A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  In the end the British leaders felt a sense of having been betrayed by the Americans, while the Americans felt that the British had cynically betrayed the ideals for which the world war supposedly had been fought. As a result of Lloyd George’s lack of scruple and Woodrow Wilson’s lack of skill, the negotiation of a Middle Eastern settlement began badly and ended worse.

  II

  So determined was Woodrow Wilson to play a personal role in formulating the provisions of the peace treaties that he came to Europe to negotiate them himself—the first American president to leave the western hemisphere during his term of office. His unprecedented move made the Allies uneasy; as Clemenceau observed, he and his fellow prime ministers, as heads of government, would be outranked by the President who also served as head of state. By right of precedence, the President therefore would be entitled to chair the Peace Conference.

  Suggestions were made in the press and elsewhere that Wilson should stay home to devote himself full time to winning support in the Senate and in the country for his peace terms, leaving his adviser, Edward House, to represent him in Europe. The President rejected such suggestions and, perhaps because of them, began to question the good faith of Colonel House. Crossing the ocean on the liner George Washington in December 1918, Wilson and his many American advisers arrived at Brest on Friday the 13th.

  Everywhere he went, Wilson met with a tumultuous welcome. John Maynard Keynes wrote that “When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history.”1 Nothing, however, could have provided a better description of what was going to happen at the Peace Conference than Wilson’s speeches about what was not going to happen. Peoples and provinces were indeed “bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game.” It was not the case that every settlement was “made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned” on the contrary such settlements were made (though Wilson said they would not be) in order to provide an “adjustment or compromise of claims among rival states” seeking “exterior influence or mastery.”* Not even his own country was prepared to follow the path that he had marked out.

  In November 1918, at roughly the time the Armistice agreements were signed, the President’s party had lost control of the United States Senate in the midterm elections. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee therefore passed into the hands of the President’s adversaries. Even before the Peace Conference began, the President accordingly was on notice that he would face problems in securing ratification of whatever terms he might negotiate. Nothing in the President’s unbending nature disposed him to make the concessions or to engage in the political deal-making that would have mitigated these political problems at home.

  Abroad it became clear almost immediately that he had not thought through how he was going to carry into effect the generous and idealistic principles that he had articulated. He arrived in Europe with many general opinions but without specific proposals for dealing with the matters that were to be decided. In his memorable portrait of Wilson, Keynes pointed to what followed: “As the President had thought nothing out, the Council was generally working on the basis of a French or British draft.”2 Lacking both detailed knowledge and negotiating skills, Wilson was reduced to an obstructive role, often refusing to be carried along by his colleagues, but unable to carry them along with him.

  House advised compromise—with the Allies abroad, and with the Senate at home. Wilson spurned the advice, and turned against the intimate friend who offered it. The President broke with House; from mid-1919 on he refused to see him again.

  III

  Lloyd George’s Middle Eastern strategy was to direct the Americans’ anti-imperialist ire against the claims presented by Italy and France, distracting the President from areas in which he might make difficulties for Britain. Maurice Hankey, British Secretary to the Peace Conference, recorded in his diary even before the conference convened that Lloyd George “means to try and get President Wilson into German East Africa in order to ride him off Palestine.”3 In fact much of the time no special effort was needed: European issues inevitably were given a high, and other issues a relatively low, priority. The question of Russia and the fear that Bolshevik revolutions would break out throughout Europe haunted the Peace Conference. The other great question was the future of Germany. The future of the Ottoman Empire ranked as a lesser issue and Wilson was too preoccupied to pay full attention to the Middle East. When Wilson did turn to these matters, Lloyd George adroitly excluded from the conference agenda questions about the British-occupied areas of the Middle East, placing them beyond the scope of the President’s scrutiny. At the same time, the Prime Minister diverted the President’s anti-imperialist energies into critical scrutiny of the ambitions of Britain’s rivals in the Middle East—her wartime Allies.

  IV

  Italy had agreed to come into the war on the Allied side in return for British and French promises of territorial gain that eventually included a share in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The promise of Turkish territory was embodied and defined in a treaty signed by Italy, Britain, and France, known as the Agreement of St Jean de Maurienne, concluded in the middle of 1917. By its terms, the agreement was subject to the assent of the Russians. Since the Russian government had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, the agreement had never come into effect. The Italians claimed the territories nonetheless, asking for equal treatment. As one Italian senator put it, “If the others have nothing, we will demand nothing.”4

  Italy had been promised a portion of Anatolia—Asia Minor, as it was sometimes called—if she came into the war, but there were no Italian communities there for her to protect, and no other communities whose interests she purported to sponsor. Indeed, in terms of Woodrow Wilson’s self-determination principles, there was no reason for Italy to occupy any part of Asia Minor at all. Prime Minister Emanuele Orlando seemed to recognize the difficulties of his case, but Italian public opinion was caught up in a gust of nationalist frenzy, as were Parliament and the Cabinet, as represented by Foreign Minister Baron Sidney Sonnino.5 Orlando and Sonnino had reason to fear that a failure to persuade the Allies to honor wartime promises to Italy would undermine their political position at home, and felt driven to take action.

