By Dylan Matthews, Image: Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images, Vox, March 6, 2022
The Treaty of Versailles, formally ending World War I and establishing a new postwar order, began with a charter for a new organization. Called the Covenant of the League of Nations, the new body was meant to resolve international disputes peaceably — and, crucially, it committed members to “respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.”
That promise, Article X of the Covenant, was the work of then-US President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson chaired the committee at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that drafted the covenant, and historian John Milton Cooper, in his book Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations, describes Article X as “Wilson’s singular contribution to the Draft Covenant.”
Wilson’s Article would help doom the League. Opponents of US entry into the League, like Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), argued that the provision obligated the United States to jump to the defense of any country around the world, entangling it in conflicts it had no part in. Lodge called it “the most important article in the whole treaty,” which would send “the best of our youth” on a foolish “errand” to “guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of every nation on earth.”
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