All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The first condition of success for the League of Nations is, therefore, a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them.
The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.
Nations, great nations have limitations. All nations have limitations. Even great powers have limitations.
The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.
Great powers can't get tired, because the international order is not self-governing.
No nation is so great as to be able to afford, in the long run, to remain outside an increasingly universal League of Nations.
Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin.
It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.