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Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson. Stupid and incompetent all the way. When you are dealing with a power that needs to be contained after a flare you have two options - first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace.
Due to Woodrow Wilson's influence - he was so stupid that thought that league of nations is a good and viable idea the winning powers took the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism, a german state that was not weakened enough to not subvert them, leaving sizable German minorities in their neighboring countries, a huge internal vacuum because of the revolution and a huge vacuum in the east due to the collapse of the russian empire. It was a recipe for disaster.
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You're correct that 'peace without victory' was an utterly unworkable ambition, but compounding this sin the US then largely acted to undermine attempts to enforce German debts at the same time it called in the debts owed to the US by its allies. Part of this was buying too much into Keynes' doomsaying book, and part was early cold war posturing and power balancing, but at the end of the day Versailles was hardly excessive or vindictive and it was eminently reasonable that France should seek reparations having borne all the destruction while the war's loser got off comparatively lightly. It was modest compared to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany had enforced on Russia the year prior (german gains in land and population here far outstripped what they lost in Versailles) , and should be seen partly in reaction to the 3B franc indemnity imposed by Germany on France in 1871. Per Stephen Shuker, it's likely Germany ended up paying no net reparations at all, having paid its immediate bills with American loans that were subsequently defaulted on in the Great Recession. Contra Keynes, who believed that Germany could not afford the ~2B marks per year for 30 years, Mantoux estimated German rearmament spending as exceeding that seven times over for each each year between 1933 and 1939.
Sally Marks' Myths of Reparations identifies two main failures in the allied prosecution of Versailles. The first was enforcement as you mention, but the second was the failure to make it clear to the German people (who again, had lost a colossal war escaping most of the destruction) the psychological reality of their defeat: “An Allied march down the Unter den Linden would have humiliated Germany briefly, but in retrospect that might have been a small price to pay”.
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