That Time Everyone Tried To Outlaw War

War is ugly, horrific and, according to some, a necessary part of human civilization. Yet in the 1920s, world powers recovering from World War I sought to make the planet a safer (or, at least, less unsafe) place. Their solution? The Paris Peace Pact, which aimed to, through an international agreement, outlaw war. Spoiler: it didn't work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome

(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as always
so much for tuning in war. Uh anyway, that's our
one and only super producer, Mr Max Williams. It's like, no,
it's sort of like war. What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing? I mean it's good for some things, depending
on which side of it you're on. Um. It has

(00:49):
been in the past and continues to be used as
a tool of international affairs, a tool of not diplomacy.
It's the opposite of diplomacy. That's the thing you try
before you get into war. But it has been used
as a way to make moves geopolitically, sort of what
we think of war as typically, right, Ben, Yeah, that's right, Noll,

(01:10):
we know that. Unfortunately, as catchy as the war song is,
it's not entirely accurate. War drives a lot of medical innovation,
a lot of scientific innovation. It is a violent, ugly thing,
but it has become an inherent part of geopolitics and
has been since ancient days. But today, and I lo

(01:32):
if you're bringing up diplomacy today, we decided off air
to step into two with optimism and This is why
we wanted to bring this story to you. War is
such a dangerous, dangerous, tragic thing. It shouldn't surprise us
that once upon a time a bunch of countries got

(01:54):
together and said, okay, guys, enough, no more war. We're
gonna stop all wars um by signing an agreement, by
signing some paper that'll stop. It's sort of like the
equivalent of let's end racism by doing a change dot
org petition. Yeah, unfortunately, I mean, I hate to be

(02:17):
a negative Nancy or Noel Brown here, I guess, but
it does feel a little bit aspirational, which I think
we can all applaud. But it also feels a little
bit laughable because, as we know, a lot of these
things are pretty non binding, and they do tend to
have plenty of loopholes that folkus can just dive right
through with very little precision needed. Yeah, exactly, And we

(02:40):
also know that, you know, I think a great comparison
be the idea of saying, Okay, we're going to eradicate
a disease by everyone signing a piece of paper that
says you're not going to get it. That's how we're
going to get rid of HIV or something like that,
Like it's the intentions can be good, but the intentions alone,
well boiler alert tell us what you think after the episode.

(03:02):
What we're talking about today is something called the Kellogg
Brand Pack of nineteen twenty eight, the idea that we
could as a species, as civilizations, just stop war by
saying it's illegal. Just wish it away, guys, wish harder. Uh,

(03:24):
you're not your vision boards not visionary enough. That's the problem.
So they so we've got to start first by saying
how this, how this came about. It starts with a
lot of context. Basically, the argument made to outlaw war

(03:44):
came about because before then people just accepted that war
was a quote legitimate interest of national policy. And that's
from a book called The Internationalist's Right by two very
smart Yale Law School professor or is Una A. Hathaway
and Scott J. Shapiro. There was an incident in sixteen

(04:05):
or three when a Dutch trader attacked and ransacked a
Portuguese ship outside of Singapore. And because of that point
that you just made ben about the idea of war
being a quote legitimate instrument of national policy, there was
a dude named Grotius Um, who was a legal scholar
who basically justified this encounter um, which ultimately you could

(04:29):
really just say was an act of looting uh and
ransacking with no international policy involved one way or the other.
But this guy Grotius made this legal justification of essentially
a Dutch pirate ship seizing you know, Portuguese goods completely
unlawfully um as an act of war um in his

(04:50):
book on the Laws of War and Peace that came
out in sixteen five, and that is what Hathaway and
Shapiro say became the text book of the law of
war and based on completely, in their opinions, spurious kind
of foundations, very shaky ground. Yeah. Yeah, not to be
confused with the absolute banger The Art of War by

(05:11):
Sun Zoo popular around the world nowadays. But yeah, Grotius
is is interesting because he essentially says any kind of
war of aggression is legal so long as the aggressors
provide some sort of justification, and even if those justifications
turn out to be b s straight malarkey, whomever wins

(05:34):
the war has a right to keep whatever they got
out of it, whether that's like land or resources. That's
right they make the whole might makes right arguments saying
that possession is not nine tenths of the law, but
in fact ten tenths of the law. And we even
know that whole the whole nine tenths thing doesn't really
hold up even as much as people wish it would.
But yeah, it's pretty sketchy stuff. And essentially the justification

