The Stimson Doctrine

At noon on 7 January 1932 Secretary of State Henry Stimson sent a telegram from Washington to the ambassador in Tokyo, William Cameron Forbes, containing the text of a note that the ambassador was to deliver to the Japanese Foreign Ministry as quickly as possible. An identical note went to the government of the Republic of China. In it the United States informed both states that it could not admit the legality of any situation de facto, nor did it intend to recognise any treaty or agreement between them, that might impair America’s treaty rights in China, including those relating to the sovereignty, independence and territorial and administrative integrity of the Republic of China, or to the Open Door policy. Nor would it recognise any situation, treaty or agreement brought about by means contrary to the Pact of Paris of 27 August 1928, to which China, Japan and the United States were all parties. Because of the time difference, the note was delivered in Tokyo on 8 January, and that is the date it bears in the Japanese reply. The principle that gains made by force would not be recognised went down in history as the Stimson Doctrine – and, because President Herbert Hoover regarded it as his own, also as the Hoover–Stimson Doctrine.

Manchuria in flames

Since the night of 18 September 1931, when officers of the Kwantung Army staged the explosion on the railway near Mukden, Japanese troops had been occupying one Manchurian town after another. The government in Tokyo promised that the conflict would not be widened, while the army in Manchuria went its own way. Zhang Xueliang, the ruler of north-eastern China, withdrew his forces without a fight, and Chiang Kai-shek’s government placed its trust in the League of Nations.

Washington at first moved cautiously. Stimson believed that the civilian government of Prime Minister Reijirō Wakatsuki and Foreign Minister Kijūrō Shidehara wanted to restrain the army, and he did not want to make its task harder with public pressure. On 5 October 1931 he wrote to the League that the United States would support its efforts, and in mid-October the American consul in Geneva, Prentiss Gilbert, took a seat at the table of the Council of the League of Nations as an observer for the first time. A country that had not joined the League agreed to talk to it on the basis of the Kellogg–Briand Pact, which both parties to the conflict had signed. In November Hoover sent the ambassador in London, Charles Dawes, to the Council’s session in Paris, but Dawes kept aloof from the proceedings. On 10 December the Council decided to send a commission of inquiry to Manchuria, which, under the chairmanship of the British peer Victor Bulwer-Lytton, was to investigate the causes of the conflict.

The appeals achieved nothing. In October Japanese aircraft bombed Jinzhou, where Zhang Xueliang had set up a temporary seat for the Liaoning provincial government, and in November the Japanese took Qiqihar, the capital of Heilongjiang province. On 11 December Wakatsuki’s government fell, and the new prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, agreed to a march on Jinzhou. Zhang Xueliang withdrew his troops behind the Great Wall, and on 3 January 1932 Japanese units entered the city. Stimson concluded that the Japanese government was either unwilling or unable to keep its promises.

Why only a note

The Secretary of State was inclined towards stronger measures, even economic sanctions in concert with the League. Hoover would not agree. He believed that sanctions led to war, and that the United States would not fight for Manchuria. The country was sinking into the Great Depression, which had begun with the Wall Street Crash; Congress and public opinion wanted no foreign commitments; and the army and navy were not prepared for a conflict in the Pacific. At cabinet meetings in the autumn of 1931 the president said that the only weapon America could use was moral force: refusing to recognise gains that violated treaties.

The idea was not new. In 1915, when Tokyo imposed the Twenty-One Demands on the Chinese, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan informed Japan and China that the United States would not recognise any agreement impairing its rights in China. This time, however, the note appealed not only to American rights and to the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922 but above all to the Pact of Paris. Non-recognition was to be a legal sanction for breaking the universal renunciation of war. Stimson believed that if the other powers joined in, Japan would be unable to obtain international legitimacy for its conquests and would in time have to give way.

The first blow, however, came from London. Stimson sent copies of the note to the British and French governments, encouraging them to take similar steps. On 9 January the Foreign Office announced that, since Japan had given assurances that it would maintain the Open Door policy in Manchuria, the British government saw no need to address a formal note to Tokyo. A few days later The Times remarked in a leading article that it was not the business of the Foreign Office to defend the administrative integrity of China until that integrity was something more than an ideal. France, too, remained silent. Both powers had possessions of their own in China and did not want to antagonise Japan.

