From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (67 page)

In response to the new internationalism, a self-conscious isolationism began to take form, and the word
isolationism
became firmly implanted in the nation's political vocabulary. Previously, non-involvement in European politics and wars had been a given. But the threat posed by the Great War and the emergence of internationalist sentiment gave rise to an ideology of isolationism, promoted most fervently by Bryan, to
preserve America's long-standing tradition of non-involvement as a way of safeguarding the nation's way of life.
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While Democratic Party zealots during the election campaign of 1916 vigorously pushed the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Wilson began to articulate an internationalist position and also the revolutionary concept that the United States should assume a leadership position in world affairs. In a June 1916 speech Colonel House described as a "land mark in history," he vowed U.S. willingness to "become a partner in any feasible association of nations" to maintain the peace.
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"We are part of the world," he proclaimed in Omaha in early October; "nothing that concerns the whole world can be indifferent to us." The "great catastrophe" brought about by the war, he added later in the day, compelled Americans to recognize that they lived in a "new age" and must therefore operate "not according to the traditions of the past, but according to the necessities of the present and the prophecies of the future." The United States could no longer refuse to play the "great part in the world which was providentially cut out for her. . . . We have got to serve the world."
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Shortly after his narrow reelection victory over Republican Charles Evans Hughes, a gloomy Wilson, fearing that the United States might be dragged into war, redoubled his efforts to end the European struggle. Twice previously, he had sent House—"my second personality"—on peace missions to Europe. His hands strengthened by reelection, he began to promote a general peace agreement including a major role for the United States. In December 1916, he invited both sides to state their war aims and accept U.S. good offices in negotiating a settlement.

In a dramatic January 22, 1917, address to the Senate, Wilson sketched out his revolutionary ideas for a just peace and a new world order. To the belligerents, he eloquently appealed for a "peace without victory," the only way to ensure that the loser's quest for revenge did not spark another war. In terms of the postwar world, a "community of power" must replace the balance of power, the old order of militarism, and power politics. The equality of nations great and small must be recognized. No nation should impose its authority on another. A new world order must guarantee freedom of the seas, limit armaments, and ensure the right of all peoples to form their own government. Most important, Wilson advocated a "covenant" for an international organization to ensure that "no such catastrophe shall ever overwhelm us again." Speaking to his
domestic audience, the president advanced the notion, still heretical to most Americans, that their nation must play a key role in making and sustaining the postwar settlement. Without its participation, he averred, no "covenant of cooperative peace" could "keep the future safe without war." He also stressed to his domestic audience that his proposals accorded with American traditions. The principles of "President Monroe" would become the "doctrine of the world." "These are American principles, American policies . . . ," he concluded in ringing phrases. "They are the principles of mankind and must prevail."
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Wilson's speech was "at once breathtaking in the audacity of its vision of a new world order," historian Robert Zieger has written, "and curiously detached from the bitter realities of Europe's battlefields."
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His efforts to promote negotiations failed. His equating of Allied war aims with those of Germany outraged London and Paris. When the blatantly pro-Allied Lansing sought to repair the damage with an unauthorized public statement, he infuriated Wilson and aroused German suspicions. In any event, by early 1917, none of the belligerents would accept U.S. mediation or a compromise peace. Both sides had suffered horribly in the rat-infested, disease-ridden trenches of Europe—"this vast gruesome contest of systematized destruction," Wilson called it.
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The battles of attrition of 1916 were especially appalling. Britain suffered four hundred thousand casualties in the Somme offensive, sixty thousand in a single day, with no change in its tactical position. Germans called the five-month struggle for Verdun "the sausage grinder"; the French labeled it "the furnace." It cost both sides nearly a million casualties. German and French killed at Verdun together exceeded the total dead for the American Civil War.
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By the end of the year, both sides were exhausted.

As investments of blood and treasure mounted, attitudes hardened. In December 1916, David Lloyd George, who had vowed to fight to a "knock-out," assumed leadership of a coalition government in Britain and responded to Wilson's overture with a list of conditions unacceptable to the Central Powers. The Germans made clear they would state their war aims only at a general conference to which Wilson would not be invited. In the meantime, more ominously, German leaders finally acceded to the navy's argument that with one hundred U-boats now available an
all-out submarine campaign could win the war before U.S. intervention had any effect. On January 31, Berlin announced the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare.
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Wilson faced an awful dilemma. Stunned by these developments, he privately labeled Germany a "madman that should be curbed." But he was loath to go to war. He still believed that a compromise peace through which neither side emerged triumphant would be best calculated to promote a stable postwar world. It would be a "crime," he observed, for the United States to "involve itself in the war to such an extent as to make it impossible to save Europe afterward." In view of his earlier threats, he had no choice but to break relations with Germany, and he did so on February 3. Despite the urging of House and Lansing, he still refused to ask for a declaration of war. He continued to insist that he could have greater influence as a neutral mediator than as a belligerent. He recognized that his nation remained deeply divided and that many Americans opposed going to war. As late as February 25 he charged the war hawks in his cabinet with operating on the outdated principles of the "Code Duello."
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Events drove him to the fateful decision. The infamous Zimmermann Telegram, leaked to the United States by Britain in late February, revealed that Germany had offered Mexico an alliance in return for which it might "reconquer its former territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona." The document fanned anti-German sentiment in America and increased Wilson's already pronounced distrust of Berlin.
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In mid-March, U-boats sank three U.S. merchant vessels with the loss of fifteen American lives. For all practical purposes, Germany was at war with the United States. Reluctantly and most painfully, Wilson concluded that war could not be avoided. The Germans had repeatedly and brutally violated American rights on the high seas. A failure to respond after his previous threats would undermine his position abroad and open him to political attack at home. Wilson had long since concluded that the United States must play a central role in the peacemaking. Surrender on the U-boat issue would demonstrate its unworthiness for that role. Germany's own repeated violation of its promises and its intrigues as evidenced in the Zimmermann Telegram made clear to Wilson that it could not be trusted. Only through active intervention, he now rationalized, could U.S. influence be used to establish a just postwar order. War was unpalatable, but at least it would give the United States a voice at the peace table. Otherwise, he told
Addams, he could only "call through a crack in the door."
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Moving slowly to allow public opinion to coalesce behind him, Wilson concluded by late March that he must intervene in the war.

