Politics & Power Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Treaties, in Frank B. Kellogg's telling, are not just promises; they are infrastructure. The phrase "such machinery" is doing heavy ideological work, recasting diplomacy as a system you can build, maintain, and trust to run. That technocratic confidence matters in the interwar years, when elites were desperate to believe war was a solvable design flaw rather than a recurring feature of modern politics. Kellogg is selling process as protection: stack enough agreements and you create "additional guarantees", a kind of legal sandbagging against catastrophe.

The intent is clear: legitimize the proliferating apparatus of international law as the new commonsense. By framing each treaty as "a step", he turns peace into incremental progress, a staircase rather than a fragile truce. It flatters publics weary of bloodshed and reassures legislators who want results without rearmament or messy entanglements. The subtext is equally pointed: if war returns, the failure won’t be imagined as moral or political; it will be a breakdown of procedure, a missing part in the machine.

Context sharpens the stakes. Kellogg, as U.S. Secretary of State, would soon be associated with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a landmark attempt to outlaw war on paper. His rhetoric captures the era's faith that norms, signatures, and institutions could domesticate power. It also foreshadows the critique: "machinery" can process disputes only if nations consent to be processed. When enforcement is optional and ambition is not, treaties can become less a guarantee against war than a record of how badly people wanted to believe guarantees existed.