(05:58):
could be something as simple as I just wanted to
have that loot. It just seem like it should be,
you know, our loot. Why shouldn't we have that loot?
I mean, I'm sure they did a better job than that,
But it's not much more complex than just kind of
trumping up some kind of bs reason that you attack
to foreign power and then you'd be you'd be off

(06:19):
scott free. Yeah, make it a war of defense. That's
one of the best moves. That's one of the most
common justifications you see, Like we had to attack these
people because they were actually aggressive toward us. Your mileage
may vary depending on what part of the world you
live in, but that's that's a very common um, a
common rationale. So this doesn't sound like much of a

(06:43):
good idea or even much of a legal justification, but
it did importantly put a couple of a couple of
handcuffs on things nations could do. One, it said that,
you know, if you're a nation, you can't go to
war to recapture stuff you law in a previous conflict,
because you lost, and now it is lawful for the

(07:05):
person the nation that beat you to own this. Uh. Secondly,
nations can't just jump in someone else's war. They cannot
change the terms on which they traded with belligerents. This meant,
in effect that other nations were obligated to look away.
Like if the peaceful religious nation state of Max Williams

(07:31):
is embroiled in a coastal battle with the expanding Empire
of the Brownians, then me over here in ben Bulin
stand cannot cannot inter see. You guys just have to
work it out yourself, according to Grotius. Otherwise you said,
you know, you're just you're just killing people, You're just

(07:53):
spreading chaos. We need to have laws for war, which
sounds so contradictory. It does sound completely contradict Three And
there is a really wonderful New Yorker article called what
Happens when war is outlawed? By Louis Menan that was
published on September eleven. Seen Uh has a really great
little tagline, did a largely forgotten peace pack transform the

(08:14):
world we live in? And we're gonna unpack that today.
Unpacked that today? Never mind. Anyhow, there is a point
in the article where he brings up um the Mexican
American War, for example, that began in eighteen forty six,
which you could in the same way that you could
view that Portuguese Dutch ship encounter. Um. It was just

(08:36):
a simple land grab, you know. It was essentially just
the Americans wanting to take what Mexico had and making
a justification for it, saying it was a matter of
unpaid debts, right, was what it was about at all.
It was just kind of a reason that allowed them
to fit this act of imperialism essentially to the framework

(09:01):
of a legal conflicts. Right now, we are somehow fighting
for justice, right, pay us what you owe us. And
you'll see this also in other wars throughout history. Sometimes
it would be aggressor will request a huge amount of
money knowing that the other party can't pay it back,

(09:22):
meaning that there will definitely be a conflict on the horizon.
This this is again, like you said, According to Hathaway
and Shapiro, Grotius is law of war explains why people
generally thought this would be a legal behavior in the
current system. And this is what they meant. This is

(09:43):
what Hathway and Shapiro mean when they refer to the
Old World Order, which set a cartoonishly low bar for
going to war. This was super convenient when you were
an imperial power expanding your empire. But then once you
and other impure real powers turned against each other, things
got a lot more tricky, like the First World War

(10:07):
turned into went from a regional conflict almost overnight to
this to pandemonia, bloody pandemonia. I love that you say
cartoon initially, ben Um, I think it really really applies
in this particular situation because remember in Looney Tunes there's

(10:28):
I think he says it multiple times, but Bugs Bunny
is in some way slighted by some aggressor, and then
he says, I hope you know or I hope you
understand that this means war. Uh. And the implication there
is all it takes for someone to just like slight
you or humiliate you in some small way, and that
there in and of itself is a just a justification

(10:50):
for all out scorched earth kind of behavior. Yeah, it's
very it's very much a matter of convenience for a
lot of people here. But after after the First World War,
folks were able to look around policymakers various genres, They
made eye contact with each other and they said, you know,
this isn't really working for anybody, so maybe we should

(11:12):
try something different. Uh. This is where the Kellogg brand
packed comes in. There were all these post war peace
movements in France and in the US for instance, that
advocated for straight up international disarmament. This is a radical idea,

(11:34):
and it's a very it's a very difficult idea because
disarmament only works if everybody does it right and and
and so the world is in a standoff, just like
in a Western film where every country is telling every
other country to put their gun down first. Uh. It's
it's tricky, but people were making progress. There were conferences

(11:55):
in d C and Uh. There were other things where
like the U s would start cooperating more with the
League of Nations in the World's Court, which was a
new thing in and of itself right, And also the
World Court I mean, these things did not exist, and
these all came as a direct response to how absolutely
devastating and horrible for just about everybody World War One was. Right. Yeah, absolutely,

(12:20):
And there's a great thought code article by Robert Longley
called the Kellogg briand Packed War Outlawed, which which gives
us a sense of the problem, and it gives us
a sense of what what people were trying to do,
even if it's utopian, even if it is as one
Max Williams said, uh, what was it? Blindly optimistic? Max?

