Read Parts I-III:

“The War to End All Wars” Part I: “World War I Begins”

By Richard C. Cook, May 28, 2025

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“The War to End All Wars” Part II: “US Dollar Neutrality,” “The US Enters the War”

By Richard C. Cook, May 31, 2025

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“The War to End All Wars” Part III: “Wartime Propaganda,” “Zionism and the Balfour Declaration,” “The Russian Revolution”

By Richard C. Cook, June 04, 2025

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The War Ends

By November 11, 1918, Germany had enough and asked for a cease-fire, so the war ended with an armistice. According to some sources, the end was delayed because President Woodrow Wilson was trying to maneuver the combatants into an agreement to stop fighting on the basis of his Fourteen Points. Germany assumed that the Allies would adhere to the Fourteen Points in the coming peace conference and that the Allies would leave Germany as a functioning nation. They did not, so Germany felt betrayed.

One thing is certain about World War I: it destroyed four empires: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the Russian. At war’s end, one empire stood victorious: the British. But as the BBC acknowledges, “The expense of World War I destroyed British global pre-eminence. Territorially the British empire was larger than ever.”[1] In fact, Great Britain still carries debt from World War I—to the tune of about two billion pounds ($3.2 billion).[2]

With regard to the defeated empires, there was no clear model as to what kind of governments would replace the ones that were shattered. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey became republics, after a fashion, and Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But what any of this meant, no one was certain. The collection of nations that existed after the war did not bring the world stability. The condition of the German Weimar Republic was particularly rocky.

One of the most disturbing things about World War I, beyond the extensive loss of life, was the widespread use of chemical weapons. These were used by both sides. After the war, claims were heard that if the war had not ended as it did in November 1918, the Allies were ready to use new chemical weapons in their planned 1919 spring offensive that would be so deadly the Germans would surrender immediately.

The US never joined the newly-created League of Nations because the US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. The main reason senators opposed the League of Nations was the provision in Article X of the League Covenant that would have required members to come to the defense of any other member that was attacked. This provision was seen as violating Congress’s war-making powers. Article X was similar to the future Article V of today’s NATO pact. The League of Nations was also viewed by the European powers as their vehicle to enforce the gold standard, which the US Senate also opposed.

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The heads of the “Big Four” nations at the Paris Peace Conference, 27 May 1919. From left to right: David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson (Public Domain)

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The Treaty of Versailles placed a much more onerous burden on Germany than Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Germany was required to pay reparations for damages in the amount of $33 billion in addition to returning Alsace-Lorraine to France, a territory annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Britain was granted Germany’s colonies in Africa and “mandates” over the former Ottoman regions of Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. France received mandates over Syria and the part of the Levant that became Lebanon.

The reparations were twice what Germany expected to pay but less than the $40 billion which the House of Morgan demanded.[3] Germany also had to accept the “War Guilt Clause,” which made them acknowledge sole responsibility for the war. The grudge the Germans bore at being “betrayed” at Versailles became a key factor in the buildup to the next world war.

The territorial division in the Middle East put Britain in control of Middle Eastern oil. US Senator William Borah, R-ID, called the Treaty of Versailles “a cruel, destructive, brutal document” that resulted in “a league to guarantee the integrity of the British Empire.”[4] He was right. According to historian Niall Ferguson,

“The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, commented that he would like to hear some arguments against Britain’s annexing the whole world.”[5]

The Treaty of Versailles didn’t come close to addressing the underlying causes of the war. As Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., put it, the main cause was failure of an international system based on the control of national economies by the financial elite who extracted unbridled profits from lending money at interest, with the borrowing undertaken by the various national governments they effectively owned. [Thus it was a “bankers’ war.”]

The subsequent debt drove the nations of Europe to colonize the world in order to pay it off. They needed a flow of value from their colonies to the master nations, but not every colonial power could continue their extractive policies at the same time. Inevitably, there would be conflicts, competition, and clashes.

While the nations of Europe licked their wounds, Germany had been driven into a corner, and Russia collapsed in revolution and civil war. Though Britain had been hurt badly and was no longer the sole financial master of the world, due to the role played by US bankers, it had its colonies, still controlled much of the resources of the undeveloped world, especially oil, and would attempt a comeback.

The US, now unburdened of any further need to rescue the Western Allies from their own stupidity, was becoming the new lender of choice, particularly in Latin America. During the 1920s, until the stock market crash of 1929, US banks moved aggressively to invest in Central and South America and made many of these nations de facto financial colonies, including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It was Venezuela where the big US petroleum companies moved in to exploit the oil fields.

