The League's Rise and Collapse

The intellectual foundation for the League of Nations lay substantially in the Fourteen Points that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson presented to Congress on 8 January 1918, outlining American war aims and a vision for the postwar settlement. Alongside specific territorial proposals—including the restoration of Belgium, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, and adjustments to Italian and Balkan frontiers—the Fourteen Points called for open diplomacy in place of secret treaties, freedom of the seas, the reduction of armaments, a general "association of nations" to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity to states great and small alike, and, in the fourteenth point itself, the League that would eventually be created. Wilson's vision of collective security rested on the premise that aggression against any one state would be treated as a concern of all, replacing the old balance-of-power logic with a system in which the community of nations would act jointly to deter and, if necessary, punish violations of the peace.