Czernin, the minister of an empire in dire straits, tries to assert the point of view of the dual monarchy, exhausted by two and a half years of conflict, in the face of the Reich, the main driving force behind the quadruplice, and its demands for a compromise peace with the Allies.

[2][3][4] To negotiate this compromise peace, emissaries were sent to Switzerland in early February 1917 to meet neutral and French diplomats, with a view to restoring relations with France, which were initially informal and discreet.

[3][5] The February Revolution put a temporary halt to operations on the Eastern Front, but forced the Reich and the Dual Monarchy to keep a large number of divisions in place to deal with the military initiatives of the provisional government.

Nevertheless, Arthur Zimmermann, the Reich's State Secretary for Foreign Affairs at the time, was confident that the submarine war would asphyxiate the United Kingdom without leading to American intervention against the Central Powers.

The Reich Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Ottokar Czernin, took part in the discussions, in the presence of their principal collaborators.

The German generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff (the dioscuri) were thinking of forcing Wilhelm II, increasingly confined to a decorative role, to resign as Chancellor.

[16] On this occasion, the Austro-Hungarian leaders developed an erroneous vision of the German policy of war aims; in fact, Charles and his ministers considered that the Germans were ready to question their plans in the West and to rectify the frontier in Alsace-Lorraine; in exchange for the Reich's renunciation of its claims in Belgium and France, Charles and his advisors proposed abandoning the claims of the dual monarchy in Poland, thus rallying to the "candidacy solution".

[13] This conference gave Ottokar Czernin the opportunity to go back on the arrangements made in Vienna, and to make the Reich's free hand in Poland conditional on the dual monarchy being granted freedom of action in Romania; moreover, the Austro-Hungarian minister made the opening of Austro-German negotiations for the conclusion of a customs union between the two empires conditional on Romania being allocated to the dual monarchy, an opening ardently desired by the Reich government.