August 27, 2007
Not Just Peace in Our Time Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:25 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead feature today, on the Kellogg-Briand Pact, makes an admirable effort to rescue the treaty’s reputation. It is very easy, in retrospect, to deride the agreement as a preposterously idealistic and doomed experiment. It certainly was one, but it’s a mistake to dismiss the treaty offhand. Even if the Kellogg-Briand Pact was a failure, the fact that it was ever enacted is notable and says a lot about the international atmosphere of the 1920s. Mr. Gordon’s article does a great job of probing some worthwhile questions about the agreement: Why was it enacted in the first place? Did it have any impact? Did its signers really think it would work? Readers should read the full article, but I would summarize its conclusions in the following way: When Japan and Germany manufactured attacks by their rivals to justify war, they did so “admitting the moral and legal force of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Before the pact, war had been nothing more than a way for sovereign states to carry on politics by other means. After Kellogg-Briand, it was a flat violation of international law, a fact that had consequences at the war crimes tribunals held after World War II in Nuremberg and elsewhere.” This point is worth considering. I think the influence of this treaty in promoting disapproval of offensive war could be overstated. Throughout history, warring parties have attempted to claim moral superiority over their rivals by posing as victims. The U.S. government under James Polk, for example, seized on a bogus reason for war with Mexico in 1846. The firefight that Polk treated as a reason for war may or may not have taken place on American soil, and the Mexican troops who opened fire on U.S. forces might have been perfectly within their rights to do so. Polk’s real concern, of course, was territorial expansion, and this murky incident served his interests well. Countries and individuals with aggressive aims have always found it advantageous to present their actions as defensive. The trend didn’t start with imperial Japan. All the same, I believe Mr. Gordon is right that the Kellogg-Briand pact helped produce a world in which offensive war is even more frowned upon. At the very least, by promoting the fairly new concept of international law the treaty set a precedent for treaties to follow. The notion of an international criminal court, for example, has its roots in the same interwar idealism as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Incidentally, an interesting side effect to our having attached such stigma to offensive war is that now even wars that are actually fought for defensive reasons are suspected of being offensive wars in disguise. There are plenty of people, in the United States and abroad, who believe that 9/11 may have been an inside job designed to provide the Bush administration with justification for an oil war in Afghanistan. The idea is mad, but at least part of its appeal comes from the fact that, were we ever to have a government misguided enough to launch an elective war in Western Asia, it would surely need to cook up some defensive rationale for that war. Hopefully, we’ll never see such a crazy scheme in practice. Oh, wait . . .
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