Great Britain and the Coolidge Naval Disarmament Conference of 1927
The Naval Disarmament Conference of 1927 was one of the most dramatically unsuccessful international gatherings of the twentieth century. The three principal naval powersGreat Britain, the United States, and Japan-came together in a spirit of goodwill with a view to consolidating their existing amicable relations by agreeing to economies in defense expenditure. But, as in Sir Winston Churchill's famous fable about the animals' disarmament conference, the very discussion of the subject of arms control aroused on all sides feelings of jealousy and suspicion, which had hitherto been largely dormant or even nonexistent. The course and outcome of the Geneva negotiations had a particularly severe impact on Anglo-American relations, which became more strained than at any time in the interwar period. In February 1929, for example, as a direct result of the events of 1927, the American government secured congressional approval for a Cruiser Construction Bill, which at first seemed likely to provoke a naval arms race with Great Britain comparable only to that between Germany and Great Britain before the First World War. President Calvin Coolidge made the opening move in the disastrous sequence of events when, on February lo, 1927, he in-