(12:44):
I think I said blindly optimistic, which is a great
way to start the new year, because you're just so
optimistic before all of it just goes through utter absolute
And then I pointed out that I might just be
a little too nihilistic in two already. And nihilism and
optimism they don't have to be actually exclusive, or maybe
they do, I don't know. Well, you could be optimistically nihilistic, right,

(13:05):
that's true. That's a very good points. I'm having a
great day, having a great day. And and and also you
can be optimistic about the idea that everything is ultimately
a great big nothing. Yeah, so optimistic nihilism. I just
had to verify. This quote views the belief that there

(13:27):
is no underlying meaning to life from a perspective of hope.
The optimistic nihilist looks at a world lack of meaning
and purpose and says, hey, this is an opportunity to
create my own meaning, my own purpose. Oh my god,
I think that might be a little bit of each
of us. Yeah, alright, gotta make your own kind of music,

(13:49):
you know, there we go. Yeah, you gotta be the change.
I think that was from the Simpsons or Gandhi. So
these folks back in the nineteen twenties they, Okay, the
old system, the old world order, hinged on this very
low bar of what makes war legal. And so the
way we replaced this is not making more new rules exactly,

(14:13):
but it is to outlaw the concept of war itself. Uh.
And there's this interesting again, this from the book The Internationalists.
There's this interesting comparison the authors make where they know
it's something in the work of Salmon Levinson, and Levinson
talks about dueling. You know, now, at least in the
US love this. We can't resolve things with dueling. But

(14:35):
back in the day, as anyone who seeing Hamilton's nos
dueling was was a way for people to resolve conflicts.
And he said, look, people kept trying to change dueling
to make all these weird rules to make it seem
cooler or more civilized, but people were still dueling, and
then that means they were still killing each other. Yeah,
but instead of like outlawing dueling as a as a thing, Okay, well,

(15:00):
if you're gonna do it, you're gonna duel, but just
know that whoever gets killed, uh, and that that person
has now been a victim of a murderer that you
have done, as opposed to it having this like this
inherent amnesty. Right, if you kill someone in a duel,
that's fair play and you get to walk away and
you know, a wild West rules even I mean that
was later, but like dueling, was that still a form

(15:21):
of dueling and to solve a problem, the understanding was
that if you killed someone in a duel, it was
a fair fight and you could walk away from that.
And then the undertakers would just come out and drag
that poor sap away. But what they did was they
removed the amnesty, right, yeah they did. They said, yeah, well,
let's just call it murder as murder, you know, what

(15:41):
I mean. We have the benefit of retrospect, So it
does sound ridiculous for us to look back and say, oh, yeah,
murder was fine for a long time if it was
a duel, because a modern version of that would be like, oh, yeah,
you know, hitting someone with your car is fine as
long as it's a car fight. Otherwise it's an accident
and you've got to pay insurance. They're like, oh, I'm sorry,

(16:02):
it was it was a car fight. It was on purpose.
I hate that guy in the Honda Odyssey. Oh do
you think they had dueling insurance back in they way
to when an insurance even start to be a thing
as boring a topic as that would that sounds on
the surface, I think it would be actually very interesting. Yeah,
it would be, and it would be uh in no
small part. I think it would be a two parter episode, honestly,

(16:26):
because I had looked into this idea and it goes
back to I want to say, the seventeen hundreds. I'm
guessing off top of my head. Here, I have the
quickest of Google searches for us given to us. Max.
The first insurance company in the U. S. Dates back
to the colonial days. The Philadelphia contribution ship that's not

(16:46):
And guess who co founded it was Hamilton's Franklin, Ben Franklin.
Kind of hustle, he'd be into. It's such a racket,
and it's one of the kind of rackets only continues
to exist because of its like legacy and it being
sort of like this this need that maybe was never
there before. Being creery Obviously, health insurance obviously is its

