I’d hesitate to say much as we have Turtler checking in here, but I do wonder if it might have been feasible and more sustainable to have concluded the war with territorial re-balancing and left it at that. No attempt at collective security schemes, no contrived disarmament, no reparations, no war guilt clause.

In a word no, not at all. For starters, about half of the Allies by 1918 if not 1917 had no direct territorial bone in the game, or at least none regarding something to be ripped out of Germany. And as dramatic and alarmist and imho frankly wrong as the likes of “War is a Racket” is on the reasons the US entered WWI, it at least does not pretend the US wished to carve a new star for the flag out of Germany or even German colonial territory; after all Butler had spent decades fighting in countless bush wars and incidents across the Western Hemisphere and Pacific Rim without large scale territorial adjustments.

The likes of the US, Andorra, Brazil, etc weren’t fighting the war over Revanche style desires for German territory, or even British concerns of diplomatic balance and what might happen if hostile powers expanded their control over the oceanic ports in the Low Countries and Adriatic. A lot of the “New Allies” were fighting overwhelmingly because of Central Powers funny business with their neutral rights and diplomatic interests, and for those reparations, the War Guilt Clause, and recognition of their rights were even more relevant than territorial claims.

And even among a lot of the older allies with territorial ambitions like Serbia, there was an overriding need for vindication and large scale repatriation and reparations after being bled white from the war and often very abusive occupation policies.

That did not mean that something like the League of Nations would be cobbled together in some grandiose desire for a Peace to end all Peaces, but it did mean that trying to diminish this into some adjustment of borders was not going to work at least after 1915.

Just, you lost your overseas dependencies on the battlefield and they stay lost,

Which had happened outside of maybe two exceptionally 1916 at the latest.

you lose any territory populated with those other than your core nationality,

Good luck defining what that is or drawing the lines there. The French, Italians, and Romanians are going to seethe heavily over that regarding Alsace.

and the German states henceforth are assembled into a Prussian federation (2/3 of the total population) and an Austrian federation (1/3).

Good luck there. France is going to tap at 1870 and point out that it, Denmark, and some others have a poor recent history with Germanic Federation organizations, especially since there will be the issue of what the devil you do if they start trying to unify in an even larger scale like we saw by 1918 with the “Republic of German Austria”.

(It is curious that the antique German monarchies just melted away in a matter of weeks).

The degree to which they melted away in that span of time is overstated. In reality it was more like the culmination of months of not years of war damage, disillusionment, and increasing reliance on military strong men to prop up the systems in the face of demands for reform, democratization, some kind of devolution, etc. Especially given how extremely harsh the measures to keep that going wound up being and how once the means to carry on fell apart with military collapse, the tide of anger and frustration was more destabilizing than even a lot of dissidents wished (Ebert for instance did not want a Republic, he wanted a reformed Monarchy with a social democratic element after the Imperial Dictatorship and “War Socialism” got jettisoned, and he declared it in an attempt to head off the proto-Spartakists).

And even then it’s worth noting that you had significant holdovers. Neo-absolutist sentiment entrenched hard into the bureaucracy and military of a lot of these states and stayed there, you had significant forces out East that weren’t defeated yet and became one of the few bulwarks against a Bolshevik attempt to conquer the continent even if they were also a threat to the independence of the new states. And people ignore that Hungary remained legally committed to a Habsburg Restoration and Hungarian revanche under “Regent” and “Admiral” Horthy, and such. Restoration was only stopped due to threats from almost all of Hungary’s neighbors that they would invade and go to war to stop it.

So the idea that the old monarchies faded away in the span of a few weeks like spring snow is I think a mistake or at least over-reading of the situation. A lot of monarchist sentiment and restorationist movements remained and frankly not all of them would probably have been hostile or adverse, esp from a Western POV (for instance, a Habsburg system under Karl would probably have been less trouble than Horthy’s Greater Hungary Revenge Trip, and some kinds of constitutional monarchies in say Bavaria or Saxony may have been more independently stable and beneficial than one big Weimar), but they often had a lot of unpleasant baggage, especially with the individual royals like say the Hohenzollern losing their throne because literally none of the Imperial family could be trusted not to go back to the bad old ways.

