On behalf of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the other co-sponsors of this event, I want to welcome everyone here for the commemoration of the Treaty of Versailles. My name is Michael Yaffe. I'm the Vice President of the Middle East and Africa programs here at the Institute. Today, we will be talking a lot about history, and so let me begin that by giving you a bit of history about USIP. The Institute was founded 35 years ago. The chief advocates for the Institute were a bipartisan group of senators and members of Congress, veterans of World War II and the Korean War, who wanted to place an Institute, a national institution that would be committed to international peace, in addition to maintaining an armed capacity. They wanted an Institute that could develop a range of effective options that could unleash international violence and international conflict. Today, the Institute operates around the world with people on the ground, basically applying the expertise and research they obtain on managing conflict. They also provide training and education, and they provide convening of parties in conflicts in order to help, basically, advance to the management and reduction and conclusion of those conflicts. The idea for the Institute can be traced back, actually, to the founding of the country. In his last address to Congress in 1796, President George Washington proposed two national academies, an Academy of Peace and an Academy of War. The Congress approved the Military Academy at West Point in 1802, and 188 years later, they approved the Institute of Peace. After moving its headquarters around Washington for a few years, finally they settled on the headquarters here at the corner of 23rd and Constitution, opening its doors in 2011. And what's interesting about, by coincidence, it is on this very plot that George Washington had proposed where the Academy of Peace should be located. So when historians who disdain the idea of foreordained events, this one comes pretty close, I have to admit. In his farewell address, President Washington had warned the country about getting entangled in European wars, and for the next 120 years, the country remained rather neutral in the international scene outside the Western Hemisphere. In 1905, the U.S. emerged on the international peace building stage when President Teddy Roosevelt helped facilitate at the Treaty of Portsmouth, the treaty that ended the war, the Japanese Russo War. In 1910, President Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on the Treaty of Portsmouth. And in his acceptance address, he actually advocated for the idea of a league of peace, the idea that there'd be some type of international institution that would help mitigate conflict. In August of 1914, the Great War broke out, and for the next three years, President Wilson tried to encourage the belligerents to basically reach some type of peace agreement before the United States could get dragged into the war itself. Eight months after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, Wilson laid out a set of principles that he thought would help create a lasting peace, the principles for creating the end of the war, if you will. These principles became known as the 14 points, which were crafted with the help of 150 scholars that became known as the Inquiry, and we'll be hearing a little bit more about the Inquiry over lunchtime. Building on Teddy Roosevelt's idea, the 14 points included a proposal for the League of Nations in order to protect the independence of all countries. Wilson also proposed that the war aims should not be limited to nationalistic goals, but rather for the unprecedented ambition of ending war itself, the war to end all wars. By not calling for harsh reparations or blame for the war on Germany, Wilson hoped Germany would be induced to the peace table, and the 14 points became the basis for the armacists that went into effect on November 11, 1918, 101 years ago this week. The Allied leaders met in France between January and June of 1919 to hammer out what became known as the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty to end the war. The Allied leaders promised their people a better world, however the results of those negotiations fell far short, and the world would soon learn that then making a sustainable peace was difficult and fraught with consequences. Today we are here commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. It's not a celebration of the treaty itself, which had many flaws and limitations, instead it's a commemoration that acknowledges that the treaty was a seminal event in world affairs, which for better or for worse, had a profound impact on what followed and therefore is deserving of continued attention. It's a moment of reflection, similar to the event USIP conducted in 2014, 100th anniversary at the beginning of World War I. Our program today is a conversation between past and present. Understanding history and looking at the past with honesty and integrity is important as it helps us make our views on the present more coherent and understandable. Our program will also include a conversation between the present and the future. Prognosticating about the future, particularly on world affairs and conflict, is dangerous and not for the lighthearted. The clues as to what may happen lay in a very clear-eyed understanding of the past and the present. I want to thank the distinguished experts who graciously agreed to join us today for these conversations. Each are notable in his or her own right as experts on Versailles, World War I, international order and peace building, and their bios are available to all of you. I should also note a commonality among the speakers is that they are all Americans. Last June 28th, on the 100th anniversary of the actual signing of the treaty, scholars from around the world had gathered in Europe for various commemorations, including the biggest one at Versailles. Indeed, we were actually originally planning to host this event in June, but many of the potential speakers that we wanted to invite actually were attending events in France. So today's program could be called an American perspective on the Treaty of Versailles. Now, about the modalities of today. The program includes three panels and a keynote speaker, Dr. Richard Haas, who is the president on the Council of Foreign Relations. The panels will cover the past, the present, and the future. The first two panels and keynote speaker will be streamed live. A recording will be made available at this part of the program soon. The last panel will be treated as an off-the-record and under Chatham House rules. Moderators will lead the panel discussions. Then the panels will take questions from the audience. If you would like to pose a question to the panelists, please write them down on the supplied note cards that are around the room and provide it to the staff members during the program. For those joining online, please provide your questions through Twitter at hashtag Versailles100. To kick off the program today, we will begin with the panel about the past. It will focus on World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, and the post-Versailles period, commonly called the interwar years, the brief window during which the World War was suspended. To introduce the first panel and lead the discussion, I welcome Matt Naylor, president and CEO of the World War I Museum and Memorial. The first panel will be followed by a brief coffee break after which the second panel will convene and be moderated by Wes Mitchell, former assistant secretary of state for European affairs, and now a senior advisor at USIP. The second panel will focus on the current international order emanating from World War I in the shadow of the Treaty of Versailles. And the third panel, after our lunchtime keynote address, will focus on the factors that will likely shape the international order, conflict and peace in the 21st century. Robin Wright, a joint fellow with USIP and the Woodrow Wilson Center, will moderate this panel. In closing, I want to thank again our co-sponsors, the World War I Museum and Memorial, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Doe Boy Foundation, and the National History Day. They have been great partners in putting together this program, and I really welcome them to Washington as well. Now, over to you, Matt. Thank you. Thank you, and we're delighted to be with you today. The National World War I Museum and Memorial is in Kansas City, Missouri. We were, in the latter part, just after the armistice, 83,000 people in Kansas City fundraised $2.5 million in 10 days to build a memorial, which was opened then in 26 by President Calvin Coolidge, and then designated by the Congress in 2014 as the National Memorial for World War I. And also the National Museum designated in 06, the most comprehensive collection of World War I archives in the world is found at the National World War I Museum and Memorial. And it was on June 28th this year that we organised a symposium at the Palace of Versailles, followed then by a dinner in the Hall of Battles, which was really quite an extraordinary experience. I tell you, at that time there wasn't really any celebration much in France, but there was certainly some commemoration. And so now we're delighted to be joining with our partners, and especially the host of the Institute for Peace here for this conversation. Assigned in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I. Seen as a mediocre compromise, it was problematic from the very beginning, creating an unstable order in Europe. Many considered it destined to falling short of ensuring a lasting peace. At the time, Mike Neuberg reminds us, observers read the treaties through competing lenses, a desire for peace after five years of disastrous war, demands for vengeance against Germany, the uncertain future of colonialism, and most alarmingly, the emerging threat of Bolshevism. And we're pleased to have with us three distinguished scholars to explore the treaty and the shaping of the international order in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Joining us on the panel today are Mustafa Aksal, the Associate Professor of History, and Nesuri Erdogan, Chair of Modern Turkish Studies, Georgetown University, Robert Kagan, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellows from the Brookings Institution, and Eric Law, the Professor and Susan Carmel, Chair of Russian History and Culture History at American University. Thank you for being here on. What is a historic day from all sorts of angles? So we're pleased that you've chosen to be with us. World War I is sometimes called the First War Forged to End War, a reflection on Wilson's justification for entering the war in 1917. And so to the group of us, to you, how do you characterize the war in terms of this idea of a war fought to end war, and how did that shape the post-World War I piece as found in the Treaty of Versailles? So initial thoughts? Yes. Yes. Is it on? Yeah. Okay, great. Well, thank you. First of all, thank you for hosting this wonderful conference. I love the fact that we're talking about history. It's sometimes useful when we're dealing with the present. The amazing thing is, poor Woodrow Wilson, you know, he was an incredible rhetorician, and he said some amazing things which sometimes would make you raise your eyebrows. One of the things he did not say was the war to end all war. He never said that. That was what Lloyd George said on the aftermath of the armistice. It's not in his war message in April. That was not the reason he took America to war. It's not in his 14 points. He never said it. And I think it's worth bringing that up because we tend to look at all this as if it was a lot of battling great ideas and incredible aspirations for changing the nature of humanity, and of course there was a lot of rhetoric along those lines. But the truth is that Wilson went to war for very practical reasons, and the peace was aimed at dealing with very practical problems, and all the talk about ending war for all time was not really what they were engaged in. They were trying to solve the very practical problem, at least in terms of Europe, of what to do about Germany and how to provide France security. And actually, we can go into this at greater length, obviously, the league was really the American attempt to answer that question. How to provide security to France, not let France dismember Germany, which was France's number one objective, and if France had had its way, it would have carved Germany back into its constituent pre-1871 pieces. And in order not to have that happen, Britain and the United States had to find some way to make France feel comfortable with a Germany that was whole. America was opposed to entangling alliances, as was mentioned. It was not going to make a security pact with France. The closest thing that Americans could devise, and this wasn't Wilson's idea, as was mentioned, Roosevelt talked about it, Henry Cabot Lodge talked about it. The closest thing that Americans could imagine doing was having a league in which all theoretically guaranteed to each other the security and inviability of their territory. But that Article 10 of the League of Nations Treaty was aimed directly at trying to reassure France. Ultimately, France was not reassured and for good reason. And the critical role of the United States in all of this was that the balance in Europe had been completely overturned by the rise of German power. There was no way for France and Russia and even England to balance against Germany. The United States came in and we figured that balance when it helped win the war. And the peace was supposed to reflect that new balance with the United States in the game. The peace failed because the United States pulled out. Eric. So the beginning, the premise of the beginning comment and statement is that the war really, we're looking at how it began from the American perspective. But of course it began four years earlier and the great powers that fell into this war, the greatest book recently on this is Christopher Clark, who really emphasizes that the origins of the war itself were multiple. And each country had its own reasons for falling into this war. And he would argue even its own sort of share of the blame for beginning the war. And none of them were idealistic notions of ending war for all time. From the German perspective it was conquest in the east, from the Russian perspective, Mustafa can talk about that. If you look from the Ottoman point of view up towards Russia, Russia's aim was to move into the Ottoman space. The Habsburg monarchy was just trying to preserve its position in Europe. The idea that there were ideals behind the beginning of the war, I think, is a little off from the point of view of 1914 and how it all began. But then even in 1917, Wilson's decision to get into the war, I would argue one of the biggest and most immediate consequences of that was to encourage the newly democratic Russia after its February 1917 revolution to launch perhaps the most ill-fated and offensive in the history of warfare, one that immediately brought about the mass desertion of its armies and the collapse of the Russian Empire and its exit from the war. And the imposed peace then that Germany gave to the new Soviet Union at Brest-Litovsk, which is a theme that I think we should probably return to later, but I don't want to hug the floor for now. Happy to talk about Brest-Litovsk. Just on this phrase, the war to end war, that's, of course, a title of H. G. Welts' 1914 book, which was a kind of hopeful statement, but that very quickly became used sarcastically. David Lord George said, yes, this is a war to end all wars just like the next one, right? And Archibald Wavel later rephrased that and said, at the time of the peacemaking, said this is a peace to end all peace about Versailles. Now, of