Agreement After War

This secret agreement, reached less than two years after the start of the war, was negotiated by British and French diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. The two countries decided to divide the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire. France would take what Syria and Lebanon are now, and Britain would take what is now Iraq and Jordan with the Gulf countries it has already controlled. Palestine should be under international control. In many ways, the region that the Middle East still has to recover from the creation of false borders, false flags and false states after the First World War – states like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, paralyzed by war and conflict. Clemenceau told Wilson: „America is far away, protected by the ocean. Napoleon himself could not touch England. You are both protected; We`re not. [37] The French wanted a border on the Rhine to protect France from a German invasion and compensate for France`s demographic and economic inferiority. [38] [39] The American and British representatives rejected the French request, and after two months of negotiations, the French accepted a British promise to form an immediate alliance with France if Germany was attacked again, and Wilson agreed to present a similar proposal to the Senate. Clemenceau had told the Chamber of Deputies in December 1918 that his goal was to maintain an alliance with the two countries.

Clemenceau accepted the offer in exchange for a 15-year occupation of the Rhineland and that Germany would also de-militarize the Rhineland. [40] In March 1921, French and Belgian troops occupied Duisburg, Dusseldorf and other territories that were part of the demilitarized Rhineland, in accordance with the Treaty of Versaille. In January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the rest of the Ruhr in retaliation, after Germany failed to implement the reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versaille. The German government responded with „passive resistance“, which meant that the miners and railwaymen refused to follow the instructions of the occupying forces. Production and transport stopped, but the financial consequences contributed to the German hyperinflation and completely ruined the German public finances. Passive resistance was then interrupted at the end of 1923. The end of passive resistance in the Ruhr region allowed Germany to undertake monetary reform and negotiate the Dawes plan, which in 1925 led to the withdrawal of French and Belgian troops from the Ruhr. [130] The Big Four themselves had competing objectives in Paris: Clemenceau`s main objective was to protect France from another attack by Germany.