On 27 August 1928, the world, it could be argued, changed. On that day, international dignitaries gathered in Paris to sign the Peace Pact – officially, the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, often called the Kellogg-Briand Pact after its main backers, American secretary of state Frank Kellogg and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. The pact was short, containing only two operative clauses. In the first, signatories condemned war and renounced it as an instrument of policy; in the second, they pledged that their countries would settle disputes peacefully.
Of course, just over a decade later almost all of those nations were at war. Since then, when the pact is remembered at all it is usually dismissed as the climax of interwar idealism; indeed,…
