by Adam Tooze
As the door to the American century swung wide in January 1917, Wilson stood poised in the frame. He came not to take sides but to make peace. The first dramatic assertion of American leadership in the twentieth century was not directed towards ensuring that the ‘right’ side won, but that no side did.17 The only kind of peace with any prospect of securing the cooperation of all the major world powers was one that was accepted by all sides. All parties to the Great War must acknowledge the conflict’s deep futility. That meant that the war could have only one outcome: ‘peace without victory’. It was this phrase that encapsulated the standpoint of moral equivalence with which Wilson had consistently staked his distance from the Europeans since the outbreak of the war. It was a stance that he knew would stick in the gullet of many in his audience in January 1917.18 ‘It is not pleasant to say this . . . I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealments.’ In the current slaughter the US must take no side. For America to ride to the assistance of Britain, France and the Entente would certainly ensure their victory. But in so doing America would be perpetuating the old world’s horrible cycle of violence. It would, Wilson insisted in private conversation, be nothing less than a ‘crime against civilization’.19
Wilson was later to be accused of the idealistic belief that the League of Nations could by itself ensure peace, of shrinking moralistically from the question of power. The failure to face up to the question of international enforcement was denounced as the birth-fault of internationalist ‘idealism’. But in that sense Wilson was never an idealist. What he called for in January 1917 was a ‘peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind’. If the war ended in a world divided between victors and vanquished, the force necessary to sustain it would be immense. But what Wilson aspired to was disarmament. At all costs he wanted to avoid the ‘Prussianization’ of America itself. This was why a peace without victory was so essential. ‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser . . . It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand . . .’ ‘The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance . . . Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the convictions of mankind.’20 It was precisely to create the necessary conditions for a peace that could be upheld without a costly international security system that Wilson in January 1917 was calling for an end to the war. The exhaustion of the warlike spirits of all the powers, the demonstration by example that war had lost its utility, would make the League self-supporting.
But if this was what Wilson meant by a peace of equals, it had a further implication. Wilson is famous as the great internationalist amongst American presidents. However, the world he wanted to create was one in which the exceptional position of America at the head of world civilization would be inscribed on the gravestone of European power. The peace of equals that Wilson had in mind would be a peace of collective European exhaustion. The brave new world would begin with the collective humbling of all the European powers at the feet of the United States, raised triumphant as the neutral arbiter and the source of a new form of international order.21 Wilson’s vision was neither one of gutless idealism nor a plan to subordinate US sovereignty to international authority. He was in fact making an exorbitant claim to American moral supremacy, rooted in a distinctive vision of America’s historic destiny.
II
Unlike the response to the 14 Points in 1918, the reaction to Wilson’s call for a ‘peace without victory’ in January 1917 was distinctly mixed.22 In the US the President was cheered by his progressive and left-wing supporters. By contrast much of the Republican Party reacted with fury to what they understood as an unprecedented partisan intervention by the executive branch. Following the bitterly contested election of 1916, the President’s address was, one Republican fumed, a ‘stump speech delivered from the throne’, an unprecedented abuse of the Senate as a platform for a partisan executive branch.23 Another member of the audience was left with the impression that Wilson ‘thinks he is the President of the world’. Charles Austin Beard, the noted progressive historian, commented to The New York Times that the only conceivable reason Wilson would have taken such an initiative was that, as in 1905 when President Roosevelt mediated the Russo-Japanese War, one of the sides in the conflict was on the point of bankruptcy and needed urgently to end the struggle.24 That Wilson meant to bankrupt them was precisely what the Entente feared. For Paris and London the questions raised by Wilson’s speech went beyond constitutional niceties. His vision threatened to drive a wedge into the solidarity of the Allied home front that had so far enabled the war to be continued in large part on a volunteer basis without draconian domestic repression. What was even more alarming was that Wilson was entirely aware of what he was doing. ‘Perhaps I am the only person in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world,’ the President proclaimed before the Senate, ‘who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back.’ ‘May I not add,’ he went on, ‘that I hope and believe that I am in effect speaking for liberals and friends of humanity in every nation and of every program of liberty?’ Indeed, Wilson went further: ‘I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear.’
