When the Governments of the World Agreed to Banish War - The New York Times

When the Governments of the World Agreed to Banish War - The New York Times

When the Governments of the World Agreed to Banish War By Max Boot Sept. 21, 2017 Aristide Briand, Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France, and Frank B. Kellogg, in the French Foreign Office, August 1928. THE INTERNATIONALISTS How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World By Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro Illustrated. 581 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, also known as the Paris Peace Pact, does not have a good reputation, for obvious reasons. Designed to renounce war “as an instrument of national policy,” it was negotiated by the French foreign minister Aristide Briand and the American secretary of state Frank Kellogg just three years before the Japanese invasion of China and 11 years before the Nazi invasion of Poland — the two acts of aggression that combined to create the greatest war of all time. Henry Kissinger called the Kellogg-Briand Pact “as irresistible as it was meaningless,” while George Kennan described it as “childish, just childish.” The Yale law professors Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro contend in their provocative new book, “The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World,” that the naysayers are wrong. They claim that while “it did not end war between states,” the Kellogg-Briand Pact did mark “the beginning of the end.” More than that, “it reshaped the world map, catalyzed the human rights revolution, enabled the use of economic sanctions as a tool of law enforcement, and ignited the explosion in the number of international organizations that regulate so many aspects of our daily lives.” Oh, and it led to “the replacement of one international order with another.” That is a lot of credit to give to a treaty that, until now, pretty universally has been dismissed as inconsequential. Hathaway and Shapiro deserve medals of intellectual valor for even daring to make a case that is so at odds with what almost every other expert in the field of international relations believes. But, sadly, their thesis, while backed up by many erudite, carefully footnoted pages, is not persuasive. “There are some ideas so absurd only an intellectual could believe them,” George Orwell wrote. The notion that the KelloggBriand Pact was a raging success is one of them. “The Internationalists” is an attempt to explain a well-known phenomenon — the decline of interstate war over the past 70 years. War itself has hardly disappeared, as witness events from Afghanistan to Syria. But cross-border conflicts between internationally recognized states are less frequent than they used to be. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the exception that proves the rule. Many reasons have been given for this development. They include aversion to the bloodletting of two world wars; the decline of racism, which once justified wars of colonial conquest; the development of nuclear weapons, which make a great-power conflict less likely; the rise of American dominance, which has been employed to stop aggression like Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait; and the spread of democracy and free trade, which make states more likely to cooperate than to fight. Hathaway and Shapiro claim that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact was the pivotal factor in catalyzing this complex change in international relations, but their own narrative suggests otherwise. While they contend that 1928 was the dividing line between the Old World Order, in which wars of conquest were acceptable, and a New World Order, in which they are not, their book shows that there was a more gradual trend over the centuries to impose humanitarian restrictions on warfare. “The Internationalists” ably charts this transformation in the legal arena, beginning with the publication in 1625 of the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius’s landmark study “The Law of War and Peace in Three Books.” Grotius held that war was only permissible as a “response to the violation of rights,” and he listed war crimes — “poison, treacherous assassination and rape” — that were never allowed. Thus was born the modern laws of war. In the 18th century, one of Grotius’s successors, the Swiss philosopher Emer de Vattel, propounded a Principle of Distinction, which made it a crime for armies to deliberately target civilians who did not take up arms. As Hathaway and Shapiro note, subsequent “international treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864); prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874); banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899); and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907).” While all of these treaties were aimed at limiting the severity of conflict, they suffered from a lack of enforcement and did little to make wars themselves less frequent. That only changed after World War II, when the United Nations Security Council was created to uphold international law, and a Cold War between nuclear-armed states imposed some stability on international politics. Crunching the data, Hathaway and Shapiro conclude, “Not until 1948, after a war in which 70 million people died, did the frequency of conquest decisively fall — a reflection of the new international institutions created after 1945 and, perhaps, the concurrent emergence of nuclear weapons.” What does any of this have to do with the Kellogg-Briand Pact? The authors make much of the fact that the Nuremberg prosecutors tried to convict the Nazi defendants of violating the 1928 treaty by waging a war of aggression. They are evidently saddened that the Nuremberg judges embraced another theory — namely, that “it is permissible to punish evil acts even if they were not crimes when committed.” No defendant received “the death penalty simply for waging aggressive war,” they note. “Only those who committed war crimes or crimes against humanity would be hanged.” In short, by the end of “The Internationalists,” Hathaway and Shapiro are forced to acknowledge that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was not nearly as important as they claimed in the beginning. Considering “the frequency of conquest,” they call it a “speed bump” on the road toward making war less legitimate, with World War II being “the stop sign.” Even to call the 1928 treaty a “speed bump” may be overly generous, but if that’s an accurate description, then it hardly justifies the claim of the subtitle that it “remade the world.” More accurate, but less sexy, would be to assert that revulsion against war, building for centuries, spiked after World War I. That sentiment produced great literature like “All Quiet on the Western Front” and also empty blather like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but did not succeed in making war less likely. Quite the opposite: Pacifism blinded the West to the growing Axis threat and made World War II more likely. Only after 1945 did the West acknowledge that it would take more than lofty promises to keep the peace — it would take security arrangements like positioning American troops in Europe and Asia and creating alliances like NATO and the United States-Japan security treaty. Those developments go unmentioned by Hathaway and Shapiro, but Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and George Marshall deserve far more credit for keeping the peace than do the justly forgotten Aristide Briand and Frank Kellogg. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of the forthcoming “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.” A version of this article appears in p