course, as someone who works on the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, perhaps the most obvious point to make and to perhaps start out with is that the peace did not bring peace and end the war at all, especially in the Middle East and in Africa and Asia. President Wilson hoped that the treaty would establish new precedents in international affairs, and you have hinted at some of that and certainly in Mike's opening remarks that there would be a new path going forward. Peaceful relationships built on states with national self-determination and multilateral institutions influencing outcomes. Was the treaty truly transformational or was a more transactional in the traditional sense of power politics leading up to that period? Eric, I see. Well, I mean, one of the biggest stories of the end of World War I is the breakup of the great continental empires into, I would say, well, some kind of nation states, but actually, in practice, smaller new multinational empire states, Czechoslovakia, which included large minorities, Poland, which included large minorities, Yugoslavia, which was a conglomeration of different minorities. So, I mean, it wasn't, it didn't usher in the era of new nation states per se, but the principle was out there. And one thing that I think is important is that it didn't just come from Wilson's mind, this idea of transforming the world from a world of empires to a world of nation states. It was something that was inherent to the process of fighting of the First World War when both sides began to appeal to national movements, the Polish movements, the Ukrainians, and others across borders as part of fighting the war. And then that continued and was confirmed in the process of the Brest-Litovsk peacemaking sort of process in which Germany created a independent Ukraine as a kind of a puppet state, but endorsed this principle of breaking up the former Russian empire into component national parts. So there's kind of a continuity of step by step moving from empires to the world of nation states or something other than empire to the dissolution of the empires that doesn't just come from the mind of Wilson. And of course, we all know that Wilson was very inconsistent in himself. And when he looked at the world outside of Europe, he definitively did not endorse the idea of national independence movements much to the disappointment of people like Ho Chi Minh who were in Versailles and heard this and had great expectations and went back disappointed. So I guess that's my main sort of thought is that this idea of the movement from a world of empires to a world of nation states has a prehistory of Wilson and of course a posthistory as well. Just then to build on that, Eric, the Russians being not part of the Paris negotiations, what would have been the consequences had Russia been included? Well, that's the big question. In 1919, what is Russia? Because in 1919, the Civil War was really getting fully underway. And the White Armies were doing quite well during the negotiations marching north towards Moscow. The United States and the Allies obviously favored the White Armies because they did not recognize Brest Letovsk and the departure from the war. They had been our allies throughout the early stages of the Civil War. The Bolsheviks who controlled the capital in the center had been the ones who withdrew Russia from the war by encouraging mass desertions from the armies. So it's just hard to imagine a counterfactual where the Bolsheviks would be invited to Versailles. No. The Whites, they didn't actually control that much of the country. And there were four different contending white movements and many different political sort of contending groups within the white movement as well. So I just can't really think of how technically they could have been at the table. So they would have been there. The what ifs are, yeah, it's risky business anyway, isn't it? To say what ifs. So instead, let's flip that and say, what's the consequences there of them not being at the around the table? Explore that some more. What do you think the consequences of that were? I mean, Bob and Mustafa can come in on this too on the idea that any comprehensive attempt at peace that doesn't include the losers has got a big problem.  And they were not only not included, but they were actively excluded from any kind of rethinking of the alliance structure and the security structure of Europe, not just during the Versailles process, but for many years after. I mean, it wasn't until the 1930s that some of the allies recognized the validity of the Soviet regime. So talk about excluding a major, formerly great and soon to be great power again, from the supposedly comprehensive settlement of Versailles, I think it's a very important point. Any other? Well, the fact of Bolshevik Russia affected, to some extent, both British and American policies toward how to deal with Germany. There were a number of reasons why the British and the Americans disagreed with the French about, I mean, the French just wanted Germany destroyed and obliterated for eternity. There were a number of reasons why the British and the Americans didn't want to do that, but one was that they were already thinking of Germany as a potential bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism. They were also worried that Germany itself would succumb to revolution, which is one reason they didn't want the economy destroyed, but so already, far from how do you bring the Russians in, they're already establishing what they hope will be the check on what seemed at the time to be the very frightening spread of Bolshevism throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And could I just add that it's easy to forget that Bolshevism almost did win in Germany, even with the various measures to keep Germany intact. I mean, there was a Red Bavaria in Hungary. There was a successful for a time communist revolution. I mean, the world didn't know that the Bolshevik world revolution was gonna fail at that point. And the idea of a cordon sanitaire to sort of wall off this illness of Bolshevism, and it was actually an illness as well, because the total state collapse that happened in throughout the entire expanse of Eastern Europe led to one of the greatest epidemics of modern times. And I mean, the great flu that's spread across the influenza epidemic that spread across the zone killed vastly more people than World War I killed. And so it was a walling off not just civil war and internal disputes, but also quite literally trying to quarantine in some sense, this part of the world. And I mean, just to add perhaps the events in Russia surely affected how Paris dealt with the post-Hapsburg lands. In contrast, the quick recognition of the constituent part of Austria-Hungary as sovereign states in contrast to what ensued in the Middle East, where the constituent part of the Ottoman Empire were not, of course, recognized as sovereign states, but were turned into quasi-colonies that were then designated as mandates. Just to build on that, because it's such a good point. And it also gets to the incredible complexity that all these statesmen had to deal with, which is why I think we should have a certain amount of sympathy for whatever the failings were, which was because Russia was no longer a reliable ally, that had been France's key check on German power. So France was actually the driving force between four, the expansion of an independent Polish state, which included taking German territory, which was a later resource of German revanchism, and also for the establishment of as strong as possible, Czechoslovakia, both of which were supposed to, in France's eyes, take the place of Russia as the Eastern check on German power. So do you think that without the treaty that you still would have had the breaking up of the empires and the creation of those nation-states, would that have happened any way? Well, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had already been fallen. That wasn't a decision made at Versailles. That had already happened. The question was what to do with the pieces of it. I'm sorry, but Wilson, by the way, clung to the idea of holding Austria-Hungary together throughout the war longer than others did, partly because he was hoping to woo Austria away from Germany and make a separate peace. He came fairly late to the idea that we were gonna have to let Austria-Hungary fall apart, but it fell apart of its own volition, I mean, of its own as a result of the conflict. Mustafa, why don't you reflect with us on the impact of the war on the Ottoman, the fabric of that empire? Well, as far as Wilson is concerned, I would say that Wilson and the British did not really see eye-to-eye at all with respect to the Ottoman Empire. The British were already talking in 1914 of a new British Empire in the Middle East. The quick conversion of Egypt from occupation in 1914, December 1914, from occupation to a protectorate, and then talk about annexing and incorporating Egypt as a way to balance the future French occupation of Syria. So already in 1914, the British and the French were discussing what to do with the Ottoman Empire at war's end. Whereas Wilson, of course, in point 12 says that the Turkish-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire, in other words, Anatolia or Asia Minor, would have an unmolested opportunity to develop its future, and so would the Arabic-speaking lands of the Ottoman Empire. But those, of course, by 1918 were occupied by primarily British and French forces, and so did not really have that opportunity that Wilson was talking about. Bob, you have argued that the last 70 years are a historic aberration, and that we risk returning to the normal, that this is not the new normal what we're experiencing is, in fact, an aberration. Reflect for a few minutes about that, and talk to us about what do you think the Treaty of Versailles teaches us that helps us understand how we came to this place of the not normal, and we'll talk a little about the risk in the conversation yet to be. Yeah, I mean, the world is configured today is not so very different in a geopolitical sense than the world of the Versailles era and before because what you really have that was new then was the potential introduction, I say potential because it ultimately was not a full introduction of American power into the global equation. I mean, previously the United States had obviously been, it was never isolationist, but it didn't conceive of itself as being a player in the international scene. As I mentioned before, had it not been for the United States entry into the war, the war probably would have ended in some kind of stalemate at best with Germany in control of substantial, if not dominant parts of the European continent. That's where the war was headed and what would have happened after that, I'm sure there would have been another war at some point just as there was. What the United States did was bring its own power to bear and re, and establish a different balance. The outcome of the war reflected the introduction of American power and the Versailles Treaty reflected the introduction of American power. And I think that there was actually a possibility if the Americans had stayed in and approved the treaty and played the role that it designated for itself in the Versailles Treaty, both on reparations and on participating in the occupation of the Rhineland for a brief period or for a few years that you might actually have avoided World War II because the great, you know, because the United States was the Deus Ex Machina that was capable of bringing a new stability to Europe. I bring that up because that is what happened after World War II and continued to happen. Basically the United States after World War II made the world safe, made Germany safe for the world in a way that it had not after World War I. The great piece of Europe that we have seen since World War II was initially, but I think continually, based on the premise that the United States, the Germany could be allowed to be whole and powerful and rich, because the United States would check it and its neighbors needn't fear it. So that was the formula that was rejected by the United States when the League of Nations Treaty and the Versailles Treaty were rejected in Congress and accepted by the United States after 1945. There was general public acceptance, it seemed across the US for many of the principles in Versailles, but that was not the case, of course, for the Congress. What was the consequence then of it not being ratified? And why did that happen? Well, you may be shocked to know that partisan politics played a huge role in the defeat of the treaty. I won't go into great detail about this. You can read the book if I ever finish it, but basically, more things that are gonna shock you. They were all thinking about the 1920 election. Both sides knew that if Wilson passed his great treaty in 1919, that it would give an enormous boost to the Democrats, and possibly Wilson himself, who was actually contemplating a third term in 1920, Henry Cabot Lodge considered it his absolute obligation as the leader of the Republican Party to defeat the treaty in any way necessary, and he rather, quite brilliantly, the legislative tactics were brilliant. I think all things being equal, the treaty would have passed, but he managed to defeat it, and almost entirely, not for doctrinal reasons, as historians seem to think, but in my view, almost entirely for partisan reasons. The consequence of which, again, is that the Versailles Treaty was dead on arrival. The Versailles Treaty depended on the United States playing its role in numerous fronts in order to succeed. That was what was built. It's ridiculous to talk about the failure of the Versailles Treaty. It never had a chance once the Americans pulled out of it. Could I just add one thing? I've long thought that to blame the Versailles Treaty for World War II and et cetera is a bit of a stretch because really it was the Great Depression if you didn't have 30% of the German young men on the streets joining brownshirt paramilitary organizations who wouldn't have had the Nazi rise to power, and without the Nazi rise to power, the world would have been very different. World War II probably wouldn't have happened, at least in the form it took. So that's something we underestimate. And the causes of, I think, economic historians who've looked really closely at the causes of the Great Depression, very few would say that reparations are in the top five or even top 10 most important causes. So the treaty's pretty distant from the Great Depression origin story, which is the origin story of World War II, in my mind. Is a question from the audience. Wilson took many experts with him to Versailles. Why did he not include Lodge and other Republican leaders in the peace negotiations? Yeah, it's a good question, and it's a question that historians continually ask. I think it's a little like saying why doesn't Barack Obama bring Mitch McConnell with him to any treaty that he was going to sign? Lodge and Wilson were bitter enemies, both personally and politically. Lodge did not want to go. That was never an option. There were other potential Republicans that Wilson might have chosen, probably the leading choice, I think, in retrospect, and also at the time would have been someone like Elehu Root, who was the sort of senior statesman of the Republican Party. Wilson didn't trust Root, and Wilson was his own problem. I mean, he didn't want anybody around who was gonna tell him what to do. But I think it's wrong to assume that even if he brought Elehu Root, that Henry Cabot Lodge would therefore have allowed the treaty to pass. So I think there's a lot of being made of that that is not really very important. Let's reflect for a few minutes then about what we learned, what have we learned about the purpose of treaties based on