Worldmaking (21 page)

   IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

    X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.

  XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan States to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan States should be entered into.

 XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

XIII. An independent Polish State should be erected which would include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which would be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

 XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
114

Wilson's Fourteen Points promised a new system of international relations that jettisoned the logic of alliance formation based on national self-interest—the diplomatic verity to which all nation-states had subscribed since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia—and replaced it with point fourteen: “a general association of nations.” As Henry Kissinger observes in
Diplomacy
, “Woodrow Wilson told the Europeans that, henceforth, the international system should be based not on the balance of power but on ethnic self-determination, that their security should depend not on military alliances but on collective security, and that their diplomacy should no longer be conducted secretly by experts but on the basis of ‘open agreements, openly arrived at.'”
115
The Fourteen Points distilled the essence of a geopolitical philosophy that remains vital today: Wilsonianism. Whether Wilson could convince France and Britain of the points' merits remained moot, although the auguries were not promising. Upon reading the transcript of Wilson's speech, the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau remarked, “The good lord himself required only ten points.”
116
He later dismissed Wilson's Fourteen Points as constituting “the most empty theory,” a dig at Wilson's scientistic pretensions. “He believed you could do everything by formulas.”
117

The usual domestic suspects were similarly concerned by the grandiosity of Wilson's ambition. Appalled by the diminution of U.S. national sovereignty promised by the Fourteen Points, Theodore Roosevelt thundered in Chicago that “we are not internationalists. We are American nationalists.”
118
Sensing the inevitability of German defeat, and Wilson's ardent focus on realizing his Fourteen Points, Roosevelt urged the American people at the forthcoming midterm elections to “emphatically repudiate the so-called Fourteen Points and the various similar utterances of the president.”
119
He thought the elevation of ethnic self-determination (implied, rather than explicitly stated) muddle-headed and dangerous, just as Wilson's emphasis on democracy promotion failed to accord to the reality that confronted him: a fallen world of flawed, self-interested nations. Roosevelt similarly viewed the Fourteen Points' promotion of “open diplomacy” as unrealistic and its approach to colonial claims as likely to hurt America's closest ally, Great Britain. He suspected that Germany, much more than Britain and France, might come to embrace Wilson's vision for reasons of self-interest, the very notion that the Fourteen Points were designed to transcend.

And so it came to pass. As the year progressed, bearing the full brunt of an American-assisted Allied assault, and aware that the deployment of three million more Americans spelled certain defeat, Germany approached Wilson directly in October 1918 to request the drafting of an armistice based on his Fourteen Points. A new parliamentary government in Germany had decided to swallow its pride (and earlier barbs concerning Wilson's suitability as a mediator) and embrace Wilson's peace without victory, or peace without defeat, as Germany might have hoped. The president responded cautiously but interestedly to this advance and did not inform Britain and France, a discourtesy that Edward House, for one, deplored. Roosevelt reentered the fray on October 24, when he wrote an open letter to Henry Cabot Lodge—who would become chair of the Foreign Relations Committee after Republicans won control of the House and the Senate—affirming that the United States “must obtain peace by the hammerings of the guns and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters.”
120

Lodge's sympathy toward Roosevelt's views was clear. He had earlier confessed to Roosevelt that he had “never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson.”
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Roosevelt's final pronouncement on foreign policy, which he dictated on January 3, 1919, declared it unconscionable that Washington might be compelled by a multilateral institution to send “our gallant young men to die in obscure fights in the Balkans or in Central Europe.” The only matters that should concern Americans were those that pertained directly to the national interest; the United States, Roosevelt added, must never assume “a position of international Meddlesome Matty.”
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Three days later, a heart attack killed Roosevelt as he slept. Wilson's vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, offered an apt eulogy: “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
123
Mahan and Roosevelt both died offering stern criticisms of Woodrow Wilson. But Henry Cabot Lodge remained.

Having been tempted to coerce Paris and London into accepting peace on his own terms—threatening to withdraw America's military, a bargaining tool of considerable weight—Wilson agreed to work with his allies and signed off on terms “laid down in the president's address to Congress of 8 January 1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent address.”
124
While at first sight these terms of German surrender represented a victory for Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George insisted that two caveats be added to this message. First, Britain and France reserved the right to decide how “freedom of the seas” should be interpreted. Second, and much more significant, Germany should be made liable for the substantial damage caused to Allied civilians and property over the course of the conflict. How these addenda might color the complexion of the peace treaty remained to be seen. One thing was sure: when the belligerents laid down their weapons at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, Wilson lost the main tool he possessed to craft a peace based on his Fourteen Points. The trump card that was the U.S. Army had been played to devastating effect—Wilson later remarked that his nation “had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world”—but higher-stakes diplomatic games remained.
125
Hereafter, Wilson would have to rely on his wits and his advisers at the negotiating table to craft an evenhanded and durable peace. Thereafter, any peace treaty would require ratification from a Republican-controlled Senate. These were the biggest tests of Wilson's career and, regrettably, they were ones that he failed.

