“The biggest weakness of the League of Nations was the absence of the USA”

I mostly disagree with the statement, my opinion on the League’s weakness is the poor
structure that the League had and was not able to manage. The League would’ve only been
concerned of the economic status of their four leading nations if they had a well thought out
structure. To add, if the leading nations had not been too self centered about their individual
nations, would not have collapsed over their own greed in abusing the veto system.
To begin with, the ultimate goal of the existence of the League was world peace through
solving world issues of the time. To be fair with the League it did succeed in some areas,
resolving issues related to European refugees and World Health respectively. You could argue
that if the United States were to be a part of the League, Wilson could have been able to assist
in resolving more issues as the League was his vision in the first place. Although that’s possible,
the result of U.S. assistance in foreign regions would cripple the U.S. economy (especially with
how over-ambitious the League was with their goals) and leave its people helpless in outrage of
where their tax money is put towards. Hence why I partially agree with the statement.
On towards the League’s downside, the four leading nations ,i.e. France, Britain, Japan and
Italy. Firstly, these nations were all with the mindset of getting the best deal out of everything
and decision making took ages. Even though the League consisted of 50+ countries around the
world all hoping for peace, it was not very fair that decisions are mostly determined by the four
most powerful nations. This could’ve been an easily resolvable issue even without U.S.
assistance if they weren’t too caught up of themselves. An example of this is when Japan was
conquering almost all of China, the League took up to six months determining what to do (which
was ordering Japan to give back the conquered land to China) although due to Japan’s status
ranking in the League, they were able to simply veto (reject) the request and proceeded with
their business. As a result of the decision making structure they were unable to prevent brutally
across Chinese soil caused by one of their own members. This again could have been resolved
if the veto system wasn’t present and if decisions weren’t based only upon the most powerful
countries. Which refers back that they would have been able to make changes in the system
(because they operate it) without U.S. supervision needed.
Moving on, the League also had faults in their system of preventing conflict. When there is
conflict between nations somewhere there are three stages the League initiates. The first stage
is moral condemnation where the nations are asked to stop conflict before further action,
essentially a warning. This stage was highly ineffective as the nations weren’t at all affected as
the League was not intimidating. Many argue that if the U.S. were apart of the League that the
first stage would have been more effective following the second one. This could be true
although I argue that after the economic draining of the U.S. it would result that the U.S. being
apart of the League is futile as Britain and France are just trying to get the most out of them.
Relating to the first point, the second stage is where the League cuts of exports being received
by the conflicting nations. Although you could argue that the nations in conflict are able to
bypass this stage by trading with the U.S. for resources. It is obvious knowing France and
Britain’s intentions that it would not result well for the U.S. economy. Not only will they be unable
to benefit from potential trade, but as well as their economic resources would’ve been drained
by the two if the U.S. were to be involved in the League. An example of France and Britain’s
greed was fairly recent during the Treaty of Versailles where they were both in efforts to gain the
most out of the deal than restoring peace itself. The third and final stage is the voluntary
interference using troops from member nations. This meant that nations apart of the League are
not required to send their forces to the conflicting nations and even if the U.S. were to be
involved with the League, it would have been ineffective as nobody is required to send military
help if they did not wish to. The whole scheme is then at fault due to the structure of
punishments and terms which would not have been better or worse with U.S. involvement. To
add, they later changed the system where it’s now required that every nation’s army must serve
for the later formed United Nations, on a rotational basis per month.
To summarize, the involvement of the United States would essentially be futile in efforts of
their final goal. The structure of the League was a complicated mess that took months of
deciding and resolving. The U.S. would have been a puppet being controlled by the Europeans
being stripped off their resources instead of the main focuses. And even then, the League of
Nations was centered upon issues within Europe itself so why must the most powerful nation of
the time, a whole Atlantic Ocean away, be apart of their problems, didn’t Woodrow Wilson wish
for self-determination in his fourteen points?

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