It has long been contended that the – Anglo-American – policies and financial forces that ‘defeated’ Poincaré's Ruhr policy in the autumn of 1923 effectively eroded Europe's best chances for stability: France's bid to found it on a contained and potentially even divided Germany. Can this be maintained? Or was the shift that led to the London conference rather a different turning-point? If there was a systemic sea-change in the 1920s during which the parameters of Versailles, France's defensive attempts to exceed them and the destabilisation they caused were altered, then it came in the autumn of 1923. It was also the turning-point at which previous British ‘neutrality’ and US aloofness in the face of the Franco-German imbroglio gave way to intervention and active pursuits of European stabilisation. This, strictly speaking, initiated the making of the nascent transatlantic peace order the 1920s.

By the end of 1923, it was becoming drastically obvious not only in London and Washington that there were not even rudiments of a functioning international system to master the new geo-political and structural challenges that the war had left in its wake. Above all, Anglo-American policymakers realised that while the resolution of the most pressing problems depended on Weimar Germany's co-operation and survival, no ground-rules had been found to engage it or even to preserve its integrity.