The last of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for the establishment of ‘a general association of nations … under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’ (Wilson and Shaw 470; Fourteen Points of Wilson [1918]). The League of Nations (‘League’) was to be that ‘general association of nations’. It marks the international community’s first attempt to establish an international organization with permanent institutions for the purpose of...