The cover image anchors this chapter summary in Kissinger’s larger study of diplomacy and international order.
In 1994, Henry Kissinger published the book Diplomacy. He was a renowned scholar and diplomat who served as the United States National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. His book provides an extensive sweep of the history of foreign affairs and the art of diplomacy, with a particular focus on the 20th century and the Western World. Kissinger, known for his alignment with the realist school of international relations, inquires into the concepts of the balance of power, raison d'État, and Realpolitik across different eras.
His work has been widely praised for its scope and intricate detail. Yet, it has also faced criticism for its focus on individuals over structural forces, and for presenting a reductive view of history. Also, critics have also pointed out that the book focuses excessively on Kissinger's individual role in events, potentially overstating his impact. In any case, his ideas are worthy of consideration.
This article presents a summary of Kissinger's ideas in the eleventh chapter of his book, called "Stresemann and the Re-emergence of the Vanquished".
You can find all available summaries of this book, or you can read the summary from the previous chapter of the book, by clicking these links.
France’s Ruhr Gamble and the Failure of Unilateral Enforcement
The chapter begins with the imbalance that should have shaped postwar diplomacy. Traditional balance-of-power thinking would have required Great Britain and France to form a firm anti-German coalition, given that even a defeated Germany possessed greater long-term strength than either victor. Yet that coalition never took shape. Great Britain oscillated between applying balance-of-power logic against France and endorsing collective security without enforcing it. France, deprived of reliable British guarantees, alternated between trying to delay German recovery through Versailles and trying to reach an accommodation with the country it feared.
This weakness became visible in the Ruhr crisis. By late 1922, France faced unpaid reparations and unresolved disarmament disputes; without a meaningful British security guarantee, it had to confront German-Soviet rapprochement after Rapallo as well. Raymond Poincaré, returning to power as prime minister, concluded that France had to enforce Versailles by itself. In January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial center, hoping to seize coal and steel as compensation for unpaid reparations.
The move revealed French weakness rather than French strength. The German government ordered passive resistance and paid workers not to cooperate with the occupiers. That policy contributed to the collapse of German finances and to hyperinflation; at the same time, it denied France the economic gains it sought. The coal taken from the Ruhr barely covered the cost of administering the occupation, and France failed to create a separatist movement in either the Ruhr or the Rhineland.
The diplomatic effects were equally damaging. The United States signaled displeasure by withdrawing its occupation forces from the Rhineland, and Great Britain pressed France to reconsider. German leaders tried to exploit the Allied split by reviving old ideas of an Anglo-German alignment, though no responsible British leader was prepared to go that far. Poincaré assumed that Britain would support France in any crisis resembling 1914. Kissinger treats that judgment as partly right but fatally premature: Britain would eventually fight again, but only after the Versailles system had decayed.
The occupation ended in the fall of 1923. France had weakened its claim to British support by acting alone; Britain had weakened French security by urging conciliation without supplying an alternative balance. Even disarmed Germany had defeated unilateral French pressure. For Kissinger, that result foreshadowed what would happen once Germany regained freedom of action.
Stresemann and the Logic of Fulfillment
The democracies responded to dead ends by invoking the League of Nations, a reaction Kissinger regards as an evasion of power politics. The League was too divided to stop a major crisis, and improvised alliances would come too late once Germany became openly aggressive. What Germany needed was a statesman who could erode the discriminatory provisions of Versailles gradually rather than confront them prematurely.
Stresemann supplied that strategy after becoming foreign minister and briefly chancellor in 1923. His policy of “fulfillment” reversed the previous German practice of diplomatic resistance. Instead of waging constant guerrilla warfare against Versailles, Germany would appear to comply with an eased reparations schedule and would use Allied discomfort with the treaty’s harshness to secure the removal of its most onerous provisions. In Kissinger’s account, fulfillment was a realistic calculation by a defeated power whose military weakness dictated caution.
