I read this book to follow a reading group. It’s a fascinating time that I’ve mostly skimmed over–Diplomacy taught me that WWI was mostly “trench warfare”, which sounded horrific and boring.
The book begins before the US entry in WWI, discussing the leaders of the various Entente powers, their goals and motivations. Initially, Britain, France and Russia are struggling shoulder to shoulder, with Britain taking the lead on financing for the team. Russia’s implosion into civil war in 1917 made things even trickier…
The politics within the three nations (and Germany!) were opaque to me before now, but came alive and were fascinating. Britain’s relations with its colonies are tricky–particularly in India, where Muslim unity with the Hindu majority suddenly undercuts the story Britain’s been telling itself about why it’s needed. Ireland has to be bribed into supporting the war with home rule… it’s so much messier than unthinking “how the empire acts” history sits in my mind.
Wilson is more a hindrance than a help, and comes across as… too ivory towerish? He’s a man of theory, with goals that are perpendicular to the world he’s trying to interact with. His striving to establish peace without victory has some very unfortunate parallels to our intervention in modern day Syria–with a similar damning of the belligerents to longer misery. He swoops in to accept the German armistice, ignoring his allies in the war–and making Germany resent being treated like they lost the war when officially they hadn’t.
The 1920s had been flappers and war profits investigation to me; the international scene, particularly America’s insistence on repayment of the debt their allies had built up defending themselves before the US entered the war, had been much hazier. While I don’t 100% trust his take on China and Japan, there’s a lot more going on along that front than I’d put together. China was divided–differently in different years. The chapter about Chiang Kai-shek’s beginning as Soviet trained and his coup where he purged the communists out of his resistance movement was all new to me.
In fact, everything Russia seemed new. I’d never heard of Brest-Litovsk, had no idea how abject the collapse of the Russia front had been, what the internal politics of the new regime were and how they had to face democratic populists while they were struggling to get established. Similarly, Ukraine and the Baltics seemed quite happy to escape the Russian Bear… if not for long.
Long story short, it’s a good book and I learned a lot. Further, it’s written for interested amateurs–if you want a broad overview of the world almost exactly a century ago, it’s a great place to start.