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Notes -
Horribly humiliated and somewhat, but not horribly abused. By about 1924, the Allies were seeking ways to strengthen Germany again. Germany experienced a net inflow of capital in the Weimar Period: hardly a nation being sucked dry with reparations.
Additionally, if Germany had finished WWI with honour, no loss of territory, and not economic dependence, would there have been a WWII akin to WWI? Would Hitler have been able to ride a wave of traditional German imperialism? The underlying strength of Germany and the rivalry with Russia/France would still be there. It might not have been as bad as WWII in reality, but to deny its possibility is to be cavalier with historical causation and counterfactuals.
The West was very kind to Russia in that period: feeding them, not attempting to roll them back further in Chechenya or Crimea, letting Russia take over the USSR's Security Council seat, stopped it sliding into civil war in 1996 etc.
Putin and his regime still ended up blaming the West for Russia's woes in the transition period. That's not to say that those acts of kindness were bad: they saved many lives in Russia, kept it from collapsing into even more bloodshed, and possibly bought a decade or more of Russian passitivity towards its neighbours - maybe the longest period of peace from Russian aggression in Eastern European history.
The point is that kindness towards your enemies is not enough. Reagan had the right idea of assertive strength and openness to mutual concessions. That won't always work - the results would be very different with Hitler than Gorbachev - but it's a relatively robust strategy. Ironically, it's not so different from what Chamberlain and Baldwin actually pursued in the 1930s, in that they undertook Reagan-style rearmanent. However, the concessions were not matched with concessions from Germany.
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