It was here that the true import of Wilson’s address became clear. The American President was calling into question the representative legitimacy of all of the combatant governments. And on the Entente side, the far from silent organizations that claimed to represent that ‘mass of mankind’ responded to Wilson’s cue. As Wilson spoke on 22 January the British Labour movement was meeting in Manchester – 700 delegates, including a minister in Lloyd George’s new government, representing two and a quarter million members, more than four times the number at their first meeting in 1901.25 The general tone of the discussion was patriotic. But at the mention of Wilson’s name the anti-war faction organized in the Independent Labour Party burst into a well-orchestrated ovation.26 Though this earned them a reprimand from The Times, the Manchester Guardian applauded.27 In the French chamber on 26 January, 80 Socialist deputies called on the government to express its agreement with Wilson’s ‘elevated and reasonable’ sentiments.28
All of this ought to have presented a truly historic opportunity for Germany. The American President had weighed the war in the balance and had refused to take the Entente’s side. When the blockade revealed what Britain’s command of the seaways meant for global trade, Wilson had responded with an unprecedented naval programme of his own. He seemed bent on blocking any further mobilization of the American economy. He had called for peace talks whilst Germany still had the upper hand. He was not deterred by the fact that Bethmann Hollweg had gone first. Now he was speaking quite openly to the population of Britain, France and Italy, over the heads of their governments, demanding an end to the war. The German Embassy in Washington fully understood the significance of the President’s words and desperately urged Berlin to respond positively. Already in September 1916, after extended conversations with Colonel House, Ambassador Bernstorff had cabled Berlin that the American President would seek to mediate as soon as the election was over and that ‘Wilson regards it as in the interest of America that neither of the combatants should gain a decisive victory’.29 In December the ambassador sought to bring home to Berlin the importance of Wilson’s intervention in the financial markets, which would be a far less dangerous way of throttling the Entente than an all-out U-boat campaign. Above all, Bernstorff understood Wilson’s ambition. If he could bring the war to an end he would claim for the American pr
esidency the ‘glory of being the premier political personage on the world’s stage’.30 If the Germans were to thwart him, they should beware his wrath. But such appeals were not enough to halt the logic of escalation that had been set in motion by the Entente’s near breakthrough in the late summer of 1916.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the generals who had saved Germany from Russia in 1914 and conquered Poland in 1915. But they owed their rise to the Supreme Command to the crisis of the Central Powers in August 1916. This experience of near disaster defined the politics of the war in Germany from this moment onwards. In 1916, Germany had sought to bleed France dry at Verdun, but out of concerns about America it had withheld the U-boats. The Entente had survived. Over the summer of 1916 the blows dealt to Austria had been near fatal. Given the force mobilized by the Entente in the meantime, any further restraint would be disastrous. The leading figures in Berlin never took seriously the idea that Wilson might actually manage to stop the war. Whatever the nuances of American politics, they insisted its economy was ever more committed on the Entente side. The effect was self-fulfilling. By acting on their deterministic beliefs about American politics, the Kaiser’s strategists tore the ground from beneath Wilson’s feet. On 9 January 1917, overriding the hesitant objections of their Chancellor, Hindenburg and Ludendorff rammed through the decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare.31 Within less than two weeks the depths of their miscalculation were to become obvious. Even as Wilson strode to the Senate rostrum on 22 January 1917 to call for the war to be brought to an end, Germany’s U-boats were battering their way through winter seas to assume battle stations in a wide arc surrounding the British and French Atlantic coastline. As Ambassador Bernstorff informed the State Department in anguished terms, it was too late for them to be recalled. At 5 p.m. on 31 January he handed Secretary of State Lansing the official declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare against the supply lines of the Entente in the Atlantic and the eastern Mediterranean. On 3 February, Congress approved the breaking of diplomatic relations with Germany.
The German decision cast ‘peace without victory’ into historical oblivion. It drove America into a war that Wilson detested. It robbed him of the role to which he truly aspired, the arbiter of a global peace. The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on 9 January 1917 marked a turning point in world history. It forged another link in the chain of aggression stretching back to August 1914 and forward to Hitler’s relentless onslaught between 1938 and 1942, which held fast the image of Germany as an irrepressible force of violence. Already at the time unrestricted U-boat warfare was the subject of anguished self-examination. As Bethmann Hollweg’s diplomatic advisor, Kurt Riezler, noted in his diary, ‘the fate that hangs over everything suggests the thought that Wilson may in fact have intended to pressure the others and had the means to do so and that that would have been 100 times better than the U Boat war’.32 For nationalist liberals such as the great sociologist Max Weber, one of the most penetrating political commentators of the day, Bethmann Hollweg’s willingness to allow the military’s technical arguments to override his own better judgement was damning evidence of the lasting damage done to Germany’s political culture by Bismarck.33
But if we allow the peculiar pathology of German political history alone to explain the derailment of ‘peace without victory’, we understate the significance of the rift between Washington and the Entente over the winter of 1916–17. Wilson’s challenge was not to Germany in particular, but to European power as a whole. Indeed his challenge was principally directed at the Entente. From the Somme offensive of July 1916 onwards, it was the Entente that took the initiative in replying to Wilson’s obvious desire for a negotiated peace, by widening and intensifying the conflict. The fact that this caused Germany to tip America into the Entente’s camp should not obscure the fact that the Entente too was running huge risks. To compound the irony, the Entente ran them on assumptions that were complementary to those on which Germany committed itself to its disastrous course of aggression. If London and Paris entwined America ever more into their war effort, Wilson’s hand would be forced. But it was, in fact, only Germany’s anticipation of that logic that made it real. This would be obscured by hindsight, but it was not forgotten by contemporaries. It would return to haunt them in the politics of the armistice in October 1918. But even after the opening of the U-boat campaign it was not clear that all was decided.
