This evening my neighbour at the dinner table was a descendant of the Cabot Lodges, a distinguished New England family, whose most famous member was Henry Cabot Lodge (picture). Wiki tells us that ‘The summit of Lodge’s Senate career came in 1919, when as the unofficial Senate majority leader, he tried to secure approval of the Treaty of Versailles and clear the way for American entry into the League of Nations, despite his personal reservations. Lodge made it clear that the United States Congress would have the final authority on the decision to send American armed forces on a combat or a peacekeeping mission under League auspices.’ Thus, Lodge was not opposed to the idea of the League, but he was opposed to its NATO-like Article X, which would have committed all signatories to mutual defence. The Senate was badly divided. However, in mid-November 1919 Cabot Lodge, with pro-Treaty Democrats, seemed to have almost cobbled together the two-thirds majority required for an amended Treaty. But this was rejected by President Woodrow Wilson. Former UK Foreign Affairs minister David Owen wrote a book about how leaders’ health problems affected their judgement (In Sickness and in Power). Here was a good example of that phenomenon, for on 25 September 1919 Wilson had suffered a stroke which clearly affected his judgement. Ultimately, the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles went ahead without American involvement. Cabot Lodge’s vision (including a Security Council veto) was finally embodied in the United Nations. How the world might have been different if the United States had joined the League of Nations is, of course, one of those great counterfactual essay titles…