Kellog-Briand Pact

Signed in Paris on August 27, 1928, an international treaty renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. The initial signatories of the Kellog-Briand Pact, also known as the Pact of Paris, were the United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Great Britain (and its Commonwealth allies). Thirty-nine other countries also ultimately agreed to adhere to the treaty.

In 1927, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aristide Briand, proposed the pact as a nonaggression treaty between France and the United States. U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellog suggested expanding it into a general pact against war, to include other nations as well.

The Kellog-Briand pact proved meaningless as early as 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, followed by Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Nevertheless, the pact was important for introducing the notion of a crime against peace, which became the basis of the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. Interdiction against aggressive war was reaffirmed in the United Nations Charter, although it has been repeatedly ignored by a number of countries since the Kellog-Briand pact was introduced.