The Japanese reply

The Japanese government replied on 16 January 1932 with a note that Ambassador Forbes forwarded to Washington the same day. It was at once courteous and ironic. Tokyo thanked the United States for the “additional assurance” that it would always support Japan’s efforts to fulfil the Washington treaties and the Kellogg Pact. It insisted that Japan had no territorial aims in Manchuria and no intention of using “improper means”, and it called the question of whether the impropriety of the means invalidated the ends achieved by them an “academic doubt”. Most important, however, was the statement that the treaties concerning China must be applied with regard to the state in which that country found itself, and that “the present unsettled and distracted state of China” was not what the parties to the Washington treaty had envisaged. Tokyo presented the changes in the administration of Manchuria as a “necessary act of the local population”, which, after the flight of the Chinese officials, was organising its own government. In this way it signalled what was to come: the creation of a formally independent state that would conclude whatever agreements it wished with Japan.

Shanghai, Borah and Geneva

A few days later the war moved to the heart of China. On 28 January 1932 Japanese naval infantry attacked the Chinese districts of Shanghai, and aircraft bombed Zhabei. This time great Western interests and the International Settlement were at risk. Stimson tried to persuade Britain to invoke the Nine-Power Treaty jointly. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, was, however, unwilling to go that far.

Stimson therefore chose a different path. On 23 February 1932 he published a letter to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Borah, which was in reality addressed to Japan, to Europe and to American public opinion. He recalled that the Washington agreements formed a whole: the United States had agreed to limit its navy and not to fortify the Philippines and Guam because commitments towards China had been made at the same time. If one part were broken, the other signatories might consider themselves no longer bound by the rest. He invited other states to adopt the principle of non-recognition. In this way he suggested for the first time that America might answer Japanese expansion with naval armament.

This time the League of Nations responded. At China’s request an extraordinary Assembly met in Geneva, and on 11 March 1932 it adopted a resolution declaring that members of the League were bound not to recognise any situation, treaty or agreement brought about by means contrary to the Covenant of the League of Nations or to the Pact of Paris. A doctrine proclaimed unilaterally by a state outside the League had become a principle accepted by several dozen countries. Its effectiveness was soon put to the test: on 1 March 1932, ten days before the resolution, the state of Manchukuo had been proclaimed in Manchuria.

Significance

The Stimson Doctrine did not delay Japan by so much as an hour. It was accompanied by no sanctions, and the European states, absorbed in the slump and their own affairs, were not inclined to strain relations with Tokyo. Critics charged that its only effect was to irritate the Japanese, who came to see the United States as the enemy of their policy on the continent, while it stood in nobody’s way. That was how it was interpreted in Tokyo: as proof that the West would confine itself to words. When in February 1933 the League of Nations adopted the Lytton Commission’s report and refused to recognise Manchukuo, Japan simply left. Benito Mussolini drew the same lesson when he invaded Ethiopia, and Adolf Hitler when he broke the Treaty of Versailles.

The doctrine nevertheless outlived its authors. Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, announced in January 1933, before taking office, that he would uphold the sanctity of treaties, and he never recognised Manchukuo. In 1933 the principle of non-recognition was written into the Pan-American Montevideo Convention. In the 1930s the United States did not recognise the annexation of Ethiopia, and when in 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles declared on 23 July 1940 that America would not recognise the annexation – a position Washington maintained until 1991. After 1945 the principle that no right can arise from an unlawful act became one of the foundations of international law, based on the Charter of the United Nations and the prohibition of the use of force.

Stimson himself did not forget Manchuria. As a private citizen he warned against Japan throughout the 1930s, and in 1940, now Secretary of War in Roosevelt’s government, he prepared America for the war that began in the Pacific in December 1941. The road to Pearl Harbor began in Manchuria, and America’s refusal to recognise Japanese conquests in China – from the note of 7 January 1932 to the demands of November 1941 – was one of its constant features.