- What were the main features of the Treaty of Versailles?

Did the treaty help create conditions

that destroyed the peace?

Surrender of German colonies, return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, Allied occupation of the Saar and
the Rhineland, Ban on union of Germany and Austria, Strict limit on German military, German
reparations and war guilt.

The contradictions of the treaty:

- No empire except for France, Italy, Britain

- Self-determination and equalityexcept for Germans
- Assured Security...except for France

- What were the key features of the League of Nations? Why did it fail to prevent aggression and
ultimately another world war?

The league of Nations consisted of a council and Assembly. Members protected other members.
Members have to consult, then act together against aggression. Unanimity required.

The League of Nations was a failure in the 1930s because of British and French self-interest. ... The
League of Nations failed in the 1930's because countries began to realize that the League didn't have
any power and the League's only way to stop them was to emplace trade sanctions on them.

- What caused the Great Depression? What role did the gold standard play in the Depression?

The Great Depression Begins: The Stock Market Crash of 1929. The American economy entered an
ordinary recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending dropped and unsold goods began
to pile up, slowing production.

After 1918, when the war ended, nations around the world made extensive efforts to reconstitute the
gold standard, believing that it would be a key element in the return to normal functioning of the
international economic system. Great Britain was among the first of the major countries to return to the
gold standard, in 1925, and by 1929 the great majority of the world's nations had done so.

Unlike the gold standard before World War I, however, the gold standard as reconstituted in the 1920s
proved to be both unstable and destabilizing.

- According to hegemonic stability theory, how could the Great Depression have been avoided or
shortened?

- Charles P. Kindleberger sparked the current debate with his book The World in Depression.
He argues that a hegemon can provide the collective good of global stability, and that the
absence of such hegemonic leadership worsened the Great Depression

He describes the problems of the 1930s, therefore, as stemming not only from Britain's
decline, which made it unable to provide direction, but from the unwillingness of the United
 States to accept new responsibility by maintaining open markets in a time of economic
downturn. There is no forgiveness for Allied debts and countries succumb to protectionism.

Key Terms

Treaty of Versailles: Germany had formally surrendered on November 11, 1918, and all nations had agreed to stop
fighting while the terms of peace were negotiated. On June 28, 1919, Germany and the Allied Nations (including
Britain, France, Italy and Russia) signed the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the war. The Germans were
ordered to sign the treaty drawn up by Allies. German reparations would come to over $30 billion dollars. They
were forced to assume full responsibility for causing the war.

Collective security: Collective security is one type of coalition building strategy in which a group of nations agree
not to attack each other and to defend each other against an attack from one of the others, if such an attack is made.

Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded on the principle of collective security. Neither
the League nor the United Nations were able to operate the principle successfully to prevent aggression because of
the conflicts of interest among states, especially among the major powers

League of Nations

Fourteen Points

Self-determination

Reparations

Locarno Pact

Gustav Streseman

Kellogg-Briand Pact

Hyperinflation

John Maynard Keynes

Smoot-Hawley Tariff

Lender of last resort

Great Depression

Countercyclical lending
 Would World War II have occurred without Adolf Hitler or Nazi ideology?

German attempts to undo Versailles began well before Hitler

Anti-Semitism existed since the 11th century, so German predisposed to be sympathetic to Hitler.

Resentment over Versailles, Democracy discredited and Depression Jews scapegoats.

How and why did the Allies appease Hitler in the 1930s? Were their decisions rational given the

information available to them at the time?

Appeasement, the policy of making concessions to the dictatorial powers in order to avoid conflict,
governed Anglo-French foreign policy during the 1930s. It became indelibly associated with Conservative
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain sign the Munich Pact, which seals the fate of Czechoslovakia, virtually handing it over to
Germany in the name of peace.

They believed that Hitler would eventually be satisfied by appeasing his demands. It was a strategy of
buying time to rearm because UK was too weak to stop Hitler. British Leaders were not hopeless fools, but
strategic calculators.

Why did Stalin agree to the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact?

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression
Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years.
With Europe on the brink of another major war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) viewed the pact as
a way to keep his nation on peaceful terms with Germany, while giving him time to build up the Soviet
military. German chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) used the pact to make sure Germany was able to
invade Poland unopposed. The pact also contained a secret agreement in which the Soviets and Germans
agreed how they would later divide up Eastern Europe. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact fell apart
in June 1941, when Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union.

