I just finished reading "A Shattered Peace", by David Andelman. It covers some of the same ground as "A Peace to end all Peace", but takes a wider scope. Andelman tries to look across the spectrum of problems that the Paris Peace Conference took on, and how they botched many of them.

To a large extent, I'd agree with Andelman's take - the diplomats there did botch the conference, and their attempt to divvy up the spoils of the war have saddled the world with many of the problems we see now. Without regard to your take on the middle east today, it's fairly easy to see that the map drawing and influence peddling of Lloyd George and George Clemanceau left us with a huge mess - and that Woodrow Wilson's incredible naivete about the world didn't help matters.

Andelman drives into the particulars though, and his analysis of many of them looks solid to me. The Balkans have only just recently recovered from the work of the Great Powers in 1919, and a ton of blood was shed in Asia (Vietnam, Korea, and China) over the course of the 20th century. Much of the bloodshed could have been avoided had the powers been more willing to let things go, but it just wasn't going to happen.

Where I disagree with Andelman is in his take on Russia. He thinks that outreach to the Bolsheviks in 1919 and 1920 could have made a difference; having read a fair bit about the raw paranoia and utopianism of Lenin and his crowd, I have my doubts. Reasoning with Lenin and Stalin then would have been as much of a fools errand as trying to reason with Robespierre in the 1790's - they were certain that they had the correct answers, and no outside thoughts were going to convince them otherwise. Here in the US, we were very fortunate to have Washington - a man who was willing to yield power. Neither France nor Russia were as lucky after their revolutions.

Beyond that though, I liked the book, and given the scope of the book, it's a minor quibble. I'd recommend it as a companion read to "A Peace to end all Peace".

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