To the Editor:

In “Outlawing War? It Actually Worked” (Sunday Review, Sept. 3), Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro credit the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact for creating a world in which wars of territorial conquest have become all but obsolete. But their argument overlooks a powerful alternative explanation: American global leadership after World War II.

This thesis is supported by the writers’ own timeline — in the 20 years after Kellogg-Briand, the world witnessed the most destructive war of conquest in history (World War II) followed by the Soviet Union’s seizure of thousands of square miles of territory in Eastern Europe. We witnessed the stark decline of wars of conquest only after the United States agreed to help create and lead the postwar global liberal institutions (including NATO).

This also helps explain why the United States signed on to Kellogg-Briand in the first place: Because Americans, even in their isolationist fog of the 1920s, recognized that as the world’s strongest commercial power they would benefit most from a world of territorial order and justice. That world emerged after 1948, not 1928.

STUART GOTTLIEB, NEW YORK

The writer is an international affairs professor at Columbia University.

To the Editor:

There is a far less sanguine way of looking at this noble effort to outlaw war.