The League of Nations
The League was supposed to prevent future wars through collective security: an attack on any member would be treated as an attack on all. In practice the League had three crippling weaknesses.
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The U.S. never joined, depriving the League of the strongest economic and military power
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The League had no military force of its own and depended on member states to provide enforcement, which they were unwilling to do
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Major powers (Germany, USSR, Japan, Italy) at various points left or were never in the League. Without universal participation, collective security was a fiction The League failed every major test. It did nothing meaningful about Japan's invasion of Manchuria (1931), Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935), or German remilitarization. By the late 1930s the League was effectively dead. The lesson would later inform the design of the United Nations after WWII.
V. The Interwar Period and the Rise of Totalitarianism
The 1920s and 1930s produced a new political phenomenon: totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes claimed absolute control over every aspect of national life. They differed from older authoritarian regimes (like Tsarist Russia or absolutist France) in their scale, their use of mass mobilization, their ideological reach, and their willingness to remake society from top to bottom. Maria should treat totalitarianism as the central political development of this era.