The Treaties for the Limitation of Naval Armament were numerous accords in the 1920s signed variously by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Italy and France.
At the end of the Great War, Britain still had the largest navy afloat but its big ships were becoming obsolete, and the Americans and Japanese were rapidly building expensive new warships.
London and Tokyo were allies in a treaty that was due to expire in 1922 but a developing American-Japanese rivalry for control of the Pacific Ocean was a long-term threat to world peace.
[2] The most important gathering was the Washington Naval Conference, sponsored by President Warren Harding and run by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.
To resolve technical disputes about the quality of warships, the conferees adopted a quantitative standard, based on tonnage displacement (a simple measure of the size of a ship).