3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 347our isolationists might well model their public utterances on those of Mr.
Chamberlain in his appeasement phase, because they are determined that
American shall repeat the tragic mistakes that Mr. Chamberlain’s Britain
repeated for so long ...[T]he risks they urge for America are not very dif-
ferent from the risks involved in the course which Messrs. Daladier and
Chamberlain pursued for so long...[T]hey may discover too late that the
cost to America of such a course, the cost of abandoning China or Great
Britain or France to the flames, is no likely to be very different from the
present cost to Great Britain and France of having earlier abandoned other
peoples to the flames.^382Schumann attacked as irresponsible those who framed policy in Downing
Street and the Quai d’Orsay between 1931 and 1939, observing that
they had failed to maintain the ‘overwhelming preponderance of power’
which they, along with their allies, at first possessed in the post-war
period. Instead of maintaining their dominant position, he observed,
they chose to ‘condone Japanese, Italian and, German aggression and
to acquiesce in, and even welcome, the steady enhancement of fascist
fighting to a point at which a balance of power was restored.’ The sac-
rifices offered up to this policy of appeasement, Schumann stated, were
the French alliance system and the League of Nations. He added that
although this policy was publicly promoted as a means of preserving
peace, the real motivation behind it and the only basis that it arguably
had in Realpolitik was the belief that the Fascist Triplice would coun-
ter-balance the power of the USSR: that in the end there would be a
clash of arms between the USSR and the fascist powers. Schumann noted
that no such clash had materialised and that in the absence of such a
clash and that of an alliance between Moscow, Paris and London, ‘the
strategic results of “appeasement” insured war between the western pow-
ers and one or more of the fascists states.’^383
Schumann warned his American readers that should France and
Britain be defeated, and he considered that they could not achieve vic-
tory without the assistance of either the United States or the USSR,
then the totalitarian alliance would repartition the world to its sat-
isfaction. The power of this coalition, he further warned, would be so
(^382) Frederick L. Schumann ‘War, Peace and the Balance of Power,’ Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 210, no. 1 (1940): 73–81, 74.
(^383) Ibid., 77–78.