ABSTRACT
The soul of the League of Nations continues to live on in almost all of the institutional arrangements that underpin the contemporary global order. This chapter reflects on some of the broader legacies of the League experiment. The League did not simply represent a "failure" from which to derive lessons. It also established a foundation for contemporary liberal order, in terms of the ideas it propagated, the political geography it helped create, and the web of related organizations upon which much of the current global governance architecture is based. Nevertheless, the political meaning and symbolism attached to Wilsonianism, though fuzzy, has been associated largely with liberal order and the American role in maintaining it, which is significant in its own right. In short, the United States, which underwrote the creation of the liberal order, has behaved inconsistently with the international values it helped propagate, causing a general perception of an "American problem" in international politics.
