I

It is easy to judge the Versailles Treaty a failure. Within a decade, many of its key provisions faced inescapable assault. States carrying the responsibility for formulating a treaty become the automatic defenders of its provisions; certainly the victims of either diplomatic or military defeat would not defend it. Historian Arthur Link, in his defense of Woodrow Wilson, argued that World War II was primarily the result of the Depression. But the Depression, whatever its magnitude, could not set the world on the road to war unless the conditions for conflict were already well established. Three of the world’s major powers – Germany, Japan, and the USSR – believed themselves sufficiently victimized by the Versailles Treaty to tear it to shreds at the first opportunity. Only the Soviet Union deviated from this perspective for a time in its drive for collective security in the 1930s.