Grey gave a great push to convince his colleagues to consult the French government about activating the House-Grey Memorandum, only to be outmanoeuvred. With this diplomatic alternative set aside, the military successfully pressured the government to assent to a major summer offensive on the Somme. The military also sought to replace the strategy agreed a few months earlier with an economic fantasy: the military was now looking to win the war with an offensive in 1917 instead of in 1916, but refused to accept that Britain would face serious financial problems in continuing the Allies' massive US supplies through a 1917 campaign. Despite fierce resistance within the Cabinet, the House of Commons forced the acceptance of the military's position. The British government suffered a financial scare when McKenna warned that their assets deployable in the United States faced exhaustion by autumn. McKenna was wrong about the timing: Britain had more assets than he thought, enough to last them into early 1917. But the scare resulted in a serious reconsideration of the House-Grey Memorandum when House and Wilson pushed for an autumn implementation of the agreement. The memorandum's proponents were unintentionally undermined by Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace.

The idea of bringing into being supranational organizations to resolve disputes between states has a distinguished lineage, going as far back as Dante Alighieri’s On World Government, Rousseau’s A Project of Perpetual Peace and Kant’s proposal for a federation of nations operating under the rule of law, and eventually evolving into “a perfect civil union of mankind.” The League of Nations was a first attempt to pool national sovereignties together to deal with the problem of war, a milestone in a long process intended to strengthen the effectiveness of mechanisms of international cooperation. The UN was initially conceived as an international entity founded on federalist principles, with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states, but it emerged as a rather less ambitious entity with two fundamental flaws: the principle of one country–one vote in the General Assembly and the veto within the Security Council, both undermining the democratic legitimacy of the organization. The chapter also reviews the concerns raised by Grenville Clark and others who thought that if member countries could not agree upon well-defined powers that they would be willing to yield, no global authority adequate to maintain peace would arise in our time.