"...only consolation was that the Malcolm-Jagow Convention was not a formal, explicit bilateral military alliance; otherwise, it was a complete and utter diplomatic disaster that to the
Quai d'Orsay in one stroke upended forty years of strategic planning and thinking.
The public terms were bad enough. Even before territorial claims were addressed, London enjoyed essentially acquiescence on the high seas by Berlin to her strategic projects. The Germans agreed that the British Empire "and her Dominions" enjoyed "a clear and permanent strategic interest in the fair and open continuance of commerce in the world's strategic waterways." In the text of the Convention, this was explicitly deemed to refer to the Straits of Malacca to which the German ally of Siam was closely placed as well as an Isthmian canal in the Americas; Germany of course was a junior financial partner in the Nicaragua Canal and was economically dominant over Costa Rica on its south shore. To French eyes, however, these clauses could very easily imply that Germany perhaps supported a
British-led Isthmian project across Panama where France had for nearly thirty years repeatedly failed
[1] and possibly even British interests in the Suez Canal. It got worse from there, as the Convention moved past formalizing each country's claims in Asia and the Pacific Islands (though conspicuously left spheres of influence within China proper vague) on to dividing up Portuguese Africa, which Germany corroborated as Britain's collateral for Portugal's substantial sovereign debt.
Britain of course enjoyed a power dynamic vis a vis Portugal where if they simply wanted to seize Portuguese Africa, they could do it; that was not London's preferred approach, however, and so the 1916 Portuguese bankruptcy with German diplomatic cover proved the excuse they needed to execute their designs. Portugal would be deigned allowed to keep their claims in West Africa in Guinea, the Cape Verde Islands, the Sao Tome Islands, and their protectorate over the Kingdom of Cabinda as well as the hinterland of Loanda, demarcated on north and south by the Loge and Longa Rivers and extending approximately two hundred kilometers inland. This was to be all that was left of the once-vast Portuguese Austral-Africa in Lisbon's hands; the rest was divided between Germany and Britain, with the Kafue and Luapula Rivers serving as the approximate dividing line, Germany absorbing all territories to the west of this line and north of the Zambezi, and Britain absorbing the territory to its east.
[2] This meant that Britain wound up with about sixty percent of Portugal's holdings in southern Africa with Germany taking on the other forty, and meant too that Britain now finally had her "Red Shore" of territory stretching from Italian Somaliland to Delagoa Bay on the Indian Ocean and Germany had doubled the size of their Sud-West Afrika colony while adding considerably more fertile land to it than the harsh Namib Desert. Germany agreed to abandon its Rovumaland colony that had previously buffered British East Africa from Portuguese Niassaland, while Britain finally as part of the convention transferred the small but strategically-placed island of Heligoland in the North Sea into German hands, ending one of the longest-running diplomatic disputes between London and Berlin.
[3]
The terms of the treaty sparked outrage in Portugal, and it seemed like the country might genuinely plunge into revolution after the reaction was so harsh that Carlos I felt obliged to abdicate in favor of his more popular son, Dom Luis Filipe, who took the name Luis II in honor of his grandfather. That was not entirely what bothered French policymakers, however; it had long been assumed that Portugal's fiscal instability and infamous inability to properly defend her interests in territory that was painted pink only on maps
[4] would eventually end with much of Austral-Africa in Brititsh hands. No, what stunned Paleologue and his advisors so was that Britain had agreed with
Germany to divvy up Africa between the two of them and done so in a sophisticated way that clearly benefited each in its own way. Germany now had a colony placed not in the least appealing part of Africa, taking "table scraps" as it had been known, but rather now sat on the southern flank of the Congo Free State and enjoyed the potential but often-untapped mineral riches of the former Kingdom of Katanga, which Belgium had long coveted but had avoided provoking Portugal over. Between the vastness of the new German South-West Africa and the Kamerun colony that had caused such controversy in the prior yeras in the Ubangi-Shari Dispute, Germany now controlled the majority of the central African coast south of the Guinean Bight and sandwiched precarious French colonies in the same region such as Libreville and Brazzaville, and thus directly threatened French access to its equatorial holdings in the interior.
