Page 370 - Beers With Our Founding Fathers

Beers with our Founding Fathers

The history of international law and treaties is long and

complex, and bureaucratically political. Unlike our Country’s history,
we do not have to go any further back than the League of Nations to

begin to see the problems we have today. Chartered from the end of
World War I (1919) to the end of World War II (1946), it was the first

international body for security and disarmament. Although the
United States was the dominant country in developing the League of

Nations, the Senate did not ratify the charter amid concerns of its
weaknesses and reliance solely on member countries to respond ad

hoc to international crises. When several actions of Japan and
Germany, including invasions of other countries, could not be

stopped in the 1930’s, and the recognized legitimacy and survival of
the League of Nations was in doubt and all but abandoned by the

beginning of WW II. These events were possible because the
League of Nations did not have any international policing authority

or enforcement, particularly its own policing; relying on members to
deploy troops as needed, and therefore had no real teeth in the

enforcement of its charter. The League of Nations was quickly seen
as the debacle it was and dissolved in favor of the current United

Nations in 1946, with the same essential intent. The United Nations
was modeled after the former League of Nations, but with increased

international support and extensive machinery to help the new
body avoid repeating the League of Nations failures. Although with

the best of intentions, the United Nations has transformed into an

international socialist experiment that has long abandoned its
mandate; similar to unions and civil activist groups.

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