As for Japan, the rejection of the racial equality clause and, by implication, of Japan's status as a Great Power equal to France or Britain doomed t… - Arthur Herman

Kerensky. He was deeply committed to Russia's continuing the war — one reason the other Entente powers should have been eager to support him. But Kerensky did have one weakness that would ultimately prove fatal. As Russia was headed on its revolutionary course from autocracy to constitutional democracy, Kerensky fully expected there would be those who would try to derail its new destiny — but he assumed they would come from Russia's pro-czarist right, not from his supposed allies on the left. All his reading of history, especially the history of the French Revolution, had led him to this conclusion: what revolutions had to fear most was counterrevolution by those trying to reverse direction.

Both men were obsessed with the power of mind over matter, and held the belief that by sheer force of will, one could send physical events in a certain direction simply by insisting that history dictated such a course of action. This belief would become one of the moral diseases that would afflict the twentieth century until its end. Here, in April 1917, was where it would start with Lenin and Wilson. And whereas Lenin had Marx to encourage him in this conviction, Wilson had Hegel and his own belief in an omniscient providential God.

now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.