Philip Zelikow’s book The Road Less Traveled (2022) is an account of the failed American attempt in 1916 to end World War I through negotiations. Zelikow’s account focuses on Woodrow Wilson and his close personal advisor House. It construes Wilson’s attempt to mediate a peace as driven by a mixture of Wilson’s desire to bring about ‘peace without victory.’ In Zelikow’s telling, the attempt fails due to political-bureaucratic ineptness and occasional opposition from his advisor House and his Secretary of State Lansing. Both Lansing and House are more often than not seen as sabotaging or at ;east counselling caution and they in the end come across as much more sympathetic to the allies than the central powers. Zelikow in party attributes House’s skeptical attitude towards the peace proposal to close personal ties with England and a desire to gain recognition among the British establishment. Lansing’s motives are largely left unexplored, perhaps owing to the limited availability of diaries etc.
Diplomatic history typically and rightly focuses on what motivated important individual decisions by attempting to reconstruct what key decision-makers believed and what goals they pursued. This almost inevitably gives rise to the so-called street lamp effect, where historians only look for evidence where there is light (or a documentary record), tending to leave pay insufficient attention to the bureaucratic-institutional context within which decisions were taken. In all fairness, Zelikow does shine a light on the role played by domestic politicking (like Lloyd George undermining the cabinet’s attempt to go along with the American proposal). Although the author does not conceptualize this much, the account is also suggestive of the need of most major decision-makers to appeal to or communicate with various audiences, domestically and internationally. Domestically, positioning was influenced or constrained by jockeying among various cabinet members (Britain) or different parts of the governmental bureaucracy (civilian government vs. miliary leadership in Germany) as well as the need to maintain domestic political support. Internationally, decisions and policymaking was complicated by the need to deal with both friends (allies) and foes (military opponents), without offering to give too much away or so little as to make a peace agreement impossible given the stalemate on the battlefield. The book demonstrates how the need of senior decision-makers to court different domestic and international audiences makes reaching a peace agreement so difficult.
Strategic considerations and bureaucratic politics play at best a subordinate role, if they play any role at all, in Zelikow’s rendering of the events. Wilson’s attempt to bring about peace is almost exclusively presented as the back-and-forth between the president and his personal advisor. France, Russia and Austria-Hungary are also rarely mentioned and barely feature in the account, let alone how they have shaped Wilson’s and Asquith’s attitude towards potential peace negotiations. This is a work of diplomatic history and it is a work in the “great men make history” genre. There are occasional references to Wilson’s domestic political considerations, and Britain’s wariness of Wilson’s policies in view of the 1916 presidential given the president’s need to appeal to pro-German and pro-Irish leaning parts of the American electorate,. But bureaucratic-institutional or strategic interests are largely neglected. However, strategically, it must have been clear (supposition!) that a German victory would have led to German hegemony in continental Europe, with Vienna in the role of a junior partner, while an allied victory would have led a much more heterogenous coalition to victory, which would have been more desirable from Washington’s vantage point.
Fighting War
The domestic and international politics of failed peace negotiations can be cast in terms of Putnam’s Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games (1988). For an agreement to be reached, decision-makers need to “negotiate” at both level I (international level) and level II (domestic level). An agreement needs to be acceptable to one’s domestic constituencies (or veto players, at any rate) as well as one’s international allies and enemies. Words and actions have several audiences and often pursue several, often incompatible aims.
First, governments need to signal diplomatic-political-military strength. At a minimum, this requires the ability to mobilize sufficient resources and maintain domestic political support. This often involves casting the conflict in fairly existential terms to maintain domestic political support, while signaling to the adversary that because the conflict is viewed in near-existential terms, one is willing and able to incur substantial costs. Stirring passions (one leg of Clausewitz’s trinity), resorting to a fiery rhetoric friend-enemy rhetoric, and tapping into well-known psychological biases, such the endowment and sunk cost biases by, for example, casting military efforts as defensive, even if they really are offensive, whether at the strategic or tactical level, are all attempts to appeal to affective biases rather than rational evaluation of costs and benefits.
Second, excessive demands may help mobilize or quieten hawkish critics and promises to sustain the war effort and to support expansive goals (even if may make it more difficult to compromise later on) often have the effect of fending off hawks and holding out the prospect of significant gains. The hawks typically are in a stronger position, which is why even relative doves often feel the need to appear more hawkish than they really, not least in order to maintain credibility in the eyes of various important domestic stakeholders, including the general public and in view of intra-bureaucratic competition. If the rhetoric becomes too extreme, however, it may be difficult reach a political-diplomatic end to the war, as one has overpromised domestically and raised unrealistic expectations. Zelikow demonstrates that as the war progressed and the costs increased, the allied powers’ territorial and economic-financial demands also increased considerably.
Negotiating Peace
Successfully negotiating a peace agreement in the context of a stalemate on the battlefield is difficult for several reasons. First, on the sides one will find a general psychological reluctance to accept costs without concomitant gains (sunk cost effect). A Wilsonian “peace without victory” would have largely implied a return to status quo ante. Both allies and central powers would have found it difficult to have incurred huge human and economic costs, despite attempts to frame it in terms of successful defense in light of enemy aggression. The German government appears to have been prepared to withdraw from Belgium, but it remains highly unlikely that Berlin would have accepted the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, as demanded by the allies.
Secondly, negotiating peace means overcoming domestic bureaucratic interests, particularly when military-civilian relationship and civilian control is relatively weak, as in the case of Germany. Moreover, the political risks of coming across as a dove are significant, and not just in the German context where the military was a more powerful and independent actor than in Britain. Not just the British prime minister but also the German kaiser could not simply go up against the interests of its domestic political-bureaucratic opponent without running significant political risks.
Third, internationally, negotiating peace requires diplomatic skills, such as striking the right balance between credibly signaling a commitment to reaching a peace and limiting one’s domestic room for maneuver in an attempt to strengthen one’s negotiating position. This is turn is helpful in terms of securing of domestic political support (or in Putnam’s terms, a favorable level II vote. All actors party to the international negotiation needs to produce mutually overlapping win-sets to make a peace agreement possible. It requires support from level II in order to strike agreement at level I. In the context of two diverse alliance systems negotiating peace building an overall win-set is very difficult, unless each alliance is strongly dominated by one actor. (Zelikow shows how Britain was on its financial knees during the second half of 1916, which would have made it relatively easy for Washington to push Britain into a “peace without victory” given London’s dependence on American private-financial support.)
“All wars must end”
All wars must end (Iklé 2005, Reiter 2009) – and all wars do end. But they typically last longer than necessary in the sense that two perfectly rational actors would come to an agreement sooner, provided there is reasonably consensus about the present and future military balance on the battle field. To the extent that wars are the continuation of political intercourse by other means, they should be more amenable to settlement in case where leaders have to appeal to fewer domestic audiences and where the warring coalitions are dominated by a single power with little fear of abandonment.