Versailles? So coming from Versailles, what have we learned about the purpose of peace treaties? I would return to that point of when, if you're looking at a comprehensive peace to end an entire global conflict or an entire era like the Cold War, it's very important to include the losers, and that is really, really hard to do conceptually and practically because it involves a total shift of the way of thinking about global politics and alliances that people just can't really do. I mean, there was talk about transcending NATO with something that included the formerly communist space in the 1990s, but I mean, there was Brussels, there were infrastructures, there were habits of mind, and we just weren't able to transcend that. And I think Wilson, for all his great ideas, also it was impossible to transcend after four years of total war and not have punitive peace towards Germany. And it's a, I think a fundamental question whenever we think of a fundamental overall restructuring of a global system of alliances, it's pretty darn hard to pull off, if not impossible. Just like the war in 1914 had many different causes and many different contexts. So did the peace have many contexts. So Germany, obviously, is perhaps the most important one. I would say for the Middle East, if the purpose of a peace settlement is to settle conflict, the very opposite, of course, happened in the Middle East. Unsettled the whole region, the entire region for decades, even a century to come, created a great deal of disillusionment with liberal democracy, with international law and international diplomacy that was held out at Paris and by the peace conference. What commitments were made to the Ottomans in the Paris peace conference, if any? Well, of course, I mean, as we now well know, the whole world embraced the idea of the principle of self-determination that surrounded the peace talks. And we should, of course, also note that this idea for sovereignty and self-determination is not something that Wilson invents, but that has a long 19th century history. In fact, the causes of the First World War in Africa and Asia is, of course, wrapped up with anti-colonial movements that have been going on throughout the 19th century. The demand for sovereignty was not just opposed, but were one phenomenon, of course, but had its roots deep in the 19th century. But what 1918, what 1919 brought and what Wilson brought was a forum in which these movements could articulate their demands for independence. And the shock of that disappointment with the peace settlement has, of course, reverberated through these parts of the world, even down to today. Well, one of our audience are asking for you to reflect on the Arab revolt against the Ottomans and the presence of Arab delegates in Paris. So I see that as a piece that Eric has already touched on as a way in which the war was fought, namely to appeal to First World War, it can, of course, be read, or is the recent scholarship read that has a conflict among and between empires. And so one way in which the war was waged was, of course, by appealing to various people within those multi-ethnic empires for alliances or for anti-imperial movements. And so the Arab revolt of 1916 should be seen as part of that. But it's also interesting that that so-called Arab revolt, really, it happened in 1916. It doesn't happen in 1914. It happens at a point in the war when things look bad for the Ottomans, when Egypt and the southern parts of Iraq are, of course, already occupied by the British. And it's only in 1916 that the Sharif of Mecca then throws in his lot with the British. We've talked a little about this question of the treaty in World War II. A question that we have is around the, was the treaty fundamentally flawed or was there a lack of adherence and enforcement to its terms, which then contributed to the rise of nationalism and other such movements? Well, I'm gonna, at the risk of repeating myself, I mean, the treaty, of course, was flawed. There was no, I mean, it was made by human beings and dealing with incredibly complicated problems. But I don't think the treaty was inherently unworkable. What happened after 1919 is the failure of the treaty being fulfilled largely again by the American contribution, which had multiple dimensions. I actually think you can obviously point to the Great Depression as being, I would say more an accelerant of trends, a decisive, catalytic accelerant, but there were already things at work. For instance, if you look at the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, that has a huge effect on Germany, obviously. It has a great bolstering effect to German nationalism. It obviously, it accelerates for German inflation and you get the hyperinflation as a result of it. The French invasion of the Ruhr is almost a direct consequence of the absence of the Americans in the game. And also, by the way, the other wonderful American contribution is the American continuing demand for full payment of the European debts, the wartime debts, which put incredible pressure on the French to demand even greater reparations from the Germans and we created this vicious cycle where Germany didn't pay, whether it couldn't have paid is another question, but it certainly put great strain on Germany to try to pay the French because they had to pay American debts were being forced to squeeze the Germans even further. The fact that the Americans were no longer providing the security guarantee that they had promised meant that the French had to take these matters into their own hands, which leads to the invasion of the Ruhr, which I have to say some American diplomats at the time in 1923 said, this is the beginning of the end. And let's not forget, Hitler is already on the scene at this point and he's not an immediate beneficiary of what happens in 1923, but he is an eventual beneficiary of that. So there's a whole sequence of events that occur because the United States has decided not to play the role. We were supposed to be the chairman of the reparations committee deciding on reparations. When we left, the French took control of the reparations committee, and which led to a wholly different approach to reparations. I agree the reparations weren't the cause, but they certainly were an exacerbating element. Just to add one other thing, the exclusion of the losers, Soviet Union and Germany from being an inherent part of the Versailles settlement was very consequential. I mean, at Rapallo very shortly thereafter, a secret military set of agreements were signed and Germany began to rearm basically in the Soviet Union outside of the oversight of Europe and the world. And the seeds were already planted for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Alliance, which really was the thing that started World War II. So excluding the losers again as a theme, I'd like to... How do you think that the dueling narratives in Germany immediately after the war between the political leaders and the military leaders, the military leaders saying we got ripped off by the politicians. We actually, they negotiated a war that we would have won that had had that then contributed to a change in public sentiment in Germany around the war. What would have happened had that been a different outcome? Well, I mean, the military was lying. The military was the one who sued for peace. They begged the civilians to sue for peace. They didn't even admit to the civilians how bad, the civilians how badly the war was going. And then all of a sudden they said, we need to have peace right now. So, but then of course they pushed the civilians out front to take the brunt of the political cost of signing the Versailles Diktat as it was known in Germany. And then the result of which, because the military sort of played ball with the Weimar Republic for a while, but the result of which is the Weimar Republic itself was born with real problems of legitimacy, precisely because it was blamed for signing this terrible treaty. And the biggest problem in Germany is that there was never really any widespread devotion to the Republic itself. And it was pretty easy for conservative elements to say, let's go back to being the Germany that we were before this Weimar Republic thing is not working. But this, the military's incredibly cynical blaming of the civilians for the treaty was definitely a contributing factor to that. Just to add to that, I mean, it was especially a hard fall because even in March, 1918, the central powers weren't yet defeated. And in fact, it looked, even as late as March, 1918, it looked like Germany and the Ludendorff Offensive might at least achieve a settled peace, settled on basis of equal partners. It really was the, you know, the Americans don't start pouring into Europe until the summer of 18 in any great numbers. And that is really what turned the tide, not so much because of what the Americans actually did, although they helped win some battles. But because all of a sudden the Germans realized that there was this absolutely unlimited supply of fresh soldiers by the millions that were going to be pouring into Europe. And they realized that that was the end. The 10,000 a day wasn't the number coming in, right? At that point, I mean, it took us a long time to start getting troops into Europe. But once we did, the Germans realized that the game was over. Yeah. And sorry, and Germany never had the opportunity to tap into the resources that came with Ukraine and with Brezli Tosk, you know, some over 80% of Russia's oil resources would have been available to the Germans and all sorts of other material gains. Here's another question from the audience. Did Wilson get played by the leaders of Britain and France at Versailles, especially on reparations from Germany? Was Wilson not up to dealing with these leaders? I don't mean to be...  Well, no, the loser at the Versailles Treaty was, aside from Germany, was France, from their point of view. The French wanted much more in the way of guaranteed security and they just couldn't get it from the Americans and the British, I would say by and large. And on reparations, the British were... Wilson didn't oppose... He won the compromise of putting off the figure until they never settled on a figure at Versailles. And so that was what the Reparations Commission was supposed to be for. And according to the treaty, the Americans were gonna be the chairperson of the Reparations Committee. So I don't think he got played. That was the big story. That's John Maynard Keynes's, he was bamboozled by those wily Europeans. But I really don't think that was true. If anybody was in a strong position in Paris, it was Wilson. He got what he wanted, which was the League. He didn't really disagree fundamentally with some of the border issues. There were things that he was upset about, about Fiume and Shantung and things like that, where he did lose. But that was losing in those cases to the Italians and the Japanese. So I don't think that's the case. I just one other thought. I was thinking through the counterfactual of what if France had gotten everything it wanted at Versailles, broken up Germany into component parts, et cetera. It still would have been an extremely powerful industrial base of the component parts. And I think we forget that Nazism was not just a one country movement. It was truly an international movement. Marc Mazauer has written a beautiful book about that that really emphasizes how the appeal of Nazism transcended borders. And it's easy to imagine in a counterfactual these component broken up parts having some variant of fascist movement that could reunite Germany. It would be a powerful rallying cry, too, with reflections back to the great 1870 sort of national awakening and movement in Germany, unification. And so I don't know. And how could you have sustained? Who was gonna sit on all these Germans? The French couldn't do it by themselves.  So what the French wanted was really unachievable. And in a way, dealing with the treaty was a way of satisfying unachievable French demands. So the war's preceding World War I and the interaction of the French with others, how did that impact the French's attitude, the attitude of France? The Franco-Prussian war and such. So this is a question from the audience. How important was the Franco-Prussian war and France's attitude toward Germany at the end of World War I? Super important. Look, talk about that and why. Look, the French had every reason to want Germany removed from the face of the earth after what had happened to them now twice. And they never had it, they did not think the Germans could be reformed. They thought a German was a German was a German. That was, there's a quote on that, I don't know whether it was Clemens or somebody else. And so what they wanted to do was make it impossible for Germany to do that again. Their minimum demand was to basically change the border so that the Rhine would be the border between France and Germany so that you couldn't have this. And the French were perfectly aware that they were the only ones who had this problem. That's why they were the ones who lost the treaty to some extent. The British had the channel, the Americans had the Atlantic Ocean, the French had nothing between them and the Germans. And all of your France was completely shell-shocked by being defeated by the Germans for a second time in 40 years and were not wrong to fear time number three. And there were no potential allies anywhere to be had because Russia was in civil war and East Europe was fractured, I mean. Could the Weimar government have done anything different to have bolstered their weak starting legitimacy? This is a really complicated story. The Weimar government had done pretty well actually by around 1925, 26, 27. Stresemann did a good job of dealing with the diplomacy and the economy partly as a result of the Dawes plan and other American infusions of capital was doing pretty well. The sequence of events that led to the undoing of the Weimar Republic is a very complicated sequence of events and the only thing I would have to say, it does precede the depression because it's really 1930 that things begin to go south. And I think personally that's related to the agreement which again the Americans helped engineer which removed French troops from the Rhineland five years earlier than the treaty had called for. The existence of French forces in the Rhineland was a huge check on German domestic politics. The Germans knew that if they elected anybody or put anybody in power or overthrew the democracy that this would be an excuse for the French to come in and attack. When the French were no longer able to do that, I think it's more than coincidence that that is when the German government shifted toward a more conservative and less democratic government which then ultimately leads to Hitler taking power. Another question from the audience about Wilson's absence. What impact did Wilson not being on the scene during the 1920s have on the post-Versa period? I feel like I'm talking too much. You know Wilson, go for it. Well, I don't know if it's Wilson. I mean, if Wilson had been president in the 1920s is that what we're talking about? You mean if he'd won a third term? Perhaps. I think things would have been different. But again, that is one of those counterfactuals that you don't know where to go with because the fact is the country in the form of the Congress rejected an American role in Europe. The candidate who ran on that platform of non-involvement hardening won an overwhelming landslide. The biggest landslide in history in 1920s. So to talk about what if Wilson had been, the country in a way had made its decision and the politicians who led the country in the 1920s reflected that decision. I think we could see that. You have to sometimes say this is what the public decided folks and we know what that's like. Yeah. Let's then go back to the treaty. Bob, you've