World War II was caused not by the shortcomings of World War I’s Versailles peace treaties, but inconsistent enforcement by Western democracies and Hitler’s desire to conquer the Soviet Union. The agreement with Germany was less punitive than the Franco-German treaty of 1870, but sufficient to irritate Germany.

All of the victors thought Germany started the war. Because they were quickly demobilizing and also threatened by Soviet-inspired unrest in Eastern Europe and Berlin, where the Bolsheviks were old-fashioned Russian imperialists in socialist rhetoric, the peacemakers had to rush to terms but also to attend to deferred domestic issues. Allied goals were inchoate, the French keen for revenge and the US and UK wary of one another; the Americans under Wilson favored self-determination while the British were concerned to husband their empire and navy. Wilson, who saw himself as tribune of the people, left unresolved the way to adjudge competing nationalist claims for self-determination; he brought no Republicans to Rome and so couldn’t persuade the Senate to ratify the League of Nations. (The League was innovative, MacMillan says, and predictably trusting of experts while lacking a constituency.) Clemenceau won more than expected, preserving a postwar UK alliance, getting (in 1920) 52 percent of Germany’s eventual payment of $4.5 billion, and a 15-year occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland (having proposed a joint customs union). David Lloyd George decided only that he should decide, albeit reparations were handled adroitly.

In southern Europe, Yugoslav sentiment was strongest among Croats inside Austria-Hungary, who wished to avoid Germanization or Magyarization. The Serbians were minded for independence. Wilson glibly overlooked Balkan history.

In central Europe, deals were cut to superimpose self-determination on traditional geographies and peoples. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, new resentments were created. The Allies went easier on Austria than Hungary, which lost two thirds of its territory and population (leaving 3.5 million Magyars outside the rump country), paid heavy reparations, and lost access to its core markets. Since the UK and US didn’t want to break up Germany, they prevented a peaceful Anschluss with Catholic Bavaria to counterbalance a Protestant Prussia. Half of world Jewry was living in the Russian pale, modern Belarus, Ukraine, and eastern Poland although 2.75 million emigrated to the United States before 1914.

Versailles’ Sykes-Picot was old-fashioned imperialism. Wilson blocked a racial equality clause favored by Japan, which was hoping for an Asian Monroe doctrine. Venizelos is labeled the greatest Greek statesman since Pericles, but comes off second best versus Ataturk. Turkey had little to lose in resisting Paris because most of the country had been given away. Delays worked in its favor, because Allied forces were weakening. The failure of the Megali idea is treated as the launching point for narrating the author’s view of Versailles’ failures.

 Article 231, the famous war guilt clause, also appears in treaties with Austria and Hungary, in order to justify reparations. However, Germany’s fate is compared to a Roman triumph. Yet Germany paid less than French reparations after 1870, and the author asserts its strategic position improved after the war because Poland buffered its eastern border with Russia, while its southern border featured small states instead of the Habsburg empire.

MacMillian, because of her construction, struggles to reconcile the master narrative with the country- or geographically specific chapters and analyses. Many of her early observations labor to relate the events of 1919 to the 21st century, going beyond obvious precedents to Whiggish views.