What was ironic about the connection between the US and the League of Nations?

It was Wilson's hope that the final treaty would have the character of a negotiated peace, but he feared that the passions aroused by the war would cause the Allies to make severe demands. In this he was right. The concept of self-determination proved impossible to implement. Persuaded that his greatest hope for peace, the League of Nations, would never be realized unless he made concessions to the Allies, Wilson compromised on the issues of self-determination, open diplomacy and other specific points during the peace negotiations in Paris. However, he resisted the demands of the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, to detach the entire Rhineland from Germany, prevented France from annexing the Saar Basin, and frustrated a proposal to charge Germany with the whole cost of the war -- although the Versailles Peace Treaty did levy a heavy burden of reparations upon Germany.

In the end, there was little left of Wilson's proposals for a generous and lasting peace but the League itself -- and the president had to endure the final irony of seeing his own country spurn League membership. Partly due to his own poor judgment at the time, Wilson made the political mistake of failing to take a leading member of the opposition Republican Party to Paris on his Peace Commission. When he returned to appeal for American adherence to the League, he refused to make even the moderate concessions necessary to win ratification from a predominately Republican Senate.

Having lost in Washington, Wilson carried his case to the people on a tour throughout the country. On September 25, 1919, physically ravaged by the rigors of peacemaking and the pressures of the wartime presidency, he suffered a crippling stroke at Pueblo, Colorado, from which he never fully recovered. In March 1920, the Senate rejected both the Versailles Treaty and the League Covenant. As a result, the League of Nations, without the presence of the United States or Russia, remained a weak organization.

Wilson's belief in a moral and legal basis for war and peace had inspired the nation. However, when events didn't live up to this optimistic standard, Wilsonian idealism gave way to disillusion, and the nation withdrew into isolationism.

The League of Nations was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes. It was first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, but the United States was never a member.

In front of the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, calling for a "general association of nations�formed on the basis of covenants designed to create mutual guarantees of the political independence and territorial integrity of States, large and small equally." Many of Wilson's previous points would require regulation or enforcement, and thus he distilled the wartime thinking of many diplomats and intellectuals, on both sides of the Atlantic, into a call for a new type of standing international organization dedicated to fostering international cooperation, providing security for its members, and ensuring a lasting peace. With Europe's population exhausted by four years of total war, and with many in the United States supportive of the idea that a new organization would be able to solve the international disputes that had led to war in 1914, Wilson's articulation of a League of Nations was wildly popular. However, it proved exceptionally difficult to create, and Wilson left office never having convinced the United States to join it.

Wilson used his tremendous influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League, he believed, would mitigate any inequities in the peace terms. He and the other members of the "Big Three," Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of Britain, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The League's main organs were an Assembly of all members and a Council, made up of five permanent members and four rotating members, along with an International Court of Justice. Most importantly, for Wilson, the League would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of member states, authorize the League to take "any action�to safeguard the peace," establish procedures for arbitration and create the mechanisms for economic and military sanctions.

The struggle to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant in the U.S. Congress helped define the most important political division over the role of the United States in the world for a generation. A triumphant Wilson returned to the United States in February 1919 to submit the Treaty and Covenant to Congress for its consent and ratification. Unfortunately for the President, while popular support for the League was still strong, opposition within Congress and the press had begun building even before he had left for Paris. Spearheading the challenge was the Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge. Motivated by Republican concerns that the League would commit the United States to an expensive organization that would reduce the United States' ability to defend its own interests, Lodge led the opposition to joining the League. Where Wilson and the League's supporters saw merit in an international body that would work for peace and collective security for its members, Opponents feared the consequences of involvement in Europe's tangled politics, now even more complex because of the 1919 peace settlement. More generally, they adhered to the United States' traditional aversion to commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Wilson and Lodge's personal dislike of each other poisoned any hopes for a compromise, and in March 1920, the Treaty and Covenant were defeated by a 49-35 Senate vote. Nine months later, Warren Harding was elected President on a platform opposing the League.

The United States never joined the League. Most historians consider that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover Administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League in the United States and the international community. Wilson's insistence that the Covenant be linked to the treaty was a blunder; over time, the treaty was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions, and the League's failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S. Congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances. However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States public and the Roosevelt Administration supported and became founding members of the new United Nations.

What was the US relationship with the League of Nations?

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