argued that it was flawed from the beginning because of the, that it wasn't generally adopted and the U.S. not having ratified. However, it was. Let's talk about what might there be some strengths and what were its weaknesses? What are the weak points of the treaty as it stood? What are the real strengths that came out of that? Each of you. Well, I mean, I think this goes back to the role and I suppose the legacy of Wilson in this whole process in these few years. I'm not so sure Wilson got everything that, or most everything that he wanted. His vision of, at least on paper, his vision of international order was very different from what actually ensued. What did ensue was the expansion of British and French Empire, at least until the Second World War. And so I think a more robust treaty perhaps would have been to put into check to create some balance, international balance and to curb the expansionism of, to put checks on the British and the French, which Wilson wasn't able to do. Let's say the fundamental failure of Versailles was to create a new balance of power and the idea that the new states of Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary could be a balance, it's sort of a balancing function, proved, we know, not to have worked, in part because they didn't really cooperate with each other because of territorial disputes and cross-border things that seem very petty today, but probably in a sense, I mean, should have been foreseen that these new nation states would not suffice to create a balance with France against what everyone should have known would be a resurgent Germany. I mean, it was the greatest, most modern industrial power on the planet, not just, I mean, America was rising, but still, Germany was the center of science, industry, everything and the war didn't touch that and everyone should have known that Germany was gonna rise again very soon and that the fundamental question at Versailles should have been creating a new balance against it and it really failed to do that. I mean, again, it failed to do that because a key player didn't play, right? And so I don't know whether the balance, I think the balance would have been different, certainly, if the United States had been in the game and then you wouldn't be relying, as you correctly say, on these very weak reads. I think people did know that Germany would eventually be powerful again. The problem was, and again, you probably couldn't sympathize, Lloyd George said, oh, it'll be 15 or 20 years and it's like, yeah, that's right, but you know, but it's sort of like if you are now, if you say, well, there's gonna be a big problem 20 years from now. Look how well we deal with problems that we think are gonna be coming 20 years from now. You tend to be a little bit more short-sighted about these things. In principle, you're certainly right that Wilson would have preferred, as any American would have not expanding. We didn't fight the war to expand the British Empire or the French Empire, but clearly from Wilson's point of view, priority number one, two, three and four was on the continent of Europe to have fought the necessary battle. He lost a battle with the British that he cared a great deal more about over the issue of freedom of the seas, which was one of his 14 points, which essentially meant that we don't wanna have you composing embargoes on us and blockades on us again, and he lost that battle because he thought he had to give things away in order to get the league. As I say, he was very painfully upset about giving the Chinese province of Shantung to the Japanese, which by the way led to Chinese Revolution and all kinds of things, which he was very unhappy about, but he did that because he didn't want the Japanese walking away from the league. Now you could say, and people have said, he put too much stock in the importance of the league compared to these other things, which you could say, and B, he didn't realize that he actually had enough bargaining power to tell everybody to jump off a bridge, and he could still get his league. I mean, you could go both ways, but that is the reason, and I just have to think at the end of the day, the issue of the British Empire and the French Empire were not that high a priority for him. It's not an accident if you look at the war. The countries that lost lost their empires. The countries that won kept their empires. And another question here from the audience. The current interesting Kurdistan leads to the question, who were the nationalist winners and losers at Versailles and why? Yeah. With President Erdogan in town. I have to think for a second. Security is really good here. Well, we don't want to test it, but so of course the Treaty for Asia Minor for Anatolia was signed at Sevres, signed in August 1920, and it provided for a referendum in the Kurdish areas as they were defined by the treaty. Those Kurdish areas excluded Kurds in Iran, Kurds in Iraq, and Kurds in Syria. What was becoming Iraq and Syria in any case as part of the new mandates that were being set up. The mandates, by the way, and the League articles were of course the first articles in all of the five treaties that were signed to settle the war. Versailles, Noi, Saint-Germain, Sev, and Trianon. Those five treaties all had as the first articles the endorsement or the ratification of the League of Nations. And so Kurdistan was going to have a referendum and that was of course upended by the armed resistance that was then organized and led by Mustafa Kemal, the later Ataturk, in that armed resistance that is now known in history books as the Turkish War of Independence. That was really not yet a Esno nationalist Turkish conflict but it was in fact fought by Kurds and Turks by an alliance, a coalition of the Muslims of Anatolia, of Asia Minor. And Sev, of course, by 1922 then was dead in the war and then replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. And at that point there was no longer consideration for creating an independent Kurdish state or polity. Can I just add another national supposed winner was Poland, which got a large Ukrainian minority and a large territories that were German minority majority. And Czechoslovakia, which got the Sudetenland. And you could say they were winners in some sense but you could also say that this ensured that both the Soviet Union would have revanchist claims to a big chunk of Poland which had acted on when it formed the alliance with Hitler in 1939 and part of that agreement was to annex those Ukrainian majority areas. And it ensured German revanchism versus Poland would be a live issue throughout the interwar period and a very important one. So I don't know if winners and losers is the way to frame it. Bobby made a comment about the Japanese and Chinese play. Question from the audience, had Japan played more of a role in the treaty, how might that have impacted the Sino-Chinese war, Japanese imperial aims? Well I think that, you know, by and large the Japanese saw World War I as a great opportunity for them to move toward what, if you wanted to look at it from their point of view, was taking, you know, sort of, they had felt like, and correctly, that the European empires had been carving up Asia at their expense for quite some time and one of the reasons they underwent the sort of the Meiji reforms was to make Japan strong enough so that it could resist, so that it could compete effectively with these other empires and its number one objective was the Asian mainland where, you know, there were resources, especially Manchuria, et cetera, that Japan lacked for its growing population and so I say that all because Japan was on an already clearly expansionist trajectory. World War I provided a great opportunity for them because Germany had taken control of the Shantung province and yet Japan would be delighted to make war, to join the Allies in the war on Germany so that it could take it for itself. And one of the things that Japanese wanted at the peace talks, as I think everybody remembers, is they wanted a statement about racial equality which Wilson wanted to do except he couldn't because the American, his own public would have had a fit over racial equality, that's our country, folks. But in any case, what the Japanese really meant by that was our equality because they didn't consider, they considered themselves superior basically to other Asians and so, but that was really like take us seriously, they didn't get that, that probably caused a great deal of resentment but what they did get was the German territory and Shantung and other islands that they didn't expand their power as a result of that. So to say that they didn't participate, from their point of view, they participated just fine and I don't know what else they could have gotten that they didn't get through the level of their participation. And so it bears remembering that war actually is restarted by two of the victors of World War I, Japan and Italy in 1931 and 1935 respectively rather than by any of the vanquished. Yeah, and Italy is another, it's pure expansionism on Italy's part, going after the so-called irredent Italian nationalism demanding parts of what later became known as Yugoslavia and is now Croatia and whatnot that really had almost had very little to do with Italy. It was the beginning of, as you say, it was the beginning of Italian expansionism as well and Mussolini comes to power partly on the back of nationalist bitterness that the Italians didn't get everything they wanted out of World War I. I mean, when you talk about the failure of the treaty, there's all kinds of things that happened that were horrible that had nothing to do with the treaty. The treaty didn't even get it wrong, but you had a lot of these nationalist and expansionist things going on that then played themselves out in the interwar period. What do you consider to be the greatest misconceptions or myths about the treaty and its impact on the world order and on negotiating peace agreements? One that had ended the war. I mean, Robert Gerwarth wrote a really great book recently on why World War I failed to end and it's an important reminder that for half the continent, the worst was yet to come, actually. The civil war in the Soviet space killed four or five times more people than World War I did and Mustafa can talk about Southeast Europe and the incredible forced expulsions of populations back and forth and the great epidemics that swept across this land. I mean, the war did not end with Versailles. So that's myth one. Myth number one. What are the myths or misconceptions? I mean, again, I think that the myth that this was really anything more than a great power settlement of a fairly traditional variety, the wild card being the strange sort of great power that the United States was and the sort of ambivalence and ambiguity of what American objectives were in this period. But other than that, it was a classic great power settlement and a lot of the things that people were disappointed about was that it was a classic great power settlement and a lot of the things that as we look back on it, I think the myth is that it was anything other than that. Yeah, I would just agree that the fighting in many parts of the world not only continued but actually intensified. I don't know if we think of the Greek armies invasion and Anatolia, for example. So another question from the audience. A key point of the treaty was the forbidding of the Austrian-German unification. Was this a punishment for either of these countries? Did it really matter if these two German states unified into a greater German as envisioned by the revolutionaries of 1848? Well, you know, that was another French demand and mostly what the French were trying to do was deal with the enormous population advantage that Germany had over France, which had been a source of French panic before the war and after the war. And so a lot of what French goals had to do with was parcelling, was cutting up Germany as much as possible to reduce the population of Germany. And you know what? It is worth remembering that if those parts of Germany had not been hived off in various ways, however foolish it may have been, nevertheless, from the French point of view, the post-World War I Germany would have been massive, massive if the millions didn't go to Poland, the millions didn't go to Czechoslovakia, if Hungary, I mean, if Austria was united with Germany, it would have been a massive country and with all the potential that Eric talks about. And so did it ultimately matter? It only mattered when we weren't willing to enforce it anymore. But that was the objective. And I think from a certain point of view, it was an understandable objective. Whether it was an attainable objective, ultimately, is another question. You know, ultimately a corporal who was an Austrian citizen ended up leading a transnational fascist movement that did unite Austria with Germany. So, I mean, yeah. What do you say? Let's return to some earlier comments that we had before about the failure of that period, this catastrophe of World War I and its post-World War I time. Had it that contribute to, and what was the outgrowth of that, which led to the experience that Bob, you point to of the, not the new normal, but the an aberrant experience for the world, an aberrant period for us. Had it the war and its aftermath contribute to that? Well, I mean, it was lessons learned. And so, for instance, it had to do, it certainly was related to the idea of unconditional surrender and complete occupation of Germany and even the division of Germany between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. The idea of leaving Germany intact and independent, that was decided, that was a mistake. And then, I bought at the same time, I think the founders of the post-war order were very conscious, as they did in the case of Western Germany, of the need to restore the German economy, to make it, once again, an integral part of the European economy. A lot of that was driven by fear of communism. It wasn't just the lesson of World War I, but the desire to quickly reintegrate the Germany that was part of, certainly West Germany, I think was one of the, was also one of the sort of lessons learned. And the other lessons learned were lessons learned over the course of the 20s and 30s, having to do with economic policy and economic autarky and things like that. Anyway, that's what occurs to me. Yeah, what occurs to me is that, even if you take the assumption that you had a perfect Versailles, a perfect treaty with absolutely the best you can ever imagine, the world would still have faced an enormous challenge in figuring out all of the inter-allied debts and how to balance, how to bring the global economy back to a stable place because those problems, in some sense, were there no matter what.  