WHEN AMERICA LEFT PEACE TO FRANCE


The League of Nations once acted like the United Nations is acting now.

  Artículo de  ROBERT L. BARTLEY  en “The Wall Street Journal” del 17.03.03
 

In the end, President Woodrow Wilson scuttled the treaty he'd negotiated at Versailles, urging Democratic senators to vote against its ratification. He preferred no treaty, and no League of Nations, to one including the reservations the Senate had attached at the behest of Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge. So the United States opted out, leaving peacekeeping to other powers, in particular France, cheek by jowl with a seething Germany.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that the League was defeated by the "isolationists." This breed did indeed exist, led by William Borah of Idaho; these "irreconcilables" joined Wilson's Democrats in voting down the treaty. By contrast, Senator Lodge, a worldly Massachusetts aristocrat, had been a powerful voice for the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines. He was no isolationist, but what today we would call a unilateralist.

Many of Lodge's long list of reservations were petty, but Wilson paid only lip service to compromising away impediments. He and Lodge deadlocked over Article X of the League Covenant, which specified that signatories would "preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence" of other nations.

Lodge's principal reservation explicitly rejected this obligation, "unless in any particular case the Congress, which, under the Constitution, has the sole power to declare war or authorize the employment of the military or naval forces of the United States, shall by act or joint resolution so provide."

Wilson called Article X "the heart of the Covenant," and was unwilling to yield on the principle of a supranational authority. With the idealistic and realistic internationalists unable to unite, the isolationists carried the day.

 

Since the U.S. had not ratified the Versailles Treaty, it was not represented on the reparations commission. The French seized the opportunity in 1921 to present Germany with a bill for nearly $32 billion, which implied an impossibly huge German trade surplus that would disrupt the commerce of the whole continent. John Maynard Keynes had already warned, in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," that if the war ends "with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction, also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds."

When Germany was predictably unable to meet the bill, in 1923 France and Belgium seized the industrial Ruhr Valley, succeeding only in crippling its productive potential and spurring the great German inflation that destroyed its middle class. The French ultimately withdrew, financial wizard Hjalmar Schacht stabilized the currency, and in 1924, Chicago Banker Charles Dawes drew up a plan to cut reparations--though the U.S. never cancelled the Allied war debts.

With Germany momentarily stabilized, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand negotiated a pact to outlaw war in 1928. It won Kellogg a Nobel Peace Prize; M. Briand had already won for the Locarno Pact, withdrawing Allied troops from the Rhineland and paving the way for German entry into the League. But as the Great Depression seized the world, the road to war proceeded apace; the League, the Kellogg-Briand Pact and other supranational arrangements proved monumentally ineffectual.

In 1929 Soviet Russia invaded Manchuria after China arrested Communist agents. Meanwhile, Japanese militarists were rapidly turning their country into the Iraq of the era, especially after Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi was disabled in an assassination attempt in 1930. In 1931 the Japanese army seized Manchuria, and later attacked Shanghai. The U.S. sent a representative to the League in Geneva as an "observer and auditor," but no sanctions were invoked against Japan.

In 1935, Mussolini invaded nearly defenseless Ethiopia; Emperor Halie Sellasie made a historic appearance at the League to appeal for protection. It did brand Italy as an aggressor, and invoked some toothless economic sanctions. In 1936, Hitler, who had already rearmed in defiance of Versailles and withdrawn from the League, remilitarized the Rhineland and revoked the Locarno Pact. His defense minister had issued orders to withdraw across the Rhine if patrols met French resistance. Any withdrawal would have jeopardized Hitler's regime, but the French sat on their hands.

The rest is history.

The League was consigned to the dust bin, but Wilson's supranational ideal lives on in the United Nations. Somehow this mélange of superpowers and mini-states, democracies and tyrannies, is supposed to confer legitimacy on the use of force. But we are again finding, as Halie Sellasie before us, that the international community is willing to proclaim high-sounding resolutions but unwilling to enforce them.

Viewed from today, Lodge's fear that the League would needlessly involve the U.S. in war seems backward. But his suspicion of a disembodied supranational authority rings prescient. We're learning that decisions of war or peace in the Middle East are too weighty for fragile political structures in Mexico or Turkey, let alone Cameroon or Guinea. Better to entertain France in a more serious forum, like the NATO authority that overcame French objections on Turkish aid.

 

Wilson's stubborn idealism has done damage enough. When the current lesson is digested, no President of the United States will ever again look for legitimacy to the likes of the U.N. or the League.

Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.