After the end of the destructive First World War, the victorious Allies wanted to ensure that a similar tragedy would never happen again. To achieve this goal, US President Woodrow Wilson proposed the creation of an international organization, called the League of Nations, whose goal was to offer countries peaceful and diplomatic means to resolve their disputes, thus avoiding military conflicts. The economies of once-mighty empires like Russia and Germany were depleted. Wilson believed that if united toward international peace and security, states would never again have to suffer another conflict as destructive as World War I. Wilson's League of Nations project was first presented in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It became clear that a handful of powerful states could not guarantee continued peace: "all countries had to work together to achieve international stability." plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In its early days, the League of Nations had a truly remarkable influence on its members. A series of disputes "between Germany and Poland over Upper Silesia and between Finland and Sweden over the Aaland Islands" were resolved by the League of Nations. Although minor, these were precisely the type of incidents that had triggered regional conflicts. In the 1920s, the League was successful in its work for a better world: it brought home 500,000 prisoners of war, aided Turkish refugees, attacked slave traffickers and drug sellers, and supported measures against leprosy and malaria. help states rebuild after the end of World War I. In the newly formed Austrian Republic, the first actions were to ask for a loan from the League, with which they built houses for the majority of the Austrian population, who had lost their homes during the war. In its first five years, the League of Nations was a true diplomatic tool: nations were willing to sit together and negotiate their way out of any crisis that threatened international security. Despite its early successes, the League of Nations had many political failures. Examples of League of Nations failures include: Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1932. Lega opposed it but could do nothing. The invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Although the League officially condemned the Italians, France and Britain were caught making a secret agreement to give Abyssinia to Italy. These crises destroyed the League's authority, which was powerless to stop Germany after 1935. By the time of the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, Britain and France ignored the League and instead sought peace. Although the league was the largest attempt at international cooperation at the time, the league's lack of superpowers, strength, and determination led it to fail in times of need. You can look at this and see that the League of Nations was an attempt to create international cooperation, although countries were committed to working together to solve problems only when it benefited them individually, and it showed that during a major crisis, nations do not did they have the determination and will to cooperate for collective peace and security, or was it the fact that the United States never joined the League? The First World War had brought the economies of many European countries to their knees. The strength of the League of Nations was to come primarily from the United States and the,.