Event: Problems of Peacemaking: The Experience of the First World War

Date of Recording: 29 Oct 2018 Description: Liddell Hart himself said that war was always a matter of doing evil in the hopes that good may come of it. This talk will explore the good that he and others hoped they might be able to forge from the evils of 1914-1918. It will focus largely on the new role of the United States, examining America's newly-found power, its attempt to base the peace on principles rather than diplomatic dealing, and its fundamental lack of understanding of the problems the war had unleashed. It will end with a case study on America's surprising and long-forgotten role in the Syria crisis of 1919. Biography: Michael S Neiberg is Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he teaches history, strategy, and international relations to American and international security professionals. His published work specialises on the First and Second World Wars in a global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I one of the five best books ever written about that war. In October 2016 Oxford University Press published his Path to War, a history of American responses to the Great War in Europe, 1914-1917 and in July 2017 Oxford published his Concise History of the Treaty of Versailles. This year he was awarded the Médaille d'Or du Rayonnement Culturel from Renaissance Française, an organisation founded by French President Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War.