1.1The question
Every peace leaves something unsaid. A treaty cannot list every grievance, every stock of arms or every name; a verification report cannot print every figure without exposing someone. The question is not whether material is held back but how it is held back, and whether the holding back can be seen.
This article asks: when does an open record make peace credible? It asks the question narrowly. It does not ask whether openness causes peace to last; nothing in the evidence used here could answer that. It asks what a record must put in the open, and what it may keep in reserve, if the reserve is not to become the thing Kant forbade: a secret reservation of material for a future war.
1.2The contribution
The article makes three contributions, each smaller than the works it draws on.
The first is a reading of Kant. Beyond the first article named in the parent study's reading note, it reads the article's commentary at length, with a passage of the third article on treasure, Kant's remark on which articles may be postponed, and the two appendices on the mental reservation and on publicity. From these it draws three propositions: that Kant's remedy for the hidden reservation is renunciation, not discovery; that publicity is for Kant a negative test, which a maxim can pass and still be unjust; and that his scheme allows a declared postponement, bounded by its purpose, where it forbids a hidden one.
The second contribution places these propositions in a modern debate about why peace agreements hold. On one side stand arguments about information: Fearon's private information and Fortna's verification. On the other stand arguments about commitment: Walter's disarmament point and Schelling's commitments that bind the one who makes them. Read for its word "secret" alone, Kant's first article would sit on the information side. This article argues that it sits on both sides at once, and that the second appendix explains why.
The third contribution reads two synthetic records with the three propositions in hand. Both concern verification and disclosure; both choose to withhold, and both write down, in the same document, what is withheld, why, until when, and what would reopen the choice. The article calls this design an open reserve. It shows how the records build it, and where they themselves record its weak point: an open reserve concentrates trust in whoever holds the reserve.
1.3The debate joined, and the limits of the claim
The placement of the works side by side, and their application to Kant and to the records, are this article's own. Each work is described only as far as the parent study's reading note goes.
The records are not archival documents. They are modern summaries written by AI for the Meridian platform, set in fictional polities, and each says of itself that it is synthetic. They record decisions before their outcome; no peace or settlement in them is observed to hold or fail. The argument is therefore about design: what a record of verification can be made to say, and what it cannot be made to prove.