The Patriot Post® · A Parable of Portsmouth
The search for peace is much in the news these days as efforts to end the Russian-Ukrainian War make daily headlines that fluctuate between hope, doubt, caution, and skepticism. Polls in the United States say a majority of Americans doubt Donald Trump can broker a lasting peace, but the volatility of public opinion can change overnight or even from hour to hour. The doubts expressed by academics and diplomats, however, are sure to be more enduring. They are also freighted with irony. Some of the expert class helped start this mess and have done little since except wring their hands and issue dire warnings about the consequences of peace talks not guided by learned professionals, like them. They volubly dispense this sage advice on cable news shows in uniform language the media reveres as “conventional wisdom.” Starting a war is relatively easy, they intone, but restoring peace is quite complicated. One imagines they are handsomely paid for such observations.
This really isn’t altogether uncharted ground, though. A similar search for peace captured global attention 120 years ago when a conflict — also involving Russia — had unexpectedly spiraled out of control with both regional and global implications. In response, a shoot-from-the-hip wheeler-dealer set in motion a process in the summer of 1905 that was fraught with peril and apparently doomed to failure. The episode could perhaps provide some valuable lessons, so let us take some time to ponder them.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 is almost forgotten now because the two world wars that defined the 20th Century and continue to shape the current one eclipse everything before them. But the clash of Tsarist Russia with Imperial Japan was more than a regional dispute and, in hindsight, held portents for a rocky future.
The underlying causes of the conflict were intricate, but a concise explanation for the war is the competition between the vast Russian Empire and the small island nation of Japan for dominance in East Asia. Diplomacy to resolve their disputes ultimately failed, with Russian condescension partly to blame because Tsar Nicholas II and most of his advisors viewed the Japanese as fumbling upstarts with oversized pretensions. The Japanese resented Russia’s patronizing manner and seethed over the attitudes that fueled it, especially since Nicholas was a weak, stubborn, stupid autocrat and much of the Russian aristocracy was equally dense and remarkably corrupt.
In contrast, Japan had thrown off feudalism with the 1868 Meiji Restoration to modernize its military, bulk up its navy, and restructure its society from a medieval shogunate into a meritocratic oligarchy. Despite these enormous changes, the Japanese maintained the samurai ethos while phasing out the samurai grip on governance. After accomplishing all this with astonishing speed and enviable efficiency, the Japanese began empire-building as the 19th century was ending. They dealt China a humiliating military defeat and considered expanding their influence into Korea and Manchuria. All this greatly troubled the Russians, who had planned to use Manchuria for a warm-water port and an avenue for East Asian expansion. The two countries went through a pantomime of diplomatic talks, which the Japanese might have called kabuki theater, except everyone was dressed in the traditional European fashion of pinstriped trousers, starched white shirts, and formal tails, giving the conversations an eerie sense of traditional statecraft. At least, until the Japanese lost patience and started the war in February 1904 with a sneak attack on the Russian Pacific fleet stationed at Port Arthur in Manchuria. It is sometimes called “the first Pearl Harbor.”
From the start of the Russo-Japanese War, it was apparent that the backward Russian Empire was woefully unprepared to challenge the modern industrial power Japan had become. Japanese armies laid siege to Port Arthur and landed in Korea to shove Russian forces into untenable positions and score a series of devastating victories. In a desperate attempt to reestablish a naval presence in the theater of war, the Russians dispatched their Baltic Fleet to the Pacific on an 18,000-mile voyage of nearly seven months. However, as soon as it arrived in late May 1905, the Japanese navy intercepted and destroyed it in the Straits of Tsushima.
These blows were calamitous — the Russian Imperial Navy never fully recovered — but they were not decisive in the way the Japanese had planned. They had started the war counting on a land victory similar to the 1870 Prussian pounding of France at Sedan and a naval one similar to Britain’s at Trafalgar in 1805. Like Napoleon before them and Adolph Hitler afterward, Tokyo discovered that Russian resilience was the incalculable variable in warfare. As early as April, even before Tsushima, the victorious Japanese were assessing what they very privately but just as grimly judged to be a deteriorating situation. In fact, they were in considerable trouble. The Russians were overcoming logistical complications to restore their depleted armies with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of men, while Japanese forces proved difficult to reinforce. The Japanese economy was in shambles with a financially overburdened population growing uneasy, international financiers restricting credit, and the war costing a million dollars a day. In mid-April, the Japanese began issuing a subtle mixture of nuanced diplomatic notes to the world and private appeals to the President of the United States, whose Japanese friends included a fellow Harvard alumnus.
