World War I ended on an ominous note, with divided victors, unrepentant losers, and a shattered global economy. After unprecedented military and civilian casualties and huge physical destructiveness – followed by brutal armed conflicts in eastern Europe, the Near East, and Northern Asia – history’s first total war came to an official end almost a decade after the shots in Sarajevo. Throughout the war anguished combatants and neutrals had made proposals to prevent future explosions of violence, and they expected a more peaceful world to emerge. The length, ferocity, and inconclusive outcome of World War I guaranteed, however, that the quest for a permanent peace would be arduous.

Ultimately, it was also unsuccessful. There is now a scholarly consensus that its failure was due to the punitive peace treaties, the victors’ unwillingness or inability to enforce or revise these documents in the 1920s, and their craven surrender to aggressive states in the 1930s. Underlying this failure were the postwar national realities: Germany’s drive to regain world power, France’s futile efforts to maintain a costly victory, imperial Britain’s obsession with maintaining a power balance in Europe, the United States’ withdrawal from the obligations of treaty enforcement, the Soviet Union’s destabilizing influence, Fascist Italy’s adventurism, disunity in the new east-central and southern Europe, and the increasingly volatile non-western world. With a massive supply of diplomatic and political records, scholars have now examined the goals and methods of statesmen, private figures, and organizations that spoke in the name of peace but failed to forge a durable order.