Some scholars have portrayed the Treaty as less harsh than it was seen to be in the immediate aftermath of the Paris Peace Conference. Gideon Rose, for instance, sees it as "more balanced" than it seemed at the time, and "a mixture of discordant elements that was neither Carthaginian nor Metternichian", while Max Hastings calls the peace treaty "clumsy" but writes that "the Germans had instead been dictating the terms as victors, European freedom, justice and democracy would have paid a dreadful forfeit.". David Stevenson argues that neither the Armistice nor the Peace Treaty made World War II inevitable – as claimed by many scholars – and that "the peacemakers have had an undeservedly bad press. ... [They were feeling their way in unprecedented circumstances, but the settlement that was constructed was more flexible than its critics acknowledged, and could either have accommodated a lasting reconciliation with the new Republican regime in Germany or ensured that it remained militarily harmless. The real tragedy of the inter-war years is that it did neither... The Treaty could have stopped another bloodbath if it had been upheld." This, of course, is antithetical to the arguments of Keynes, or at least his followers, who draw a direct line between the economic conditions created by the Peace Treaty and the rise of belligerent regimes in Europe.