Chapter 11 reappraises the peace conceptions and reordering strategies of Lloyd George and the other architects of the British agenda for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that what they envisaged centred, not on containing Germany and re-establishing a workable balance of power but rather on the novel aim to create, in cooperation with the United States, a new Atlantic concert that was to stabilise a modern international equilibrium within a recast global order. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of what became an ambitious British peace programme, which included the most elaborate and influential blueprints for a League of Nations as framework for a novel, and integrative, international concert. And it highlights that British approaches to peacemaking, which were also designed to bolster the British Empire and expand British imperial influence in the Middle East, evolved and changed significantly between the armistice and Versailles as well. Finally, it analyses the extent to which Lloyd George and other key actors like Robert Cecil and Jan Christiaan Smuts had embarked on constructive learning processes – and the extent to which their evolving concepts and strategies were conducive to the creation of a durable and legitimate Atlantic and global order.

Chapter 17 explores how far the new Atlantic order that began to take shape in 1919 could be extended to the most unsettled region after the war: the post-imperial terrain of central and eastern Europe. It reassesses how the victors sought to balance in different ways newly prominent claims of national self-determination and fundamental strategic considerations in their efforts to create a stable system of states in this region – and of how they interacted with the representatives of the numerous east European national causes. While also analysing the Czechoslovakian settlement it then focuses on the victors’ attempts to “solve” the most critical problems in this context, the Polish and the Polish-German questions. And it underscores how extremely difficult it proved to establish a viable Polish nation-state that was not from the outset divided from its more powerful German neighbour by conflicts over contested borders and minority problems. More broadly, it shows how challenging it was to establish effective mechanisms to protect the rights of German, Jewish and other minorities in the new and very heterogeneous east European states. And it elucidates that the western powers’s capacity to forge a durable new order reached distinctive limits in the east.

Chapter 18 analyses how the principal western policy- and decision-makers of 1919 sought to deal with the Bolshevik challenge or, more precisely, the political challenge posed by Lenin’s regime and the political and ideological challenge posed by what they regarded as the threat of a transnational spread of Bolshevism across and beyond Europe. It also reassesses the overall significance of the Bolshevik threat for the making of the nascent Atlantic order after the First World War, underscoring that it affected the peacemaking process but was not as decisive as generations of cold war historians have claimed and highlighting that this process was by no means shaped by a struggle between Wilsonianism and Leninism. It then examines how Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks interpreted the western powers’ pursuits and sought to expand the communist revolution westwards, also through the Communist International. And, finally, it illuminates how difficult it proved for Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and their advisers to agree on a common approach both towards the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik regime – and how they eventually concentrated on isolating it and preventing a German-Bolshevik alliance, ensuring that subsequently the Soviet Union would remain outside the nascent Atlantic system.

Chapter 10 reappraises the evolving plans and visions for a League of Nations and a new, progressive international order that were advanced by Woodrow Wilson and those who came to advise the American president and contribute to the American peace agenda that was presented at the Paris Peace Conference. It reinterprets Wilson’s core aspiration as, essentially, the pursuit of a new Atlantic order – rather than a “new world order”. And it not only analyses the underlying assumptions and maxims of the peace programme that he and his core advisers elaborated after the end of the Great War – and the crucial changes they made to this programme and their approaches to peacemaking during the critical phase between the armistice and the peace negotiations at Versailles. It also evaluates how far Wilson and his advisers had drawn deeper lessons from the war – and how far the president’s reorientated ideas and strategies for a “peace to end all wars” actually met essential requirements that had to be fulfilled to create a durable and legitimate postwar order in and beyond the newly vital transatlantic sphere.

