Its history 101 – international law and treaties are worthless

If the victors of Versailles intended to keep their ill-gotten gains, they had to be willing to employ military force against a revanchist Germany whenever the latter attempted to effectuate resistance to the terms of the so-called peace. The Western democracies, however, lacked the requisite will; instead of fighting to preserve their hegemony, they preferred to trust in their own illusions. They put their faith into such meaningless pronouncements as Wilson's Fourteen Points,2' the Pact of Paris,22 and its corollary the Stimson Doctrine;23 into the ineffectual organs of the League of Nations - the Council, the Assembly, and the Permanent Court of International Justice; into vapid and useless legalist-moralist doctrines like neutrality, disarmament, and arbitration; and into the codification of international law and the formulation of a definition of aggression. Finally, and perhaps most egregiously of all, they actually believed in the existence of a beneficent world public opinion that would will the world on its path towards peace. These chimera were exploded when a powerful and resurgent Germany, under the leadership of a demonic yet brilliant tyrant, together with like-minded allies in Italy and Japan, challenged the status quo of Versailles with the might of their armies. 24 Inter national law was a farcical joke to the Axis powers. The only way to stop them was through the exercise of that lone medium they understood and appreciated most - sheer, naked, brutal force, stripped of all pretensions to anything but outright conquest. Hence the need for their unconditional defeat and the demand for their unconditional surrender. It was unfortunate for the lives of millions of people that the Allied enamor for international law meant they had to learn this lesson the hard way, after the mistakes of Manchuria, Ethiopia, the Rhineland, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. If Western statesmen had been attentive to the historical imperatives of power politics, and not fascinated by the seductive allurements of international law, the Second World War might never have happened - or else it would have occurred in the middle 1930s when the devastation would have been minor in comparison to that which it was in actuality. They could have fought the war on their own terms and at the time of their own choice, not those of their adversaries. The Western democracies had only themselves to blame for the Second World War. Political realists delight in bandying about that famous quotation from George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."25 Faced with a Communist threat in the aftermath of the Second World War, they set out to ensure that the United States and other Western democracies did not, in their confrontation with the Soviet Union, repeat the same grievous errors they had allegedly committed in their confrontation with fascism - reliance upon the fictitious and fatuous strength of international law and international organizations. In the political milieu of the Cold War, the West must not repeat the same near fatal mistake it had made after termination of the First World War if it wished to avoid a suicidal Third World War.26 Hence the justification for the necessity of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the policy of containment, the Berlin airlift, the intervention in Korea, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). These elements of postwar American foreign policy were quite properly founded upon pure calculations of national interest and power politics.