Would Theodore Roosevelt have joined the League?

Would Theodore Roosevelt have joined the League of Nations?

Probably not, although the counterfactual cannot be settled, because American politics resisted commitments seen as diminishing constitutional sovereignty.

Theodore Roosevelt did not face this decision in the circumstances being imagined, so the answer remains uncertain. The tentative answer is that he probably would not have joined. It rests on a historical argument about American objections to commitments thought to diminish constitutional sovereignty. Differences between British and colonial American understandings of constitutional authority provide background to that argument. The comparison of parliamentary sovereignty with American constitutional authority is expressly a rough sketch for a naval-history discussion, with constitutional law outside the stated expertise. References to wording in the NATO treaty and United Nations Charter illustrate the concern without resolving the counterfactual.