Barnes' research on the origins of World War I was generously funded in the 1920s by the German Foreign Ministry, which intended to prove that Germany had not started World War I as a way of undermining the Treaty of Versailles. In Barnes' articles on the causes of World War I in "The Nation", "Current History", "Christian Century", and above all in his 1926 book "The Genesis of the World War", he portrayed France and Russia as the aggressors of the July Crisis of 1914, and Germany and Austria-Hungary as the victims of a Franco-Russian plot. In 1922 he wrote an article for the first issue of "Foreign Affairs", the foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations, having earlier contributed book reviews to "The Journal for International Relations", which became "Foreign Affairs" in 1922. After 1924, Barnes had a close relationship with the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a pseudo-historical think-tank based in Berlin secretly funded by the German government and founded by Major Alfred von Wegerer, the former "völkisch" activist. The centre's sole purpose was to prove Germany was the victim of aggression in 1914, and that the Versailles treaty was morally invalid. The Centre provided Barnes with research material, made funds available to him, translated his writings into other languages, and funded his trip to Germany in 1926. During Barnes' 1926 trip to Germany, the writer was welcomed for his efforts to, as Barnes described it, "clear Germany of the dishonour and fraud of the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles".