War II was a different conflict from World War I, and the 1930s differed markedly, indeed
decisively, from the 1920s. While one might conclude that the strategic history of
1914–19 rendered a second war of some kind all but inevitable some day, the World War
II that actually happened was the product of policy choices in several capitals as well as
of shifts in the contexts for international politics.
Historical empathy for the human agents of strategic history is hampered by the
curse of hindsight. As a consequence, it is difficult to assess fairly the statecraft and
strategic policies of the 1920s and 1930s. Almost inevitably, historians judge policies not
on their contemporary merits, but with reference to their consequences. Naturally, since
a world war concluded these two decades, behaviour in those years on behalf of peace
with security is found to have been fatally wanting.
To understand the interwar decades and their strategic consequences, it is essential to
grasp both the vastness of the shadow cast by the war so recently terminated and the
major differences between the 1920s and the 1930s.
Versailles and the legacy of the Great War
Peace settlements do not make, or remake, strategic history. Instead, they reflect their
political and strategic contexts. Versailles 1919 has acquired a largely undeserved repu-
tation allegedly as a leading contributor to the eventual onset of World War II. The facts
of the matter do not support such a negative view.
It is true to claim that the Versailles Settlement was thoroughly unsound, but the
fault reposed in its contexts, not in the heavily constrained policy choices of the leading
peacemakers. Those individuals were Georges Clemenceau for France, David Lloyd
George for Britain, Woodrow Wilson for the United States and Vittorio Orlando for Italy.
Versailles was a faithful reflection of the appalling political and strategic contexts created
by the war. Germany was not invited, while the new and desperately insecure Bolshevik
Republic was the victim of ill-judged military intervention by the principal Allied states.
In addition, the new Russia was suffering from several ongoing civil wars, and was
conducting extensive warfare with the newly restored state of Poland. Major combat
began in January 1919 and persisted until Polish victory was conceded in the Treaty of
Rigaon1 8 March 1921.
The Versailles Settlement broke just about every defining rule of sound statecraft for
peacemaking, but it is difficult to see how the principals could have drafted a substantially
different document. After over four years of increasingly total war, the victors – the
nominal victors, that is – were in no mood to be magnanimous. The United States was
alone among the winners in not harbouring acquisitive or vengeful motives. (President
Wilson spoke of ‘a peace without victory’ in a speech to the US Congress on 22 January
1917.) Admittedly, those potent words were uttered prior to both American belligerency
and American shock at the predatory terms of the peace imposed by a victorious Germany
on the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 191 8. The settlement was an all-too-
faithful expression of reality. Germany and its allies had been defeated, but not destroyed.
Berlin had sued for peace, but it did not sign an instrument of unconditional surrender.
The Allies could have continued the war, invaded Germany in 1919 and wrought great
physical destruction upon the main instigator of the catastrophe. But, for good and ill,
they chose to be satisfied with an armistice and the dictation of terms of peace.
100 War, peace and international relations