Germany’s choices after defeat were stark. It could resist enforcement and hope to make the settlement too painful for the victors, or it could cooperate long enough to rebuild strength. Resistance risked a showdown at the moment of maximum weakness; cooperation risked demoralizing domestic opinion by seeming to accept the hated peace. Before Stresemann, Germany had used resistance, and passive resistance in the Ruhr had worked tactically. Yet German grievances remained: the Polish border, the loss of eastern territories, military restrictions, and reparations aroused intense nationalist anger.
Stresemann understood that Germany could not revise these provisions alone. Although Rapallo had unsettled the Western powers, the Soviet Union was too poor and isolated to restore German prosperity or provide decisive diplomatic support. Germany needed foreign loans, which would not arrive in a climate of confrontation. Fulfillment therefore aimed to regain economic strength by reassuring Britain and, when necessary, France, while keeping open the longer-term project of revising Versailles.
Kissinger emphasizes that Stresemann could attempt this strategy because he came from the conservative nationalist milieu. Born in Berlin in 1878, he had earlier supported annexations, unrestricted submarine warfare, and expansive German war aims. Having denounced Versailles bitterly, he possessed nationalist credentials that more moderate Weimar leaders lacked.
Reparations, Loans, and Germany’s Recovery
The first test of fulfillment came over reparations. Stresemann proposed international arbitration on the expectation that a broader forum would be less exacting than France acting alone. In November 1923, France accepted the appointment of the American banker Charles G. Dawes as impartial arbiter, a symbol of how far Allied unity had deteriorated. The Dawes Plan, accepted in April 1924, reduced Germany’s payments for five years and helped end the immediate reparations crisis.
The arrangement solved one problem by creating another. During the next five years, Germany paid about $1 billion in reparations while receiving about $2 billion in loans, much of it from the United States. In effect, American lending financed German reparations, while the surplus helped Germany modernize its industry. France had originally sought reparations as a means to keep Germany weak. Instead, choosing a Germany capable of paying helped make possible German economic recovery and renewed military power.
Kissinger treats this outcome as a central irony of the decade. Fulfillment placed both France and Britain in an insoluble position. French security required military discrimination against Germany, since equal forces would favor the country with greater manpower, industry, and mobilization potential. Germany, however, would never permanently accept a system that denied it equality. Britain could have balanced the risk by allying firmly with France; in practice, it refused to be drawn into France’s Eastern European commitments or into a possible war over the Polish Corridor or Czechoslovakia.
Locarno and the Two Classes of European Frontiers
Austen Chamberlain tried to escape the dilemma in 1925 by proposing a limited guarantee for the western borders of Germany, France, and Belgium. Stresemann immediately understood the danger of a pact that identified Germany as the potential aggressor and objected that any agreement excluding Germany would be an agreement against Germany. Chamberlain then moved toward a hybrid of old alliance diplomacy and new collective-security language.
The resulting Locarno Pact guaranteed the borders between Germany, France, and Belgium and confirmed the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland. Great Britain and Italy pledged to assist against violations of these western arrangements, regardless of which party committed them. Germany accepted its western frontier and entered the League of Nations. At the same time, Stresemann refused to recognize Germany’s eastern border with Poland as permanent. Germany signed arbitration agreements with its eastern neighbors, but Britain refused to guarantee even those pledges.
Locarno was celebrated as a breakthrough. Briand, Chamberlain, and Stresemann received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the “spirit of Locarno” became the slogan of postwar reconciliation. Kissinger’s judgment is much harsher. Locarno did not settle Europe; it defined the next arena of conflict. It created two classes of frontiers: western borders accepted by Germany and guaranteed by the great powers, and eastern borders neither accepted by Germany nor guaranteed by Britain.
The pact also exposed the confusion of the interwar security system. France had traditional alliances with weak Eastern European states, which Britain refused to join. Locarno created a special guarantee that seemed stronger than the League yet weaker than a formal alliance. The League itself remained the universal collective-security framework, though Locarno implicitly admitted that the League was not enough even for its leading members. Since neither Locarno nor the League identified the likely aggressor in advance, military planning became nearly impossible.
