The Myth Of The Indispensable Nation And The Quagmire Of Forever Wars, Part 2

Even John Maynard Keynes, who was a British Treasury official at Versailles, could see that the Carthaginian Peace Treaty confected there would only sow the seeds of economic breakdown in Germany and throughout much of warn-torn Europe.

In his famous tract, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes rightly foresaw the disaster ahead:

The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe,– nothing to make the defeated Central Powers into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new states of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.

 The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others,– Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something that would pass muster for a week, the President (Wilson) to do nothing that was not just and right. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the States whose destiny they were handling.

As it happened, Adolf Hitler himself later validated Keynes’ prophecy in spades. Writing in Mein Kampf ,  he made absolutely clear that the unjust treaty of Versailles was the key to mobilizing the German nation:

What a use could be made of the Treaty of Versailles. … How each one of the points of that treaty could be branded in the minds and hearts of the German people until sixty million men and women find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame; and a torrent of fire bursts forth as from a furnace, and a will of steel is forged from it, with the common cry: “We will have arms again!”

So Woodrow Wilson has a lot to answer for because he is the father of the Carthaginian Peace that broke the world at Versailles. But the matter is far greater than just Wilson’s Folly of leading the US into war in April 1917.