Why did the nascent transatlantic peace order of the post-World War I era disintegrate so rapidly under the shock-waves of the World Economic Crisis? Why were its mainstays basically eroded within less than four years after the landmark settlement of the first Hague conference, to be finally swept away by Hitler after 1933? Did the Great Depression reveal that the system founded at London and Locarno was built on flawed premises? Did it reveal that the ‘illusory’ cease-fire that these settlements had allegedly instituted was merely one stage in the twentieth century's ‘thirty years' war’? If so, then the stabilisation efforts of the 1920s had indeed prepared the ground for Hitler's ascent to power. Or was the unprecedented world crisis of the early 1930s the crucial caesura? Was the crisis simply too overwhelming to be mastered by policymakers on either side of the Atlantic? Did it not only wreck what had been forward-looking attempts at a ‘European restoration’? Did it also undermine America's bid for a Progressive reconstruction of the Old World?

The key question is, indeed, a different one. What should be analysed is what made the international system of the 1920s, as altered through the Hague settlements and the Young regime, so susceptible to collapse when the World Economic Crisis escalated. In essence, the disintegration of the ‘unfinished transatlantic peace order’ between 1930 and 1932 was by no means an inescapable outcome.