033.5111 Laval, Pierre/192
Memorandum by the Secretary of State
The Netherlands Minister34 asked me about the Laval negotiations and first spoke of the consultative pact. I told him that the French brought it up in exactly the same way as it had been brought up in London at the Naval Conference:35 namely, that they desired a security pact as a condition of disarmament and that the consultative pact was merely a gesture, and that therefore a consultative pact would not produce disarmament and would have been likely to produce misunderstanding. He then asked about reparations, and I told him that the method by which those could be approached had been agreed upon: namely, through the initiative of Europe through the boundaries of the Young Plan. He asked whether that was our view as well as Laval’s, and I told him yes.
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- Dr. Jan Herman van Roijen.↩
- See Foreign Relations, 1930, vol. i, pp. 1 ff.↩