III
Following the severing of diplomatic relations with Germany, there were many in Wilson’s administration, perhaps most notably Secretary of State Lansing, who now wanted to commit completely to the Entente. America, he demanded, should align itself with its ‘natural’ allies in the cause of ‘human liberty and the suppression of Absolutism’.34 The pro-Entente voices in the Republican Party led by Teddy Roosevelt were in full cry. The British government was only too keen to seize this opportunity of a transatlantic political alliance. Having belatedly come to the realization that, as their ambassador to Washington put it, ‘Morgans cannot be regarded as a substitute for the proper diplomatic authorities in conducting negotiations likely to affect our relations with the United States’, London hurriedly dispatched a Treasury team to Washington in the hope of initiating government-to-government contact.35
Atlanticism came easily to the Entente by 1917.36 Since before the war, starting with the Second Moroccan Crisis at Agadir in 1911, it had become increasingly commonplace to stress the political solidarity of Britain and France against the bullying imperialism of Germany. Deeply disappointed by the failure of his hopes for an Anglo-German rapprochement, Lloyd George came to see France as ‘Britain’s ideological counterpart in Europe’. Upholding their alliance against the ‘throned Philistines of Europe’ was essential.37 In his wartime speeches Lloyd George did not hesitate to associate British democracy with the European revolutionary tradition. The knock-out blow to Imperial Germany, he promised, would deliver ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’ for all.38 To assert a common Atlantic heritage in the struggle for liberty and freedom was simply the next step in this chain of historical and ideological associations.
Such thinking came even more easily to French Republicans. Already before the war, many in the Third Republic had looked upon the Entente with Britain as a ‘liberal alliance’ that would help France offset its regrettable dependence on an alliance with the autocracy of Tsarist Russia.39 When André Tardieu, one of Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s closest collaborators, was dispatched to Washington in May 1917, his mission was to deliver an appeal for the ‘two democracies, France and America’ to stand together in proving the point that ‘republics are in no way inferior to monarchies when they are attacked and have to defend themselves’.40 And there were, of course, plenty of voices in the United States willing to chime in. In the spring of 1917, French delegations to Washington and New York were feted as the heirs of Lafayette who had helped to win freedom for the colonists in 1776. But what both the Entente strategists and the Germans had not reckoned with was the White House and the substantial body of American opinion that President Wilson represented. Despite German aggression, America was not yet at war, and the President and his circle continued to cold-shoulder the Entente.41
Wilson’s reluctance to become involved in the European conflict derived in part from his belief that wider issues were at stake. As we shall see in chapter 5, in the spring of 1917 the President was deeply preoccupied with events in China. Japan’s role as an ally of the Entente disturbed him greatly. Over the winter of 1916–17 the strategy of American leadership that lay behind his call for a peace without victory was explicitly spelled out in racial terms. Given China’s vulnerability and the dynamic expansion of Japanese power, what was at stake for Wilson in suppressing the self-destructive violence of European imperialism were not just the petty quarrels of the old world, but nothing less than the future of ‘white supremacy on this planet’.42 As the US cabinet met to debate the news from Europe in late January 19
17, one witness recorded Wilson’s thought as follows: The President was ‘more and more impressed with the idea that “white civilization” and its domination in the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact, as we would have to build up the nations ravaged by the war. He said that as this idea had grown upon him he had come to the feeling that he was willing to go to any lengths rather than to have the nation actually involved in the conflict.’43 When Wilson said it would be a ‘crime against civilization’ for America to allow itself to become sucked into the war, it was ‘white civilization’ that he had in mind. In Britain there were plenty who shared Wilson’s racial vision of world history. But it was precisely so that Britain could concentrate its main force in Asia, they believed, that Germany must be tamed. The war in Europe was not a distraction from the worldwide struggle, it was an essential part of it. Why then was the President so reluctant to see America’s essential interests engaged? Despite the efforts by the Entente to align their cause with the values of America, Wilson remained deeply sceptical. And if we trace the development of Wilson’s political personality back to its origins in the nineteenth century, it becomes clear why.