  Starting in the middle of March 1919, Italian troops began a program of landing in southern Anatolia at Adalia (the present-day Antalya), supposedly to restore order, and then re-embarking. Eventually they stopped re-embarking, and after two months they had troops on a more or less permanent basis at Adalia and also, further up the coast, at Marmaris.6 The Allies feared that, having landed, the Italians were about to march inland to occupy the entire section of Anatolia to which they claimed they were entitled.

  Lloyd George pushed the United States into the lead on this question. Woodrow Wilson appealed to Italian public opinion to exert a moderating influence on Orlando’s territorial demands in Europe and the Middle East; whereupon, on 24 April 1919, the Italian delegation left the Peace Conference to return home to seek domestic support. In the absence of the Italians, the United States, France, and Britain turned against them. Italy, though yesterday’s ally, suddenly loomed as an imperialist aggressor posing threats to the peace; and as the Allies banded together against her, Clemenceau remarked: “What a beginning for the League of Nations!”7

  On 2 May 1919, outraged by reports of Italian ships being sent to Smyrna, President Wilson offered to send in the American navy, and spoke of the possibility of the United States going to war against Italy in order to defeat aggression.8 By 5 May, as Wilson and others told tales of atrocities they claimed were being committed by the Italians, the Allies were at fever pitch, and determined to reach a decision before the Italian delegation returned on 7 May. Following a suggestion by Lloyd George, they agreed to ask Greece, which was near at hand, to land troops at Smyrna, supposedly to keep order, but in fact to pre-empt the Italians. The Greeks landed their troops on
15 May.

  Though intended by the Allies as a temporary measure directed solely against the Italians, the Greek landing assumed a different—and more permanent—character from the start. Maurice Hankey, head of the British secretariat at the Peace Conference, believed that the Smyrna enclave, where Greek troops had landed, ought to be detached from Turkey and incorporated into Greece.9 In this view he was not alone; Lloyd George and Wilson were enchanted by Eleutherios Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, and were won over to his vision of Greece’s historic mission.

  Venizelos had established an astonishing hold over the imaginations of his fellow Allied leaders; but even had he not done so, his case was strong where Italy’s was weak. His position was intrinsically appealing both to Wilson’s sense of America’s principles and to Lloyd George’s sense of Britain’s interests. Venizelos’s claims to Anatolia, unlike Italy’s, were based on population as well as history. Smyrna, the coastal metropolis, was a Greek city, and had been a center of Greek civilization since remotest antiquity. According to the then-current (1911) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of its population of 250,000, “fully a half is Greek.” The Britannica added that “Modern Smyrna is in all but government a Christian town…” The notion of transferring its government from Moslem Turkey to Christian Greece appealed strongly to Lloyd George’s Christian and Hellenist values. It appealed, too, to President Wilson’s principles of self-determination.

  Like Italy, Greece had been late in entering the war on the Allied side but, unlike Italy, Greece had been regarded by the British as a client and protégé since the early days of the Great Game. The British navy, at the battle of Navarino in 1827, had won the war for Greek independence, and the two countries had traditions of friendship for one another. Lloyd George saw Venizelos’s Greece as Britain’s natural ally.*

  Italy and Greece had advanced conflicting claims: they eyed essentially the same areas of the expiring Ottoman Empire. In sending in Greek troops, Wilson and the Allied leaders intended to keep the Italians from seizing these areas before a decision could be reached as to who should have them. But the effect of doing so was to deny the Italian claim and to favor that of Greece. On the British side there were those who were dismayed by this outcome, but it fitted with Lloyd George’s view of Britain’s interests and principles.

  Accomplishing many purposes at once, Lloyd George was able to divert Woodrow Wilson’s attention from Britain’s designs to those of Italy, by letting the American President take the lead in imposing what was really Britain’s policy in Smyrna. At the showdown with the Italian leaders, Wilson castigated them for their “imperialist ambitions.”10 Taking a friendlier line, Lloyd George instead appealed to their nobility, in a speech of such eloquence that it moved Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, to tears. Orlando went to the window and sobbed emotionally. Across the street, an observer who caught sight of him asked, “What have they been doing to the poor old gentleman?”11

  What they were doing to him was presently made clear. On 19 June 1919, weakened by his failure to achieve Italy’s territorial ambitions at the Peace Conference, Orlando was obliged to resign as Italy’s Prime Minister.

  V

  Lloyd George’s second diversionary project for Wilson was to turn him against the French claim to Syria.

  The American President was allowed to participate in the Ottoman negotiations even though the United States had never joined in the war against Turkey. Although Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were not applicable to the Ottoman settlement (unlike Germany, Turkey had not been allowed to surrender on the basis that any of the points would be applied), they were an expression of the political philosophy with which he approached public issues. Lloyd George recognized this; and when President Wilson turned to the Arabic-speaking Ottoman provinces, the British Prime Minister shrewdly diverted his attention from Britain’s designs to those of France by directing his attention to the French threat to Syrian independence—a threat that ran counter to Wilson’s points and principles.

