In Paris, fifteen nations sign a treaty renouncing war itself

A decade after the armistice that ended the First World War, diplomats at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris were still searching for a way to keep it from happening again. On August 27, 1928, representatives of fifteen nations, including the United States, France, Germany, and Japan, signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, formally renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. What began as a narrow proposal between Washington and Paris had grown, through months of diplomatic maneuvering, into a near-universal declaration. The treaty had no army and no court, and it carried no penalty for breaking it…