Senior Fellow Charles Edel and Hal Brands write in The American Interest on the lessons to be drawn from the Versailles settlement a century ago. They examine why the world's democracies were so naiive in retrospect to the tragedy that would soon befall them.

This is the first published excerpt of Edel and Brands' forthcoming book: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (Yale University Press, 2019).