August 27, 2006
The Kellogg-Briand Pact Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:55 PM EST In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Kingston Trio was a very hot singing group in the “faux folk” tradition, singing highly sophisticated arrangements of both genuine folk songs and contemporary ones that echoed the folk tradition. One of their big hits, for instance, was “They Call the Wind Maria,” written by Broadway’s Lerner and Loewe, not exactly a pair of yokels from the sticks. Another of their big hits was a song called “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy:
Last night I had the strangest dream
I’d ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They’d never fight again
Judging from the lyric, Mr. McCurdy thought this an excellent idea, if one unlikely to be adopted.
In fact, it had been adopted already. Seventy-nine years ago today, in 1927, eleven nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for Frank Kellogg, U.S. secretary of state under Coolidge, and Aristide Briand, foreign minister of France. Basically it bound the signatories to renounce war as “an instrument of national policy.” Sixty-two nations eventually signed on to the Pact of Paris, as it is formally named, putting an end to war. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course. Unfortunately, there was no mechanism for enforcing the treaty—it was just a piece of paper—and many of the signatories regarded it as nothing more than a public-relations exercise. Only three years after it came into force Japan seized Manchuria, and Japan invaded China proper in 1937. In 1941 it attacked the United States. Germany forcibly reoccupied the Rhineland in 1935, seized the Sudetenland in 1938, and invaded Poland in 1939, setting off the greatest conflict in human history. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and Albania in 1939. Japan, Germany, and Italy were all signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Kellogg’s successor as secretary of state, Henry Stimson, with naiveté equal to that which brought about the Kellogg-Briand Pact, closed down the State Department’s code-breaking operation, saying that “gentlemen don’t read other men’s mail.” Gentlemen indeed do not, but nation states most certainly do, because so many of them do not act like gentlemen. Treaties that ignore the reality of how non-democratic nations all too often act do not ensure the peace. Instead they help to ensure war. One would think that by now everyone, even the most dewy-eyed naïf, would realize that pieces of paper don’t protect peace anymore than does a feel-good folk song. What protects it is countervailing power, and making it crystal clear to rogue nations that the democratic states are willing to use that power as necessary.
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