Kellogg-Briand Pact

This 20th-century approach emerged in the era of the League of Nations after World War I and the much-maligned 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing international aggression — a time when statesmen and diplomats believed it would be possible to use nonmilitary tools to end war once and for all.

This “no-spying agreement” will be as effective at abolishing spying as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was at abolishing war.

In fact, a mass movement for peace had pressed the U.S. government, in 1928, to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international “Treaty for the Renunciation of War,” sponsored by the United States and France and subsequently signed by most of the nations of the world.

Perhaps that is why the Kellogg-Briand Pact is often belittled, when it is remembered at all.

They say the relative prosperity and peace of the post-World War II world owes a great deal to a now-obscure international treaty — the Kellogg-Briand Pact.