*   *   *

As a global hegemon, Europe had been mortally wounded by World War I. Three empires—the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman—lay in ruins, while subsequent Anglo-French expansion at their expense mainly revealed an inability to finance such commitments. After scoring a notable success in Russia, the threat of Bolshevik revolution hung ominously over Germany and much of Central Europe. The Czech leader Tomáš Masaryk captured the scene perceptively when he described Europe on the eve of peace negotiations as “a laboratory resting on a vast cemetery.”
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It is in this context that we may appreciate the cathartic enthusiasm that greeted Woodrow Wilson upon his arrival in France, a mood that is captured evocatively by the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig:

We believed—and the whole world believed with us—that this had been the war to end all wars, that the beast which had been laying our world waste was tamed or even slaughtered. We believed in President Wilson's grand program, which was ours too … We were foolish, I know. But we were not alone. Anyone who lived through that time will remember how the streets of all the great cities echoed to cries of jubilation, hailing President Wilson as the savior of the world … There was never such trusting credulity in Europe as in those first few days of peace … Hell lay behind us, what could make us fear now?
127

America's intervention had shortened the war, and Wilson's new vision for international affairs proffered perpetual peace as its seductive primary goal. Raymond Fosdick recalled that “Wilson's welcome in Paris was accompanied by the most remarkable demonstration of enthusiasm and affection on the part of the Parisians that I have ever heard of, let alone seen.” In his diary he wrote that “an American can be anything he wants to be today; he owns the city.”
128
In
The Shape of Things to Come
, a work of science fiction that anticipated the development of world government, H. G. Wells wrote that for “a brief interval, Wilson stood alone for mankind … He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.”
129
The British economist John Maynard Keynes observed that “when Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history … Never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewith to bind the princes of this world.”
130

While Wilson enjoyed the support of a spellbound public audience, the princes, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, would prove less susceptible to his charms. In a conversation with Edward House, Clemenceau had remarked that “I can get on with you, you are practical. I understand you but talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ.” Responding to Wilson's oft-repeated declaration of faith in the League of Nations, Clemenceau reassured the French Chamber of Deputies, to hearty applause, that “there is an old system of alliances called the Balance of Power—this system of alliances, which I do not renounce, will be my guiding thought at the Peace Conference.” He then made a reference to Wilson's charming
candeur
, which in translation can mean either candor or naïveté. His hostility becomes explicable when one considers the scale of French losses. A quarter of the male population between eighteen and thirty had died in the war, and he had serious doubts about Wilson's ability to prevent comparable future bloodshed by appealing to humanity's “better angels,” as Abraham Lincoln had phrased it. It was said that Clemenceau, nicknamed Le Tigre, had requested that he be buried upright facing Germany when he died.
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He was a formidable negotiator: proud, Machiavellian, and utterly committed to the pursuit of France's national self-interest. He was determined that Germany be made to pay dearly for its culpability—which he deemed total—in causing the war.

The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, was less driven by revenge than was the Tiger, but he would prove an equally forceful negotiator. Sensitive to British public opinion, which appeared as desirous of retribution as Clemenceau, Lloyd George liked many aspects of Wilson's new vision, but he realized that supporting his plans for a balanced peace treaty would be electorally poisonous in light of his 1916 commitment to fight Germany to a “knock-out.”
132
The aristocratic John Maynard Keynes was no fan of the humble Welshman Lloyd George, describing him memorably and viciously as “this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity.”
133
Yet he still recognized that Lloyd George possessed the Old World skills to run rings around the naïve arriviste from the United States. Keynes served on the British delegation to the conference and observed that Wilson “had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House.” Given the apparent rigidity of Wilson's mind—which Keynes attributed to his “theological temperament”—and the fact that the president's advisers were ill prepared to counter the experience and the ingenuity of their French and British counterparts, he was outmaneuvered on virtually every point.

Keynes was hardly an impartial chronicler of events. His 1920 book,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, was a scathing critique of the Treaty of Versailles, informed by his belief that Wilson's initial vision of a “peace without victory” was appropriate—indeed, essential—and that his failure to convince Clemenceau and Lloyd George of its merits was calamitous. Yet he captures the essence of what transpired at the Paris peace negotiations with his usual literary facility:

The President's slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation with a glance, frame a reply, and meet the case by a slight change of ground; and he was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of a Lloyd George …