Britain, too, had totally rebalanced the scales in Africa. No longer was its lonely outpost at mosquito-ridden Isla Inhaca at the entrance to Delagoa Bay its main source of power projection in the southern Indian Ocean; it now enjoyed Lourenco Marques, the established Portuguese port that had along with tiny Oosterburg been one of the few outlets for the United Free Republics that did not depend on Natal or the Cape, thus totally enveloping the Boer states and their allied kingdoms and making them economic dependencies. The Matabeleland and Shire Highland regions, known for their rich farmland and potential gold reserves, were now also in British hands and forever foreclosed upon potential Boer expansion northwards. Britain's long-standing geopolitical aim - to prevent another power from enjoying free range of access to the Indian Ocean after France's possession of the Suez Canal - had finally been achieved, a true accomplishment for Ian Malcolm, a Foreign Minister of little other accomplishment. Britain appeared at the time to have come out ahead, though the realization of the true extent of staggering mineral wealth in Katanga and then the discovery of oil off of the central African coast eventually made clear that it was Germany that had benefitted in the long run from Portugal's stumble.
[5]
The massive absorption of new territory was hugely popular in Britain and Germany, in the former as a boon to the flailing government of Hugh Cecil that was faced with twin crises in Ireland and India that persistently refused to go away, and in the latter that now was able to finally point at a vast colony of substance. It was conversely hugely unpopular in France, especially because it sparked fears that Britain and Germany were now pursuing ever-closer rapprochement and that Britain sought to isolate France diplomatically through its moves. This was not entirely true - Malcolm viewed parceling up southern Africa between London and Berlin as a way to maintain German support in a potential future dispute with Russia - but the trumpeting of nationalist triumph in the German press and an outburst of public Anglophilia in Germany punctuated by a successful tour by George V to Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Hamburg in the second half of 1916 did much to stoke that impression, as did rumors from the
Deuxieme Bureau's spies in London (including the mistress of a senior Foreign Office civil servant who "leaked like a sieve") that the Convention perhaps included secret clauses where Britain pledged to remain neutral in the event of a German conflict with France
and Austria, provided that Germany remained neutral in a conflict between Britain and Russia. While no such clauses were ever revealed, French strategic thinking presumed them and thus required a new level of bellicosity to persuade Germany that there would be a huge price to be paid even if Berlin (wrongly) assumed British support.
Secret clauses that didn't exist notwithstanding and strategic realities shaken overseas, the biggest problem for Poincaré was that it embarrassed French nationalists and thus had to embarrass him if he wanted to keep his job. The increasingly irrelevant
Ligue in particular was apoplectic, adamant that in the day of the
Petit-Aigle and Georges Boulanger, Germany in particular would never have dared collude with Britain at France's expense to seize such a vast corner of Africa, but now in the time of the
Petit-Colombe and Poincaré, the Second Empire's two greatest strategic rivals could essentially do as they please with little more than loud protests from Paris. Ironically, the Anglo-German Convention arguably isolated its two signatories more than it isolated France, as it was (not unfairly) viewed in other European capitals as London and Berlin beating up on a prone, poor, defenseless junior state. Italy in particular viewed it as carte blanche to pursue her own interests in the Balkans and maybe even North Africa more openly, while Russian diplomats very deliberately informed their British counterparts that they were uninterested in hearing about British "concerns" regarding their influence in Persia and Afghanistan ever again. But such nuance was lost on Poincaré and his closets collaborators, who were already feeling politically fragile after their poorly-advised decision to call snap elections the previous autumn, and now there was a newfound necessity to underwriting their political fortunes with more openly Germanophobic belligerence - because, quite simply, it was popular with the French public and its conservative elite alike..."
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La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] Hat tip to
@Devoid for this idea
[2] So, roughly, Germany is getting most of OTL Angola, Katanga Province in Congo (which ITTL was controlled by Portugal, though "control" is a loose term), and the western half or so of Zambia. Zimbabwe, eastern Zambia, Malawi and all of Mozambique just became British.
[3] As in OTL, the Royal Navy finds the island of little use to them, but Germany is way more paranoid about a
potential naval base that close to the Kiel Canal than the RN is actually interested in placing one there, and so it's a cheap sweetener for London to get Rovumaland instead.
[4] Hehe
[5] Granted I'm not sure exactly when Angola's oil bonanza was struck, and much of it is nearest to Cabinda and Loanda, which of course are still in Portuguese hands.
