There’s Still No Reason to Think the Kellogg-Briand Pact Accomplished Anything

If Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro's new book The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World is correct, then I've been guilty of educational malpractice for the past 30 years. Why? Because I’ve taught a course on "The Origins of Modern Wars" off and on since the 1980s, and one of the cases I address is World War II. In that context, I use the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact as an example of misplaced idealism that failed to stop the slide to war and may have made it a bit more likely. In my treatment (and those of many historians and political scientists), the pact — whose signatories agreed to renounce war as an instrument of policy and promised to resolve future disputes solely by "pacific means" — is a mostly irrelevant footnote to history and an object lesson on how not to prevent war....