The Day They Ended All Wars—Remember?

Secretary of State Frank Kellogg signs the agreement, on August 27, 1928.

(Corbis)

On August 27, 1928, 79 years ago today, the world abolished, for all time, war as an instrument of national policy.

Meeting in Paris, the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, India, the British dominions, and several other countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact (named for the American Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, and the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand). More than 60 countries—not far from all the sovereign nations in the world at the time—would sign it within a couple of years.

“The High Contracting Parties,” Article I of the pact began portentously, “solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” It required that the signatories settle “all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin” by “pacific means.” What it didn’t do was establish any means whereby the treaty’s provisions could be enforced. And only 11 years after the signing, the greatest war in history began, a war that would lay waste much of the world and cost well over 50 million lives.

Those of us who have lived our lives in the shadow of that great war can be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking the impulses that led to the Kellogg-Briand Pact were naive. They were. But the pact, in fact, has had long-lasting and very significant diplomatic consequences. We live in a different world from our great-grandparents, in part because of Kellogg-Briand.

And it is important to remember what the generation that wrote the pact had just lived through: the “seminal catastrophe of this century,” as the historian George F. Kennan called it. World War I had burst unexpectedly upon the world in 1914, after a Serbian nationalist had assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and Austria’s attempt to gain politically from it had set off a cascade of events that had proved impossible to stop once it began. In four years of static trench warfare, more than eight million soldiers had died for few if any gains. Indeed, Allied victory in 1918 had come not from the defeat of the German army in the field but from the collapse of the German home front.

With treasure beyond counting and an entire generation of young men lost in the carnage, everyone in postwar public life, at least in the democracies, had the same political goal: to prevent at all costs another war like the one just ended.

Of the Western Great Powers, the United States had been the least involved and suffered the fewest casualties, reluctantly entering the war only in the spring of 1917. And almost as soon as the war was over, and despite President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts, the United States had retreated into the isolation that had been its basic foreign policy since the administration of George Washington. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the peace treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, which was supposed to keep the peace by collective action.

But it did not withdraw completely from international diplomacy. In 1921 and 1922, when a new naval arms race threatened to break out among the major naval powers, the United States hosted a conference that resulted in the Washington Naval Treaty. This treaty placed severe limitations on the size and number of capital ships in the navies of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan.

In 1927 France proposed a bilateral agreement with the United States in which both sides would forswear war between them. President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Kellogg thought this was too close to a French alliance, and they suggested instead that an agreement to outlaw war be opened to all nations. This was an immensely popular idea internationally, and since the pact would not outlaw self-defense but only wars of aggression, most countries had no objection to signing it.

The negotiations were relatively easy, and the United States Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 85–1, although it adopted a reservation that signing the treaty did not limit the right of American self-defense or require the country to act against signatories that violated the treaty. The one senator who voted against it was the Republican John J. Blaine of Wisconsin, always notably maverick in his politics. Kellogg was awarded the 1929 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the pact (Briand had already won it in 1926 for his work on the Locarno Treaty, which secured German admission to the League of Nations, among other matters).

The lack of an enforcement mechanism, of course, proved a fatal flaw in the Kellogg-Briand Pact as the 1920s gave way to the ’30s and depression began to grip the world economy. Germany, Italy, and Japan, all signatories to the pact, became notably more aggressive in their foreign policies. On September 19, 1931, the Japanese began to establish a puppet state in Manchuria by attacking a Chinese garrison. This was, in fact, exactly the sort of war of aggression the Kellogg-Briand Pact was meant to outlaw. But the day before, a group of Japanese army officers had blown up a small section of a Japanese-owned railroad in Manchuria, near the Chinese garrison, in order to claim that Japan’s actions were taken in self-defense.

So while the pact had done nothing to keep the peace, it had at least received the backhanded compliment of causing the Japanese to stage an “incident” in order to justify their actions. Hitler, too, would utilize a charade—an “attack” on a German radio station by men in Polish uniforms—to justify his invasion of Poland, in 1939.

By staging these incidents—which, of course, fooled nobody—both Germany and Japan were, in fact, 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.

And in drawing up the charter of the United Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact served as precedent for Article 2(4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

So while the Kellogg-Briand Pact was quixotic, naive, Pollyannaish, whatever, it was also, perhaps, the first step on a long road to what Winston Churchill once called the “broad, sunlit uplands” of peace, of which humankind has dreamed since the dawn of the species.

—John Steele Gordon writes “The Business of America” for American Heritage magazine. His most recent book is An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins).