How perceptive were British and American assessments of the Franco-German problem and the aims of French and German policymakers? Undoubtedly, Stresemann and Briand, who directed French foreign policy from April 1925, pursued different interests and agendas through the Rhine pact. Each had different ideas about what kind of security order and what wider consequences it was to engender. Apart from the British and the American, there were distinct French and German rationales for what became the Locarno system. Were these differences so fundamental that any pact could only conceal but not overcome them?

As will be shown, the status quo power France and the revisionist power Germany came to pursue different but not irreconcilable aims and strategies in the era of London and Locarno. There certainly was a tension between what Briand and Stresemann sought; but there was also a remarkable degree of common ground. A critical question became how far British diplomacy could propel a peace process that helped to maximise such common ground. And what part could US policy play under its self-imposed restraints? Re-appraising these questions requires, first, a further systematic comparison of French and German postwar policies, which centres on each power's approach to the Locarno pact.

Accommodation with the west and peaceful revision – Stresemann's Locarno policy

The unsettled security question and the need to counter what Berlin regarded as the danger of a reconstituted Anglo-French entente that again cemented the status quo and isolated Germany – these concerns lay behind the German Rhine pact initiative evolving, with D'Abernon's prodding, around the turn of 1924/5.