Collective Security

Collective Security. The term collective security was coined in the 1930s, but the concept that each nation's security depended upon that of all other nations, that peace was universal and indivisible, was not new. Earlier advocates, especially President Woodrow Wilson, had affirmed this concept during World War I. The victorious Allies had institutionalized it in the postwar League of Nations. Despite the Senate's rejection of the League, and the League's failures to stop aggression during the 1930s, Wilson's legacy—his vision of a “new world order”—continued to shape U.S. foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. As one of the world's great powers, the United States by midcentury abandoned its earlier policy of neutrality in favor of collective security.

Wilsonian collective security presupposed U.S. hegemony. Drafting the Covenant for the postwar League at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Wilson ensured that it would conform to his vision of world order. He viewed the League as the worldwide extension of the Monroe Doctrine. He expected the United States to control the League so that it would extend U.S. influence abroad without jeopardizing U.S. independence. A veto over potentially unacceptable decisions by the League Council would guarantee that its actions would coincide with U.S. preferences.

Rejecting Wilson's globalism, Republican senators doubted that the United States could control the League. Led by Henry Cabot Lodge, they feared that the League would endanger U.S. independence and entangle the United States indiscriminately in foreign wars. They did not want Wilson or any president to use the League to involve the United States in foreign wars without congressional approval. Although most had supported war against Germany in 1917, these senators repudiated the Wilsonian vision of collective security.

After World War I, Republican presidents largely shunned the League in Geneva, Switzerland. The closest they came to global collective security was the Kellogg‐Briand Pact of 1928 and the Hoover‐Stimson Doctrine of 1932. President Calvin Coolidge approved the multilateral treaty that Secretary of State Frank Kellogg had negotiated with French foreign minister Aristide Briand to renounce war except for self‐defense. The Kellogg‐Briand Pact did not, however, prevent Japanese aggression against China in Manchuria in 1931. In response, Secretary of State Henry Stimson announced his and President Herbert Hoover's doctrine of nonrecognition. The United States rejected forceful changes in the territorial and political independence of nations, but it also eschewed both unilateral and collective action to enforce the avowed right of national self‐determination.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt revived the Wilsonian idea of collective security. In the 1930s, the United States had attempted neutrality while Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan committed aggression against their neighbors in Europe, Africa, and Asia. After the 1938 Munich Agreement failed to preserve peace, Roosevelt and other U.S. policymakers concluded that the nation could not protect its security alone. In 1939–41, the United States formed an alliance with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, and also China. This alliance served as FDR's model for a postwar United Nations to replace the discredited League. Like Wilson earlier, he expected the victorious powers—the world's policemen—to dominate world affairs. Five nations, eventually including France, would each have the right to veto the UN Security Council's decisions.

The United Nations failed to fulfill its Wilsonian promise. FDR's secretaries of state, first Cordell Hull at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944 and then Edward Stettinius at Yalta in 1945, helped to draft the new UN Charter. Their efforts culminated in 1945 at the San Francisco Conference, where President Harry S. Truman, after FDR's death, reaffirmed Wilson's legacy. However, this revived concept of global collective security, involving cooperation among the great powers, soon succumbed to the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States divided the world into competing spheres of influence, creating a new balance of power rather than universal collective security.

Only once during the Cold War did the United Nations provide collective security as FDR and Truman had hoped. In 1950, after North Korea attacked South Korea, the United Nations responded with collective defense against aggression. Because the Soviets were temporarily absent, the United States obtained the Security Council's approval for the use of military force to defend South Korea from aggression. From the Korean War to the end of the Cold War, the United Nations served as an international forum for U.S.‐Soviet rivalry rather than as an organization for collective security. U.S. presidents, frustrated by their lack of control over the United Nations, routinely criticized it for failing to fulfill its original intent.

As an alternative throughout the Cold War, the United States pursued regional collective security, which the UN Charter permitted. Under the 1947 Inter‐American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, the United States committed itself to defend Latin American nations. The 1949 North Atlantic Treaty ended American isolationism by involving the United States in a long‐term military alliance with western European states (NATO). Other mutual security treaties extended the U.S. network of alliances to the Pacific and Asia, including Australia and New Zealand in 1951 (ANZUS), Southeast Asia in 1954 (SEATO), and bilateral treaties with the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Claiming authorization under these mutual security treaties, the United States intervened in various countries to sustain allies and prevent Communist victory, most notably in Vietnam from the 1950s to 1975. This unilateral form of regional collective security epitomized U.S. involvement in the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War opened another opportunity for the United States to use the United Nations for collective security. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, President George Bush organized a broad coalition, including the Soviet Union, to stop this aggression and restore Kuwait's sovereignty. For the first time since the Korean War, now that the United States was the world's only superpower, it could provide leadership in the United Nations to use military force in the Persian Gulf. During the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Bush proclaimed a “new world order” of global collective security. Thus the Wilsonian legacy still influenced U.S. foreign policy in the post‐Cold War world.

President Bill Clinton extended collective security into the Balkans, involving both the United Nations and NATO in conflicts arising from the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Crisis. In 1995, the United States and its NATO allies retaliated with air attacks against Serbia to enforce UN resolutions calling for the end of Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia‐Herzegovina. NATO intervention enabled the United States and its UN partners to negotiate the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which established an international peacekeeping regime in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and ended most fighting in the region. Three years later, after Serbia resorted to ethnic cleansing of Albanians in its province of Kosovo, the United States and its NATO allies threatened military reprisal against Serbia to force it to comply with UN demands. This collective action curtailed Serbia's attacks and facilitated the negotiation of the 1998 Kosovo Accords, which required Serbia to remove some armed forces and accept international supervision in Kosovo, even within its own province. This was enforced in the Kosovo Crisis (1999). Thus the United States, along with its partners in the United Nations and NATO, continued to pursue collective security in the post‐Cold War world.
[See also Peacekeeping.]

Bibliography

Roland N. Stromberg , Collective Security and American Foreign Policy: From the League of Nations to NATO, 1963.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, 1987.
Lawrence S. Kaplan , NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance, 1988.
Robert C. Hilderbrand , Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security, 1990.
Robert W. Tucker and and David C. Hendrickson , The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose, 1992.
Thomas G. Weiss,, David P. Forsythe,, and and Roger A. Coate , The United Nations and Changing World Politics, 1994.
Townsend Hoopes and and Douglas Brinkley , FDR and the Creation of the UN, 1997.

Lloyd E. Ambrosius