he who has the power often has the right,and he whois weak can only with difficulty keep from being wrong in the opinion of the majority of the world (查看原文)
By conceding that the Versailles settlement was inquitous, the victors eroded the psychological basis for defending it. The victors of the Napoleonic Wars had made a generous peace, but they had also organized the Quadruple Alliance in order to leave no ambiguity about their determination to defend it. The victors of World War I had made a punitive peace and, after having themselves created the maximum incentive for revisionism, cooperated in dismantling their own settlement. (查看原文)
No enforcement machinery existed for reparations, and no verification machinery for disarmament. Since France and Great Britain disagreed no both issues, Germany was disgruntled, and the United States and the Soviet Union were out of the picture, Versailles had in effect led to a kind of international guerrilla war rather than a world order. (查看原文)
The Unitend Nations did provide a conveniant meeting place for diplomats and a useful forum for the exchange of ideas. It also performed important technical functions. But it failed to fulfill the underlying premise of collective security- the prevention of war and collective resistance to aggression......In the Gulf War, collective security was invoked as a justification of American leadership, not as a substitute for it. (查看原文)
There is a classic document called Crowe Memorandum(1917.01) which leavs no reasonable doubt that Great Britain joined the Triple Entente in order to thwart what it feared was a German drive for world domination......Admitting to major differences between Great Britain and both France and Russia, Crowe nevertheless assessed these as being subjec to compromising because they reflected definable, and therefore limited, objectives . What made German foreign policy so menacing was the lack of any discernible rational behind its ceaseless global challenges...and the German drive for maritime power was "incompatible with the survival of the British Empire."..(Why German foreigh policy proved so unsettling to the rest of Europe,,is its aimlessness, the need for little prestige successes and solic... (查看原文)
In 1804, the mercurial Alexander I, Tsar of all the Russias, approached British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, Napoleon's most implacable enemy, with a proposition. Heavily influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Alexander I imagined himself as the moral conscience of Europe and was in the last phase of his temporary infatuation with liberal institutions. In that frame of mind, he proposed to Pitt a vague scheme for universal peace, calling for all nations to reform their constitutions with a view to ending feudalism and adopting constitutional rule. The reformed states would thereupon adjure force and submit their disputes with one another to arbitration. The Russian autocrat thus became the unlikely precursor of the Wilsonian idea that liberal institutions were the... (查看原文)