The US continued to attract the Western world’s gold reserves as backing for the financial boom of the Roaring Twenties, while Britain was threatened with eclipse. This would be reversed through the Great Depression, as we shall see.

The Unlikelihood of an End to War

There was a time when people really believed that World War I would be the last war, including British author H.G. Wells in his 1914 propaganda pamphlet, The War That Will End War. Very soon the world saw that the next war was inevitable. But what Ludwig Dehio calls the two “flanking powers”—Russia and the US (now replacing Britain)—were temporarily absent from the world scene.

The attention of Russia was consumed by the communist revolution and its attendant horrors. The US had turned its back on Europe by rejecting the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. French nationalists took charge at Versailles, seeking to so load down Germany with constraints and reparations that it could not arise again, though Britain seemed to wish to keep some semblance of German functionality, now as a buffer against former ally Russia. So, on the Continent it was the same old power politics.

Europe had learned nothing.

With Britain’s resurgence through the acquisition of new colonies, the Empire seemed it might emerge triumphant. Yet the Round Table knew that Britain would only be safe if it gradually began to integrate its colonies into partnership under the Crown. Thus came into existence the British Commonwealth of Nations, declared at the 1926 Imperial Conference and codified through the Statute of Westminster in 1931. While the “commonwealth” was assented to by eight heads of state (including Newfoundland), it was still the British Crown in charge.

Meanwhile, American and British elites took steps to keep the two nations marching toward the future together. The result in Britain was creation of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as “Chatham House.” The Royal Institute was closely aligned with the Round Table and the Milner influence coming down from Cecil Rhodes and Nathaniel Rothschild. A key figure in defining the mission was the English historian Arnold Toynbee.

In his book The Anglo-American Establishment, Carroll Quigley writes as follows:

“Among the ideas of Toynbee which influenced the Milner Group we should mention three: (a) a conviction that the history of the British Empire represents the unfolding of a great moral idea — the idea of freedom — and that the unity of the Empire could best be preserved by the cement of this idea; (b) a conviction that the first call on the attention of any man should be a sense of duty and obligation to serve the state; and (c) a feeling of the necessity to do social service work (especially educational work) among the working classes of English society. These ideas were accepted by most of the men whose names we have already mentioned and became dominant principles of the Milner Group later. Toynbee can also be regarded as the founder of the method used by the Group later, especially in the Round Table Groups and in the Royal Institute of International Affairs.”[6]

What Quigley fails to mention is that all of these fine-sounding words rested on one foundation: the vast financial power that propped up the British state, including the Crown, and that derives in a significant sense from the extraction of profits and resources from the colonies. This power was now threatened by British indebtedness to the US and possession by the US of much of the world’s gold.

In the US, a parallel institution to the Royal Institute was created: the Council on Foreign Relations. The Council grew out of joint meetings between British and American diplomats, scholars, and other interested parties at the Hotel Majestic in Paris in May of 1919, just before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

While the British went home to set up the Royal Institute, the Americans were more circumspect. Almost a year earlier, a set of secret meetings took place in New York City, headed by corporate lawyer Elihu Root, who had been secretary of state under President Theodore Roosevelt. The meetings were attended by 108 high-ranking officers of banking, manufacturing, and trading and finance companies, together with many lawyers. The Council on Foreign Relations was the eventual result.

President Woodrow Wilson was succeeded by Republican Warren Harding, who won the 1920 presidential election with his slogan of “Return to Normalcy.” That meant, principally, that big banking and big finance were unleashed, with the Council on Foreign Relations, which was legally chartered on July 29, 1921, the instrument of those interests.

In 1922, the first issue of the Council’s Foreign Affairs was published, using money donated by those whom they called the “thousand richest Americans.” The Rockefeller fortune was and remains instrumental in the operations of the Council on Foreign Relations as the premier US instrument of international financial control. This New York City institution run by and for the elite would be at center stage in the US decision to enter World War II and in setting what the nation’s war aims would be. But more on that later.

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Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.

Notes

[1] Overview: Britain, 1918 – 1945. By Rebecca Fraser <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/overview_britain_1918_1945_01.shtml>

[2] <https://themillenniumreport.com/2018/07/the-nyc-and-london-banker-who-financed-the-bolshevik-revolution/>

[3] Stone and Kuznick, p.36.

[4] Ibid, p.36.

[5] Ferguson, Empire, p.315.

[6] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, GSG and Associates, 1981, p.42.

Featured image: A British news placard announcing the signing of the peace treaty (Public Domain)

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