Postwar shock and the treaty-timing dilemma

The proposed explanation for many treaty mistakes combines good intentions, negotiators projecting their own good faith onto others, and the lingering shock of the First World War. One possibility is that major international agreements should wait until societies are no longer acting from the conviction that such a catastrophe can never recur. That proposal immediately encounters a practical objection: wars create the urgency that makes difficult treaties politically possible. The First World War generated the impetus for naval limitation, while the Second exposed reasons those arrangements needed reform. Treaty timing is therefore a genuine dilemma, with no automatic guarantee that immediate agreement or delayed negotiation will be safer.