  The British delegation did not go so far as to pretend to the President or to the other delegates that Feisal had liberated Damascus. General Allenby accurately informed the conferees that “Shortly after the capture of Damascus, Feisal had been allowed to occupy and administer the city.”12 The British did pretend, however, that Feisal and his followers had played a substantial role in the liberation of Syria. The British contended that Feisal had therefore earned the right to serve as the ruler of a free Syria: and specifically that he should be free to reject French advice and advisers if he chose to do so. As presented by Lloyd George, this was the issue of the dispute. According to the Prime Minister the parties to the dispute were Feisal’s Syria and Clemenceau’s France. Britain, he claimed, was a friend to both parties and therefore would not take sides.

  Wilson was naturally disposed to support the Syrians’ right to choose their own government and destiny. He also could not help but be favorably influenced by Feisal’s willingness to cooperate in achieving a settlement. Feisal met with Felix Frankfurter, a representative of the American Zionist leader, Louis Brandeis; and, after the meeting, Frankfurter reported to Brandeis that “The Arab question has ceased to exist as a difficulty to the realisation of our programme before the Peace Conference.”13 Indeed, as Arab representative at the Peace Conference, Feisal told the conferees that he excluded Palestine from the area he claimed for Arab independence. Feisal’s apparent reasonableness in dealing with Jewish claims contrasted sharply with Clemenceau’s hard line in dealing with Arab claims to independence—claims that Clemenceau took to be a British-inspired sham.

  The British said that they were ready to allow the French whatever influence over Feisal that they were able to exert. That, in the French view, was thoroughly dishonest, for Feisal, as everybody knew, refused to accept French direction or influence. It was evident that he was beholden to the British. He was on their payroll; his delegation’s expenses were paid by Britain. At the Peace Conference he went everywhere with his British liaison officer, T. E. Lawrence, who was his friend, adviser, confidant, translator, and inseparable companion.

  Recognizing that to accept Feisal as Syria’s spokesman was in effect to concede Syria to Britain, the French produced Syrian leaders of their own. The most prominent of them had lived in France for many years, some of them under Quai d’Orsay sponsorship. They claimed that, despite similarities in language and religion, Syrians were not Arabs, and deserved a country of their own under French guidance.

  Lloyd George counterattacked by linking British cooperation with France against Germany in Europe to resolution of the Syrian question. The German issue was of overriding importance to Clemenceau, as he had demonstrated at the end of 1918 when he conceded Palestine and Mosul to Lloyd George in order to cement the Anglo-French alliance.

  Clemenceau had already gone almost to the limit of what was politically possible for him. When he accepted Feisal as leader of Syria, subject to Feisal’s meeting French terms, he went the whole way. In asking him to accept not merely Feisal but also full Arab independence, the British were asking him to go further and ruin himself politically; yet he needed Britain’s help against Germany and, in coupling the issues, Lloyd George placed him in an agonizing position. During the course of their conferences the French Prime Minister often erupted into frustrated rage. Once he was driven to such anger that he offered Lloyd George the choice of sword or pistols.14

  It was not as though he had not made his position plain. He had told one of Lloyd George’s advisers that French political opinion would not permit the abandonment of claims to Syria: “he personally was not particularly concerned with the Near East,” but France “always had played a great part there, and…French public opinion expected a settlement which was consonant with France’s position. He could not…make any settlement which did not comply with this condition.”15 This was no exaggeration, as was demonstrated when officials of the French Foreign Ministry organized a press campaign against their
own Prime Minister in Le Temps and Le Journal des Débats, alleging that he was giving away too much to the British.16 But Lloyd George went on pushing for more concessions, and went on breaking what Clemenceau had regarded as firm British commitments to France. “I won’t give way on anything any more,” Clemenceau said, “Lloyd George is a cheat.”17

  It remains unclear why Lloyd George was so determined to exclude France from the Middle East. With respect to French claims to Syria, and to Cilicia, the adjacent area just to the north, Lloyd George’s stated position was that British troops would have to remain in occupation in order to keep the peace between the French and Feisal’s Arabs;18 but it was a somewhat one-sided peace that Britain imposed. A small French force continued to occupy a narrow coastal area centered on Beirut. From Feisal’s area, Arab units continued to mount hit-and-run guerrilla raids against the French. The presence of Allenby’s British troops protected Feisal’s area from French retaliation.

  General Allenby warned that war might break out between the Arabs and the French. President Wilson appeared to take the warning seriously, and reacted by making a proposal that took Lloyd George and Clemenceau by surprise: a commission should be sent out to the Middle East to ascertain the wishes of its inhabitants. The proposal was viewed as childish by French and British career officials, who did not believe that public opinion, in the European or American sense, existed in the Middle East. For Lloyd George the proposal was dismaying because sending out a commission would take time. Nonetheless, the British Prime Minister tried to make the best of it by attempting to get the commission to focus exclusively on the claims of France—and the resistance to those claims by the Arabs whom France sought to rule.