However, none of the parties support his recommendations. They believe that Germany must bear full responsibility for the war. Therefore, Keynes have written this book and exposed a plot of the Versailles Peace Treaty, which was not only highly exceeded the compensation capacity of Germany, and also it would led the middle part of Europe become pauperization. Therefore, Keynes was disagreeing with the Versailles Peace Treaty. He believed that the Versailles Peace Treaty would bring another crisis to the world and affect the peace of the world. Germany will arouse another war for revenge.
To conclude, the economic consequences of the peace is the beginning of another war.
Keynes' book remains highly readable in many sections. He was not only a brilliant economist, but a superb writer with a keen eye for the foibles of the great men of his time. However, some sections of the text, such as the one dealing with reparations, are abstruse and less suitable to the modern audience. These are still brilliantly told, but unless you are a grad student or a scholar with a particular interest in the many details of Germany's economy in the early part of the century as well as the demands put on it by the treaty, you are not likely to find these sections as gripping as the others.
The book must be read by those interested in the Versailles Peace Treaty and the aftermath of its signing. Even today, the power of Keynes' argument is evident. I've just recently finished reading Margaret MacMillan's "Paris, 1919," and while I enjoyed the book, I found her arguments against Keynes to be unconvincing. MacMillan says the actual collection of economic claims against Germany was rather modest, less, for example, than Germany collected from France in the aftermath of the 1870 war. But Keynes admitted the allies might not hold Germany to all the economic terms of the treaty. He still felt strongly that many of those terms - whether enforced or not - discouraged sound planning by German investors, companies, and its government, and unnecessarily impoverished the German people. This he felt was bad for not just Germany, but all of Europe.
The portrait he gives of the different negotiating abilities of French's Clemenceau, United States' president Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George is a devastating picture of the different motives each one of them had at the time: the aim of Clemenceau was to exact revenge to French's traditional enemy and to debilitate Germany as much as possible, thus postponing her return to prosperity and to menace again France. WIlson's, portrayed as a good man but lacking any negotiating feature a man of his stature should have, was a frail man only to save his face in the moral stances he took in his preliminary 14 points Armistice proposal, which led to the initial surrender of the Germans to the Allied forces. The British Lloyd George was only worried about upcoming elections in his country and was playing all the cards (good or bad) he had to save himself from an humiliating defeat to the Liberals.
The outcome of it all was a Peace Treaty who despised each and every point of reality, representing a burden Germany would not be able to pay, thus leading to the dismantling of an economic European system that led famine, social disturbance and finally to the World War II.
The book is a best-seller ever since and very easy to read and should be also recommended to every one interested in the power broker skills one has to have to succeed (Clemenceau) or fail (Wilson) in negotiation as hard as this one.