Part I

Estimating the overall effectiveness of both the Washington and London Naval Treaties is somewhat difficult for historians to analyze because by the treaties' own standards they failed. Intended to forestall a battleship naval arms race, they instead launched several miniature races in in categories like cruisers and destroyers. The Treaty drafters intended the ratio of naval strength as fair metric for the national security of each party, but instead the Treaty system engendered resentments and evasions. In terms of naval architecture and trends in ship design, the tonnage limitations were not really practical to account for the growth and complexity of naval construction; keeping within Treaty weight limits was a daunting task that often resulted in compromised designs. The unilateral abrogation of the Treaty system by parties like Japan also underscored the Treaties' fundamental weaknesses. Given this record, most of the historiography of the Treaty system is a meditation on aspects of the Treaty system that failed.

The early historiography on the treaties interpreted them within the shadow of the war and tended to argue that the Treaty system only benefited those who were willing to evade it. This interpretation put much of the onus on the failure of the Treaty system on Japan and enfolded it into the wider narrative of global fascist expansion and diplomatic perfidy like the Munich agreement. Samuel Eliot Morrison's officially-sanctioned History of United States Naval Operations in World War II was emblematic of this early postwar years' condemnation of the Treaty system. This "other great error," according to Morrison, the treaties:

were a crime of against American defense, they were a tragic mistake in their effect on the internal struggle in Japan. Naval limitation by treaty violate the doctrine of imperial command, and rendered the militarists desperate. It became clear to them that if civilians were allowed to determine naval strength by international treaties, and if the Diet were allowed to hamstring the armed forces by meager appropriations- as was being done in the United States and Great Britain- their millennial supremacy would soon be a thing of the past, and their plans for expansion by conquest must be permanently shelved. The military elements knew perfectly well that the limitation treaties left Japan in a very advantageous position as regards security; it was the principle of the thing and its political consequences that they dreaded.

Additionally, Morrison notes that that the Treaties gave a parsimonious Congress a chance not to build up to its limits, and made European possessions in the Pacific more tempting targets. Japanese griping about unfair tonnage ratios, according to Morrison, was just a "jingo slogan" used by militarists to browbeat liberal Japanese politicians into either building up to Treaty limits with an eye to scrapping the system altogether at a time of their choosing. The Treaties may have been a fair chance for peace, but only if one side were willing abide by them.

The approach pioneered by Morrison became one of the dominant leitmotifs for early scholarship on interwar naval arms limitation. During the early Cold War, the failure of naval arms limitations became an auxiliary to the Munich Pact as an example of the inefficacy of arms control agreements. For example, in 1968 Congressional debates over the Nonproliferation Treaty, Representative Paul Findley contended that "Peace is not assured by treaties," and both Washington and Kellogg-Briand are examples of this. Much of this popular discussion of the Treaties presented them as a zero-sum game in which Japan benefited. The 1970s work on the Treaties though started to present a more nuanced view of the Treaty system and Japan's role in it. A good deal of this change was the result of the work of Japanese historians whose works slowly penetrated into the West. Akira Iriye's landmark works on Japanese diplomacy showed that Japanese leadership was far more divided than the liberal vs. militarist paradigm popularized by the likes of Morrison. More importantly for the historiography of the Treaties were a series of articles by Asada Sadao which exposed the various factions within the IJN over the Treaties and the emergence of a fleet vs. Treaty faction within the IJN whose conflicts filtered into the treaty negotiations. This window into Japanese perceptions and infighting was quite valuable for wider reestimations of the Treaties. The informal practice in Japanese bureaucratic institutions of gekkokujo (rule from below) in which subordinates sometimes had more influence than their superiors, made it very difficult for Westerners to parse out who were the individuals pushing for abrogation or revision of the Treaties. The work of Asada allowed historians to delimit the various fault lines within the IJN and how the Treaties exacerbated them.

This more nuanced vision of Japan also extended to the other main Treaty powers as well. Steven Pelz's Race to Pearl Harbor saw the Treaty being done in on all three sides during the 1930s as dissatisfaction with the Washington conference compounded in various naval circles. Ian Nish framed naval limitation as part of a larger narrative of the deterioration of Anglo-Japanese relations and a a reluctant reorientation into an Anglo-American alliance. The latter was usually taken as a given by older historiography like Morrison, but the work of Nish and A. J. Marder showed that both the IJN and RN were initially quite reluctant to see each other as potential enemies.

This influence of the 1970s historiographic reevaluation of the Treaties has had an enormous impact on contemporary historiography on the Treaty system. These historians' focus on conflicting visions of security, internal squabbles, and more complicated diplomacy set the tone for later historical analysis of how the Treaties actually functioned. David Evans and Mark Peattie's magisterial Kaigun on IJN strategy is representative of how historians have incorporated this more complicated picture. Kaigun argues on the basis of both archival research and the secondary literature produced in postwar Japan that the Treaties were a promising road not taken by Japan. By forestalling a naval race Japan could not possibly win, the Treaty system made it possible for Japan to win in the Pacific, at least over the short term. Evans and Peattie present the triumph of the anti-Treaty fleet faction as representative of the narrow strategic culture of the IJN heads who were preoccupied with the concept of a decisive naval battle. While the Treaty forced the IJN to adapt to new methods of construction and tactics, Japanese shipyards and naval architects often proved to be not up to the task of reconciling ambitious designs on too small of a hull. Japanese "cheating" of naval limits, according to Evans and Peattie, were sometimes intentional (eg the Mogami-class "light" cruisers"), but also the result of an overburdened Technical Research Department that sought to square new designs with limits that often came up short. Evading or abrogating the Treaties was often not a simple matter according to Evans and Peattie, and Treaty limits often encouraged innovative solutions.

Contemporary naval historians more focused on technical matters also concur with Kaigun on this point. D. K. Brown's histories of British naval development note that the battleship "holiday" of Washington was a relief for the RN as it allowed the service to incorporate wartime lessons without having to significantly revise existing designs on the slipyard. As with Pelz, Brown notes that all signatories cheated on the Treaty limits, although the British were according to him more scrupulous. The RN, for example, would not include the full storage of shells in the final displacement of its ships, which was a violation of the spirit of the Treaties' tonnage limits, but not as flagrant a violation as the USN's position that Lexington and Saratoga's displacement should not count the addition of AA and its associate fire control since they were not an issue in the 1922 negotiations. In Brown's portrait of naval design, all parties were interested in wringing the maximum gain out of the Treaty system. The British DNC were more acutely aware of the penalties from cramming too much on a narrow hull and were more risk-averse than their colleagues in other navies. In a similar vein, John Jordan's Warships after Washington observes that the Treaty races in cruisers and destroyers was merely a reflection of preexisting trends in naval architecture that favored developments like the heavy cruiser or super-heated steam powerplants. Treaty limits may have sharpened the race in these categories, but did not create them. Jordan also astutely notes that one of the failures of the Treaty system was that:

the proposals for establishing relative naval strengths and status at Washington would be based on a "snapshot" of the force levels prevailing at that time, taking into account not only ships in service but also those on the stocks. This would be at the root of the flaws inherent in the treaty, many of which would be exposed only later in the decade when an attempt was made to extend the treaty ratios agreed for capital ships and aircraft carriers to other types of ship.