(17:08):
own thing. But what what would you do? Maybe maybe
that would just be like you would you know, dueling
insurance would be just a life insurance policy, you know
that would kick in in case you were killed in
a duel. Let's let's do it. Let's do a history
of insurance podcast because it will take us to a
very interesting place in the modern day. UM and the
the the idea. I think it's a wonderful idea. The

(17:29):
idea of insurance isn't just UM doesn't just refer to
the privatized industry that the US labors under today. Insurance
is also a kind of safety net in general. And
that's why France. France had a terrible time to World
War One. They wanted the insurance of international alliances. They

(17:54):
were like Germany is still giving off a bad vibe.
And it turns out, you know, that that bad vibe
would later prove to be correct. What it's sure would
that bad vibe definitely paid bad dividends in the form
of World War two and and the reign of Hitler
and all the horrible, horrible things that he did. Um,

(18:17):
so good on you France for clocking that vibe. Here's
the thing. Let's talk about the Pact in particular. We've
got this climate of isolationism. You know, let's not you know,
mess with foreign wars. Let's not get embroiled. It's just
too much. It could cause us too much mutually assured destruction.
So let's um follow this dueling idea. We obviously can't

(18:38):
outlaw war outright, but what we can do is remove
the amnesty, remove that legal protection. You know, if you,
um hijack a foreign ship and pillage it, that is
no longer something that you are protected for. You will
be tried, uh and treated as a criminal. Mm hmmm,
because you shouldn't have killed people. That's I don't know,

(19:01):
the stuff that was such a hot take at the time.
You shouldn't kill people. Maybe let's work it out. This
is where we meet the guys behind the name of
the pact, the French Minister of Forid Affairs Aristide Briand,
and the American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg. Funny story. Initially, Kellogg,

(19:22):
when he got pitched this idea by Briand, he thought,
I don't think this is gonna happen. I mean, obviously,
he said, I I don't think the US is going
to go to war with France, so there's no point
in US promising not to, which is just side note here,
that's a really shady thing to say, Like why do
we need to come on, buddy? Uh? And he said,

(19:45):
he said, what I really think is happening here is
that this proposal has an ulterior motive. I believe that you, Briand,
are trying to make the US commit to intervening on
France's behalf in any case of an attack by Germany.
And then well, I mean that's true. And there was

(20:07):
some back and forth and the public pressure again, the
pro piece movements were huge in the US and France,
and eventually something happened. Kellogg thought, gave it a think,
and he comes back to Briande and he says, you
know what, man, that sounds great. Honestly, why why shouldn't
we renounce war? But it shouldn't just be between us,

(20:29):
He says, we should make the treaty multilateral. We should
have everybody's sign it, and then everyone would just stop
waging war. Yeah, and Kellogg really thought that he was
pulling a fast one on his his counterpart over there
um in in the land of France, because back to
that New York article, Um he knew that France had

(20:52):
a lot of mutual defense treaties with other European states
and it would be really, really difficult for them to
honor all of those treaties if France agreed that they
would renounce war altogether. So he thought that he was
kind of putting one over on the guy. But because
of the way that the agreement was ultimately worded, there

(21:13):
was enough latitude in it that made it seem like
a smart political move for Brand and his um you know,
contemporaries to sign um And what we got was the
General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, known as the
Paris Peace Pack because that's where it was signed, or
the Kellogg briand Packed. And you know, everybody is still

(21:36):
trying to recover from World War One. The public in
general is kind of sick of war. Many people have
now seen the horrors of conflict firsthand, so there's public
support behind this. The participants, when they're creating this agreement
in Paris, they start baking in some exceptions from the

(21:59):
very job. From day one. First they said, okay, hashtag
not all wars. We're gonna ban wars of aggression, but
we cannot ban acts of self defense because this means,
you know, people have to be able to protect their
populace and their resources, their borders and so on. And
so the final version of the agreement had just two

(22:23):
clauses everybody agreed on. I think we can each do
one here. All signatory nations have outlawed war as an
instrument of national policy yep. And all secretary nations agreed
to settle their disputes only by peaceful means some warm Yeah.
I don't know that that'sting those get pretty violent. Yeah, yeah,

(22:45):
you gotta. It's about the leverage on the wrist. You know.
People are messed up about that game. You know. I
whenever I do a thumb war, I always turn my
hat backwards. Let people know that I mean business. These
sound great, eight, don't they in kind of a utopia
sky blue you know, silver lining playbooks kind of way. Uh,

(23:09):
it really sounds nice. It also sounds a little a
little too optimistic if we're being nihilistic about Yeah, this
is one of those things where it's great and it's
it's great to say, and it feels good to tell
other people this, But what do you do when the
rubber hits the road? How do you enforce this? Fifteen

