Washington Naval Conference

At the end of World War I, the British still had the largest navy afloat, but its big ships were becoming obsolete, and the Americans and the Japanese were rapidly building expensive new warships.

To stop a needless, expensive, and possibly dangerous arms race, the major countries signed a series of naval disarmament agreements.

Historian Martin Pugh writes that they achieved the greatest influence in the 1920s, "when they helped to promote women's contribution to the anti-war movement throughout the Western world.

[9] The American delegation, led by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, included Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge and Oscar Underwood,[3][4] the last being the Democratic minority leader in the Senate.

The conference's primary objective was to restrain Japanese naval expansion in the waters of the West Pacific, especially with regard to fortifications on strategically-valuable islands.

They were to eliminate Anglo-American tension by abrogating the Anglo-Japanese alliance, to agree upon a favorable naval ratio vis-à-vis Japan, and to have the Japanese officially accept a continuation of the Open Door Policy in China.

Japanese officials also brought other issues to the conference: a strong demand to remain in control of Yap, Siberia, and Tsingtao as well as more general concerns about the growing presence of American fleets in the Pacific.

[5] The head of the Japanese delegation to the Washington Naval Conference was Prince Iyesato Tokugawa, who during the first four decades of the twentieth century led a political movement in Japan that promoted democracy and international goodwill with the U.S., Europe and Asia.

[12] To resolve technical disputes about the quality of warships, the conferees adopted a standard based on the tonnage displacement, a simple measure of the size of a ship.

[18][19] The Washington Naval Treaty led to an effective end to building new battleship fleets, and the few ships that were built were limited in size and armament.

Even with the treaty, the major navies remained suspicious of one another and briefly (1927–1930) engaged in a race to build heavy cruisers, which had been limited in size (10,000 tons) but not numbers.

The US Navy maintained an active building program that replaced obsolescent warships with technically more sophisticated new models in part because its construction yards were important sources of political patronage and so were well protected by Congress.