1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Both were admirers of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who taught them (in Lenin’s case, via his primary intellectual influence, Karl Marx) that all history has an end point, a culmination in human perfection toward which all great thinkers and reformers and other world-historical figures consciously or unconsciously direct their energies to realizing. Indeed, Wilson and Lenin both convinced themselves that making this perfection one’s conscious goal ipso facto turned one into a world-historical figure. In their minds, the sacrifices they demanded of themselves, their wives and families, and their fellow human beings, sometimes truly horrific sacrifices, were all worth the final goal: the equivalent of paradise on earth.

  And if single-minded determination, inner discipline, and the sheer resolve to bend people and events to one’s will are proof that one is prepared to assume that momentous role, then what Lenin and Wilson did in their lifetimes is nothing less than awe inspiring. They stand as living proof of Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s words “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”

  They were also in their own ways both secular millennialists. They saw the world and mankind around them as fallen, but they believed there was a final, destined golden age of redemption coming—not through a Second Coming of Christ, as conventional Christian millennialists have believed, but through a Final Coming of History, a great convergence of global fire into a single, coherent whole.

  Their total commitment to these beliefs certainly made them both self-righteous, usually infuriatingly so. Yet there were also important defferences. Lenin’s background and experience made him a more brutal man than Wilson; he was capable of overseeing acts of violence that Wilson would have been horrified to contemplate, let alone commit. Lenin’s correspondence is full of references to machine guns, bombs, and shooting and killing opponents; Wilson’s is not.18

  At the same time, both men dismissed those who opposed them as not just wrongheaded or misguided but evil. They could be unbelievably vindictive toward those who they thought were thwarting or betraying them or blocking the path to their chosen paradise on earth. And both could be cunning and unscrupulous when they believed the ends justified the means, as when Lenin happily cooperated with the German government to get himself installed in Russia, and when Wilson was willing to compromise one after another of his Fourteen Points in order to get his League of Nations.

  Finally, both were revolutionaries, men who dedicated themselves to overthrowing an existing world system in order to build a new and, in their minds, more perfect system. By and large, they succeeded in overthrowing those old systems, although what they created instead in their lifetimes turned out to be unqualified disasters.

  Yet it would be a mistake to see either of them as an unqualified failure. Starting in 1917, Lenin and Wilson left important, lasting achievements, for better and for worse, that would shape the next century and beyond and that still animate much of what happens today.

  Lenin’s achievement actually seems easier to summarize. He left behind the Communist Soviet Union, the single most comprehensively destructive and tyrannical system in human history—destructive not only to those living inside the Soviet Union for the next seventy years, but to those who had the misfortune to live in countries whose leaders were inspired by Lenin’s system and by his personal example. Those would come to include Mao Zedong’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, not to mention the countries of eastern and central Europe that were forced to become Soviet satellites after World War II and that had to endure Soviet-style economies, armed forces, and police states until the entire Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989. Lenin’s artifact, the Soviet Union itself, died much as it had been born, in a violent coup d’état in the Russian capital in 1992, with Mikhail Gorbachev playing the role of Alexander Kerensky—except that, in this case, Kerensky won. As for the total body count of Lenin’s Communist legacy, the best round estimate is one hundred million people.19

  Lenin’s legacy extends beyond the history of communism, however. It was Lenin who made the terms terror and terrorism part of the global political vocabulary, and who made imposing terror on innocent civilian populations by both official and unofficial means (the thrown hand grenade, the targeted assassination, the taking of hostages, the murder of family members, the car bomb, and the suicide vest) part of the normal revolutionary repertoire. Stalin would use terror to subjugate entire populations (including those of eastern Europe); Mao would do the same in China and Tibet. Both would pass the practice along to others—in Mao’s case, to Communist terrorist groups across Asia in the 1950s and ’60s; in Stalin’s case, and that of his successors, to terrorist groups in the Middle East.20

  Today’s Al Qaeda and ISIS killers are as much Lenin’s heirs as Stalin’s, Mao’s, or Castro’s. Their goals are also very similar: the destruction of the existing order, with the aim of imposing a new order—in the case of Al Qaeda and ISIS, one inspired by the Koran and Sharia law rather than by The Communist Manifesto, even though, in its broadest outlines, it sometimes doesn’t seem so different.

  For Lenin, then, a global legacy of permanent violent revolutions and terror.

  For Wilson, the legacy looks more complex, but one single, ineluctable fact emerges from what he started in 1917: U.S. global hegemony, right up until today.

  Historians and others sometimes like to date the arrival of that U.S. hegemony, of the United States as superpower, as the end of World War II. This is a well-worn misperception and myth. Memoirs such as Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation, meaning the creation of the U.S.-led liberal international order that supposedly dominated and stabilized the world after 1945, have compounded that myth. If anything, Acheson, Truman, George Marshall, and the others were latecomers to the feast. It was America’s entry into the First World War, not the Second, that signaled the arrival of the United States as the single most powerful nation on earth, and that restructured the world system around a new centrifuge of global power.

