern capital ships would act as a deterrent force, shielding Japan’s empire from the United States. By deterring the United States from taking aggressive action across the Pacific, Japan could then pursue a forward foreign policy on the Asian mainland in confronting the rising challenge of Chinese nationalism and the threat from the newly established Soviet state. Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, Japan’s navy minister, won the Japanese government’s approval for warship construction to counter the United States.

The huge cost of the Japanese warship acquisition plan, however, soon tempered the enthusiasm of Japan’s leaders for competing against the United States. To meet the navy’s demands, Japan’s naval budget skyrocketed, increasing more than fivefold from ¥84,974,783 in 1915 to ¥483,590,000 in 1921. Even accounting for wartime inflation, this growth in the navy’s budget was extraordinary. Spending on the navy amounted to almost a third of Japan’s national budget. This spending bill, too, came at a time when Japan, like Britain and the United States, confronted a severe downturn in the economy. It is estimated that the Japanese economy contracted by more than 8 percent during 1921. A deterioration in Japan’s international balance of payments threatened the country’s financial system, and the government looked for support in American loans from Wall Street. Admiral Katō, although a champion of the navy’s buildup, understood that the expense of competing against the United States carried a higher price tag than what Japan could afford. The admiral lamented that Japan’s “national wealth has simply not increased in proportion to naval expenditure, and we cannot proceed at the current pace. I am at my wit’s end.”

Harding’s call for a conference in Washington provided Japan with an opportunity to gain the security at sea that they sought without having to go to the great expense of building a new generation of capital ships. At the beginning of the conference, the Japanese delegates declared: “Japan desires to cooperate with other powers to escape the burden of defense that stifles our industry. On arms reductions, which is a just policy that will eliminate [great power] misunderstanding of Japan and guarantee our security.” By stopping the American naval construction in negotiations, Japan would gain a strategic edge. In negotiations, Katō maintained: “Avoidance of war with America through diplomatic means constitutes the essence of national defense.” If only future Japanese naval and military leaders had held to Katō’s wise counsel, then Japan and the United States would have avoided the clash of arms a generation later.

The government of Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s finance minister who became prime minister after an ultranationalist assassinated Hara Takashi, welcomed the negotiated settlement achieved in Washington. Takahashi advocated a foreign policy of collaboration with Britain and the United States, and for Japan to exercise restraint in its dealings with China. Arms control would enable him to reduce the budget of the armed services, thus freeing up resources for what he considered more productive spending on infrastructure improvements and education. “Because of the economic situation,” Takahashi maintained, “we must control the expansion of government expenditures. We must be frugal where we can be frugal.” The Washington Conference enabled him to advance his foreign policy and economic agenda. “Because of the Washington Conference,” he told the Japanese Diet, “we can reduce military expenditures and have a little surplus for the future.” Takahashi wanted to enhance Japan’s power and standing by acting as what our age would call a responsible stakeholder, who would benefit economically by cooperating to uphold the peace in Asia and the Pacific.

While Hughes jumpstarted the negotiations, achieving an arms control agreement in Washington entailed hard bargaining. Katō wanted to keep the Japanese navy as strong as possible relative to the United States. Japanese naval planners demanded that their battle fleet acquire at least 70 percent of the strength of the United States Navy. American naval planners opposed the Japanese demand: they insisted that Japan’s force of capital ships would amount to no more than 60 percent of the United States. To break the deadlock, Katō agreed to the ratio of strength fixed by the American side, but he wanted something in return. To accept an inferior ratio in naval strength, he asked for Britain and the United States to limit the defenses protecting their forward bases in the Western Pacific. By imposing restrictions on the fortification of forward bases, Britain and the United States would have difficulty projecting naval power into the region during the initial stages of a conflict with Japan. Hughes accepted this tradeoff because he believed (quite rightly) that Congress would refuse to fund in peacetime the development of major bases in Guam and the Philippines required for the forward deployment of American naval power. The net strategic result of this tradeoff was to accord naval dominance in the Western Pacific to Japan. Despite the inferior ratio in battle-fleet strength—a minimum deterrent—Japan emerged from the Washington Conference in a strong strategic position.

That the United States succeeded in getting the other great powers to reach an agreement in Washington was due in part to the American invitation coming at the right moment. The workings of democracy, along with the liberal world view held by the leaders of the great powers, set the stage for an international agreement. In Washington, the negotiations built on the plan presented on the opening day by Hughes. While Hughes’ plan was modified during the talks, an agreement emerged that reflected the willingness of leaders to curb spending on weaponry and to show restraint in their foreign policy ambitions. Lord Balfour, the leader of the British delegation, claimed the conference “has been of absolute unmixed benefit to mankind.”

The Washington Conference, however, turned out to be but a truce in the competition for naval mastery in the Pacific. A return to great power competition during the 1930s ended the treaty framework for international cooperation and security in Asia that came out of Washington. Only twenty years would elapse between the fanfare inaugurating the Washington Conference and the opening shots fired by Japanese aircraft attacking forward-deployed American and British naval forces in the Pacific. The battleships regulated by the arms control regime negotiated in Washington became the main targets struck by Japanese aircraft at the war’s beginning.

Although Japan derived important strategic benefits from arms control, the leaders of the Japanese navy did not see it that way. They objected to treaty restrictions that stood in the way of their demands for naval buildup. They wanted an arms race. The famous Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the strategic architect of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, believed that American and British leaders only respected Japan’s “mighty empire rising in the east” because of the country’s growing armed strength. Yamamoto foresaw that “the day may not be so distant when we shall have Britain and the United States kowtowing to us. For the navy, the most urgent task of all is to make rapid strides in the field of aviation.”

