In 2025, new diplomatic rounds continued around Russia’s war against Ukraine: a US-Russia meeting in Riyadh, discussions in European capitals, and talks involving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Yet none of these initiatives produced either a ceasefire or a peace treaty. The article draws a parallel with World War I, when negotiations also failed to halt the fighting quickly.
The immediate trigger for the global war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, but the real causes had formed earlier. By the end of the nineteenth century, the interests of the British, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, as well as France, were colliding in Europe, Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Germany sought colonies and naval expansion, Russia wanted control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles and influence over Slavic peoples, while Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were trying to prevent their own disintegration. Smaller states were driven by nationalist ambitions.
These contradictions produced two opposing blocs: the Entente and the alliance of Germany with Austria-Hungary. The United States and other countries later joined the Entente, but the core structure of the conflict remained unchanged. For that reason, peace proposals failed: each side believed concessions would undermine its strategic position.
Between 1914 and 1917, Germany and Austria-Hungary repeatedly advanced peace initiatives. German representatives sent proposals to French and Russian politicians, and in late 1916 Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg made a public appeal for negotiations. Berlin hoped either to lock in its military gains or to portray the Entente as responsible for prolonging the war. The Allies rejected the offer, seeing it as an attempt to preserve German power.
Austria-Hungary also searched for a way out, including through Emperor Karl I’s secret contacts with France. But these efforts collapsed because Vienna depended on Germany, the Allies had conflicting demands, and divisions persisted inside the Entente itself. Separate contacts with Russia after the fall of the monarchy also failed, and a proposed socialist conference in Stockholm in 1917 never received backing from the major powers.
The war ended only after the Central Powers were militarily and economically exhausted. In the autumn of 1918, their allies began to capitulate, while crisis, strikes, and food shortages spread in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Compiègne Armistice stopped the fighting, and the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, formalized the outcome. But, the author argues, that peace did not create a stable security order and became one of the causes of another global conflict two decades later.