Worldmaking

by David Milne

  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.”121 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.”122 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.

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  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.”126 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.131 He was a formidable negotiator: proud, Machiavellian, and utterl
y 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 …

  At the crisis of his fortunes the President was a lonely man. Caught up in the toils of the Old World, he stood in great need of sympathy, of moral support, of the enthusiasm of masses. But buried in the Conference, stifled in the hot and poisoned atmosphere of Paris, no echo reached him from the outer world, and no throb of passion, sympathy, or encouragement from his silent constituents in all countries.134

  Wilson reluctantly acceded to the French and British insistence that all war guilt be placed on Germany’s shoulders and that the nation pay massive reparations for Allied losses. The Treaty of Versailles redrew the maps of Europe on broadly ethnic lines (although a large population of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland became citizens of Czechoslovakia), sliced Germany in two with the creation of the so-called Polish corridor to permit Warsaw access to the sea at the newly created free city of Danzig, provided for the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland, and added significant heft to the French and British Empires in the transfer of “mandates.” On the cavalier way national boundaries were redrawn, and former Central Power colonies parceled out, Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, “But darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake … Isn’t it terrible—the happiness of millions being decided in that way.”135 Finally, Germany was compelled to pay $33 billion in war reparations—equivalent to more than $400 billion in today’s terms.

  On the Treaty of Versailles, George Kennan later wrote: “Truly, this was a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil’s own hand.”136 Soon after it was signed, John Maynard Keynes described the peace as Carthaginian, redolent of the brutal peace that Rome imposed on the Phoenician city of Carthage in 146 B.C. following the Punic Wars. This description takes things a little too far—Clemenceau for one was disappointed that the treaty did not treat Germany more harshly—although there is little doubt that Versailles bore scant relation to the treaty Wilson envisioned when he declared war on Germany in 1917. The president made a series of vitally important concessions to his fellow negotiators, seemingly resigned to the fact that Britain and France’s huge losses accorded them the right to play a larger role in punishing their tormentor. Unsurprisingly, Progressive support for Wilson at home evaporated. The cover of The New Republic blared: THIS IS NOT PEACE.137 Resigned to strong Republican opposition, Wilson had now provoked the ire of Progressives, who had played such a strong supporting role in the election of 1916 and who backed his subsequent rationale for war. The president’s political and diplomatic options were narrowing to a needle’s eye.

  The president instead vested all hope on a single thread: the creation of an all-powerful League of Nations. On this matter he received strong support from the British diplomat Lord Robert Cecil and General Jan Christian Smuts, who would soon become prime minister of the Union of South Africa. The drafting of the League of Nations Covenant, which was presented to the conference on February 14, 1919, was a remarkable achievement for which Wilson may claim preponderant credit. In theory, the League of Nations was vested with sufficient potency to eradicate “balance-of-power” diplomacy from international affairs. Article X guaranteed the independence and territorial integrity of all established nations. Article XI held that the league possessed the right to intervene in the event of “war or threat of war” anywhere in the world. Articles XII to XV laid out procedures for arbitration, which would be channeled through a Permanent Court of International Justice. Article XVI asserted the league’s authority to impose economic boycotts, and resort to the use of military force, to dissuade nations with warlike intentions.

  If all the world’s leaders had possessed Wilson’s faith in the League of Nations, then the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles might have been softened over a period of sustained peace; the world might well have transcended its hardwired tendency toward conflict. General Smuts credited Wilson with drafting “one of the great creative documents in human history.”138 Yet the success or otherwise of the covenant’s bold creativity was predicated on unanimity of international support and a common understanding of what membership in the league entailed. And each leader understood the League of Nations in different ways, stretching its meaning to justify individual goals and proclivities. In September 1918, Lloyd George had announced, “I am for a League of Nations,” which must have appeared encouraging from Wilson’s perspective. But the British prime minister continued: “In fact the League of Nations has begun. The British Empire is a League of Nations.”139

  The response to these words is immediate: How could it ever have succeeded? Many intellectuals and nationalist leaders in Asia had been impressed by Wilson’s references to “self-determination” and the “equality of nations.” The historian Erez Manela identifies a “Wilsonian Moment” of high expectations that coursed through those nations colonized by the Old World, a point at which freedom from European rule appeared tantalizingly close and Wilson appeared their best hope. A major Shanghai newspaper printed the text of the Fourteen Points, describing Wilson’s ideas as “a beacon of light for the world’s peoples.” A little after the armistice, a nationalist publisher in India, Ganesh, printed a collection of Wilson’s speeches under the adulatory and hopeful title President Wilson: The Modern Apostle of Freedom.140 Ultimately those hopes were dashed, as the victorious European nations retained their empires and carved up those of their adversaries for good measure under the so-called mandate system. The ephemerality of the Wilsonian moment caused profound disillusionment in Asia and elsewhere. One young Vietnamese nationalist, who would later take the name Ho Chi Minh, was deeply affected by America’s failure to live up to its Universalist rhetoric.

  While it was embraced by much of the colonized world, the c
ovenant of the League of Nations met a more hostile response in the United States. William Borah, the isolationist senator from Idaho, observed, “If the Savior of mankind should revisit the earth and declare for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.”141 Henry Cabot Lodge criticized the covenant for undermining the Monroe Doctrine, constraining America’s freedom of action, and opening the door for partisan attacks on the United States—afforded the imprimatur of “international law.” The New Republic observed that “the League is not powerful enough to redeem the treaty. But the treaty is vicious enough to incriminate the League.”142 A degree of disillusionment was setting in at home of which Wilson, sequestered in Paris, was largely oblivious. For their part, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were happy to sign on to Wilson’s cherished project, satisfied to varying degrees that Anglo-French objectives had been met in respect to the president’s earlier concessions. Neither man believed as truly as Wilson in the league’s epoch-redefining potential, but failing its full effectiveness, French and British interests would hardly be impeded by working through a League of Nations in which they would exert significant clout. Wilson was generally pleased with what had been achieved in Paris, even though the Treaty of Versailles bore little relation to his Fourteen Points. All that remained was to secure ratification of the peace treaty in its original form, the difficulty of which scarcely seemed to occur to the president. The day before he set sail, Wilson told the French president, Raymond Poincaré, that while a fierce battle awaited, it would be over in just one day.143