Select File and then Print from your browser's menu. Paul Smith From Jason Tomes's shrewd and meticulous rendering of his views in Balfour and Foreign Policy. But where Michelet saw international harmony as structured by God, Balfour wanted to entrust the task to the Anglo-Saxon peoples, as the patentees of ordered freedom. His finest hour arrived in 1917, when the USA took station alongside the British empire for the preservation, as he saw it, of world order. Tomes might have done more to situate Balfour in the spectrum of Conservative approaches to international affairs, and in particular to examine what he derived or discarded from his uncle, Salisbury, but this is an excellent study, well organized and written, and throwing fresh light even on such hackneyed topics as the Balfour Declaration.
Tomes is able to show that there was often much sense in Balfour's assessments.
It pointed up the difficulty of assimilatory colonization. Balfour was well aware of the shortcomings of the Versailles settlement. He saw at once that the absence of the United States hamstrung the League of Nations, and that general disarmament and compulsory arbitration were impracticable. But sceptical clarity and commitment to peace were seldom accompanied by faith or energy in the prosecution of improvement. Most obviously at Versailles, Balfour did not fight to change climates of opinion.