Peters Library speaker connects today’s problems to WWI
Exactly 101 years after the the first meeting of the Paris Peace Conference among leaders of the Allied nations, Michael Neiberg hosted a World War I presentation at the Peters Township Library.
Neiberg, a Pittsburgh native, historian, professor and author, discussed during the Jan. 18 meeting the biggest problems with the end of the war and its peace agreements thereafter, and how they led to the problems of today.
“What really intrigues me about this time period is just the way that everything we’re dealing with today had origins to that period,” he said after his lecture, “America in War and Peace.” “They are some really difficult problems, and big problems like that aren’t solved, they’re managed.”
Neiberg, the inaugural Chair of War Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College, started his presentation by explaining how the ramifications of World War I are still alive today. He noted how U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said a day earlier that the U.S. will continue to have a presence in Syria, with the hope that president Bashar al-Assad is removed from office.
“I didn’t know when I was putting this lecture together that the secretary of state would be talking about Syria in the way he’s talking about Syria, but I think it proves the point,” Neiberg said. “Here we are 100 years later, and Syria, Russia and China remain three of the United States’ four most important foreign policy problems, with Iran being the fourth – and I could tie that back to World War I if I wanted, too.”
Neiberg explained that while Americans and Europeans think the first World War ended in 1918, most of the rest of the world saw it continue into the mid-1920s.
When talking about the war and the peace treaties that followed, Neiberg took a different approach than most historians.
“Historians on the American side usually talk about Woodrow Wilson, and I will in a little while. But I want to introduce you to William Linn Westermann,” he said.
Westermann was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and was named in 1917 to The Inquiry, a foreign policy study group formed by Wilson, which Neiberg said was the “first think tank in American history” and later became the Council on Foreign Relations. The Inquiry was a 150-person group, but only Westermann and 16 others went with Wilson to Paris for the future agreement.
“Westermann in August 1917 was reading papyrus scrolls in Madison, Wisconsin,” Neiberg said. “In December 1919, he’s in a meeting to decide whether the city of Constantinople, which we now call Istanbul, will go to Turkey or Greece. Only two years separate those two events.”
While most talk about Wilson’s 14 points on how to sustain peace after World War I, Westermann was a skeptic, Neiberg said, as Westerman once said, “no one knows just what’s in the president’s mind beyond vague phrases and beautiful ideas.”
The group also made hand-drawn maps of Central Europe, separating the parts of it by ethnicity, exports, railroads and languages, among many other factors.
Though the U.S. never intended to get involved in the war, Westermann and Wilson both agreed that it was important for the U.S. to avoid losing Eastern Europe to communism.
“Westermann and Wilson thought that it was absolutely important that the United States offered a better vision for the future of Eastern Europe than the new Soviet Union had offered,” Neiberg said. “They had to give them something better than what Lenin had, or else they’d turn to communism. Even if the United States didn’t want to be involved in this, now it was.”
Neiberg then introduced Tasker Bliss, a Pennsylvania native and U.S. Army chief of staff during World War I. Bliss realized there were two main problems with mapping out Europe, Neiberg said.
“First, even if you could figure out what you wanted the map to look like, there was no way to enforce it,” Neiberg said. “Second, just because we create small, ethnically homogeneous nations, that doesn’t meant that they’re virtuous, simply because they’re small.”
When the United States started to get involved in the Middle East, mainly due to the previously unknown Sykes-Picot Agreement, Bliss knew it wouldn’t end well.
“Tasker Bliss says, you’ve got to be kidding me. You want the United States Army to do something about the Middle East?” Neiberg said. “He writes later to his wife, ‘I myself have declared that I would not touch the question, even with a pole long enough to reach from here to Syria, unless I were positively ordered to do so by my government.’
“Bliss believed that the United States, under no circumstances, should get involved in this part of the world. It’s too far away, we don’t know anything about it, and there’s nothing there that justifies our interests. This will change in the 1930s and 1940s when all of the oil of Saudi Arabia is discovered. What Bliss would’ve said about that, I don’t know,” Neilberg said.
Neiberg said Bliss “would not be particularly surprised” that the U.S. is still in military conflict in the Middle East 100 years after World War I.
Neiberg ended his lecture talking about King Faisal, the Shandong problem and answering audience questions.
“Americans were not disillusioned by the first World War. They’re disillusioned by the peace that comes later,” Neiberg said at the end of his lecture. “They’re disillusioned by the sense that the Paris Peace Conference, which produced the Treaty of Versailles and four other treaties, actually made the world less safe that morning.”