Hall of Mirrors

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It’s astonishing that, with a showdown looming over the Iran pact, we haven’t heard more about the League of Nations. That was the scheme — inked after World War I — to set up an international governing organization. It was the 14th of the 14 Points that President Woodrow Wilson proffered at Paris during the parley in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The result was the first peace treaty ever rejected in the United States Senate, which feared for our sovereignty.

The fate of the pact is full of lessons as Congress prepares to debate the deal that President Obama has struck with the ayatollahs. It is a reminder that the United States Congress, to which the Constitution grants the bulk of the enumerated foreign policy powers, is not to be taken for granted. That is precisely what President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have done in pursuit of an intergovernmental agreement in respect of appeasing Iran.

It would be hard to reckon who evinced a lower opinion of the Congress, Wilson or President Obama, who, like Wilson once did, is facing a senate controlled by the Republicans. For Wilson that meant a Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Henry Cabot Lodge. The Senate’s own history quotes Wilson as denouncing Lodge and his allies as “contemptible, narrow, selfish, poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere.”

Such sentiments in respect of Congress are shared by Mr. Obama, who had Mr. Kerry keep the Senate in the dark, or at least gloom. After World War I, Wilson negotiated in the Hall of Mirrors consulting with but a coterie of aides. The Senate first got the Versailles Treaty not from the administration but from the Chicago Tribune, whose Paris leg, Frazier Hunt, had smuggled it back to America. The Tribune gave it to Senator Borah, who read it on the floor of the Senate, where the Constitution protected him from prosecution. “Tribune Has Treaty!” was the headline.

The Senate after due consideration refused to ratify it. The vote was 49 to 35, short of the two-thirds needed for the treaty to become what the Constitution calls the “supreme law of the land.” President Obama’s position is even worse. At least a majority approved Wilson’s treaty. Mr. Obama has chosen not to submit the matter to the Congress as a Treaty, but that only underscores his lack of confidence in his ability to win support. As it now stands, it’s possible that a majority of one or both houses may vote against it.

What a incredible thing that would be, underscoring one issue on which the senators are showing concern. There are elements of the Iran pact that the Senate doesn’t yet know about. This was marked by both Senator Corker, the Republican who chairs of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Cardin, who is the committee’s ranking Democrat. In hearings Thursday they voiced frustration on the missing text related to inspections and made clear they wanted a classified briefing. Which brings us to Wilson’s most glaring hypocrisy.

The first of Wilson’s 14 Points was “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” Yet the League of Nations, though the idea had a long gestation, was put into the Versaille conference by Wilson and only then to the Senate, which today has been cut out of the work on the Iran pact and ranked second after the U.N. No wonder the Congress is so cool to the trophy.

In respect of the League of Nations, Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. Yet he never won support in the Senate, though he tried until exhausted and felled by a stroke. When Wilson died, the Senate selected Lodge to represent it at the funeral, but Wilson’s family asked Lodge not to attend. Some will insist that by defeating the League, the Senate set the stage for World War II. But by defeating the League of Nations the Senate ensured America’s full sovereignty for another two generations. Now the Senate feels a pact inked in the name of avoiding war may bring on war. It will happen in a United Nations that is a spawn of the League hatched in the Hall of Mirrors.


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