To End All Wars, New Edition: Woodrow Wilson And The Quest For A New World Order

435 Pages·2019·54.177 MB·English

by  Thomas J. Knock

TO END ALL WARS

TO END
A LL
WARS
Woodrow Wilson and the Quest
for a New World Order
New Edition
THOMAS J. KNOCK
With a new preface by the author
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 1992 by Thomas J. Knock
New Preface copyright © 2019 by Thomas J. Knock
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this
work should be sent to Permissions, Prince ton University Press
Published by Prince ton University Press, 41 William Street,
Prince ton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Prince ton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press . princeton . edu
Cover image courtesy of Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library &
Museum, Staunton, Virginia.
All Rights Reserved
First published in hardcover by Oxford University Press, 1992
First Prince ton Paperback printing, 1995
New Edition, with a new preface by the author, 2019
Paperback ISBN: 9780691191614
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018963370
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For
my mother and father,
Evelyn T. Moorman and JacJ^ A. Knoc\
my aunt, Dorothea M. Drischel
and Arthur S. hin\

P N E
reface to the ew dition
Woodrow Wilson is neither fondly remembered nor well understood by most
Americans in the twenty- first century; even so, he occupies a secure position
within the pantheon of great presidents. The domestic legislation he signed
into law and the new directions he charted in foreign policy during the First
World War shaped the politics and diplomacy of the United States through-
out the twentieth century and beyond. Among all presidents only Franklin
Roo se velt and Lyndon Johnson have matched Wilson’s rec ord in enacting a
significant legislative program. Much of Wilson’s program, like FDR’s and
LBJ’s, is still with us today. It includes the creation of the Federal Reserve
System and the Federal Trade Commission, tariff reform that reduced rates
by 40  percent, and the first federal laws to restrict child labor and to establish
the eight- hour day (for the nation’s 400,000 railroad workers). But Wilson
carved out his most monumental legacy in the realm of international politics.
No chief executive has ever set in motion a more original idea for reducing the
risk of war than the twenty- eighth president did through the Covenant of
the League of Nations. According to Senator J. William Fulbright, this was
“the one great new idea of the 20th  century in the field of international rela-
tions, the idea of international organ ization with permanent pro cesses for the
peaceful settlement of disputes.”1 Owing to his aspirations and the tragic re-
versal of fortunes that befell him a fter having accomplished so much, however,
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viii Preface to the New Edition
Wilson remains a controversial as well as a consequential president. And he
has refused to go away. Since his death in 1924, he has continued to compel
the attention of scholars and prac ti tion ers of American foreign policy, with
con temporary concerns always a part of the driving force.2
Once, during a critical juncture in the Armistice negotiations in Octo-
ber 1918, Wilson told an anxious Demo cratic senator, “I am now playing for
100 years hence.” He did not speak idly.3 Indeed, in the centennial of the
United States’ direct involvement in the First World War, it was profoundly
ironic that Donald Trump’s challenges to long- standing international com-
mitments and certain standards of be hav ior should have coincided with the
one hundredth anniversary of such events as the Fourteen Points address and
the strug gle over American membership in the League of Nations. Having
already appropriated from the pre– Pearl Harbor period a contentious phrase,
“Amer i ca First,” Trump summoned in 2016–17 a new form of American anti-
internationalism, if not quite isolationism. His administration soon would
question the usefulness of the United Nations and alliances such as NATO,
withdraw from the proposed Trans- Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate
Accord, and UNESCO, and unveil an “Amer i ca First” bud get. In May 2018
the president announced that the United States would abandon the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action that had effectively restricted Iran’s nuclear
weapons development program; the following month the United States left
the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. Since January 2017, impas-
sioned critics, responding to Trump’s wrecking- ball approach to American
foreign policy, have argued that the comparative peace, prosperity, and
stability that prevailed in the West throughout the Cold War and into the
twenty- first century owed to the vari ous security alliances and international
economic institutions that the United States has created or underwritten
since 1945.4
Few of these briefs, however, took much note of the concurrence of Trump’s
advent and the Wilsonian centenary. Nor did they seek out insights from the
president who did more than any other to give life to the very notion of a pro-
gressive world order. Yet Wilson’s internationalism may provide a better cor-
rective to the works of Trump and of some of his censurable pre de ces sors than
the current defenders of Cold War globalism have proffered. It might even
offer the remedy. In light of the renewed debate over Amer i ca’s proper role in
the world, the ironic coincidence reminds us that President Wilson’s vision of
an international community retains undeniable relevance, that his greatest
worries a c entury ago remain ours today.5
In January 1918 Wilson unveiled his Fourteen Points before a joint session
of Congress. Along with certain specific territorial arrangements, this blue-
print for a better world included proposals for a significant reduction of arma-
ments among the great powers, impartial adjustments of all colonial claims, an
equality of trade conditions and the lowering of economic barriers among all
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Preface to the New Edition ix
nations, freedom of the seas, and the establishment of a league of nations. The
program embodied new ideas and new ways of thinking about what the inter-
national community of the twentieth c entury might achieve in the wake of the
unparalleled catastrophe born of the nineteenth c entury.
For Wilson, the progressive, the most impor tant of t hese war aims was the
fourteenth— the postwar peacekeeping machinery he would design at the Paris
peace conference in 1919. This was no slender organ ization. With its provisions
for settling disputes between nations through arbitration, for arms reductions,
and for imposing collective economic or military sanctions against any nation
that attacked another in the first instance, the league would wield real author-
ity. Yet, at e very turn, Wilson put the heavier stress on what t oday we call con-
flict resolution— that is, on the crucial machinery for avoiding war before it
started, for facilitating disarmament and settling international disputes peace-
fully through the pro cess of arbitration. He once said the league “must grow
and not be made,” that it would have to evolve by stages through experience, on
a case- by- case basis. The obligation to submit disputes to arbitration, for exam-
ple, would create, “ little by l ittle, pre ce dents that would break the habit of re-
course to arms.” And so, he explained, “a machinery and practice of cooperation
would naturally spring up which would [produce] . . . a regularly constituted
and employed concert of nations.” Seventy- five years l ater, in an essay in 1993 on
how the lack of faith in the United Nations might be overcome, Lori Fisler
Damrosch of Columbia University Law School also saw the prob lem as a m atter
of cultivating the habit: “Small achievements w ill lead to greater ones, and more
of them, and eventually to patterns that reflect under lying princi ples.”6
Of all the great powers, only the United States rejected Wilson’s pi lot cre-
ation. Whereas partisanship motivated much of the opposition in American
politics, ideological conviction informed most of the objections to it. “Interna-
tionalism has come,” the Demo cratic senator Gilbert Hitchcock remarked,
“and we must choose what form the internationalism is to take.” That was
how most participants at the time understood the great debate—as a strug gle
between Wilson’s progressive internationalism and a more conservative,
circumscribed one that most Republicans preferred. Yet very few of Wilson’s
adversaries w ere isolationists. Most of them, including the redoubtable Sena-
tor Henry Cabot Lodge, were conservative internationalists. Because league
membership held serious implications for national sovereignty and unilateral
action, conservatives in the Senate refused to countenance the treaty u nless
some fourteen reservations w ere attached to it. The most consequential of
these concerned arbitration, collective security, and disarmament— provisions
that might interfere with the unilateral exercise of force. According to Senator
Lodge the reservations would “release us from obligations that might not be
kept” while “preserving rights which ought not be infringed.”7
Wilson held that such reservations would “change the entire meaning” of
the treaty, that the league would be undermined from the start if the United
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