They all moved to something new. People, France started overvaluing its currency. Some people argue that that was one of the fundamental causes of the Great Depression, that overvalued currencies reduced trade globally. I mean, that would have been enormous. And then if you assume that, say, the Versailles treaty happened after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Bolsheviks, one of their first acts was to abrogate all the debts that they owed to all of the allies and to the rest of the world. And that included the largest government-to-government loan in world history to that date, which was from France to Russia in 1906 to help stabilize things for its ally after it went through its first revolution. So just that act of a default on all the debts that the former Tsarist Empire owed to the world, that would have been an enormous challenge to try to figure out how to manage that without a global economic catastrophe as well. So Versailles can kind of be overvalued, I think, sometimes. There were big problems that were independent of it. What made the moment so extraordinary in some ways is that in 1919, the world map was wide open as it rarely has been in history. And then to try to address that, to orchestrate the world from Paris under the exclusion of so much of that very world. It's really difficult to see how that could have had a more realizable outcome. We had just a few minutes from needing to wrap up. So last question for us. What might we learn from the treaty and its legacy that informs the current conditions of the world today? Margaret McMillan has argued that there are ominous parallels between the world today rise of nationalism in a variety of places, the shifting alliances, breaking up a seeming of international order. How, what might we have learned from the treaty and its legacy that informs the current conditions of the world today? I mean, this is what I sort of mean by when you've mentioned is what's an aberration and what's not an aberration. I mean, I think that we are used to looking at the rise of nationalism and maybe the return of autocracy and the return of potentially geopolitical competition as, oh my God, how did that happen? But of course that is the norm. That was the norm leading into World War I. It was the norm leading out of World War I. And really, it's only after 1945 and really in some respects only after 1989 that we get this sort of new, what we could see to be normal, which is really quite abnormal. And if you ask what are the ingredients of abnormality I continue to believe and it's a very, I hate to be so America-centric, but the United States is in such a peculiar position in the world in terms of its geography, its wealth and its power, which gives it a sort of unique ability to be in multiple places with large number of forces in a way that can provide stability and security. I really think that that was where we tiptoed up to playing that role after World War I and pulled back from it. We undertook to take that role after World War II and for the next 70 plus years. But now I would say normality in the American psyche is returning because it was abnormal for anybody to take on the role we took on after World War II and it was particularly abnormal for Americans. And I think ambivalence toward playing this kind of role in the world is the norm for Americans. And I think ever since really the end of the Cold War Americans have been increasingly asking, could you please remind us why we're doing this again? And nobody's really been persuasive to explain that to them and so we are returning very much to the country that we were in 1919. I don't know if that's what Margaret McMillan means probably it isn't, but I think that the trend she identifies are inevitable. The only question is, is the deus ex machina gonna continue to be the deus ex machina? And I have my doubts obviously. Yeah, it's a really important point I think that America tends to swing too far from one extreme to the other of trying to run the world to totally stepping back from it. And just the episode in Kurdistan with the sudden US reversal of its policy there, I think is a good reminder that even on the margins America still has enormous impact in specific places in the world that are very important. And maybe that's one of the lessons of Versailles that stepping back has its costs as well. I mean it's also debatable, right? To what extent US involvement across the globe has been a stabilizing factor. And I would say for the Middle East it's perhaps not so much going back to 1919 but going back to 1914 and the period before then that actually had a polity in which people of great difference of ethnic and religious linguistic difference were able to be accommodated in a single polity. And the partitioning and separating out into various peoples vaguely on this principle of self-determination had of course served the region much less well. Arguably the people of the Middle East in terms of political rights even were better off before 1914 then since then. There's a parliament in 1908 in Istanbul with Muslim, Christian and Jewish delegates and a parliament, there are empire-wide elections, there's a constitution, there are features of a polity that I think today we wouldn't mind seeing at all. In 1920, Congress assembled in Damascus with a constitution, it says they represent all the various peoples of Syria at the time and they make, adopt a number of resolutions, they make a number of demands. Demand number one is that Syria should be a constitutional monarchy and should be completely independent and sovereign. And resolution number two is if that sovereignty for whatever reason shall not be granted by the League of Nations, then an American mandate over Syria would be acceptable for a period of no longer than 20 years. And then it says, and if that's not possible, then a British mandate could be possible. Under no circumstances do we want the French and what do they get? They get the French. Well, thank you. They are time has passed. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Mustafa Axel, Robert Kagan and Eric Law. Great, we'll take a short coffee break. People can get caffeinated and we'll return here at 10.45 for the next panel. Thank you. Thank you. You can hear me? Yeah, it's a great opportunity to, as Michael just said, talk a little bit about the past and a little bit about the present. We're delighted on this second panel to have a first rate lineup of speakers. And I wanna start us off by maybe echoing a little bit of what was said in this previous panel or sort of transitioning over from Versailles to, I guess you could call this the Yalta panel, the post-1945 panel. But by saying, I think 2019 is an opportune moment to talk about these foundational questions of post-war order for a couple of reasons. And one of them, just gleaning from what we heard in this last discussion, is these anniversaries. So this is the 100th anniversary of 1919 in Versailles. It's the 30th anniversary of 1989, which I think we shouldn't forget is also a kind of post-war, a post-Cold War ordering moment. And then next year, of course, is the 75th anniversary of 1945. But of course, another reason that it's a good time to talk about sort of the foundational questions of regional or global order is that those things appear to be in doubt. So I think we've come through a very long stretch of history where we weren't asking questions about the foundation because it seemed to be firm. And so it's when things start to come apart that you start wanting to look at how they were built to begin with. And I think we're clearly at one of those moments. I'd also say upfront, just to kind of frame the discussion and before I introduce our speakers, that I think these three moments that I've just mentioned, 1919 and the settlement at Versailles, 1945, and the settlement that you could say either Yalta or Potsdam, and then also 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of those I think if you looked at them sort of panoramically, you can see the 20th century in profile and you can trace the primary political contours of the 20th century through those three moments. They were all concerned with questions of stability. I mean, fundamentally, questions of stability and maybe you could say also legitimacy in the wake of a major war. So two world wars and then one Cold War. They were all concerned, I think, primarily with the question of Germany, which we'll come back to in a moment. At least let's say their proximate concern was Germany, but inevitably ended up concentrating on the space between Germany and Russia, so central Eastern Europe, and then of course they set a template that you could say allowed questions of global as opposed to merely regional order to be taken into account. The post-1989 world that we live in now, and if you noticed last week, we had a series of commemorations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is really an outgrowth of the post-1945 order. So the system of collective security, international institutional cooperation, NATO, the European Union, OSCE, the Bretton Woods system, and its descendant institutions, the WTO, IMF, all grew out of this moment after 1945. So you could say the world, as we know it, is really built on those foundations, 1989, tracing back through 1945 to 1919. And the final thing I'd say is, before we start, is just before we start talking about 1945 and the world that was rebuilt after the Second World War is that the world, as we know it today, is built on the foundations that came out of the Second World War. And I think that has to be stated clearly up front. We've come through a stretch of unprecedented international peace and prosperity. I think I'm correct in saying that at the 75-year mark from 1945, we've now gone through a longer period without Great Power War than maybe the next closest claimant to that title, which would be the long piece of the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna. But we also see considerable signs of strain on the international order. And those post-1945 foundations are very much in question. So trade wars, reemergent nationalism, and the return of what you might call unmitigated Great Power competition. So for this panel, I think what we want to do is use the expertise that we have here to talk a little bit about the legacy of 1945, and maybe put it in the context of some of the questions that were raised in this previous panel about 1919. And then inevitably, I think we want to talk a little bit about the present and the future and how serviceable these institutions that came out of the Second World War and their descendants will be for the future. So we have with us this morning three individuals who I think are very well-suited to talking about the world after 1945. We have, to my immediate left, Robert Litvok. You all have the bios, but let me highlight a couple of things about their background. Senior Vice President and Director of International Security Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars served on the National Security Council staff as Director for Nonproliferation and has taught or held fellowships at Georgetown University, Harvard, Russian Academy of Sciences in Oxford, and is the author of several books, including most recently books on North Korea, Iran, and nuclear terrorism. To Dr. Litvok's left, we have Avile Rochwald, Professor of History at Georgetown University with a focus on European international history and a special emphasis I think you could say on nationalism and ethnic politics in some of his work. Author of several books, including two that I think have special relevance to today's discussion, The Endurance of Nationalism, Ancient Roots, and Modern Dilemmas, and Estranged Bedfellows, Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War. And then to Avile's left, we have Ellen Lipson, Director of the Masters in International Security Program and Center for Security Policy Studies at George Mason University, formerly served as President and CEO of the Stimson Center and has significant government experience, including role as Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council and Stens at the State Department of Policy, Planning Staff, National Security Council and Intelligence Advisory Board. So I'm going to pose a series of questions. Maybe I'll start out by asking a question for all three of our panelists and then some questions for each of them individually. What I wanna do is start with kind of the origins and context of that moment in 1945 and then bring it forward through sort of the content of that settlement and implications for the President. And then of course there will be ample time for questions from the audience. We're gonna follow the same format as we did before but I want this to be as much of a discussion as possible. So let me start out with a question that I think would pick up on a little bit of where the previous panel was leaving off and let's talk for a moment maybe about the origins and context of the post-war order in 1945. And the place to start I think is Germany. 1919 and 1945 and of course you could add to that 1989 all had their origins in what you could call the German question, which was really the question of the 20th century. And that was how to manage the fact of German economic and military power that had you could say from 1871 onward, the old balance of power in Europe was not able to contain Germany once it unified. So each of these orders let's say 1919 and 1945 answer the German question a different way. The answer of 1919 was to create a tier of buffer states between Germany and Russia in part to help contain its power but also to weaken Germany. And then of course 1945 answered that question in a very different way. Not through buffers but through partition and dividing Germany and Europe and relegating central Eastern Europe to a Soviet spear. So I want to start for our panelists with a question about having drawn this contrast looking at Germany specifically. When you think about 1945 and the deliberations, the decisions that were made about how to handle the problem of Germany, what lessons did the architects of the 1945, the post World War II order, what lessons did they learn from the mistakes or successes that we've just heard about in this previous panel with regard specifically to Germany? And let me put it this way, were they cognizant, how cognizant were allied leaders of the pitfalls of 1919? Were they learning from that experience or is your sense that they were more reacting to events on the ground? Maybe we could start with Robert and work our way to the left. Well, thank you very much. And let me just begin by thanking Mike Gaffey for putting this conference together. The Wilson Center is delighted to partner with USIP on it and other institutions to your questions. It was really in the defining issue in international relations in the first half of the 20th century how to manage German power. By 1945, Germany was a vanquished power. One diplomat at the time quipped, we like Germany so much, we've got two of them. But the immediate issue was how to deal with rising Soviet power, which was present in Eastern Europe. And there the architects of the post World War II settlement took into account what had happened after World War I. Now we're at the US Institute of Peace and it would be appropriate to reference the two dominant schools of thought about how you achieve peace in the international system. The first associated with Wilson, Wilsonianism, focuses on the internal organization of states. The argument being that democratic governance will create the proliferation of democratic states will create a Pacific international system because democracies don't fight each other. The alternative school, often called realism, focuses on the distribution of power among states. And the driving argument is that stability rises from a stable distribution of power among the major powers. After World War I, you had a kind of Wilsonian vision, but America, as was commented on in the last panel, returned to normalcy, came home. You didn't have a League of Nations or any credible collective security organization and you had two revolutionary states on the continent, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It came to a head in 1939 with the World War. The post-World War II settlement created institutions, and here I'm drawing on the pathbreaking work of John Eikenberry, his great book after victory, written at the Wilson Center, where he argued that the post-World War II institutions, that's station identification folks, drew on both traditions. In Western Europe, you had a community of democracies develop, building on bread and woods, et cetera. But you also had NATO in the realist tradition of international relations to contain Soviet power, because American grand strategy has been integrating states into the community of democracies with market economies. But when that state is not a ripe candidate for