Disarmament

The postwar world began in 1919, with the signing of the Versailles peace treaty. Nobody could tell then how stable the new structure of peace would be, or even what the structure meant in different regions of the world. With the U.S. Senate refusing to ratify the treaty, some were already writing off the just begun postwar period as but a brief interlude in otherwise conflict-ridden international affairs, and many were pessimistic about the future of the League of Nations as well as other arrangements the powers had worked out in Paris.

The world during 1919–20 did, indeed, seem very precarious, little different from the situation on the eve of the Great War. Not only did the United States not participate in the League, thus apparently reverting to prewar isolationism, but the peace treaty was proving extremely unpopular in many countries: Germany, Italy, China, and others. In these countries movements were already developing to denounce the peace treaty and what it signified. The Germans condemned the punitive aspects of the peace, the Italians thought they should have gotten more out of it, and the Chinese were disatisfied because the treaty had not forced the Japanese to withdraw from Shantung.

The situation was still unstable in the Soviet Union, and Poland seized the opportunity to invade the revolutionary nation. In Hungary, in the meantime, a radical government established itself, giving rise to fears elsewhere that Bolshevism was spreading. The creation, in 1919, of the Communist International, to coordinate Communist activities throughout the world, conjured up the spectacle of a global movement to challenge the peace.