  Compared with its economic and financial dominance, America’s military and strategic power was a lesser contribution to that hegemony, at least at first. Although Wilson and Pershing wound up adding nearly two million American soldiers to the military balance on the Western Front, virtually none of them remained in Europe by 1923. Nor is it the case that U.S. membership in the League of Nations could have prevented war in Europe, any more than it could have prevented war in Asia. The United States’ distance from Europe ensured that it would exercise almost no direct influence on the tumultuous events that would engulf the Continent over the next two decades, from the rise of Mussolini and Hitler to the outbreak of the next war in 1939, League or no League. If anything, the Soviet Union, for more than two decades after the 1917 revolution a pariah state and also not a member of the League, had a far more decisive impact. For instance, Hitler could not have fought a war against Britain and France if he had not signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin two weeks before he invaded Poland.21

  Nor were the interwar years a complete waste, as far as the United States was concerned. Contrary to later myth, “American diplomacy was ceaselessly active in European questions” in the Republican 1920s.22 It was the 1930s of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats, who were embarrassed and horrified by Wilson’s legacy, that finally firmly shut the door on Europe. By 1933, the issue of reparations was dead. All the former Allies except Finland had defaulted on their debt to the United States, and the United States let it happen. (Also by then, Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had made it clear he would not be paying reparations to anybody, treaty or no treaty.)

  All the same, by that date the leadership of America in the world financial system, which Woodrow Wilson had made possible and on which the entry into the First World War had put the final seal, was now evident to all, and was permanent. After the 1920 depression, the American industrial economy and trade with the Unite
d States had become the sustaining engine of world growth, even in the darkest days of the Great Depression of 1930–32. No country could ever again rise to prominence by ignoring or snubbing American financial interests, or without calculating the United States’ economic clout—not even the Soviet Union, whose own rebirth as an industrial economy under Stalin was made possible only by American engineers and business interests, from the United States’ iron and steel industry to its mining, oil, and natural gas to its railroads and hydroelectric power grid.

  Adolf Hitler realized this, too. After coming to power in 1933, he launched himself in a race to dominate Europe before he believed the United States would—a race he lost during World War Two. It was, in fact, a competition he had no hope of winning, once America’s vast economic resources were mobilized for all-out war.23

  Because it was not until World War II that the military and strategic components of American hegemony came back into line with a world economic order built since 1917 around the United States. In 1945, American troops and naval fleets did not go home; this time they stayed in Europe to meet a new threat, a Soviet Union transformed by war from pariah nation into an economic and strategic superpower; and they stayed in Asia long enough to blunt a Communist push to turn victory in China into a sweep through the Korea Peninsula and then into Indochina and Southeast Asia.

  The Soviet Union that dominated and commanded the Communist world in 1945, much as the United States dominated (though it never commanded) the capitalist free world, was, at first glance, a far cry from the one Lenin left when he died in 1924. That Russia had been a bankrupt and virtually failing state, an international outcast unrecognized by no nation except its fellow outcast, Germany, and the hub of an international Communist conspiracy that was as ineffectual as it was despised. In 1945, it was the world’s second-largest economy with the world’s biggest army and, in terms of sacrifice and gain, the key victor of World War II—and four years later, the world’s only nuclear power after the United States. It enjoyed power and reach in Europe and Asia that the czars had only dreamed about, and international communism was becoming an empirical reality, significantly in the most populous nation on earth, China.

  Yet this Soviet Union was still very much Lenin’s. Much of its vaunted international eminence was transient and illusory, and the result of the complete destruction of its twin nemeses, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It was a brutal police state run by the same narrow and narrow-minded elite who were corrupted but also paralyzed by total power and terrified by any hint of dissent or opposition. It was still an economic basket case, barely able to feed itself, whose relations with its neighbors were characterized by intimidation and terror. In many ways, it’s the same Russia that persists today.

  Since the Soviet Union now possessed nuclear weapons, however, it was assumed to be a superpower as well. In retrospect, it seems easy to predict who would ultimately win the Cold War. It was much harder for those who lived it to know what the final outcome would be. In the end, of course, after decades of bitter conflict, Wilson’s America prevailed over Lenin’s Soviet Union. By every measure, that was a better outcome for the world and for the global future. Yet, now, more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the same uncertainties that were seen in 1917 and at the dawn of the Cold War have returned. The new world disorder isn’t going away anytime soon.

  This is because today the United States’ status as the dominant global power, Wilson’s most lasting legacy, seems threatened once more. Both Russia and China loom large as challengers, on the economic as well as the military and strategic plane; never before, not even in the bleakest days of the Cold War, has the United States’ position as leader of the international order been threatened by two powerful rivals at once. There are fierce calls to “make America great again.” Whatever the merits of that case, the fact is that the need to build a new, more durable order out of the outmoded old American hegemony has never been greater.