(23:31):
nations originally signed the agreement, uh, and there were a
lot of heavy hitters, and then eventually another forty seven
nations followed. This meant that by nineteen or so, the
majority of all the governments in the world had signed
up for this and said, yeah, we're over warm, which

(23:56):
makes sense from an optics standpoint. You know, it's to
to use a a political term. I mean, it was
politically smart. That's why all these other nations signed on,
because it kind of it presented this kind of like
codified optimism that the citizens of the world could get behind, because,

(24:16):
like you said, there was total uh, fear and paranoia
and war fatigue, and this is just the kind of
legislation that makes you think that the powers that we
really do have your best interest in mind. Yeah, it's
it's also to that point about optics. It's also very difficult.
Once a majority consensus is achieved, it's incredibly difficult to

(24:38):
be the one country that said, fuck you, guys, war
is awesome and I'm not going to sign up for that,
you know what I mean. Uh So, so people are
feeling this international pressure and we don't know whether or
not this is due to the Kellogg Brian's Pact, but
there was a relative period of peace about four years

(25:01):
after signing, and it first got tested the pact, that is,
in one when Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria. In something
called the Mukden Incident, which started September. There's a lieutenant
in the Quang Tung Army, part of the Imperial Japanese Army,

(25:21):
who detonates a little bit of dynamite on a railway
near Mukdun. The explosion doesn't even cause that much damage,
but it does give the Japanese Army the opportunity to
blame this on Chinese dissidents and justify a crackdown an invasion.
Japan had signed a pact the US and the League

(25:41):
of Nations. Still, they just didn't bother to take any
action to enforce it. Okay. So the time, the US
was absolutely being eaten alive by the Great Depression, so
they had, me know, a lot of stuff on their minds,
their collective mind um. Other nations in the League also
had their own issues to deal with, um, So they

(26:04):
did not want to spend their money, uh to help
another country like China achieve independence. They're like, you know,
we support you and everything, you know, uh spiritually but morally, morally,
totally on the right side of history here, but yeah,
we don't have any scratch to spare you. Um. So
after Japan's kind of weird subterfuge war was sort of

(26:30):
you know illuminated in nineteen thirty two, that's when Japan
went into like full lockdown, uh international lockdown in terms
of isolating themselves from the rest of the world. That
ended with them pulling out of the League in nineteen
thirty three. Yeah, and this played a role in, uh,
the growing perception of people across the planet that the

(26:51):
League of Nations was a nice idea but was not
powerful enough to do the things that wanted to do,
which ultimately, you know, would lead to the Unite Nations, which,
as we know, a lot of these U n kind
of um what do you call them? Uh? Not declarations
resolutions right, Uh, they are not binding. It's sort of

(27:12):
like this, we agree conceptually to do this stuff, and
we're gonna talk about it and write it down. But
when you know, like you said earlier, the rubber hits
the road or push comes to shove or any other cliches,
there's nothing holding us to these. We're gonna do what
we gotta do. It's the same as like outlawing war. Yeah,
it sounds like it sounds like a really nice idea,
but or isn't just a tool. It's a thing that

(27:35):
happens between people when they get pushed to the extreme,
and there's really no way around it. You know, you
can't just remove the fight from the dog that is man.
So this reminds me of something called the broken window theory,

(27:56):
which you guys may have heard of. And the broken
window theory is a sociological concept that applies in micro
macro cosums. It's it's the idea that, um, there's a
sort of domino effect, like people in a dirty alley
will be more likely to litter than they would in

(28:17):
a clean place, and that people in this This is
where I'm going with this, Like, if one person is
breaking the agreement, the treaty, the pact, then it makes
it so much easier for other people or other countries
rather to subsequently violate the agreement because everybody else is

(28:37):
doing it, why can't we so? Or pretty much right
after the ninety one Japanese invasion of Manchuria, we see
Italy invade Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, Japan invades China,
Germany is after Poland, the Soviet Union invades Finland, Germany
invade war it yes, yes, just so. In the Sausage

(28:58):
War episode, do check that out. It is grizzly and
not as not as it's not the food fight. It
sounds like it is a food fight, not fun at all. Well,
it's a different like a food fight like and like
you know, a high school rom com. It's a fight
around food because people are starving and will slash throats
to get food. But check it out. Fun, fun, fun

