In the era of the two world wars, internationally minded American statesmen turned their attention to meeting two objectives. The first was to engage the United States more with the wider world; more particularly to embed the United States within an international system dominated by European states but, with the inclusion of Japan, becoming increasingly pluralistic. The second was to use this new American global consciousness to reform the international system so that it accorded with the standards of civilization and operated along commonly regarded civilized norms. The codification and promotion of international law was one of the key methods of achieving these objectives; not coincidentally, many, if not most, of the key American internationalists of the era were lawyers.