"المفاوضات حول سكة حديد بغداد" [و‎‎٥‎٧] (٣٢/٣)

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THE BAGDAD KAIL WAY NEGOTIATIONS.
IN an article in the " Quarterly Review " of January 1917 the two main trends of
thought running through German war literature on the Near and Middle East are
clearly set forth; " the first is occupied with the subject of a Central European
agglomerate stretching from the Baltic and the North Sea to Constantinople, and
thence dominating Asia to the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf; the second dwells on
the use of this agglomerate as a wedge to split the British Empire." In the numerous
extracts quoted from recent German publications it is shown how commercial
penetration in Turkey, where German trade increased tenfold between 1889 and 1912,
is in future to be solicitously fostered as a means to political ascendancy ; how the
road from Berlin to the Persian Gulf is considered the vital nerve in German
economic life and German policy ; how the phrase " Ostend-Bagdad " implies the
undermining of Britain's command of the seas by boldly evading it with a land route;
how the way is to be opened to Egypt and Persia, and through the Persian Gulf—
where England's supremacy and the Pax Britannica must be broken—to the Indian
Ocean and the lands around it.
An old saying points the unwisdom of spreading the net in sight of the bird;
if these professions of policy should appear in the German interest premature, they
have certainly served to emphasise the paramount British interest of opposing to
the uttermost the " Drang nach Osten" It is indeed well put that, should the
Prussian system secure its hold across the great land mass of the globe, from Denmark
to Arabia, there would soon be no vital issue, whether in Europe, Asia, or Africa, that
would not be decided from Berlin.
After all that has been said and written in Germany on war aims—Turkey to be
the pivotal point of Prussian world-power and future dominion; Antwerp to be
surrendered as the gateway of German expansion; a reconstituied Poland under
German authority ; the Chancellor's own avowal, on the eve of war, of the intended
annexation of the French colonies—clearly the possibility of satisfying the ambitions
of Imperial Germany can no longer enter into our calculations. No reasonable
give-and-take settlement can be lasting or expedient with a great Military Power if
it be set upon using every point of vantage gained as a means of threatening or under
mining its neighbours.
We are not concerned in the present article with such larger aspects of foreign
policy ; nor are we inclined to discuss here whether in the years belore the war it would
have been wiser, or indeed possible, to abstain from further efforts to reach a general
settlement with Germany by friendly negotiation. Our immediate object is a narrower
one ; it is confined to tracing the development of railway interests in Turkey and, in
the light of that development and of available information, seeking to restore the
perspective and focus the situation in which the later negotiations concerning the