Countries go to war and continue to fight till they go bankrupt, then they sign a peace treaty. Wars where one side wins, like in WWII, are rare in history and mostly a story of someone make a bad mistake.
The classic example of a bad mistake was WWII, Hitler was having problems within Germany by 1938, the Pope (Pius IX) had smuggled a letter to the Catholics of Germany saying Hitler could NOT be trusted. The same Pope came out against the discrimination against the Jews that the Nazis supported. Inflation was up, and wages were at 2/3rds of what they had been ten years before. Thus Hitler had to go to war to keep in power. As the group of Generals who tried to remove him in 1938 said to each other in 1940, Hitler was then a hero and you can NOT overthrow a hero so all plans to overthrow Hitler was stopped.
Thus Hitler went to war when his Generals were telling him Germany would not be ready till 1944. Hitler won for his enemies were even less prepared then Germany had been. Britain was surpassing Germany in production of Weapons by 1941. That was one of the reasons any attack on Britain become impossible after 1940, Britain had become to strong. At the same time the internal problems within Germany remained, so Hitler attacked Russia in July 1941. The German High Command thought they were lose and lose badly but Hitler ordered the attack.
Stalin was the reason Hitler did so well. Stalin had purged the Officer corp, includings its best commanders in 1938. This was NOT resolved till December 1941 when Stalin finally put those officers he had sent to Siberia and not killed back in charge of the Russian Army. Those Officers won the Battle of Moscow and the Battle of Stalingrad the next year. Once the Soviet Red Army had its act together, it was a slow but steady crawl to Berlin. By 1943 the German Generals were asking Hitler to work out a deal, but he refused and kept on firing those Generals. Germany by 1943 had to make a deal with some one, either Stalin or FDR (Churchill was just side actor by that time). Hitler had to give Stalin or FDR whatever they wanted, but Hitler could not do so, thus the war ended with Germany Divided between the two sides Hitler did not want to deal with.
As I said above WWII was the exception, WWI is more the norm. Both sides were under tremendous strains by 1918. Churchill in 1938 said that both sides would have signed a peace treaty by the end of 1917 if Wilson had NOT entered the war, for both sides were on the edge of collapse. People remember the Russian Revolution, but ignore that Germany had a similar Revolution in 1918, but that revolution was suppressed by the troops released to go home by the armistice. Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe had similar Communist revolts, as did France. Britain had massive strikes going on inside England (and lets not bring up the growing problem of Ireland at that time period). The US was NOT that much better off, the 1919 Steel Strike was just massive and suppressed with violence as were the coal strikes of the same time period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_strike_of_1919
The Pennsylvania state police clubbed picketers, dragged strikers from their homes and jailed thousands on flimsy charges. In Delaware, company guards were deputized and threw 100 strikers in jail on fake weapons charges. In Monessen, Pennsylvania, hundreds of men were jailed then were promised release if they agreed to disavow the union and return to work. After strikebreakers and police clashed with unionists in Gary, Indiana, the U.S. Army took over the city on October 6, 1919, and martial law was declared. National guardsmen, leaving Gary after federal troops had taken over, turned their anger on strikers in nearby Indiana Harbor, Indiana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare
The end of WWI is more the norm for the end of a long war. Look at what happened to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, they were bankrupt and ended up with many of the same problems seen world wide in 1917-1920. Strikes, protests, revolts etc.
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