(29:20):
little romp if you haven't already. And so, eventually, as
Germany invades multiple European nations in Japan attacks the United
States a new world war engulfs the planet World War two.
This results and yes, more than sixty million people dying

(29:42):
the deployment of atomic weaponry. Uh. Nobody was really talking
about the Kellogg Briand Pact. Nobody was like, hey, hey, though,
hey guys, we signed the thing. Everybody has a copy
at their house. I think that's what we've been both
saying this whole time. It's like, it's nice to comba
ah and drum circle around the campfire with our you know,

(30:03):
brethren of the world. But when it all comes down
to it, war is just kind of part of who
uh we are as human beings, and when threatened, you're
going to fight back despite whatever you've agreed to on paper,
especially when it's kind of toothless and there's really no
way to enforce it at all. Yeah, they didn't define

(30:26):
self defense. I think that's one of the biggest errors there.
So these countries were invading other countries and they were saying, whoa, whoa,
we're defending ourselves, sort of similar to the way you
can hear the current government of Russia saying that their
actions in Ukraine are defense measures due to the encroachment

(30:47):
of NATO. Uh. Yeah. Now this is not to say
that there weren't like positive things about this. We're we're
sort of ragging on it a little bit. There were
things that it defined that needed to be defined or
that sort of flipped the definition. You know, we were
talking about from the beginning, where the definition of war
was so like vague and easy to justify. And in

(31:10):
this if if if nothing else that was really really lasting.
There's a couple of the things that were lasting. But
I think the most important thing is it it kind
of held people to account where it's like, if you're
going to declare war and you are found to be
the aggressor and did so under false pretenses or under
like fully self serving pretenses, you can be tried as

(31:31):
a war criminal. You know. For I believe that it's
called crimes against peace. Isn't that right? Yeah, I believe
that's correct in international law, it's planning or waging a
war of aggression. Uh. Then there's also the related but
distinct crimes against humanity. Yeah. This is such a noble,
beautiful idea, and it's a shame that even even the

(31:52):
people who wrote the book examining this, Hathaway and Shapiro
say that the Kellogg Briand pack is today regarded often
as historically insignificant because it had no enforcement mechanism, no
binding consequences. It reads more of like, um, I mean,
this sounds brutal, but it reads kind of like a
promise to be good, like the way you would have to,

(32:15):
you know, make the boy Scout pledge or something. Uh.
There weren't any real consequences for not being brave, thrifty,
clean and reverence and so on. I can make to obey,
to obey the law of the pack. That's the part
that I remember. Um, I was just a cub scotch.
I think that's Richard Kipling. No, No, it's it's too
to do and to help other people and to I

(32:36):
to yeah, and to obey the law of the pack. Yeah,
you got me. That's the one who only got through
cub Scouts and went to like one boy scout meeting
and quit. I'm with you, buddy. He just then they
fast tracked you right to eagle, didn't it, because you
were just you were like year old. But here's the thing,

(33:00):
you're right then. It was toothless. It was impossible to enforce.
It did read like a sort of like gg up
Golden Rule, but it actually is still around to this
day and is the heart or the core of what
we now know as the U N Charter. And it
does you know sometimes uh these you know, making a
stance if only conceptually matters. It is sort of like

(33:23):
this ideal that we set and that we can look to,
the idea of world peace. It's sort of a cliche,
you know, because we know that's very, very difficult, one
of those things that you use your genie wish on.
But then also that could be one of those monkeys
past situations couldn't because world peace could mean that just
like literally it's impossible, so everyone just dies, right, yeah,

(33:44):
Or it could be a situation like you see in
Serenity the film. No spoilers, but check it out if
you haven't seen it. It's worth the ride. Yeah. So
there is something else you have to throw in here.
And you may have heard this said on other shows.
You may have read this another Works of Academia and
so on, but you will often hear people describe the

(34:05):
current age as the most peaceful time in human history.
There's a matter of debate over how true that may
actually be, but the fact of the matter is, since
n nations have gone to war against other nations a
lot less often, and when they have, most of the
rest of the countries across the world have said, ah,

(34:27):
this is not legit and we need to sanction you
or punish you somehow. And it's it's strange because historians
are still kind of, i would say, sussing out exactly
what led to this drop in international war. I don't know,
I mean, is it is it sort of the fear

(34:47):
of mutually assured destruction? Is it sort of like playing
by international kind of rules. It's hard to say, but
we do know that not since the Russian seizure of
Crimea and to any fourteen, has there been uh an
example of a nation holding onto a territory that it