While Yamamoto favored building up Japan’s naval air power, the navy brass sought to break out of the arms control framework established at Washington by constructing the Yamato-class battleships. These monster battleships were built in great secrecy to prevent American and British intelligence from knowing their firepower and armor strength. When these battleships joined the fleet in the early 1940s, they were the most powerful in the world.

Meanwhile, those voices in Japan who called for restraint in spending on the armed services were silenced. Takahashi, again serving as finance minister, opposed large increases in spending that the leaders of the armed services demanded, as he had in 1921. In a newspaper interview, he stated that, even if Japan refused to be bound by arms control restrictions, he would continue to resist increased naval spending. He viewed a policy of confrontation with Britain, China, and the United States as utter folly. Japan did not have the economic strength to achieve the imperial dreams that beguiled nationalist extremists. Takahashi’s determined opposition led to his murder during the military uprising of February 26, 1936, when rebellious soldiers broke into his house and killed the elderly statesman while sleeping in his bed. Takahashi’s fate symbolizes the end of the sober judgment exercised by Japan’s leaders who sought security through cooperation with Britain and the United States at Washington. Instead, Japanese militarists and nationalist leaders, possessed by dreams of empire, took control and led Japan to war.

At a time when American power and purpose in the world is increasingly questioned, the story of the Washington Conference deserves to be remembered because it shows how great powers can cooperate to provide for their security. The United States took the initiative in calling the conference, and its success owed much to the skill and determination of American leaders. Washington could exercise this leadership role because it was backed up by the hard reality of America’s growing economic and naval power. Adam Tooze has noted that “Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the British Empire had been the largest economic unit in the world. Sometime in 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, the combined output of the British Empire was overtaken by that of the United States of America.” Perhaps that moment arrived on August 29, 1916, when the so-called Big Navy Act was signed into law by President Wilson. Economic and naval ascendency went hand in hand. The United States possessed the big stick of a naval modernization effort that other countries wanted to limit. British and Japanese leaders had no stomach for a high-stakes contest for naval mastery against the United States. They preferred negotiation to a head-to-head arms race with the United States and feared the consequences if the talks broke down. Alienating Washington might also curtail American support for reviving the international economy.

Today, the prospects for arms control are far less favorable for American leadership. The United States is now involved in a three-way nuclear competition with China and Russia that is much different from the experience of the Cold War. American aims in Asia now stand threatened by the foreign policy ambitions of China’s leaders and an across-the-board buildup of the Chinese armed forces. Projected increases in China’s intercontinental ballistic missile force in land-based silos have exceeded previous American estimates. A report by the Federation of American Scientists concludes: “With approximately 300 apparent silos under construction—a number that exceeds the number of ICBM silos operated by Russia—and an additional 100-plus road-mobile ICBM launchers, China’s total ICBM force could potentially exceed that of either Russia and the United States in the foreseeable future.” The lack of transparency on Chinese decisions about nuclear weapons resembles Japan’s attempts to conceal its capital ship construction during the late 1930s and the increase in Soviet ICBMs that confounded Robert McNamara’s Pentagon during the 1960s. The growing ICBM force will provide Chinese nuclear target planners with an enhanced capability to execute first strikes in wartime. Like Japan during the 1930s, China is no longer content to possess a minimum deterrent force.

Nor is there any force of public opinion or peace movement within China to constrain the nuclear buildup. No free press exists to spur open debate about the strategic wisdom or necessity for acquiring a land-based nuclear force that reaches toward parity with Russia or the United States. At the Washington conference a hundred years ago, a common liberal world view and growing public sentiment against arms spending animated the American, British, and Japanese governments to go to the negotiation table. While liberal domestic political opinion opposed to modernization of the nuclear triad and ballistic missile defenses is a force to be reckoned with today in the United States, no comparable internal pressure pushes China’s authoritarian regime to negotiate.

Not surprisingly, then, Washington’s repeated efforts to engage China in arms control talks have led nowhere. When Harding pitched a conference in Washington to discuss arms control, the British and Japanese governments jumped at the invitation. The Biden administration, like its predecessors, wants to “pursue arms control to reduce the dangers from China’s modern and growing nuclear arsenal.” It would seem, however, that China wants to achieve parity in nuclear weapons with Russia and the United States. If that is Beijing’s aim, arms control has no prospect of achieving worthwhile results before the end of this decade when China’s nuclear arsenal pulls even with the United States. Even then, will China’s rulers be content with nuclear parity, or will they strive for superiority, whatever that might mean in measuring the balance of terror?

The dangerous decade of the 1930s and the breakdown of arms control thus seems a better fit for understanding the strategic predicament that the United States finds itself in today than the period leading up to the Washington Conference. The administration’s nuclear posture review must entertain worst-case scenarios in the face of China’s threatening buildup. China’s refusal to enter arms control negotiations gives President Biden an opportunity to rally domestic political support for modernizing the nuclear triad, strengthening ballistic missile defenses, and developing emerging technologies. Until China’s rulers are convinced that increases in their nuclear forces do not confer a strategic advantage, the United States cannot expect to have the initiative in arms control negotiations that it possessed a hundred years ago in Washington.

John H. Maurer serves as the Alfred Thayer Mahan Distinguished Professor of Sea Power and Grand Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. The views expressed in this article represent those of the author alone.

This article appeared originally at The National Interest.