The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Everything now depended on the response of the Germans. Following Trotsky’s startling declaration, the Bolshevik delegation was delighted to see their relentless tormentor General Hoffmann reduced to spluttering expostulation. The idea of unilaterally and one-sidedly suspending a war was simply ‘unheard of . . . unheard of’.25 As Kühlmann’s legal experts confirmed, in three thousand years of international law there had been only one single precedent of a Greek city state during the classical period refusing both to continue fighting and to make peace.26 Trotsky had gambled that the moderate forces in Germany would be strong enough to hold back the militarists. And if something like Trotsky’s strategy had been attempted in the summer of 1917, when the momentum had been on the side of the Reichstag majority, perhaps a stand-pat strategy of ‘No peace. No war’ could have been made to stick.