The Belligerents’ Rights Dispute and the ‘New Mercantilism’

Abstract

The resentment British blockade practice had stirred up amongst American businessmen was not erased by the American entry into the war. The trouble came to a head before the Armistice, when the allied and associated powers were meeting in Paris to discuss the terms they should offer. In asking for an armistice, the German government had referred to the ‘Fourteen Points’ President Wilson had proposed as a basis for a negotiated peace, number two of which was ‘The Freedom of the Seas’. Wilson’s representative, Colonel House, insisted that the right of belligerents to intercept neutral trade must be given up for wars outside the auspices of the League of Nations, which was to be established. If this demand were not accepted, House warned that the United States would build a greater army and navy than Britain possessed. American distrust of British naval power was enhanced by the Anglo–Japanese alliance, and by the wartime Anglo–French Entente. House threatened that the United States would make a separate peace if Britain refused to give up its claim to belligerent rights, and President Wilson warned that Congress would ‘have no sympathy whatever with spending American lives for British naval control’.¹