Reduce the Ottoman state to its Turkish core and divvy up the Hapsburg dominions into seven or eight parcels.

That’s more or less what happened to the extent it wasn’t spontaneously happening even before the Allies began doing it (the Habsburg Empire in particular began imploding so fast that Italian frogmen planning to blow up the SMS Viribus Unitis found out she was officially the Jugoslavia of a new, supposedly neutral confederal state and their attempts to warn their new neutral captors about the placed mines were misinterpreted with explosive consequences). And we saw how imperfect those results were, not helped by the failure of the Allies to keep imposing the terms meant for the Ottomans.

Even a victor like england suffered under the burden as it sought to discharge itself of colonies like aden or egypt, part of the chronicle of the partition i related earlier

Within a decade labour was briefly back in power, and they were not well disposed to rearmament but neither was baldwin or chamberlain

Nah, I can confirm that Brest-Litovsk, Bucharest, and most of the other plans actually on the table for the Central Powers to impose had WWI gone their way were vastly, vastly worse than Versailles. The OHL had concluded that full implementation of the food plans they had in mind would cause the death by starvation of at least a quarter million throughout the former Russian Empire, and likely far more. Not only was this not viewed as a disqualifying or at least significant moral problem, by the end Ludendorff was arguing rather loudly that it would be a good thing and was trying to make inroads to fully sway Wilhelm II and the cabinet to it. Plans for Western Europe were somewhat better but not by as much as people like to believe and involved the chopping up or annexation of most of the polities in Western Europe between the Pyrenees and the Alps.

Versailles and its sisters get a lot of flak even in comparison to what they deserve, and I agree that Wilson’s particular flavor of dreamy idealism and racism generally made things worse, but while they were unfair they were unfair in part to balance out the truly staggering damages inflicted in the war and the occupation (especially since even before the murders in Sarajevo usually identified as the start of the war the German government was declaring orders for a confiscation of circulating gold in order to prep for a war footing, in line with the records we have from 1911-13 anticipating a major war and the likely need to start it as the aggressors).

That said that is easier to see in hindsight especially now that we have access to the Prussian State Archives and a bunch of other sources we did not have access to, with more concrete details on what the CP intended.

But I can confirm that the fear of the French being blamed as the aggressors was well founded. Just years after the Armistice you had the likes of Gerald Nye and Smedley Butler peddling “alternate facts” about how the US was driven to war by war profiteers and fear they would lose their investments, and you still had significant isolationist or pro-German sentiment (one thing I have learned from digging in is the sheer number of American nationals and resident aliens – a bunch born in the US – that went over the Atlantic to serve in the militaries of their ancestors, and while with say the Western Allies like Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, or Greece this isn’t viewed as that surprising or controversial even if it probably should be, but this also included in Russia, Germany, the Habsburg Empire, and Bulgaria). But the main reason France did not march into the Rhineland was due to financial turmoil and the need to secure a large credit agreement to shore up the franc and the French economy. Hitler and his goons picked the time well, and correctly read that the rest of the West would not stop German remilitarization of the Rhineland and that France would not act alone.

Sure, that’s what happens when people lose a war, but what they’re willing to accept in order to get out of it has a limit depending on their ability to further resist–we’re seeing that in Iran right now–and those were just very different propositions in WWI as opposed to WWII.

Here’s a question: what would have been more appealing to the south German populations – their own federation or continuing to be appended to Prussia?

Hard to say, but they haven’t been trying very hard to get off on their own since then, although a lot has changed since then.

Trouble with that one is that Germany did not lose WWI so catastrophically that the Allies were free to just completely make over Germany as they did at the end of WWII, and the Central Powers each had separate treaties, and the United States and Russia treated separately from the Versailles Treaty.

“Germany might be disarmed; her military system shivered in frag- ments; her fortresses dismantled; Germany might be impoverished; she might be loaded with measureless indemnities; she might become a prey to internal feuds; but all this would pass in 10 years or in 20. But the Rhine, the broad, deep, swift- flowing Rhine, once held and fortified by the French army, would be a barrier and a shield behind which France could dwell and breathe for generations. ”

But Foch didn’t get this provision in the treaty, of course, demilitarization was the compromise. And the re-militarization by Germany was a pretty good indicator of aggressive intent.