A concert of the Great Powers resembling the Quadruple Alliance sought to regulate such vexing problems as were presented by the Balkans and China, but their concord was not loud enough to drown the notes of discord.
The outspoken word of governments was still all for peace; their proposals for preserving it were of two kinds.

First, there was the time-honored argument that the best preservative of peace was preparation for war.

Foremost in the avowed policies of the day, this was urged by some who really believed it, by some who hoped for war and intended to be ready for it, and by the cynical who did not wish for war but thought it inevitable.

The other proposal was that war could and should be prevented by agreements to submit all differences between nations to international tribunals for judgment.

In the United States, which had always rejected the idea of balance of power, and which only in Asia, and to a limited degree, assented to the concert of powers, one or the other of these two views was urged by all those who saw that the United States had actually become a world power, that isolation no longer existed, and that a policy of nonintervention could not keep us permanently detached from the current of world politics.
The foremost advocates of preparedness were Theodore Roosevelt and Admiral Mahan.