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Reminiscent of the United States' current imbroglio in Iraq and the greater Middle East in the beginning of the twenty-first century, where an apparent initial military victory has been eclipsed by mismanagement and incompetence in winning the peace, the victorious Allies in the Western world faced a similar dilemma after the devastating World War I of the early twentieth century. In that conflict, the resultant peace settlement ensconced in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent war reparations apparatus was, in spite of the mainly noble intentions of its chief architects, a flawed economic and security order. Reluctant German politicians swallowed the bitter pill to stabilize the fledgling Weimar Republic, the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Versailles Treaty even though President Woodrow Wilson barnstormed the country in its defense, and John Maynard Keynes's famous The Economic Consequences of the Peace portended doom for prospects of European postwar economic recovery. With a few notable exceptions about specific aspects of the immediate post-World War I framework, historians have largely accepted this verdict. The real debate starts with the implications of the Versailles system for the tumultuous decades of the 1920s and 1930s, witnessing the rise of communism and fascism and culminating in the nightmare of World War II. Are the origins of World War II to be sought in the imperfect peace of World War I? Did England's "policy of appeasement" of foreign ministers Austen Chamberlain and Neville Chamberlain directly or indirectly contribute to Germany's resurgence? Were the interwar years merely an interlude in the larger Thirty Years' War of the twentieth century or was there a viable opportunity for enduring post-World War I prosperity and security?

It is in this tangled web that Patrick O. Cohrs has contributed a mammoth study examining exhaustively the financial, political, and diplomatic relations of the United States and mainly the Western European nations of England, France, and Germany from 1919 to 1932. In this fine revisionist work, Cohrs argues that European and American policy-makers-diplomats, financiers, presidents, and prime ministers-were able to create a viable transatlantic international order in the 1920s, which constituted an important accomplishment in the history of international relations and was not inexorably doomed to fail. This new international order went beyond the punitive instruments of the Versailles settlement or pre-World War I precepts such as the balance of powers. The real peace of World War I, according to Cohrs, emerged out of the 1924 London reparations settlement and 1925 Locarno security pact. These conferences erected a new "concert of Europe" underpinned by U.S. financial clout, while Western Europe's major powers resolved their political differences via a process of reciprocity, accommodation, and compromise. The overriding goal of this framework was to integrate Germany gradually and pacifically on an equal footing into the community of nations, which in turn would shore up the Weimar Republic's political and economic weaknesses. Crucially, Cohrs maintains that the new stabilization was dependent on the United States' role as the de facto financial and economic hegemon of the world and England's political role as honest broker to overcome the intractable differences between France and Germany. When both powers-primarily the United States-neglected to further the "unfinished peace" of London and Locarno by fortifying and expanding its foundations in the late 1920s, the new order was unable to withstand the economic, financial, and domestic pressures unleashed by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and, thereafter, the Great Depression. The "unfinished peace," although carrying a heavy price tag in failing to counteract fascist and communist movements of the 1930s and the outbreak of World War II, was not completely forgotten. The United States and Western European countries learned hard lessons and applied them after 1945 in forging a durable hegemonic financial and security transatlantic order as reflected in the Bretton Woods conference, the Marshall Plan, and then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Cohrs has based his study on an amazing corpus of primary sources-mainly diplomatic and political-from dozens of archives in England, France, Germany, and the United States. In terms of historical methodology, Cohrs skillfully puts an emphasis on the interdependence of domestic and foreign policy, convincingly exposing the limits of diplomatic history based solely in the "primacy of domestic policy" or "primacy of foreign policy" tradition. Even so, it is clear his priority is on policy-makers and their diplomatic initiatives, and less so their status in their domestic settings. A reader unfamiliar with the political history of Europe in the 1920s may at times be confused. While accounting for the contexts in which individuals operated, Cohrs leaves no doubt that specific individuals and the decisions they made mattered. Consequently, certain persons are cast in a favorable light, while others are not. For example, England's socialist prime minister Ramsey MacDonald is heralded for his vision of a peaceful international order and pragmatism, while the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann is applauded for his Westpolitik or anchoring the Weimar Republic in a Western European security and economic framework. Conversely, American presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover and many of their advisors and secretaries of state are criticized for their "aloof" and isolationist foreign policy and yet unswerving pursuit of narrow U.S. commercial and financial interests.

Cohrs should also be commended for including in his analysis consideration, albeit briefly, of the instability of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular Polish-German relations and their border disputes. Cohrs argues that substantive progress on that front could only come after pacific resolution of the Franco-German question, when perhaps an "eastern Locarno" could bring clarity and stability to the region. And yet, even if the peace of London and Locarno endured to stabilize Western Europe, it is not clear that such stabilization was forthcoming elsewhere in Europe and it certainly would have required the inclusion of the Soviet Union. As Lloyd George expressed in the 1918 Paris Peace conference to his colleagues: " we must not create a Poland alienated from the time of its birth by an unforgettable quarrel from its most civilized neighbor." That is unfortunately precisely what happened.

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