Kissinger argues that Locarno confirmed the military results of the First World War rather than overcoming them. It ratified Germany’s defeat in the West and, by leaving the East unguaranteed, preserved Germany’s freedom to challenge that settlement later. From that moment, the distinction between victor and vanquished became increasingly blurred, while Stresemann became the only major statesman with a coherent long-range policy.
Personal Diplomacy, Briand, and Thoiry
With the Versailles order lacking a stable geopolitical foundation, its defenders increasingly relied on personal diplomacy. Kissinger contrasts this with nineteenth-century diplomacy, whose practitioners might have known one another socially but did not pretend that personal warmth could replace national interest. After World War I, leaders began treating atmosphere, public gestures of goodwill, and individual relationships as diplomatic assets in themselves.
The three central foreign ministers embodied this style in different ways. Chamberlain, known as a Francophile, made Stresemann fear a real Anglo-French alignment and thereby helped push Germany toward Locarno. Briand represented France’s turn toward reluctant conciliation: he saw that France’s relative position was declining, but his policy was vulnerable in a country devastated by German armies. France alternated between Poincaré’s rigid enforcement and Briand’s conciliation, yet it was strong enough for neither. Poincaré’s approach required unilateral power France no longer possessed; Briand’s approach required concessions French opinion would not sustain.
The strongest attempt at a broader settlement came at Thoiry in September 1926, after Germany entered the League. Briand and Stresemann sketched a package in which France would return the Saar without the scheduled plebiscite, evacuate the Rhineland within a year, and withdraw the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission. Germany would pay for the Saar mines, accelerate reparations, and fulfill the Dawes Plan. Kissinger stresses the unequal character of the bargain: Germany’s gains were permanent, while France’s benefits were mostly financial and temporary.
The Thoiry project collapsed under opposition in both countries and technical difficulties over financing. German nationalists rejected cooperation with Versailles even when it produced favorable terms, while French critics accused Briand of surrendering the Rhineland buffer. Its failure marked the last serious attempt at a general Franco-German settlement during the interwar period. More fundamentally, it left unanswered whether conciliation would reconcile Germany to the Versailles order or accelerate Germany’s ability to overturn it.
Disarmament, Rearmament, and the Illusions of Peace
After Locarno, France retreated step by step from the Versailles settlement under British and American pressure. American capital strengthened German industry, and in 1927 the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission was abolished. Its functions passed to the League, which lacked the means to verify compliance. Meanwhile, Germany’s secret rearmament accelerated. Versailles could dismantle existing weapons more easily than it could prevent research, preserve military skill, or block rapid future production.
The disarmament debate sharpened the contradiction between German equality and French security. Germany pressed first for political equality and then for military parity. France insisted that it could not disarm without additional guarantees. Britain, the only power able to provide those guarantees, refused to guarantee the eastern settlement and went no further than Locarno in the West. French experts tried to devise technical criteria for arms reduction; Kissinger treats these efforts as evasive because they could not overcome the basic fact that equal armament levels would favor Germany.
France’s defensive mentality appeared most clearly in the Maginot Line, begun within two years of Locarno. Germany was still disarmed, and France’s Eastern European allies depended on France’s ability to threaten or enter the demilitarized Rhineland if Germany attacked them. A defensive line on France’s own border signaled that France no longer planned to use that leverage. By choosing static defense, France reduced its ability to protect Poland and Czechoslovakia and gave Germany greater freedom in the East.
The same preference for symbolic gestures produced the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Briand first proposed a French-American renunciation of war in 1927, and Frank Kellogg expanded it into a multilateral agreement. In August 1928, fifteen nations signed the Pact of Paris renouncing war as an instrument of national policy, and nearly the whole world soon joined. Yet reservations drained it of force: France, Britain, and the United States preserved broad claims of self-defense or freedom of action, while the United States rejected enforcement obligations.
