Canter Bridge

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Were there ever six months like these?

Present at the creation—and barely after the deluge—Britain’s David Loyd George, France’s George Clemenceau, and the emerging American empire’s idealistic Woodrow Wilson gathered to shape the world that was to be. Loyd George’s great-grandaughter, the Oxford historian Margaret Macmillan has given us a colorful description of those titans laying with nations in the drawing rooms of post-war Paris.

The book’s cover photo of the three victorious leaders is worth a chapter or two on its own.

What were these man thinking?, one might be tempted to ask. Fate has shoved in to their laps prerrogatives that few national leaders could covet, and each of them seized them with the utmost urgency. There were colonial rights to be asserted and defended. Wilson was upfront about the peoples’ right to self-determination, though Macmillan makes justifiable hay with how little he had considered the forces this would bring into play.

Mostly they squabbled, and refereed the squabbles of others. It was exhausting work, made up on the fly by men whose minds could not possibly comprehend the implications of decisions made on tired afternoons, then reversed—or almost—when a competing notion was presented next morning with persuasive zeal.

Psychologically, Macmillan’s analysis is riveting. Conceptually, she is harsh on Wilson’s Principles and—in grammar that has become familiar in transatlantic discourse—Wilson’s arrogant idealism. Indeed, he was a long way from Princeton University’s presidential office. She diminished the role assigned by conventional wisdom to the Versaille Treaty and its irritating and ultimately provocative influence on the rise of Hitler’s Reich.

The book offers all manner of occasional insights into modern conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East. Indeed, it is difficult not to find new light into the twin impulses of America’s isolationism and her imperialism. How many high school, college students, and news analysts have any sense for how difficult it has been to drag America into Europe’s wars and reconciliations? And how troubled the results have proven to be, dragging accomplished?