The elites of the world were skeptical. President Theodore Roosevelt was easy to dismiss as a showboating buffoon who had stumbled into his office because William McKinley had been assassinated and had won reelection in 1904 by pandering to an undiscerning but adoring public. Sophisticates dismissed him as a narcissist who wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. The French ambassador playfully informed a confidant, “You must always remember that the President is about six.” And the French ambassador was Roosevelt’s friend. His enemies minced no words about “that damned cowboy” being a foolish man who shot off his mouth and swaggered as well as staggered from crisis to crisis.
There was more to him than met the eye. Roosevelt had watched the war’s progress with mixed emotions. His sympathies were with Japan, for he admired the country’s pluck and energy, and he dismissed Russia as backward, oppressive, and capable of “literally fathomless mendacity.” However, Japanese victories troubled him. He worried that an unchecked Japan, lacking the counterbalance of Russia, might be tempted to run rampant in East Asia or, as he said, Japan would “get the ‘big head’ and enter into a general career of insolence and aggression.”
In the immediate setting, Roosevelt feared that a complete Japanese victory would threaten U.S. interests, so he actively sought to mediate the conflict in 1905. When Russia’s stubbornness blocked progress, Roosevelt muttered to his Secretary of State that the tsar was “a preposterous little creature” incapable of making either war or peace. Yet after Nicholas II learned that his Baltic Fleet lay at the bottom of the Tsushima Strait and the Sea of Japan, the preposterous little creature cautiously agreed to talks.
Initially, international reactions were overly optimistic. “Mr. Roosevelt’s success has amazed everybody,” said the London Morning Post, as if someone had discovered a talking dog. But getting the Japanese and Russians to talk to rather than shoot one another was just the first step, and as difficulties over the details of peace multiplied, the world soon turned doubtful again. It took Roosevelt weeks of tactful gestures, stroking compliments, soft warnings, and gentle incentives to get envoys from the two governments together at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The president’s maneuverings were nearly all behind the scenes, giving the impression that nothing was happening and proving to experts that failure was stalking his efforts, but negotiations began in August despite the naysayers’ predictions. Even then, Japan’s territorial demands and its desire for Russia to pay for the war endangered the talks on an almost daily basis.
Yet the two nations had compelling reasons to seek peace. The war’s hardships had wrecked Japan’s economy, but they were threatening the Russian government’s very existence as violent revolutionaries saw opportunity in chaos. It was no secret that Nicholas was having to grant concessions to keep his throne. Though Roosevelt did not know the full extent of Japan’s economic troubles, he believed Russian domestic unrest gave him leverage to nudge the two parties to compromise. In the end, everyone bowed to reality and signed a peace treaty ending the war on September 5, 1905.
Suddenly the stupid cowboy was hailed as an international statesman. He received the 1906 Nobel Prize, and global opinion lauded him for personifying “American courage and daring.” The world would ever afterward judge the United States as a major player in its affairs. Meanwhile, the elite experts of politics and diplomacy were nonplussed if not humbled, at least for a while.
For the unchanging realities of the modern world lost no time in reasserting themselves. The Portsmouth Peace Conference was indeed a grand accomplishment, a success against almost all odds, and a tribute to the man who made it happen, but it is also a sobering parable in retrospect. War is easy, peace is hard, and the intervals between the two grow shorter as the stakes grow higher. Nicholas II kept his throne, but in only a few years, violent revolution not only ended his reign but murdered him and his family. The Soviet Union came into being drenched in blood and poised to employ more systematic and ruthless oppression at home and more malignancy abroad than any tsar could ever have imagined. In Japan, riots broke out when the treaty terms were announced, particularly those stating that Russia would pay neither an indemnity nor reparations. The Japanese military grumbled about winning the war but losing the peace, blaming both the United States and Japan’s envoys at Portsmouth. By the 1920s, they were pondering how to attack the Philippines, and a few years later began laying plans for Hawaii, just in case the diplomats again failed them.
Few remember the Russo-Japanese War, which is the final and most sobering lesson of this parable, one pithily stated by John Boorman’s Merlin: “It is the doom of men that they forget.”