(35:07):
just kind of land grabbed or that it like sort
of went after just with imperialistic kind of goals and
not you know, as self defense. So something changed, Yeah,
I mean you will. Also, this is where you'll hear
phrases like packs Americana, like post World War two, US
becoming the global superpower and America is kind of the

(35:29):
world's police officer, and there, you know, keeping an American
perspective of peace just because no other country really had
the military or economic ability to challenge it for the
driver's seat. But the rest of the world started to
catch up, and more and more students of international affairs

(35:49):
were predicting, by the nineties seven users so that we
would see a surgeon armed conflicts across the world. And
when that didn't happen, people started saying, well, maybe it's
because nuclear weapons changed human civilization mutually should destruction Maybe
exactly that I was I was saying getting out as well.
And and just to backtrack ever so slightly, the Russian

(36:10):
seizure of Crimea was one of a very few, a
small handful of cases of of that sort of went
against this rule that we're talking about. Are this new normal? Um,
the idea that it's just not a smart move to
go after other nations uh and try to grab their land. Um,
it really does require a few more layers of like

(36:33):
checking the boxes and making sure is this in fact
a legitimate conflict or are we just being greedy and
trying to take someone that we believe should be ours
because we want it. We want it, it's our precious right.
So that's uh, that's I always think of Gollum when
I think of putting in crimea, is it fair? Is
it funny to me? Yeah? Kind of? You know, it

(36:55):
was a little bit of a gallam esque figure and
a little more muscular, but he's got the he's got
the bald thing going for him. That's a little funny.
And so if we keep tracing the evolution of war
and peace here, we know that historically democracies seem pretty
hesitant to go to war with other democracies. There's also

(37:16):
a strong argument that international trade has made countries much
more interconnected, and it's made war less viable, less attractive.
Like why am i? Am I really gonna go bomb
the country where like the majority of factories that make
the majority of stuff I buy are located. That's kind

(37:36):
of an own goal, isn't it. So people have stopped
doing that as much at least, well, here's the question.
At least they've stopped doing it so much for now,
because no one can reliably predict whether or when large
scale conflict of World War three will spark up again.

(37:58):
And you know, lest we look like we are three
American residents or three US residents, uh, casting aspersions upon
our global neighbors, we have to admit the US is
not immune to these things at all. You you will
see a lot of conflicts that the U S engages
in phrased as wars of defense of some sort. And

(38:23):
Max you had a really good point about just how
important language matters when talking about this, and how what
we've talked about today's episode has kind of shifted the
way the US UM has sort of like titled some
of these departments, right. Oh yeah, Like you know, if
you listen to like historical stuff about like civil war
and stuff like that, they're like the Secretary of War,
Secretary of War, and it's like, wait, wait, wait, we

(38:44):
don't have a Secretary War like nineteen forty seven. They're
just like, yeah, we don't go to wars anymore. We
have defense Secretary of Defense, you know, with one of
thost like powerful positions in the government. Yeah, it's like,
oh no, don't know. Anytime we have to use like
our military, it is to defend Americans and freedom and stuff.

(39:06):
It's like a little scary when you think about that
was so I mean, whether you can trace it directly
back to the Paris Peace Pack or the Kellogg Briand Pact,
it definitely had an influence, especially because it it is
to this day kind of the foundation of the the
U n you know, charter so and again we know

(39:27):
the UN can be pretty toothless too, but it does
sort of set a standard and aspirational standard of how
we would hope that we would, um you know, kind
of get along with other nations, uh, in the world,
at least the ones that are like member nations. And
it paves the way to for large international organizations stuff
like NATO, stuff like the UM Organization of American States

(39:51):
and so on. Like these are groups of countries that
have allied together with the goal being that they will
provide i'm in defense and this is something really important
to a lot of maybe smaller countries with smaller militaries,
and that kind of interconnectedness that Kellogg Briand proposed is

(40:13):
with US today right now. And there's a great example
for mental flaws. Like as you are hearing this, if
you're in the US, there are sixty seven countries that
the US has promised to back up in a in
a fight. Basically, yeah, we don't need to list them all,
but there's certainly someones that I wouldn't have thought, uh

(40:35):
necessarily would be in play South Korea, Pakistan, Israel obviously,
but like Argentina, Barbados, the Bahamas, uh, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Italy, Latvia.
I mean some of these makes sense and like kind
of track based on what we know about, like our
most obvious alliances. Um, but some of them are a