integration, you balance their power, you contain them until, as Kenan argued, the Soviet Union would mellow or collapse as his prophecy that came to fruition in 1989. So the structure of post-1945 had this two-tier, two-track international system. In the West, institutions and the liberal internationalist model, vis-à-vis facing the East, a collective security organization in the realist tradition to balance Soviet power. Avio. I mean, it's striking that in the previous panel, we discussed a peace treaty with Germany and other religions that ultimately failed. In 1945 and immediately following years and decades, there was no peace treaty with Germany. Peace treaties were signed with some of the minor belligerents, but not with Germany. And under those conditions, an unexpected, though eventually carefully managed, stability emerged. And it was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany that a lasting settlement agreed to by both the Soviet Union at the time and the Western powers and the Germans was arrived at. And unquestionably, the objective of unconditional surrender, which the allies, which the British and Americans announced at the Casablanca conference, which Stalin eventually signed on to after his peace-feelers for a separate peace with Germany had failed, was conditioned in part by wanting to keep the anti-German alliance together and allay Stalin's suspicions, but in large measure clearly as a lesson derived from the conditions under which the armistice and peace were negotiated in World War I, where there was a fundamental disconnect between the punitive nature or perception of the peace treaty that emerged in 1919 and the circumstances under which World War I had ended, with German troops still on French and Belgian soil. They were in retreat. It would have been a matter of weeks before there would have been allied troops on German soil, but the mistake, as it was seen in retrospect, was that the armistice was signed and took effect on November 11, 1918, while German troops, albeit in retreat, were still on French and Belgian soil. And of course, in the East, there were still victorious against the Russians. And so that lent itself to the myth that Germany had been stabbed in the back from within. It hadn't really lost the war. And given that it hadn't really lost the war, a punitive peace was completely unacceptable and out of sync with the spirit of the 14 points. So I think there was a very clear lesson derived from that, that next time we're defeating Germany first definitively and unconditionally, and then we'll see about the settlement later. And unquestionably that, I mean, I think that ended up being an effective approach. There was no question in post-45 Germany, but that the country had been defeated. There was no plausible argument that the defeat had somehow not been real and not ultimately self-inflicted. So I think the architects of the post-World War II system were very conscious of the costs of the punitive approach. And I wonder whether it would be correct to say that in their minds, they were making a distinction between the defeat of an ideology, the defeat of Nazism, but not necessarily the total defeat and humiliation of the German people. So that there was still, I think, some respect that Germany could rebuild itself and be a normal country again, as opposed to some of the very harsh views where we should destroy their factories. They should just go back to being an agrarian society so that we don't have to feel threatened by them. I think after World War II, there was at least the prevailing view was you did have to reconstruct a successful German economy, but hopefully change the political culture of the place. But I would say that the partition of Germany, my understanding, was expected to be temporary. That it was a transitional period, just like the partition of the Korean Peninsula after World War II was supposed to be temporary. It was not intended to be a permanent condition. But I wanna go back to Rob's two schools of thought. I think that the tension that we heard about in the first panel in Versailles, of whether people believed that there was a march of human progress, whether there was an aspiration to change the nature of international relations, or whether the goal was restore a reassuring sense of stability that was premised on great powers that got to do what they do. They've got to feel strong and confident, but they're somehow willing to distribute power among in the international system. So I think that tension that was unresolved, I mean, Wilson fails to get some of his most idealistic ideas through, but you have kind of hollower shells of what was supposed to be a new peaceful order being constructed. So after World War II, we try again, and we sort of have much more success in building institutions that are more robust, but still premised on the notion that states are gonna compete, and states have to learn rules of the road of how you share responsibility in the international system. But I just wanna underscore this notion of whether it was still a minority of the architects, I think, who actually believed that you could get all the way to something that would be transformational of a different way for sovereign nation states to interact with each other, and that's the project that I think we're all still involved in. So that's an important point, and let me follow up to what you just said with a related question. So this dichotomy between a more realist informed and a more Wilsonian informed approach to building peace, you see within the, you see different strands of this within how the West itself was ordered after the Second World War, but particularly if you contrast the terms of if we wanna call it a settlement at Yalta of in Western Europe or Central and Eastern Europe. And I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the trade-offs that were navigated. So clearly in comparison to Versailles, Yalta brought greater stability in that you didn't have these indefensible states. The Germans called them Cessan-Staten, the seasonal states, the small indefensible states of Central and Eastern Europe after World War I. In their place, you had a monolith of Soviet military and political power. This may be the biggest criticism of the 45 settlement of Yalta. In fact, Yalta has become synonymous with a kind of, if not immoral than a moral approach to foreign policy where you're willing to trade off entire countries. How valid is that criticism? I mean, looking back, if you're in the shoes of Roosevelt or Truman or Churchill and you're looking at Stalin's position, probably, well certainly Churchill, but probably even Truman was under no illusions about Stalin keeping his promise for free elections. And yet, the presence of Soviet armored divisions limited our options. How valid is the moral criticism of Yalta? Well, I think the Churchill was aghast as he watched the United States cajoling Stalin and sort of a naive belief that somehow Stalin would still be a player as he was during the war of being part of this coalition of victorious states against Nazism. So I do think it was a huge concession on the American's part to accept this sphere of influence. So it was a diminution of what I think were American going in objectives of what should the post-war order look like. So personally, I think that criticism is the default towards the realism. We've got to accept the world as it is and still hope that we can change it over time. But I think the people who had higher expectations who really did see that the post-world order was supposed to be fundamentally different than the so-called peace to end all peace or the war to end all wars intended to be.  But I think others accepted that the Soviets had established that they had a lot of power and that they were, but I think from the perspective of promoting democracy, of promoting a sort of evolutionary concept of the human condition that was supposed to lend itself to greater freedom of individual expression, et cetera, it was a very painful compromise to make. That's a segue into a question that I want to present to Avile that's more about nationalism. One of the ironies of the post-World War II settlement or order is that these independent nations that we had helped to create, that America had helped to sort of midwife after World War I, which were mentioned in the previous panel. So an independent Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia in the post-World War II setting, clearly the West, if we took a strong moral stand on self-determination, it wouldn't have much bearing on the actual outcomes on the ground because Stalin had however many hundred armored divisions to control those outcomes. But the role of nationalism, and so if you're looking at the 20th century from the standpoint of an Austrian or a Hungarian, you would say, let me get this straight. America wades into European affairs after the First World War with all of these high principles. And we in a way insist on nationalism, national self-determination, the national principle, as an antidote to the problems of empire. In Austria's case, you could say the problems of federalism. Fast forward a generation and after World War II, we come back and we insist on federalism in Europe as a solution to some of the problems of nationalism. It helped me understand from, when you're looking at the post-World War II order, how do you see, where did national sovereignty fit in U.S. thinking about post-war order and what was the major difference from 1945 and 1919 in U.S. policy? Ethnic cleansing. I mean, at Potsdam, the U.S. Britain and the Soviet Union agreed to sort of legitimize the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans from regions such as parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia that was already underway, but they legitimized it, encouraged its completion as a way of resolving, once and for all, the disconnect between that Professor Lor alluded to in the previous panel between the idea of the nation-state and the reality of multi-ethnic polities. Of course, this can't be permanently resolved in any case and it didn't permanently resolve it for all European countries, but it did away with some of the notoriously problematic conflict-ridden issues surrounding territorial eruditism and the status of ethnic minorities in Europe. To cite Marc Mazauer again, to cite in the first panel, he makes the case that in a sense, the Allies were completing what the Germans had under, what the Nazis had undertaken during World War II with some notable differences without an extermination, as to mention to it at all, but and with the reversal of the outcome so that instead of Germans enslaving or exterminating other peoples, it was now the ethnic Germans who were being kicked out of Czechoslovakia and Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, but functionally, a completion of the process or an advancement of the process whereby nation-states in Central Europe and East Central Europe were made to at least appear more homogeneous than they had been before the Second World War. And of course, there were some major border changes, especially involving Poland, that sort of rounded off this process, so to speak, Poland and Germany, and these sort of ostensibly more stabilized and homogenized nation-states could then ideally work more cooperatively with one another in any kind of federative structure. But I don't see a contradiction between the U.S. encouragement of movements towards European common market and Wilsonian ideals. I mean, the Wilsonian ideal of self-determination had been linked to the League of Nations. After 45, it's linked to the United Nations and to the possibility of regional structures that might be connected to and legitimized by the United Nations. So I don't, I mean, I think the idea was, in a sense, a realization in some respects of the Wilsonian ideal of nation-states living cooperatively with one another in broader federative structures. The point about European federalism, I think, is really key and you see elements of continuity there and, of course, significant difference. After 1945, the approach to, or the idea of an integrating Europe was much more on the fourth front and obviously those ideas have been there for some while. Robert, you mentioned the Wilsonian strand and maybe nothing better represents this than the U.S. support for European integration in its various forms after World War II and European federalism, which interestingly, nowadays you very often don't hear either American or European leaders, maybe for very different reasons, refer to the American role in encouraging European integration. How crucial was of a role did the United States play after World War II in encouraging European nations and in particular France and Germany to collaborate and cooperate as alternate course from the more punitive approach that Ellen mentioned a moment ago? I think it was central, I mean, in that U.S. Korean strategy, so to speak, had this kind of two-track approach in the West integration to resolve, one of the, I mean, you've written about this era, the traditional problems of European security, France and Germany going to war multiple times through European coal and steel and then building out from that into the European Union. That, until recently, has been a central tenet of American foreign policy promoting that because it was viewed that that type of supranationalism of the European Union was a way of consolidating the strength of Europe's economies and through the supranationalism of the European Union finessed some of the nationalist problems that had led to tensions and even conflict in the past. To the East, there was NATO, which was essentially a geostrategic holding operation until the Soviet Union kind of mellowed or collapsed the prophecy of Ken and coming to fruition in 1989. And I think you use the term long piece, John Gaddis wrote a book about the Cold War era and made the case, taking into account the kind of the moral hazard and the moral cost of Yalta that it did consign Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere, but that reflected in a short of a Third World War to push the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, I mean born, one must acknowledge the brunt of the fighting against the Nazi war machine in the East going all the way to Stalingrad and then pushing back. It would have led to a conflict. We avoided a Third World War, and Gaddis I think persuasively argues in that book that the combination of a clear line of demarcation between East and West, clear commitments, buttressed by nuclear weapons, which made war between major powers prohibitively costly, led to this extended period of peace in Europe, and we're now at an inflection point with a different kind of dynamic, but with where Russia is and where this country is certainly. Let me follow up on that last point in a specific way, particularly given some of your work in writing on nonproliferation, the nuclear dimension. One crucial difference between 1919 and 1945 is the absence of deterrence in Europe after 1919, and I think this was mentioned on the previous panel. America left European affairs, whereas after the Second World War, we stayed, built permanent bases, but you could add to this the crucial element of atomic military power. So after 1919, France made an effort as the US leaves, Europe to build a kind of first NATO with its patronage of the Little Entente, but clearly this is not enough to deter Germany and Russia. After World War II, I think it's important to remember that Truman initially intended or wanted a kind of peace dividend to bring the troops home, but the fact that the US alone possessed atomic weapons was very significant in our calculations until the Soviets also got the bomb. So was the post-World War II order more stable or less stable as a result of the US and Russia both