Having read Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919", the treaties of Versailles and Sevres were even worse than painted in your review. I would be hard pressed to name one border set by those treaties that didn't later result in direct warfare, let alone contribute to further instability. EVERYONE was there-including both Rupert Murdoch's father and Ho Chi Minh, and though the latter was a busboy, he still hoped to gain the ear of someone influential in regard to the future of French-Indochina. A fascinating and often neglected "blip" was the drawing of the border between Poland and the newly created Czechoslovakia. A dispute by those countries over the area that was the former Duchy of Teschen actually led to a seven-day war in 1919, and lasting enmity which led the Polish ambassador to France to actually side with Germany when it annexed the Sudentenland. So despite William Shirer's protestations in his famous, "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" that the Nazis should have been stopped in the far more defensible mountains of Czechoslovakia, there would have been no way to supply that country because Poland, like the other countries surrounding Czechoslovakia was unfriendly.
One of the great unsung blunderers of history is Gerald Fitzmaurice-almost singly responsible for driving the Turks into the willing arms of the Central Powers. Though he served as a model for one of the heroes of John Buchan's ripping "Richard Hanney" novels, it was his embrace of the "Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy" that caused him to refuse to have anything to do with the then ascendant Young Turks.
Excellent review. This aspect of the sources of today's problems is under-explored.
Having read Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919", the treaties of Versailles and Sevres were even worse than painted in your review. I would be hard pressed to name one border set by those treaties that didn't later result in direct warfare, let alone contribute to further instability. EVERYONE was there-including both Rupert Murdoch's father and Ho Chi Minh, and though the latter was a busboy, he still hoped to gain the ear of someone influential in regard to the future of French-Indochina. A fascinating and often neglected "blip" was the drawing of the border between Poland and the newly created Czechoslovakia. A dispute by those countries over the area that was the former Duchy of Teschen actually led to a seven-day war in 1919, and lasting enmity which led the Polish ambassador to France to actually side with Germany when it annexed the Sudentenland. So despite William Shirer's protestations in his famous, "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" that the Nazis should have been stopped in the far more defensible mountains of Czechoslovakia, there would have been no way to supply that country because Poland, like the other countries surrounding Czechoslovakia was unfriendly.
One of the great unsung blunderers of history is Gerald Fitzmaurice-almost singly responsible for driving the Turks into the willing arms of the Central Powers. Though he served as a model for one of the heroes of John Buchan's ripping "Richard Hanney" novels, it was his embrace of the "Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy" that caused him to refuse to have anything to do with the then ascendant Young Turks.
https://www.cornucopia.net/store/books/gerald-fitzmaurice-1865-1939-chief-dragoman-of-the-british-embassy-in-turke/
I loved that book. https://crawdaddy.substack.com/p/first-political-step-into-modern
T.E. Lawrence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 voiced his support for giving 'The Jews' Palestine.
Margaret Macmillan in Paris 1919 mentions this. Could have been David Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace.