It may be a canard that armed forces always prepare for the previous war. It is, however, true that certain forces at the end of certain conflicts look back and congratulate themselves. The Prussian army in 1763, the Royal Navy in 1815, the (re-)United States in 1865 - all remembered flaws of conceptualization and execution, but each could congratulate itself on its overall performance. World War I, however, was an exception. The defeats had been catastrophic; the victories archetypes of “winning ugly”. The military establishments of the Western world looked back on the years since 1914 with a single emotion: Never Again - at least not in the same way!

International relations were equally dysfunctional. The much-maligned Versailles Treaty and its counterparts were less responsible for that condition than the general lack of restraint that emerged in Europe after 1914. Political climates in general had been significantly brutalized by four years of war. The Little Entente; France’'s network of Eastern European alliances; and Italy’s Balkan ambitions encouraged unstable successor states to threaten each other with armies they could not afford. Postwar economic relationships developed in zero-sum contexts well before the Great Depression. Great-power policy became the conduct of war by other means. The new Soviet Union regarded itself in a state of war with its capitalist counterparts. Germany and Russia were entirely excluded from the peace negotiations. The Allies blockaded Germany for a year after the armistice. Low- and midlevel armed conflict persisted into the mid-1920s: Germany, everywhere in Eastern Europe, Russia and Poland, Turkey and Greece. Even the League of Nations developed into a forum for expressing antagonisms. Woodrow Wilson’s principle of “open covenants openly arrived at” too often became “overt hostilities publicly expressed.”