Michael Neiberg’s Potsdam is an interesting but somewhat over-ambitious book.1 Its principal arguments seem to be that the Potsdam Conference of 1945 occupied a place in history that was almost analogous to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and that it was rather successful. While this book is enjoyable, I don’t really agree with these main arguments. At the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson officially classified Great Britain, France, Italy, and, before the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia as “associate powers” to facilitate his pursuit of a non-vengeful peace. He had to threaten to make a separate peace with Germany to get the British, French, and Italians to accept a truncated version of his Fourteen Points as a basis of negotiation. Months of the Paris Conference were taken up with argument over the creation of the League of Nations, and Wilson was not accompanied by any colleagues from the Congress, and, in particular, from the Senate, which was in the hands of his Republican opponents and where a two-thirds majority would be required to ratify a treaty.

In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been a fairly senior official in the Wilson Administration, secured the co-founding by the Big Three plus China and France of the United Nations and had equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans in the American delegation to the founding meeting in San Francisco. Even before he had arranged to be nominated to a third term