A product of the interwar peace movement, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was a 1928 agreement among several nations to seek to stop war. In 1927 James T. Shotwell, a Columbia University professor and trustee of the Carnegie Endowment fOR International Peace, visited French foreign minister Aristide Briand to lobby for a formal repudiation of war by the United States and France. When the French refused to attend the Geneva Naval Conference, Briand attempted to mollify American concerns that the French might be engaging in an arms race by sending a draft of a treaty to Washington on June 20, 1927, along the lines that Shotwell had suggested. Worried about the revival of German militarism, the French hoped to forge an alliance with the United States as a security measure against their historic enemy.
America’s secretary of state Frank Kellogg proposed an alternative to Briand’s alliance, a multilateral treaty that outlawed war. Eventually 62 nations signed the treaty in Paris in 1928. The nations agreed to “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy.” The signatories, however, watered down the treaty by attaching amendments refusing to outlaw, for example, wars of self-defense. The U. S. Senate attached an amendment to the pact that allowed for the use of force to uphold the Monroe Doctrine as well as to protect national interest or honor. Perhaps more troubling was the fact that the U. S. Congress passed legislation to increase its navy at the same time that it formally renounced war in the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. On the same day that the Senate approved the treaty 85-1, it appropriated funds for 15 new cruisers.
Furthermore, the Kellogg-Briand Treaty had no mechanism for enforcement. Instead, according to Kellogg, it relied on “moral force.” The treaty was in fact only a statement of principle that required no sacrifices or responsibilities. It did not provide a sense of security to its signatories, nor did many peace advocates believe that the treaty guaranteed a peaceful world. American statesmen and peace advocates who supported the pact saw it as only a first step in a longer process toward a peaceful world. It was viewed more or less as a tool to educate the public about the costs of war. However, it proved useful after World War II, when the treaty was revived by the Allies to punish German leaders for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials.
See also foreign policy.
Further reading: Lewis Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations, 1925-1929 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961); Richard W. Fanning, Peace and Disarmament: Naval Rivalry and Arms Control, 1922-1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
—Glen Bessemer
World History