(40:56):
little unusual. Yeah, I mean, I gotta point this one
out right here. If Iceland gets to the war, we're
go fight with them. But Greenland, Greenland's on their own.
You know what you did. Greenland also are packed with
New Zealand technically ended in nineteen six. They know what
they did. That's just gonna be my answer for all

(41:18):
of these. No, it also doesn't Netherlands still on Greenland.
Uh yeah, Greenland is an autonomous country, but I think
it's part of the Kingdom of Denmark, which really sounds
like something they did from tax purposes, right, Like we're
a country, but we're also Denmark. It just depends on,

(41:39):
you know, when the light bill is due, I imagine.
So this, this though, leads us to something really optimistic,
even if it's optimisticalistically realistic. Yeah, this leads us to
something beautiful, we can say, which is that even if
this is an overly ambitious idea, even if it's what

(42:00):
corporate America would call a big swing, it is a
wonderful idea, a world without war. I don't know what
it would take for us human civilization to reach that
level of sophistication, but if I have to be completely
honest and transparent, I think it would need to be

(42:21):
an external threat. Like the biggest chance for global world
peace is either a lack of scarcity, a post scarcity economy,
or aliens are real. They're coming for us. Everybody put
your own beef on the back burner. We gotta we
gotta team up for this one. I don't know, what
do you guys think, can world peace happen without aliens?

(42:44):
I'm going in. I'm going in Star Streks. I'd be
disappointed if you didn't. I mean, First Contact the movie,
like when you know, the world obtaining world peace and
became the paradise that it is in modern quote unquote
Star Trek is when they met the Falcons spoilers right here, guys,
after the first war flight, and you know they're like,

(43:06):
oh wow, We're not the only like creatures in here.
We have to all band together. Or we're gonna get
wiped off the face of the earth. So I mean,
I think war is very much like a by product
you really kind of think about. There's a lot of
other things that have to get fixed first before we
you know, stop trying to invade each other's land and
kill each other. Yeah, like you know, plagues, pandemics, Yeah exactly, Yeah,

(43:32):
absolutely nothing. But also you know population control. That's a
whole another conversation there. But this is very interesting and
very prescient for where we are now geo politically. And
while the sort of headline for this is that it's
like this pack that nobody really remembers anymore. Um, I
don't know if we mentioned this, but Kellogg did win

(43:54):
the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in this agreement. Um,
and I think it definitely set the tone in many ways.
Even if we don't remember this one, particularly, its legacy
lives on. Yeah. Absolutely and well said. And with that
we want to pass the torch to you, fellow ridiculous historians.

(44:16):
Thank you, of course, as always fortuning in do you
think a world without war is possible in our time?
I'd love to hear from you while you're molding that
over big big shout out as always to our superproducer,
Mr Max Williams. Big shout out to our own sometimes allies,
sometimes nemesses Jonathan Strickland a k the quister oh Man,

(44:39):
and shout out to Alex Williams. Speaking of passing Alex Williams,
we can post our theme and also is Max Williams brother. Uh,
speaking of passing the torch, I was re gifted a
Max Williams gift over the holidays from Alex Williams. You
got Mr Alex Williams a Suvie uh cooking machine and

(45:00):
uh Alex is not much of a chef, he says,
and he knows that I am. And he passed the
torch of the Suvie cooker onto me. So for that, Max,
I thank you because it's awesome. He actually had texted
me about that, and I gave that to him so
long ago. I forgot what a Suvie was. I had
to look it up. Well, anyone that's interested in precision cooking,

(45:23):
look up Susie. It's a wonderful way of it's. Yeah,
you gotta do the reverse here, you suvie the thing
in a hot water bath. This device that used to
be like thousands of dollars when the technology first kind
of was around. It keeps a container of water exactly
the right temperature, and you seal your steak or protein
or vegetables in a bag and then it cooks for
like a couple of hours and it gets it to
the exact right temperature. Um, why would I want meat

(45:46):
that was cooked in water, you asked, Well, afterwards, it's
cooked perfectly inside and then you see it on the
outside and it is the best um cook you will
ever enjoy in your or you have a sloppy steak,
but uh, Tim Robinson aside. Also, big big shout out
to Eve's Jeff Cope, big big shout out to Christopher Hasiotis,
and big shout out to every world leader who managed

(46:09):
to pursue diplomacy instead of bloody conflict. We know you're
all listening. We'll see you next time. Books. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.