Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [247]
Fine sentiments—but they amounted to little in the end. At the Peace Conference, even heartfelt agreement on principle faltered in the face of other considerations. Armenia was far away; it was surrounded by enemies and the Allies had few forces in the area. Moving troops and aid in, at a time when resources were stretched thin, was a major undertaking; what railways there were had been badly damaged and the roads were primitive. Help was far away, but Armenia’s enemies were close at hand. Russians, whether the armies of the Whites or the Bolsheviks, who were advancing southward, would not tolerate Armenia or any other independent state in the Caucasus. On Armenia’s other flank, Turks deeply resented the loss of Turkish territory, and the further losses implied in the Armenian claims.
In Paris, Armenia’s friends were lukewarm and hesitant. The British, it is true, saw certain advantages for themselves in taking a mandate for Armenia: the protection of oil supplies coming from Baku on the Caspian to the port of Batum on the Black Sea, and the creation of a barrier between Bolshevism and the British possessions in the Middle East. (In their worst nightmares, the British imagined Bolshevism linking up with a resurgent Islam and toppling the British empire.) On the other hand, as the War Office kept repeating, British resources were already overstretched. The French Foreign Office, for its part, toyed with ideas of a huge Armenia under French protection which would provide a field for French investment and the spread of French culture. Clemenceau, however, had little enthusiasm for the notion. The Italians, like the French, preferred to concentrate their efforts on gains on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and in Europe. That left the Americans. 31
On March 7, House assured Lloyd George and Clemenceau that the United States would undoubtedly take on a mandate. Lloyd George was delighted at the prospect of the Americans taking on the “noble duty,” and relieved that the French were not taking on a mandate. House, as he often did, was exaggerating. Wilson had warned the Supreme Council that “he could think of nothing the people of the United States would be less inclined to accept than military responsibility in Asia.” It is perhaps a measure of how far Wilson’s judgment had deteriorated that, on May 14, when Armenia came up at the Council of Four, he agreed to accept a mandate, subject, he added, to the consent of the American Senate. This ruffled the French because the proposed American mandate was to stretch from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, taking in the zone in Cilicia promised to France under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. While Clemenceau, who took little interest in the Turkish-speaking territories, did not raise an objection, his colleagues were furious. From London, Paul Cambon complained: “They must be drunk the way they are surrendering . . . a total capitulation, a mess, an unimaginable shambles.” Although no one suspected it at the time, no arrangement made in Paris was going to make the slightest difference to Armenia.32
Many other schemes for the Ottoman empire were floating around the conference rooms and dinner tables in Paris that spring. “Let it be a manda [buffalo],” said one wit in Constantinople, “let it be an ox, let it be any animal whatsoever; only let it come quickly.” If all the claims, protectorates, independent states and mandates that were discussed actually had come into existence, a very odd little Turkey in the interior of Anatolia would have been left, with no straits, no Mediterranean coast, a truncated Black Sea coast, and no Armenian