“Making peace is harder than waging war,” Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, said in 1919 of the Paris Peace Conference. It was a lesson those who met at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars knew well, as did those who attempted to end the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century. The clothes are different today, and their wearers arrive by plane and not by horse. They no longer have powdered wigs or embroidered waistcoats but they still sit around grand tables and they still try to guess what the others want. History echoes, as Mark Twain suggested, and in those echoes there are warnings for today.
The longer and more costly the war, the harder the task is of making a durable peace. More than a century after the Paris conference, as he talks about bringing another European war to an end, it is not clear that President Donald Trump and his top advisers realise this.
All negotiations are challenging, whether over business contracts or buying a house, as we know instinctively from our own relationships. When powers come together to end wars, the stakes are of life or death. Incompatible national goals and the high emotions raised by a punishing and costly conflict make establishing peace a hard and painful process. We are seeing this for ourselves with the discussions around ending the war in Ukraine. Russians and Americans have just met in Saudi Arabia, a country that did not even exist in 1919, and already they are disagreeing about what was said or promised.