Winston Churchill was once asked: What are the desirable qualifications for any young man who wishes to become a politician. He replied: “It is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.” To comment on the legacy and consequences of the Versailles treaty, one must be willing to take up Churchill's challenge. I will do my best to live up to this task.

The three chapters in this section cover the entire gamut of the Versailles treaty. First, William Keylor calls attention to the Paris Peace Conference as a unique episode in the annals of international diplomacy. Had it been successful, a conference and five associated treaties that attempted to redraw the map of over half the world's continents, change the nationalities of millions of people, redo economic relations, create a formula for the abolition of war, and even reframe the basic concepts of morality in international relations would have had immeasurable importance. Ironically, the fact that the conference was by and large a failure increased its influence in the years to come. It is to the failures that so much time and study have been devoted: as events in and of themselves, as cause and effect on the road to the next war, and finally as guideposts to our future, which eerily resembles the world the Versailles peacemakers saw.