Chapter 20 sheds new light on what arguably was the crucial problem of the peacemaking process of 1919 – the fact that ultimately the peace settlement and the terms and rules of the new order were not negotiated between the victors and the vanquished but imposed by the western powers, above all on the fledgling Weimar Republic. It shows that what led to this outcome were not only the unprecedented transatlantic complexities Wilson and the principal British and French “peacemakers” faced when trying to hammer out the fundamental parameters of the peace and postwar order, and to reconcile their often all but irreconcilable interests, aims and ideological priorities. As it underscores, the imposed peace of 1919 was also the outgrowth of underlying hierarchical assumptions the victors shared about their “right” to dictate terms to the defeated German power and to place it on probation. Also analysing the strategies that leading German policymakers like Brockdorff-Rantzau and Matthias Erzberger pursued to open the door to a negotiated peace it finally reappraises the eventual political-cum-ideological battle between the victors and the vanquished that escalated in 1919 and analysis the destructive consequences of the peace settlement’s ultimate imposition.

Chapter 9 provides the most comprehensive appraisal yet not just of the unparalleled range of pressing problems but also of the underlying structural and systemic challenges that the principal peacemakers confronted in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular, it throws into relief that by the end of 1918 not only eastern Europe had to be fundamentally reorganised after the collapse of the eastern empires and, crucially, the cardinal German question had to be settled in a new way but also, and above all, the need had arisen to create, for the first time, a functioning Atlantic order that included both the old and new European states and the newly pivotal American power. At the same time, it argues that the war had radically changed the international, national and transnational conditions in which a peace settlement had to be negotiated and cardinal decisions about the shape of the postwar order had to be made. And it shows that the unprecedented catastrophe had given rise to unprecedentedly far-reaching – and conflicting – expectations on all sides of a “peace to end all wars” that was to be forged and compensate the different societies and populations for the unprecedented sacrifices they had made.

Chapter 13 reappraises the difficult attempts made by those who sought to break with Wilhelminian power politics and develop both a western-orientated peace agenda and a new, progressive foreign policy on behalf of the defeated German state and, eventually, the fledgling Weimar Republic. It argues that while the core aim of the new protagonists, the social democratic leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann and the new republic’s first foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, was to negotiate a lenient Wilsonian “peace of justice” they also came to develop forward-looking Atlanticist policies designed to integrate a republican Germany into a reconfigured Atlantic order – and the League of Nations. It elucidates the prevalent maxims and assumptions of the new German peace agenda that was elaborated after the armistice. And it examines how far the new German key actors had drawn more far-reaching lessons from the war and Germany’s catastrophic yet only partially acknowledged defeat – and how far the new priorities and conceptions they advanced went beyond tactical considerations and could actually contribute to the creation of a peace-enforcing Atlantic order after the Great War.

Chapter 16 focuses on a comprehensive analysis of how the principal negotiators of the victorious powers sought to come to terms with the two most vital and indeed intricately interconnected questions of the entire peacemaking process: the challenge of establishing a new security architecture to stabilise the Atlantic world and make it “safe for democracy”; and the challenge of agreeing on the fundamental terms of the German settlement and how to deal with the pivotal problem of what shape and what status was to have in the postwar order. It reappraises how the protagonists came to forge a hybrid system of collective security that combined the novel guarantees of the League of Nations, temporary territorial guarantees, far-reaching disarmament of the defeated power and, crucially, specific security agreements under which Britain and the United States pledged to come to France’s aid in the case of unprovoked German aggression. And it offers a new interpretation both of the challenges of fortifying these elements into a new international concert system that could effectively secure the fledgling Atlantic peace and of the challenges of negotiating terms of a German settlement that could gain legitimacy not only among the victors but also on the part of the vanquished.

Chapter 12 reassesses the peace conceptions and reordering and security policies of Clemenceau and the other authors of the French programme for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that while their key aim undoubtedly was to secure France against what they saw as the critical threat of renewed German aggression they came to pursue new, essentially transatlantic strategies to this end, which came to concentrate on efforts to establish, in cooperation with Britain and the United States, a new Atlantic alliance and security community. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of the ambitious French agenda, showing that it too was significantly reorientated between the armistice and Versailles. Finally, it explores how far Clemenceau, his main adviser André Tardieu and other French policymakers had drawn constructive lessons and consequences from the catastrophe of the war – and how far their aims and strategies, which focused on containing and initially isolating postwar Germany, indeed opened up realistic perspectives of securing peace and creating a durable Atlantic and global order.