The Sovereignty Wars

The Sovereignty Triangle

In 1919, Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell and the distinguished United States Senate majority leader from the state of Massachusetts Henry Cabot Lodge met in a Boston auditorium to debate approval of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Conceived at the Paris Peace Conference after World War One, the League would entangle America in the kind of international commitment it had avoided since the presidency of George Washington. At issue was national sovereignty as established and protected by the United States Constitution.

In its simplest form, national sovereignty is the ability of a nation to act independently in ways that determine its future. The sticking point was that Article 10 of the Covenant of the League of Nations required all members to protect each other from invasion. Signing and respecting the Covenant would require the United States to intervene in foreign disputes in ways that might not be in its self-interest and would thereby limit its freedom of action. Lodge argued that this would threaten the integrity of American democracy.

The debate ...