OPINION

BRADLEY R. GITZ: The lost peace

This weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the most disastrous diplomatic endeavor in history--the Paris Peace Conference that produced the Versailles Settlement. Convened to end the worst war of all, it paved the way for an even worse one two decades later.

It has been said that Versailles was the most destructive kind of peace treaty--just harsh enough on the Germans to produce a desire for revenge but not so harsh as to prevent them from rising and acting on that desire (via an entrepreneurial Adolf Hitler).

Lost in a century's worth of recriminations, however, is the role that clashing visions played in the tragedy; more precisely, the chasm between the worldviews of Woodrow Wilson and those of our wartime associates.

Wilson could never bring himself to call Britain and France "allies" because they weren't fighting for the same lofty reasons we were and by his way of thinking were nearly as culpable as Kaiser Wilhelm and the Hapsburgs for the unprecedented slaughter.

For America's most sanctimonious of presidents, the amoral realpolitik of the Europeans had gotten them into the mess and only a disinterested, idealistic America could get them out.

As articulated in his "Fourteen Points," a statement of war aims issued before American soldiers had even arrived in France and preceded by no consultation with Paris or London, we were fighting "the war to end all wars" in order to make the world safe for democracy; to fashion a new international order under American leadership based on American values.

For David Lloyd-George and Georges Clemenceau this was pious balderdash--the American president who demanded a "non-punitive" peace represented a party come lately to the conflict that had paid a vastly smaller price in blood and treasure. Clemenceau succinctly expressed his assessment of Wilson and his 14 points when he noted, "God only needed 10."

So Wilson's post-war vision was shredded point by point in demoralizing negotiations over six months at Paris; with the German army overwhelmed by Iowa and Vermont farm boys, our "associates" no longer needed America's help and could reject its hectoring president's admonitions.

With hindsight, what emerged from Paris was an unfortunate compromise between unfeasible Wilsonian idealism on the one hand and traditional European power politics on the other. The cause of peace would have almost certainly been better served by the victors embracing either Wilson's position of generosity toward the Germans (much as Metternich and Castlereagh had rehabilitated France at the Congress of Vienna, thereby ensuring a century of relative peace on the continent) or by taking apart Bismarck's handiwork altogether, given how much it had done to destabilize the European order.

By choosing neither course, Europe was firmly set upon a course to another, even bloodier conflict.

Wilson did, however, get the one thing which mattered to him most at Paris and to which he clung even more tenaciously after all the compromises to which he was so temperamentally ill-suited--the embedding of the covenant of the League of Nations within the treaty itself. It would be the League led by America that would prevent a replay of the tragedy and serve as a mechanism for correcting the injustices flowing out of the peace conference.

The rest of the story is, of course, dismally familiar, even if more often than not misrepresented in our high school history texts (to the extent that history of that sort is still taught), with America's entry into the League and Wilson's grand vision thereafter allegedly subverted by Henry Cabot Lodge and isolationists seeking a "return to normalcy."

In reality, the League wasn't defeated by isolationist sentiment, of which there was some but not all that much, but by Wilson's own stubbornness, aggravated by the bitter experience in Paris. Contrary to contemporary mythology, Lodge was as much an internationalist as Wilson but appropriately skeptical of the system of "collective security" upon which the League was based and the peace to be kept (a skepticism later justified by its failure in confronting Axis aggression in the 1930s).

Lodge, as a realist, favored instead a binding alliance among the victors which would have finally committed his nation to custodianship of the European balance of power, a vision that would eventually be fruitfully realized 30 years later with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but only after a war that claimed roughly five times more lives than what occurred between 1914-1918.

The rejection of both Wilson's collective security scheme and Lodge's binding alliance would lead to a long American withdrawal from world politics precisely when American power would be most needed.

The Versailles settlement was the unfortunate result of a clash between idealism and realism, but so too was the subsequent American refusal to help uphold its provisions, whatever their demerits.

There is so much to learn from all of this, including that the march of civilization can be abruptly interrupted by calamity, that the greatest threat to peace is historical amnesia (there was virtually no one alive in 1914 who remembered Napoleon), and that through whatever precise mechanism the key to global stability and thus peace is American leadership (perhaps the lone aspect that Wilson and Lodge agreed upon).

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 01/21/2019

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