possessing nuclear weapons? You know, as General Jack Ripper and Dr. Strangelove says, you know, as they launch, you know, 5,000 megaton strike on Soviet, I wouldn't knock the whole program because of one slip-up. I mean, we had, I think we can kind of, you know, give a kind of a synthetic coherence to the Cold War, and particularly for students, you know, if you're teaching them, we don't even remember the Beatles, you know, think of, oh, yeah, it turned out okay because it turned out okay, but I remember ducking cover during the Cuban Missile Crisis and there was this kind of mutual assured destruction and a kind of stability that in the later detente era, you know, was evident, but there were also to use the technical social science term some really hairy moments during the Cold War when it could have gone disastrously kind of wrong. Initially, nuclear weapons were viewed almost as an extension of strategic bombing. I mean, you know, I was talking to my father of that, late father of that era, I asked him, did we know that in America that, you know, like in a raid on Hamburg, we killed 30,000 people in one night or this was going on in Tokyo? He said, we didn't know and we wouldn't have cared. It was viewed as just an extension of all-out war. And when you talk about, you know, oh, we didn't have a punitive peace after World War II, the war was punitive compared to World War I, when you devastated cities, et cetera. So it was a whole, there had been enormous kind of, if you will, payback from that. But the establishment of the kind of the stable nuclear deterrent relationship after the close call of Cuba created a kind of stability and allowed, created a structure that, you know, produced, I think, this long piece. I mean, you know, it's a counterfactual, but I think there would have been a third world war if there had not been nuclear weapons. Someone like Patton was saying, hey, we got the men here, we got the machines here. Let's go, Moscow, you know? And the United States, to its credit, did not do a preventive war option against the Soviet Union. And consider the Soviet Union at the time, ruled by Stalin. I mean, this is a guy who killed 20 million people to collectivize agriculture. You know, there could have been a persuasive case for preventive war against Stalin. It didn't happen. He died in 1953 and a kind of a newer era, a different kind of Soviet leadership took over. But I think you have to look to the importance of nuclear weapons and making the cost of war, you know, prohibitive. Ellen, I wanna come back to something that you mentioned a moment ago, which is the role of ideology after World War II, which is, of course, also very different from the post-Versailles period. And at the end of World War II, there was, in fact, considerable sympathy across much of the Western world for Joseph Stalin, for the Russian people, even for communism as an idea. And of course, the suffering of the Russian people during the Second World War, I think, was very much noted in America and in Britain. Of course, Britain is a shattered economy. Most of the economies of mainland Europe are even in a worse state. And communism was in vogue in, and even Stalinism was in vogue in some intellectual circles in the West. And I think you could go further than that and say, coming at the end of a period that had seen the Great Depression and two world wars, it was far from clear that liberal democracy and markets would win out in the long-term vis-a-vis communism. What is your view of the efforts that were made in the immediate aftermath of World War II by Allied Powers to create a kind of ideological bulwark in Western Europe? Why didn't communism gain more ground among the populaces and leaderships of Western Europe than it did? So you started out our panel by talking about, is that we keep coming back to the German question, and I'm wondering whether we really keep coming back to the Russian question in the post-World War. How do you manage, so the German story is sort of a success story of the integration of Germany, but there is this problem of whether it's big ideas or just the share mass of the size of the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation that have become the factor that we're always talking about and having to manage. But back to your specific question, so I really do think that one of the great success stories of the post-World Order was a kind of healthy competition of ideas. Clearly, the Truman administration and its successors were quite focused on trying to dilute the appeal of communism in Western democratic societies, whether we did it overtly or a little bit covertly at times, but we really had a major campaign, not just to strengthen the defense capabilities of our allies in Europe, but to win the war of ideas. So there was lots of propaganda, opening up a free media contestation of elections, very, very closely following the rise of the relative strength of communist parties in competitive elections in Western Europe. The Truman doctrine set the principle of we will respond to any further encroachment of communist ideology. It's how Greece got into NATO was because of the threat of communism dominating the political culture of that place. So this is a contestation of ideas. It's not just about sheer military force, but I think it was the Stalin era that embittered many Western intellectuals that communism was somehow a fairer system of distribution of economic benefits, et cetera, that once it was understood, and it took a while into the mid-50s for people to actually know what the era of Stalinism was like for people who lived under Soviet control, there was a kind of disillusionment that set in with of Western intellectuals that had flirted with communism as the solution to their problems. Meanwhile, Western Europe, of course, had did have the social welfare system. It picked up on some collective economic ideas that were kind of anti-capitalist in their instinct, and that remains a difference between American political culture and the politics of Western Europe. If I could just follow up, I mean, I would very much echo that, but the U.S. actually encouraged the development directly and indirectly of the welfare state and of a kind of technocratic federalism in Europe because martial aid was channeled in a way that incentivized the pooling of resources and the coordination of economic plans. And under Eisenhower, the U.S. had a very steep, progressive taxation system, as we know. So although the U.S. would never call itself a welfare state, the post New Deal and post World War II and post Taft-Heartley Act, notwithstanding, U.S. was much to the left of what had been before and has become since. And when the Iron Curtain fell, the myth was propagated that this was a triumph of the free market. I would argue that it was a triumph of the mixed economy. And the myth that it was the triumph of the purely free market, I think, has been one of the pitfalls of global and domestic policy in the West since 1989. So I wanna talk a little bit about the American role, something that each of you have mentioned, but after World War II, probably the biggest difference from the post-World War I moment is how America postures itself. The fact that through martial aid, money, so let's say financially, ideologically, but above all militarily, that we, unlike after World War I where we sort of cut bait and leave the League of Nations to its own devices, we build permanent military bases, encourage the development of NATO and the European Union. And I think we now take it as a foregone conclusion that all of that would have occurred. But of course, for many reasons that a couple of you have referred to, it was not a foregone conclusion that the United States would make these open-ended commitments. There's a great line from Atchison when he's sitting in front of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and he says, he's asked, what do the American people want? And in sort of an off-the-cuff response, he rattles off several things that the Americans want after World War II, all of which are arguably irreconcilable.  And those were the kind of domestic constraints that confronted the Truman administration. So you have Truman, he wants to bring the troops home. He has political reasons to need to bring the troops home after this five years of fighting in the Pacific and in Europe. We forget, but he wanted a balanced budget, which is a huge task then, even bigger now. But, and this is once the Marshall Plan has moved forward. So Marshall Plan was something like a tenth of the annual federal budget is going towards Europe. And in the middle of this, the Russians get the atomic bomb. My question has to do with given these political constraints that existed as much as in 45 in some ways as they did in 1919. How is it that America formed the will on a political level to, how did American leaders convince the American public? Many of whom had sons who were serving abroad, daughters who were serving abroad. What was the big difference in convincing the American people, how was this done? How could the American people be convinced to undertake what would essentially be open into commitments? And did we know that those commitments were going to be open-ended? True. So as Ben Steele and others who've written on the origins of the Marshall Plan have written, it was really quite a remarkable, successful public-private partnership, essentially, that the private sector was mobilized to be part of the campaign to sell the Marshall Plan to the American public. And there were these, you know, Wall Street lawyers who came to Washington who were part of the team that went out and talked to chambers of commerce and, you know, covered the country, building support for the Marshall Plan as not only an altruistic thing to do, but a very self-interested thing to do, that, you know, economic stability in Europe in the long run is good for U.S. prosperity. It builds markets. So it was a little bit a self-validating concept, but it was also, there was a generosity of spirit and an assumption that we came through the war so much less scarred than the countries of Western Europe had. So it was really a rather brilliant political campaign. Not just the politicians are not the only ones who deserve credit. It was also this integration of people from the private sector. And I do think that part of what the long-term legacy of the Marshall Plan is this, and not all European political parties would agree, is this changing the role between the private sector and the state. That that was one of the investments of the Marshall Plan was a little bit promoting an American system where you need a dynamic private sector that is regulated but not restrained to be able to create economic growth. And then I hope we'll get back to the question of integration. I think that's economic integration. I think is also an important principle of the Marshall Plan that we didn't embrace ourselves, but certainly worked in the Franco-German story. Robert or Avile, either of you have a thought on the American question? Scholars have noted that an international order requires a lead power, a dominant power to kind of maintain it, the global commons. Britain did it in the 19th century. The United States inherited that. There was discussion in the last panel of whether this was a departure that's sustainable or was it just a phase, a period of international relations. The two-track international system of integration in the West containing the Soviet Union in the East created unprecedented wealth and security for the societies in the West. And the architects of that system were Britain and the United States, which are now each going through kind of Brexit and America first here, kind of questioning that role and that structure, which is often called just sort of disruption but could become transformational. It depends how it plays out. But if one looks at the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the sole superpower. Charles Krauthammer said that we were a hyperpower and could kind of lay down rules of international order. I can bury in that after Victory Book, I think offers a persuasive question to this riddle of why didn't the whole world balance American power after the fall of the wall? I mean, we were the hyperpower, the sole superpower. If you're a realist and you believe in the balance of power, you'd think the whole world would be balancing against the United States. He persuasively argues that it did not happen because American power was embedded and channeled through international norms and institutions that made American power more legitimate, less threatening to other. It's an argument and there's an alternative view. But that spoke to an American role in maintaining what the political scientists call benign hegemon of maintaining the global commons. If the United States is no longer gonna play that role as part of America First and or to deal with whatever motivations and I think it's sort of the effect of globalization, identity, politics, and terrorism that are driving kind of the disruption here. If we're not gonna play that role, that's gonna have huge downstream consequences and it's why places like USIP and the Wilson Center exist to debate them, so it's gonna take them. I would just add to all that the point that again, it comes back among other things to the circumstances under which Germany was defeated and in 1945, American troops were on German soil and so they found themselves perforce in occupation of part of Germany in coordination and tension with other occupying powers and that was a situation that by its nature with the rising tension with the Soviet Union made it more difficult for the US to rapidly withdraw troops and then as tensions with the Soviets rise, the incentives to stay increased. But again, originally NATO was conceived of as a guarantee pact that would be enforced by the American nuclear monopoly and as it takes shape, of course, that monopoly is broken and then the Korean War breaks out. Another situation with the US finds itself in occupation of foreign territory. So we have several questions from the audience now and I'm gonna pick the first two and I'm gonna read them one for each of our speakers and then we'll move through a couple of the others. But let me start with a question maybe for Robert, given the comment that you've just made about the US and our international role. In March 1952, Stalin put forth a note proposing a reunified neutral Germany. Many historians seem to debate the nature and intent of this note. Do you have any thoughts on this proposal? And then let me ask a question for Avio, which is how much does America's selective recognition or condemnation of ethnic cleansing affect nation building after wars? The Cold War kind of emanated in concentric circles from Germany and there was this proposal from the Soviet Union for a unified Germany with conditions attached about neutrality. The Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Center has a lot of documentation on this question. I think that came in the last year or so of Stalin's life. It's an intriguing counterfactual of what would have happened if there'd been sort of an Austrian solution for Germany. I think the dynamic at that point, the political dynamic on both sides sort of mitigated against kind of that type of a settlement. And perhaps, I mean, it's one of the perennially missed opportunity questions about the Cold War, but a neutral Germany kind of unhinged from the West and the way the integrationist approach was developing could have had some unintended consequences, but it's a fascinating counterfactual. On ethnic cleansing, I mean, I think it's kind of, in a sense, it was sort of a one-off in 1945. The US never sort of institutionalized a prescription for ethnic cleansing as a solution to conflicts where territorial or minority issues were at