Michael: Thanks for the amazing answer. I have a question though. What about this: “Collective security
Another important weakness grew from the contradiction between the idea of collective security, that formed the basis of the League, and international relations between individual states. The collective security system the League used meant that nations were required to act against states they considered friends, and in a way that might endanger their national interests, to support states that they had no normal affinity with. This weakness was exposed during the Abyssinia Crisis when Britain and France had to balance attempts to maintain the security they had attempted to create for themselves in Europe “in order to defend against the enemies of internal order”, in which Italy’s support played a pivotal role, with their obligations to Abyssinia as a member of the League.
On 23 June 1936, in the wake of the collapse of League efforts to restrain Italy’s war of conquest against Abyssinia, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons that collective security had
“failed ultimately because of the reluctance of nearly all the nations in Europe to proceed to what I might call military sanctions… [T]he real reason, or the main reason, was that we discovered in the process of weeks that there was no country except the aggressor country which was ready for war… [I]f collective action is to be a reality and not merely a thing to be talked about, it means not only that every country is to be ready for war; but must be ready to go to war at once. That is a terrible thing, but it is an essential part of collective security.”
Doesn’t that mean that each member of the LoN had to be ready to defend other members of the LoN? I could be misunderstanding this. If so, could you elaborate?