On April 2, 1917, the president appeared before packed chambers of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. In a thirty-six-minute speech, he condemned Germany's "cruel and unmanly" violation of American rights and branded its "wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants" as "warfare against mankind." The United States could not "choose the path of submission," he observed. It must accept the state of war that had "been thrust upon it." He concluded with soaring rhetoric that would echo through the ages. "It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war," he conceded. But "the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried dearest to our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." As critics have repeatedly emphasized, Wilson set goals beyond the ability of any person or nation to achieve. Perhaps he felt such lofty aims were necessary to rally a still-divided nation to take action unprecedented in its history. He may have aimed so high to justify in his own mind the horrors he knew a war would bring. In any event, he set for himself and his nation an impossible task that would bring great disillusionment.
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Germany's gamble to win the war before the United States intervened in force nearly succeeded. Adhering to the nation's long-standing tradition of non-entanglement and in order to retain maximum diplomatic freedom of action, Wilson and General Pershing insisted that Americans fight separately under their own command rather than being integrated into Allied armies. It took months to raise, equip, and train a U.S. army and then transport it to Europe. A token force of "doughboys" paraded in Paris on July 4, 1917, but it would be more than a year before the United States could throw even minimal weight into the fray. In the meantime, buoyed by promises of future U.S. help, France and Britain launched disastrous summer 1917 offensives. French defeats provoked mutinies that sapped the army's will to fight. Allied setbacks in the west combined with
the Bolshevik seizure of power in late 1917 and Russia's subsequent withdrawal from the war gave the Central Powers a momentary edge. Facing serious morale problems at home from the Allied blockade, Germany mounted an end-the-war offensive in the spring of 1918.

It was a transformative moment in the war.
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The German army again drove close to Paris, but it could not break through Allied lines and suffered irreplaceable losses. The addition of 850,000 fresh U.S. troops made possible an Allied summer counteroffensive. More important, as the German high command conceded, huge numbers of Americans arriving at the front produced foreboding of defeat.
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Long before the fighting ended, Wilson had begun to fashion a liberal peace program to reshape the postwar world. The ideas he advanced were not original with him. Even before the founding of the nation, Americans believed they had a special destiny to redeem the world. Prior to 1914, European, British, and American thinkers had dreamed of reforming international politics, a task made urgent by the horrors of the Great War. But Wilson promoted these ideas with a special fervor and eloquence and made himself their leading spokesman. In the process, he formulated and articulated a set of principles that would bear his name—Wilsonianism—and would influence U.S. foreign policy and world politics for years to come.

In Wilson's view, the war provided that opportunity for world leadership for which Americans had been preparing themselves since the birth of the nation. The death and destruction visited upon Europe made clear the bankruptcy of the old order. Scientific and technological advances created the means to uplift the human race. The United States must therefore take the lead in building a better world. "We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world," Wilson affirmed in 1916. Replacing traditional American unilateralism with a universalist view, he insisted that "the interests of all nations are our own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind is inevitably our affair."
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Wilson insisted that a just and lasting peace must be constructed along American lines. He assumed the superiority of Western civilization and the continued dominance of the West. But he believed that European imperialism had exploited helpless peoples and generated explosive tensions among the great powers. Old World diplomacy had produced only "aggression, egotism, and war." Economic nationalism, with its tariff wars and exclusive, monopolistic trading arrangements, had exacerbated international
conflict. Wilson found equally abhorrent the radical notions of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who had seized power in Russia in late 1917, that the international system could be freed of war only by a worldwide revolution that eliminated capitalism. He firmly believed in American exceptionalism. Only a world reformed along liberal-capitalist lines would serve the United States and the broader interests of mankind. Economic nationalism must give way to a commercial internationalism in which all nations had equal access to the markets and raw materials of the world, tariff barriers were eliminated, and freedom of the seas guaranteed. Colonial empires should eventually be dissolved and all peoples given the right to determine their own destiny. Power politics must be replaced by a new world order maintained by an organization of like-minded nations joined to resolve disputes and prevent aggression—"not a balance of power but a community of power."
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In a series of public statements, most notably in his Fourteen Points address of January 8, 1918, Wilson molded these broad principles into a peace program. Called by the
New York Herald
"one of the great documents in American history," the speech responded to Lenin's revelations of the Allied secret treaties dividing the spoils of war and his calls for an end to imperialism as well as a speech by Lloyd George setting out broad peace terms. Wilson sought to regain the initiative for the United States and rally Americans and Allied peoples behind his peace program. He called for "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at." He reiterated his commitment to arms limitations, freedom of the seas, and reduction of trade barriers. On colonial issues, to avoid alienating the Allies, he sought a middle ground between the old-style imperialism of the secret treaties and Lenin's call for an end to empire. He did not use the word
self-determination
, but he did insist that in dealing with colonial claims the "interests" of colonial peoples should be taken into account, a marked departure from the status quo. He also set forth broad principles for European territorial settlements—a sharp break from the U.S. tradition of non-involvement in European affairs. The peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires should be assured "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development." Belgium must be evacuated, territory formerly belonging to France restored. A "general association of nations" must be established to preserve the peace.
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