stake and on the contrary, I mean, the tendency in more recent days or decades has been to discourage it for all kinds of obvious reasons. Obviously, even if aside from the enormous numbers of casualties involved, de facto and ethnic cleansing is not a clean process, it's a dirty, violent, brutal process under the best of circumstances. And so, even if it ends up resolving one issue, it creates a dangerous precedent in other conflicts and there are strong reasons not to incentivize it by rewarding it in any given case. And so, for instance, in the Bosnian conflict, the US pressed very much for a retention of some kind of Bosnian state entity that would remain unified even as Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim regions maintained autonomy and that's been an uneasy compromise because the Bosnian unity has only been maintained ever since then by an international presence and there's little reason to think that it would last the removal of that presence. So it's an issue that comes up time and again. It came up in Iraq when the question was should we resolve, try to resolve the civil war after our invasion by creating de facto Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab spheres or should we bend towards maintaining the territorial and political unity of Iraq? It comes up time and again in one conflict after another. Ultimately, I don't think there is any one formula that fits all conflicts and the US and other powers would be wise to take each conflict on its own terms rather than deriving sort of unilateral lessons from previous experiences. Ellen, at the end of your last question you mentioned European integration so I'm going to put this question to you from the audience. Many people believe that the grand bargain struck between the United States and Western European governments in the late 1940s and 1950s was, we'll give you aid and subsidize your defense and in return you will give free health care and education to keep the communist labor unions out. Is this outdated? Do we still need to subsidize European defense? So, well I think we're in the beginning of a real shift on that and perhaps President Trump deserves some of the credit for really pushing on this, everybody pay their fair share. So I think there now, so the flip side of that is that the Europeans are now doubting the American staying power and commitment so therefore there's a sort of resurgence in Europe grappling with the need to be more self-sufficient in security and defense matters and that is I think a very live debate. It is true that there has built up some resentment that the reason the European Union was able to enjoy peace and prosperity and create this very lovely lifestyle for Western Europe is that there was a division of labor if you will that we were accepting the responsibility of being the security provider. But again, we're back to what Bob Kagan said in the morning, maybe that period of the benign hegemon was an aberration to some extent and that we are now, the pendulum is swinging back to a more circumspect American role in which other countries that are equally prosperous can pick up more responsibility. So I would, it's possible that in hindsight people will say did we get, were we Stooges, did we overinvest, did we caudal the Europeans, did we go too far in creating such a lovely peaceful environment for them. But I think the prevailing argument would be 70 years of avoiding the Third World War. If you just do the math between Versailles and World War II was 20 years and we've now been riding a wave of 70 years of no reconstituting of that conflict. But I do wanna come back to the question of whether NATO enlargement to me would be another thing to put on the table right now of whether in the success of these, creating these robust institutions we sort of didn't know when to stop and whether that mid 90s sort of expansion of the success of NATO and of the Western order has now triggered yet again a kind of Russian anxiety and a Russian pushback that we're now living with in Crimea and elsewhere. So whether history is sort of, we're going through another cycle of creating some uncertainty but it was built from the belief that this US-led created institution is sort of the model. Everybody wants to join this club. Well, you know what, not necessarily everybody wants to join the club and it does have some costs. So I don't know whether others believe that NATO enlargement in hindsight might have begun to destabilize the environment in the Eurasian land mass but I think that's certainly one way to interpret what's happening. So I wanna come back to a couple of the things that you've said at the end of our discussion because I think they're fundamental but let me ask one question from the audience that I think each of you have touched on a little. Ellen, you've been talking about hindsight. This is more of a foresight question looking at the world from 1945 to what extent did the Western participants including the Truman administration and the deliberations in 1945 fear and prepare for a return to retrenchment by future US administrations that the US would retreat from world issues and maybe answer this bearing in mind the comment that was made on the previous panel that it is let's say geographically the temptation if not the norm for US foreign policy prior to this 70 year period that you've mentioned of forward engagement to not be as involved in Europe and Eurasia. To what extent do you think the architects of 45 anticipated an America that would want to withdraw some day? Did they see this as setting the cast for something indefinite or were they just focused on the problems of the moment? Anyone who wants to respond? I think the impetus for retrenchment has been the almost constant state of war we've been in Southeast Asia, Middle East, and it's fatigue and the costs without tangible outcomes that I think are a driver of what George McGovern called Come Home America and President Trump has talked about endless wars and sort of bringing American forces home. So I think that it came from both kind of the right and the left and you had kind of neo-conservatives sort of pushing a what some called Wilsonianism in boots of like democratizing at the point of a boy band at like in Iraq and you had humanitarian hawks as they've been called calling for interventions in distant places under a humanitarian rubric. I mean, there are cases that may be made specifically but the United States has been kind of engaged almost constantly in these kinds of military engagements on the periphery, which have, you know, in both blood and treasure been costly and I think have a feedback into as, you know, you have services, some service man said, God, I'm handing off a kind of a mission in Afghanistan to my son that I had, you know, after 2001, you know, and that is what brings the question home and it has opened the door to the literature that's out there on restraint, the book by Barry Pozen, others who've talked about offshore balancing. I think it's a way of bringing our capabilities and our commitments into some kind of balance now and I think a concern is that as the pendulum swings we may go too far and part of a manifestation of that concern is that under America first and sort of the whole, the kind of the renationalization of American foreign policy that some of the core institutions like the European Union and NATO are kind of under scrutiny and we're losing less sight that these are really kind of, they're made in American institutions that have really served us very well and that a departure from that really requires a robust national debate, which I don't think we've had. I think we're sort of, you see episodic kind of engagement on it. I would just make the point that in 1944, early 45, I think Roosevelt in the last months of his life was still assuming that the U.S. would withdraw troops from Europe after the war and he was looking for the kind of middle ground between isolationism and engagement, he had the four policemen notion under which the U.S. would have a kind of sphere of influence, it wouldn't be called that, it would be called something nicer, but in the Western hemisphere and the Pacific, a nationalist China would be the U.S.'s sidekick in East Asia containing Japan and then Britain and the Soviet Union would sort of figure things out among themselves in Europe, where after all Churchill was trying to negotiate percentages deal, percentages of influence in Eastern Europe, sort of quasi behind the U.S. back. So I mean, I think it's not until NSC68 in 1950, that sort of the outbreak of the Korean War and NSC68 that NATO becomes fully militarized and that the U.S. sort of political and strategic establishment fully sort of makes the paradigm shift into the idea that the U.S. as a global power needs to be somehow involved in security matters around the planet. And so that wasn't how things were exactly conceived of in 1945, at the other end of the chronological trajectory I would say that at the moment, it's not just a question of whether the U.S. will return to the role it played or didn't play prior to its entry into the First World War in 1917. The U.S. by virtue of its economic power and global military presence and so forth is a world power one way or the other. The question is whether it will be a power, whether it will use that power to continue to try and create cooperative institutions or whether it will become a rogue state that tears up the Paris Climate Accord that encourages dictators, of course we've always done business with dictators but that embraces the ideas of idea of dictators being welcome to come do business no problem as our president said the other day and that scoffs at the idea of human rights as a value to be given even rhetorical lip service be it domestically or abroad. So I'd like to just introduce the concept of the sort of erosion of respect for institutions that we see in societies around the world and so we know that we have it as a domestic issue of the Congress and formal institutions are held in low regard by the public it's partly because of the empowerment of individuals through information technology, globalization, et cetera it's a global phenomenon but if we take that to the institutions that we created after World War II there is some erosion of trust or of respect for these institutions they look like their very self referential bureaucracies whether it's the World Bank or the various institutions that are caught up in their own rule making and not necessarily judging their success by their impact on people's lives but I think we have to just also have a sober recognition that meanwhile rising Asia may be creating a new set of institutions that may mean something different to them so we have this what we've always called the international liberal order maybe was only the western liberal order and that we are seeing the emergence of new institutions in societies that are going through very different changes we don't want to generalize and say they're all living in non-democratic systems but certainly some of the big powers are very non-democratic so I do think we have to widen our lens a little bit here to bring into consideration is the Shanghai cooperation organization or the Asian infrastructure and investment bank I mean are these we don't know enough about these institutions because we're not physically witnessing their emergence but whether in fact there's the emergence of some new institutional orders that will only put even further pressure on this crisis of confidence in the western order and certainly the UN it's painful to be watching my Stimson Center is very involved in thinking about the UN at 75 and so much discussion of can you fix the UN which is perceived as in declining effectiveness I think you could still make the argument that some of the specialized agencies of the UN system do their jobs very well but that at the big macro level the organization doesn't look like it's and certainly when the Russians and the Chinese are trying to undermine the performance of the UN you really do have to question whether we don't even fully understand how the 21st century may play out in terms of these institutions. So maybe for our last comment from each of you I want to pick up on exactly that point I mean so we've talked about the world that was created after World War II and I think our audience has probably gotten a good sense of how serviceable this order has proven so it's durability, prevention of great power for an incredible period of time you can go further than say probably the longest stretch of peace and the most prosperity for the most people on earth of any time in recorded history and I think most people would agree with the proposition that I hear coming from each of you that that is all desirable and needs to be sustained. That may be me. Sustaining those institutions by an act of willpower is a little bit of what I hear you guys saying that by political commitment and political signaling that the West can say these institutions are still durable and yet Ellen you've referenced what I think is the key threat to the future of these institutions which is changing power relationships. The fact that China possesses the kind of economic and technological wherewithal. Russia is not a classic peer competitor but has clearly opted out of the Western led order. You could say that China has to a certain extent. So let me put the question this way how do we take these institutions that were very serviceable for the last 70 years but are clearly showing signs of strain? WTO, Chinese non-compliance would be putting it mildly over the last decade. Paris, you've got China building a coal-fired power plant every two weeks while we cast a gate internally in the West. This is a real issue. Russian non-compliance with virtually every major international treaty that it's party to certainly in the military field. So how do we take this institutional order can it be, do you attempt to reform that order preemptively? So you, the West leads a process of reforming these institutions and if so is there any reasonable prospect that China and Russia would want to be part of them? Do you continue to tweak at the margins and wait for it to fall apart? Does it take what we saw in the 20th century which is another great power confrontation? What's the future of this 70-year success story? I mean, I would just suggest generically that in order to sustain reform some of these institutions, new efforts need to be made to give broader sectors of the global populace a stake in them. Just as the Marshall Plan created strong incentives not just for technocrats, but for entire populations to support sort of the development of mixed economies, democratic societies and so forth in cooperation with one another. Mechanisms need to be found to convince skeptics both within Western countries and across the globe that they have something that the incentives to sustain these institutions are greater than the short-term temptation to throw them over and whether this means creating a new sort of pattern of redistributing funds on the EU model whereby some of the wealth was redistributed to the less well-off economies to give them a stake in the EU and that generated a backlash but the EU has also shown remarkable resiliency especially after the object lesson of Brexit or some other mechanisms but I think there's a broad sense of that people don't have a stake in the survival of these institutions and material mechanisms for changing that perception constitute a crucial factor. Robert or Alan? I think the starting point for sustaining these institutions is to not take them for granted and to look back on the 70 years and say, oh, it was inevitable, these outcomes, because it most certainly was not. I mean, the irony of renationalizing foreign policies in America, Europe, with Brexit, elsewhere comes at a time when Pre