Kissinger presents the pact as the purest form of interwar evasion. It outlawed war except in the circumstances most likely to occur and imposed no duty to assist victims of aggression. Worse for France, it became another argument for further French disarmament. In the symbolic climate of goodwill, the Allies ended the Rhineland occupation in 1928, five years early.
Stresemann’s Ambiguous Legacy
Stresemann’s position abroad strengthened even as his domestic position weakened. He used Germany’s entry into the League to widen Germany’s room for maneuver with Moscow. Germany obtained an exemption from League enforcement obligations on the ground that a disarmed state could not undertake sanctions risks. Stresemann then reassured the Soviet Union that the exemption reflected Germany’s reluctance to join any anti-Soviet coalition. In April 1926, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Berlin. They promised neutrality if either was attacked and refused to join political combinations or economic boycotts aimed at the other. This understanding effectively removed both states from collective security against each other and rested in part on shared hostility to Poland.
By 1929, German nationalism had become increasingly resistant even to favorable settlements. The Young Plan reduced reparations further and set an eventual end date, but conservatives, Nazis, and communists attacked it fiercely. It passed the Reichstag by a narrow margin. The “spirit of Locarno” was already mocked by nationalists as the “ghost” of Locarno, even before the Depression fully radicalized German politics.
Stresemann died on October 3, 1929. Kissinger portrays him as irreplaceable because Germany lacked another democratic statesman of comparable skill and because Western confidence in his personality had become central to European pacification. Later publication of his papers complicated the image of Stresemann as a “good European.” They showed a disciplined practitioner of Realpolitik seeking to restore Germany’s prewar stature. He wanted to end reparations, gain military parity, revise the eastern border, recover lost territories, pursue Anschluss with Austria, and regain colonial outlets.
For Kissinger, that record does not make Stresemann a precursor of Hitler. Stresemann sought traditional German objectives, but he pursued them through patience, compromise, and European consent. He understood that Germany’s underlying potential made gradual revision possible and that violent confrontation was unnecessary. Kissinger even leaves open the possibility that Stresemann’s tactics might have become convictions over time. His death left that question unresolved.
The Final Drift Toward Collapse
At Stresemann’s death, reparations were moving toward settlement and Germany’s western frontier had been accepted. The eastern frontiers and disarmament remained unresolved. European leaders then invested their hopes in general disarmament. In Britain, Ramsay MacDonald made disarmament central to policy, slowed naval and air construction, and treated arms reduction as the path to peace. By then, British opinion had accepted the idea that Germany deserved parity.
France saw the danger but had lost the will to act on its own analysis. In 1932, Édouard Herriot warned that Germany was moving from submission toward rearmament and territorial demands. Yet his tone, as Kissinger reads it, was resigned. France still had the largest army in Europe, and Germany remained formally disarmed, but French leaders no longer spoke as if these facts gave them strategic choices.
Britain pressed France to accept German parity while trying to square equality with security through formulas. In 1932, after the democratic German government walked out of the Disarmament Conference, it was drawn back by a promise of “equality of rights” within a system of security. The phrase pleased British opinion but concealed an unresolved contradiction. Equality meant ending discrimination against Germany; security meant protecting France from the consequences of German equality. Without a firm British alliance with France, the two goals could not be reconciled.
The hollowness of collective security was first exposed outside Europe. In 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria, legally part of China though weakly controlled by the Chinese central government. The League had no practical enforcement machinery, no state was prepared to fight Japan without the United States, and no one wanted economic sanctions during the Depression. The solution was delay through the Lytton Commission, which mildly criticized Japan after fact-finding. Japan responded by leaving the League, beginning the institution’s unraveling.
Europe treated Manchuria as a distant anomaly and continued disarmament talks as if collective security had not already failed. Then, on January 30, 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany. In Kissinger’s interpretation, his rise revealed that the Versailles system had long rested on a fragile illusion. France lacked the strength to enforce it alone, Britain refused the alliance needed to sustain it, and the League could not replace power. Stresemann had also shown how defeated Germany could regain the initiative without openly breaking the peace until the structure was already hollow.
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