ABSTRACT
On 12 August 1905, two years before it was to expire and about a month before St Petersburg and Tokyo signed their peace treaty, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 was adjusted. This time, with the British not ruling out a Russian revenge attack elsewhere to make up for its reversals in Manchuria, India was included in its scope. The preamble mentioned as one of the objectives of the renewal the ‘consolidation and maintenance of the general peace in the regions of Eastern Asia and India’. Article IV noted that Great Britain had ‘a special interest in all that concerns the security of the Indian frontier’ and that Japan recognised the British right ‘to take such measures in the proximity of that frontier as she may find necessary for safeguarding her Indian possessions’. The revised treaty, which in its preamble now specifically endorsed the ‘principle of equal opportunities for the commerce and industry of all nations in China’, could more easily engage Great Britain and Japan in war than before. The 1902 provision about support in a war with two enemies had been changed. Article II of the new treaty stipulated that if ‘by reason of an unprovoked attack or aggressive action, wherever arising, on the part of any other Power or Powers’ Japan or Great Britain ‘should be involved in a war in defense of its territorial rights or special interests’ in East Asia or India, the other would ‘at once come to the assistance of its ally’ and would ‘conduct war in common, and make peace in mutual agreement’. 1