  That makes learning the lessons of Wilsonism from one hundred years ago more urgent than ever.

  Wilson’s initial and biggest mistake may not have been entering the Great War in the first place, as some neo-isolationists like to argue.24 Rather, his mistake may have been entering it too late—when the balance of power had already shifted disastrously against the Entente. If Wilson had entered when Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge wanted, for example, after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, instead of in 1917, the war might have ended much earlier and many millions might not have died—and Russia might have had breathing room to carry out the reforms it needed to emerge as a modern democratic nation.

  Or, alternatively, if Wilson had used America’s financial leverage over Britain and France in January 1917 to force them to the bargaining table instead of scolding them about the need for “peace without victory,” he could have achieved much the same result—and not one but two depressions, in 1920 and in 1929–32, could have been avoided.

  Still, either option would have demanded that the United States act like a Great Power instead of as a shining light and beacon of humanity, as Wilson wanted. By seeing the world through a utopian lens, one that reflected the world as he wanted it to be instead of as it actually was, Wilson missed more than one historic opportunity, with tragic results—as does every president who makes the same mistake.

  Wilson’s second blunder was his approach to the issue of the League of Nations—not the concept itself but the existential weight he assigned to it, and to virtually every international agreement he put his name to. He would have been better off listening to Theodore Roosevelt: “I regard the Wilson-Bryan attitude of trusting to fantastic peace treaties, to impossible promises, to all kinds of scraps of paper without any backing in efficient force, as abhorrent.” He added, “A milk-and-water righteousness unbacked by force is to the full as wicked as and even more mischievous than force divorced from righteousness.”25 It’s hard to find a better formulation of both Wilson’s and Lenin’s approach to political power.

  Roosevelt’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge was no enemy of setting up a League of Nations to adjudicate disputes among nations. But he lacked Wilson’s fascination with vague commitments and high-minded promises. Instead, Lodge saw an international organization arising from America’s wartime alliance with Britain and France, one backed by the American public and by its members’ willingness to use military force.26 It was in fact a vision much closer to France’s and Clemenceau’s, and it would finally take on flesh and bones with the creation of NATO in 1947—after the world had learned the folly of relying on Wilson’s version alone. Over the four decades of the Cold War, it was NATO—not the League’s direct heir, the United Nations—that deterred Lenin’s legacy of “force divorced from righteousness,” and that has kept the peace in Europe until today.

  As we’ve seen, some still blamed the failure of the League, and the disasters of the 1930s, on the United States’ failure to join in. Just the opposite is the case. By staying out, the United States paradoxically preserved its role as pure and unsullied global arbiter, much as Wilson would have wished. It was ready to step in as deus ex machina when chaos and tyranny threatened in 1941, and could impose its role as global umpire once again, both in Europe and in Asia this time, when the war was over in 1945.

  America learned its lesson after 1945, in the era of the Cold War. It needs to learn it again now, in the era of Vladimir Putin and an aggressive militarized China. The leaders of Russia and China are heirs to Lenin’s legacy, who wish to reap the whirlwind of today’s global disorder. By disengaging globally, America succeeds only in setting the conditions for the next round of global chaos, and we end up intervening when the stakes are much higher and the forces we confront much deadlier. This is not an argument, however, for acting as “globocop.” It is an argument for updating Woodrow Wilson’s fundamental legacy with a strong dose of realpolitik of the kind Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge could have brought if Wilson had been ideologically and te
mperamentally capable of sharing with others his vision of America’s global future.

  For the goal of America’s relations with others in war and peace is still Woodrow Wilson’s: that the mantle of American exceptionalism should serve as the shelter from the storm that Lenin’s disciples constantly unleash. That’s why, today, Wilson’s legacy still is relevant. As Henry Kissinger once wrote, from World War II to the Cold War to the war on terror and beyond, America is still wedded to the role that “Wilson had envisioned for it, as a beacon to follow, and a hope to attain.”27

  It’s one an American president ignores at everyone’s peril.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAS its distant origin in memories of listening to a conversation between Alexander Kerensky and my father in the shadow of Hoover Tower at Stanford University. Who could have imagined that it would take more than fifty years to see that conversation to its completion here in these pages?

  My thanks go as always to the staff of Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, but also to the staffs of the Library of Congress; the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia; the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and the Massachusetts State Historical Society.

  My Hudson Institute colleagues Chris DeMuth and Scooter Libby, and Alex Pollock of R Street, listened while I described the parameters and themes of the book; their advice and counsel contributed greatly to the final result. My research assistant Idalia Friedson helped to organize and prepare the final version of the footnotes, as did Mark Ashby and Gabriel Davis. And thanks also go to the anonymous intern who tracked down the ever-important but ever-elusive Volume 42 of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson at George Washington University.