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Another criticism that's often made of the peacemakers and the treaty they came up with, as you say, the Versailles Treaty embodied the principles of the League. It was the founding document of the League of Nations. All that high-minded talk went along with basically an imperial carve-up of the world. It wasn't just the British who were concerned with their empire. As you said, the Italians fixated on certain territories. thought they were owed in the aftermath of the war. All of the major powers seen in that light looked anything but high-minded. This did have profound long-term consequences in all sorts of places, but the one that tends to get focused on is in the Middle East. The Middle East really was an imperial carve-up. For all the talk of a new era of politics, a new era of democracy, a new era of openness, what you got was an imperial stitch-up. Could that have been different? Is that actually, rather than focusing on the piece with Germany or the unfulfilled promise of the League of Nations, is the real what-if question about 1919, the long-term consequences of what was decided about particularly boundaries and national identities in the Middle East that we're still living with today? It's

a very interesting question. I keep thinking about it because I'm not sure myself. I mean, what you had in Paris, and that includes Woodrow Wilson, you remember he came from the American South and had very firm views on the black Americans that they would not believe the equivalent of white Americans. And I think what you had was, in some ways, transitional figures, like George Clemenceau Wilson, who grew up in the 19th century and still embodied many of the ideas of the 19th centuries about the differences between various civilizations, trying to deal with a more modern world. And I think often assuming that people who were not European or Anglo-Saxon or whatever you want to call them, white braces, as they would have said, were not capable of governing themselves. So it was perfectly all right to hand them out to others. And in fact, you were doing good. I mean, it's so typical of great powers as it is often of individuals, that they ascribe the best of motives to themselves and the worst of motives to others. And I think Woodrow Wilson really failed to recognize just how imperial power the United States was, as a lot of Americans have failed to recognize. And, yes, I think they could have done better. But the question then is, what would the alternatives have been for the Middle East? The Ottoman Empire was collapsing, and Arab nationalism was beginning to become a really potent political force. Kurdish nationalism was still as yet undeveloped, but you could see the origins of Kurdish nationalism. So what would the alternatives have been? Were there the makings of states in a number of those territories? And it's not clear, was the possibility, as the Hashemites of Saudi Arabia and Benetto wanted, was there the possibility of a single Arab kingdom, which I think was unlikely? And because the peoples of Syria, the peoples of Jordan, the peoples of what became Iraq, actually had significant differences as well as significant similarities. And then you had Lebanon, which had a very large Christian community. And the borders that were drawn, in many ways, not all, in many ways course, suited the imperial powers, but they also did reflect, Lebanon did reflect a particular character of Lebanon with its large Maronite Christian and other Christian sects. The borders of Iraq were more or less borders of the three Ottoman states which had existed before that. And there had been some cohesion among them. I think the Ottoman governor of Baghdad had been seen as the superior of the other two governors of Mosul and Basra. And those borders did reflect older borders. In the east, they reflected the border coast between Iran and the Ottoman Empire. And so, yes, those countries were cobbled together, but in some cases that reflected facts on the ground. Were there enough civic and political institutions for those countries to rule themselves? And there may well have been. They never got the chance, and then that was one of the problems. But sometimes when territories are thrown together, they can actually develop into countries. And then Canada was thrown together out of a couple of British colonies, and then a few more British bits of territory were added in. And it did become a country. So saying the borders are artificial doesn't necessarily mean that something can't exist and flourish within them. And I think in some cases the borders in the Middle East, particularly I think in Iraq, did reflect what was existing on the ground. But certainly, the borders of Palestine and the borders of Jordan drawn very much to suit the British. So my question always is what would the alternative of being? And it's difficult to see. I mean, if that part of the world has been left alone to manage its own affairs, it might have been better. But geographically and given oil, that was highly unlikely.