Didn't WWI end with a negotiation, hence the potency of the "stab in the back" narrative which helped propel Hitler to power? WW2 ended with the unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan, the allies having learnt from their mistake.

No. It ended mainly because the Germans surrendered after the US came into the war& the allies walloped the Germans during 1918. There was no negotiation except among the allies. The Germans had to accept the terms. The myth of the stab in the back was that the Germans had a choice about any of it.

The opposite is happening in the US now, of course - the fascists have learnt from their failures to seize the levers of authoritarian control fully during 2017-21, while the interim 4 years saw the rest of the country complacent about the nature of the threat because they failed first time round.

It did, though the German army was collapsing on the Western Front, and the German Empire itself collapsed before the armistice on November 11th 1918. The Dolchstosslegende in some respects resembles the Lost Cause of the South, which still has potency some 160 years later (hence VP Vance).

And, of course, the Korean War never officially ended.

And there was that famous negotiation that ended the Vietnam War...

A good illustration of what happens to an ally when the US withdraws military support and provides a private security guarantee.

Also what happens when you have a vast bureaucracy that can't imagine the end of its world discontinuednotes.com/2025/04/16/l...

The prototype for all failed western interventions was of course the Russian Civil War 1918-21. discontinuednotes.com/2021/08/31/j...

WW1 ended in armistices followed by diktat peace treaties that were not negotiated (there would not have been a "war guilt" clause if they were). The Turks had a revolution and fought another war to get their peace treaty cancelled and a new one instead, but we brush over that bit.

Perhaps he's alluding to the Yalta Conference. Maybe he read the wikipedia page on Operation Keelhaul and thought "yeah, that's how you do deportations".