If genius loci is anything to go by, then the statesmen assembled at the Hall of Mirrors in the Sun King’s palace on 17 July for a working dinner had a lot to ponder.
The seminal moments of Donald J. Trump signing the 14-point Memorandum due to end US hostilities with Iran may usher in a new epoch in Middle Eastern history, with or without parallels to the event that transpired at roughly the same place just over a century (107 years) before, marking history.
Did the spirits of the ancestors, President Wilson, British PM George Lloyd, and French PM Clemenceau haunt those around the table? It is harrowing how the spirit of the place, genius loci, can revive memories normally lost on people, but this time certainly recurring in the minds of at least some attendants.
The Wilsonian aspiration to juxtapose the promise of a new epoch of freedom based on the principle of self-determination for the peoples of the world, foremost in horribly war-scarred Europe, against the age-old “winner takes it all” principle that drove the victorious imperial powers Britain and France, hung over the Versailles Conference of 1919-20. But all in vain.
Losers Germany and Austria-Hungary were punished and truncated, rather, cut to pieces in the case of the latter. Wilson meant well by promising people’s freedom to decide their fate, if they wanted to live in polities of their own. The implementation was grossly unfair, leaving the losing powers with a sense of bitter injustice. Hardly had the ink dried on the Treaty of Versailles when the stage was already set for revanche. It took a mere thirteen years for Adolf Hitler, product of Versailles, as he was dubbed, and of the German refusal to accept what the people of Germany felt was a diktat, to seize power. The rest is history. The world learned at its own peril that no peace may be better than unjust peace.
Versailles 1919-20 spelled disaster for the Arabs, too. Promised independence in their own state, they were shamefully betrayed by the imperial victors. Wilson was already away, with America soon in self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, when the spoils of war in the Middle East were divided by victorious Britain and France. Sykes-Picot was a give-and-take over the heads of unsuspecting millions who woke up to scathing new realities after the Turkish Caliphate collapsed into a set of thinly veiled new European colonies. Only a new global conflagration helped rid them of their colonial masters. Versailles remains a symbol of treachery and a bitter memory to all Arabs ever since. So much about the record of Versailles 1.0.
When poring over the 14 points of Trump, did anyone present have a feeling of – stylishly – déja vu?
The 14 Points of Trump are now vivisected to provide an intelligible reading for the uninitiated. No easy task, as the maze of conditions, many seemingly contradictory, presents the picture of a compromise that may avert war but seems hard-pressed to establish just peace.
Still, let us look at it as an off-ramp, saving the region and the world from more unnecessary bloodshed and suffering. Particularly the Gulf nations who wanted none of it, taking the brunt of the beating for something they never committed to. Their economies injured and their confidence shaken, now they are left to pick up the pieces. Will they accept contributing to Iran’s economic revival? Paying for passing Hormuz under any name – toll or service charge – for nations that have lived along the Gulf, name it Arab or Persian, for millennia, borders on humiliation.
Let peace come back to the shores of the Gulf as inspired by Versailles 2.0 – its good spirits, if any. But let the lesson sink in: an unjust peace, leaving one side reeling, will never be a lasting one. Historia est magistra vitae, history is the teacher of life, said the old Romans. It never rang truer than now. Wilson’s first 3 points called for open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, and free trade. Let those who sit to the task in Geneva take note.
Image: Lenka Hrabalová
