Up to the time of the armistice, and afterward until the collapse of Baron Wrangel, France hoped for the miracle of the regeneration of Russia. This would have solved the Constantinople question. And as long as Venizelos was in power in Greece the French did not despair of preventing Greece from becoming infeudated to Great Britain. But aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean had to be subordinated to the more important aspiration of controlling the Rhine.
The British Foreign Office saw this from the very beginning of the Peace Conference and indicated to Mr. Lloyd George the successive moves in a skilful game. The British premier balked every time his French colleagues wanted to speak firmly to Germany--balked on the Rhine occupation, the Saar Valley, the entry into Frankfort, the taking over of the Ruhr basin, the Upper Silesian settlement, the amount and method of payment of the German indemnity, the trial of war prisoners, and the enforcement of German disarmament. Much of the opposition was sincere and based on common sense. But every time Mr. Lloyd George gave in to the French it was a case of _do ut des_; one after the other the French aims in the Near East suffered dimunition at the expense of British aims. It was not through intrigues and superior skill in working out policies in the Near East that the British gradually gained control of Constantinople, and extended the frontiers of Mesopotamia and Palestine beyond the Sykes-Picot line, but by agreeing to back the French in some new demand upon Germany!
French and British diplomacy, in considering the devolution of the Ottoman Empire, agreed on two points only: the necessity of using the Greeks to prevent Italy’s scheme of monopolizing the commerce of Asia Minor through control of Smyrna; and the passing of the buck to the United States to take over the vast bleak mountains of Armenia, so that we could become benefactors of the helpless and policemen to guard against the infiltration of Bolshevism, while the rich and fertile parts of the empire were being exploited by themselves.[7]
With all these conflicting aims, motives, and treaty entanglements, is it any wonder that the Peace Conference year brought no agreement as to the terms of the treaty to be imposed upon Turkey? When the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties were imposed, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were compelled to sign a blank check, agreeing beforehand to whatever disposition of the Ottoman Empire the Principal Allied and Associated Powers might make. So they were out of it! But these treaties did contain a very definite provision for the peoples of Turkey. Article XXII of the League of Nations Covenant provides a mandatory government “to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of states which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” The “well-being and development of such people form a sacred trust of civilization,” so the Covenant declared, and they were divided into three classes. The first dealt with the liberated regions of the Ottoman Empire. The text is explicit: