Why do wars sometimes end with the winning side “settling” for a peace treaty or money instead of simply capturing the opposing country?
An example of this could be the The Treaty of Versailles
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Because often times conquering an entire nation is just not desirable. France would have no desire to conquer all of Germany in 1919. It would add 60 million Germans to France, which at the time only had a population of 40 million. Why would the French people want to add Germans to their country only to be outnumbered by them? There wouldn’t have been a difference between France conquering Germany and Germany conquering France. Furthermore, France would have to administer all these German territories they just occupied. Integrating Alsace-Lorraine into Germany in 1871 took almost 15 years, and the only reason it didn’t take France that long was because they filled the state with troops after 1918.
Same with America and Japan. America already had issues administering the Philippines, how would they have been able to administer an annexed Japan?
What about when there aren’t just two sides to a conflict? In 1945, Germany was at war with almost every country in the world. Would each country get a slice of Germany? Would one country chosen at random get all of Germany?
The administrative reason was the main reason in ancient times. It was just too much work and too much hassle to administer that much territory. The only times such large amounts of land were conquered in such a short amount of time was when the land was empty of people, such as Caesar’s conquest of Gaul or the Russian conquest of Siberia.
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