Do you see the spiral model or the deterrence model as a better explanation for the outbreak of
war? Is your judgment different for the causes of the war in Europe versus the causes in the Far
East?

The Deterrence Model posits that conflicts arise from acts of appeasement made in the false expectation
that appeasement will elicit better behavior from the other side, when in fact it elicits worse behavior. The
other, believing that it coerced or frightened the appeaser to offer its concessions, assumes that more threats
will elicit more concessions. Hence it makes additional demands, backed by threats. It also may dismiss the
appeaser's threats after the appeaser changes course and adopts deterrence; as a result, it may move too far
and trigger war.

Prescription: Threat of punishment works better than appeasement. Sticks are safer than carrots. Peace is best preserved by
unyielding policies.
How was the conduct of World War II different from that of World War I? How was it similar?

Why did the German blitzkrieg fail in the Soviet Union when it worked so brilliantly in France?

- The area of the USSR west of the Ural Mountains was about eight times larger than France, which
already makes the concept of a highly mobile, yet also highly coordinated, offensive campaign rather
more difficult to pull off

- The Soviet Union also had relatively underdeveloped infrastructure. The roads were not, for the most
part, paved. Dirt roads are already tougher on vehicles than paved ones, and that's only when you
consider dry weather. The invasion of the Soviet Union, however, coincided in no small way with the
annual rainy season, the Rasputitsa. This turned the roads into rivers of mud, which rendered them
practically useless for speedy transport - practically everything would sink into the mud, including
vehicles and personnel.

- And after the rains left, the winter came. That meant the Germans had to transport even more supplies
to the front on dirt roads covered with snow. And in case you're thinking that they had vehicles
purpose-built for this sort of thing, they didn't. The primary supply vehicle for the German invasion of
the USSR was the horse-drawn cart.
- None of this was really an issue with the invasion of France. The Germans could rely on railroads for
much of the transportation of supplies there, and the French couldn't retreat all that much before they
lost too much to have anything left to save. Additionally, the Germans could, and did, use far fewer
troops in the invasion of France than they did in the invasion of the Soviet Union, which made the
coordination of those troops much easier.

- And then we get to the psychological factors.

- The French felt they could surrender without it being tantamount to annihilation. They weren't
obviously wrong in this regard: while the Nazi racial hierarchy did not count the French as part of the
Aryan master race, said hierarchy didn't consider them subhuman, either. Plus, most of the French
armies that did surrender were treated, mostly, in accordance with the rules that governed treatment of
prisoners of war.
- Also, there was a good segment of the French population and the French leadership that simply did not
feel that the French Third Republic was worth dying for, and considering that the Third Republic had
lurched from crisis to crisis throughout the course of its existence, this wasn't an unjustifiable view. Of
course, we know now that it didn't work out for France, but at the time, it could have seemed like a
reasonable option.

- The Soviets were not under any illusions about surrender being an option. Hitler had always been
extremely clear about finding Slavs to be subhuman and communism to be depraved. Hitler winning
meant annihilation of the Soviet Union as a government, but also of most of the people who lived
within its borders. The leadership knew it was either victory or death, and it made every sacrifice it felt
necessary to avoid the second outcome. This did include extreme callousness regarding the lives of
citizens of the Soviet Union and for their property, but it would have been even worse had the Soviet
Union not done this.

- The Soviets burned whatever they could not take with them as they retreated. This kept the Germans
from being at all able to live off the land.

Why was it so difficult to bomb military targets in Japan? Why was Japan such an inviting target

for incendiary bombing?

Is the era of bombing civilians over? Could such a thing ever happen again in contemporary wars?

Is there such a thing as a civilian in total wars like World War II?

 - Was the Cold War an inevitable by-product of the geopolitical situation and the balance of power
between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945? Or were non-structural factors, like ideology
and personality, the key drivers of hostility?

Stalin wanted to expand communism and establish sphere of influences but the U.S. wanted to stop
them. In China, the U.S. sent troops to stop the Soviet Union and the CCP to control Manchruia.

In Korea the U.S. stopped communist North Korean troops from taking control of the Korean
peninsula.

In the Middle East, the US prevented the Soviet Union from taking control of Trieste, which wouldve
gave them access to the Adriatic Sea.

The U.S. and Soviet Union

- Was the United States or the Soviet Union more responsible for the Cold War? Or were both equally
responsible?
- Why did the United States launch the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan?
- What was the ultimate goal of U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union containment or rollback?
- What does Ambassador Novikov get right in his telegram? What does he get wrong?