A century after President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the European war against Imperial Germany in 1917, his role and legacy have continued as important subjects not only in the scholarship of historians and political scientists but also in the public discourse of both leaders and citizens in modern states. His rationale for U.S. intervention in the war and his vision for a new world order, which he hoped to create during the postwar peacemaking, were controversial at the time. They have remained so, but nevertheless still relevant, as later generations looked to his legacy for insight and guidance while thinking about America’s leadership in international relations and its place in world history. These essays affirm that enduring relevance and contribute to that ongoing scholarly and public dialogue.
When Germany resorted to unconditional submarine warfare early in 1917 to defeat the Allies, particularly the United Kingdom, before the United States could mobilise its potential naval and military force to help them, this direct threat to American shipping and commerce challenged the national sovereignty of the United States, not just its economic prosperity. Wilson expressed his understanding of these overlapping interests with the principle of freedom of the seas. In her essay, Ashley Dodsworth focuses on the importance of this principle in the president’s thinking about war. But she broadens the scope of her interpretation by examining his understanding of natural resources. Wilson, she observes, believed that nation-states could not exercise their sovereignty or self-determination unless they had access to essential natural resources from other countries and could sell their own natural resources to other countries, both of which required the freedom of the seas.
As Dodsworth notes, Wilson explicitly affirmed the principle of freedom of the seas in the second of his Fourteen Points, which outlined his vision of peace in a speech to Congress on 8 January 1918. Even before the United States entered the war, he had begun to frame the issue with his strong response to the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915 by a German submarine. He regarded this attack against a British ship, which killed Americans, as a much more serious German violation of traditional international law than the British offshore blockade of Germany. Dodsworth notes, moreover, that in his Fourteen Points address the president linked the freedom of the seas with the preservation of international peace and, consequently, with the League of Nations he hoped to create after the war. While at this time he asserted that belligerent states should not violate the freedom of the seas, Wilson began to think that the new League might do so in the future on behalf of the international community to stop aggression.
Dodsworth examines two episodes during the First World War to develop her argument regarding natural resources in Wilson’s thinking about the self-determination and economic security of states. First, during the Mexican revolution, he showed his concern that foreign governments might threaten Mexico’s independence by helping their nationals gain exclusive control over Mexico’s natural resources. Wilson saw himself as seeking to protect Mexico’s self-determination in international relations, much as he would later envisage America’s role in the future League of Nations. Second, the cotton crisis in 1915 in Anglo-American relations involved more than the economic losses that American cotton producers would suffer when the British government named cotton as contraband subject to seizure and blockaded its shipment and sale to Germany. This also threatened American sovereignty. When the British agreed to purchase the cotton, that concession resolved the conflict by creating a new market for this natural resource. Wilson preserved not just America’s economic interest in cotton sales but also its independence or self-determination. Despite the British blockade, the United States thus fulfilled the larger purpose of the freedom of the seas.
While focusing on Wilson’s diplomacy during the First World War, Dodsworth emphasis that his legacy of Wilsonianism continued for the next century. Access to natural resources would remain crucial in international relations. Although ‘not paramount nor central’ in the president’s decisions during the First World War, she concludes, ‘this aspect of his thought needs to be explored and added to our larger understanding of Wilson in order to fully comprehend how he came to make the decisions that helped shape the twentieth century.’
In his essay, Clinton Condra demonstrates that the debate between President Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge over the Versailles Treaty, particularly the League of Nations, reflected a historic dialogue in British politics about the human condition and the connections between domestic governance and international relations. During the nineteenth century, John Bright had expressed the worldview that Wilson would advocate during the First World War. Robert Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury, had also articulated the perspective that Lodge would later embrace. Noting these similarities between British and American politicians, Condra makes the larger point that all of them were engaged in a transatlantic Anglo-American debate.
As Condra observes, Bright affirmed an optimistic liberal belief in the potential for progress in human affairs. He hoped that the expansion of democracy in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world would contribute to peace. In his view, the promotion of democracy in domestic politics would provide a better foundation for world peace than the attempt to preserve a precarious balance of power in international relations. Ironically, Bright’s political philosophy led him to support the northern Union against the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War. He believed that President Abraham Lincoln fought that war to preserve democracy in the United States and also to emancipate the African-American slaves. If the northern Union could defeat the southern Confederacy, this would advance democracy and consequently peace. For this reason, Bright resisted the temptation to favour a balance of power between the North and the South, although this division might have served British interests. Condra observes that Wilson, although born and raised in the American South, later adopted Bright’s interpretation of the American Civil War as well as his optimistic liberal vision of international relations. As a further irony, while Bright favoured British isolation from continental European international politics for the purpose of promoting democracy at home, Wilson used the same liberal ideas to justify U.S. intervention in the European war against Germany. Condra notes, ‘Bright regarded the American Civil War much as Wilson would regard the First World War: regrettable as was the violence it entailed, it was nevertheless an indispensable means to the end of transforming the character of international political life.’
In contrast to Bright, Salisbury thought that the European balance of power provided a better foundation for peace than democratic governance ever could. He accepted power politics as a fact of international life, not something that might be overcome with the worldwide spread of democracy. He saw that Louis Napoleon, although democratically elected, had established the Second Empire in France and pursued aggressive foreign policies. Salisbury doubted that the human condition would change and therefore rejected the optimistic liberal belief in progress.
Condra observes that Lodge expressed essentially this same perspective during the First World War. As a consequence, the Republican senator did not believe that Wilson’s League of Nations could ever transform international relations in the way the president promised. It could not inaugurate a new world order of peace. Instead, Lodge feared that the League would entangle the United States in endless international conflicts. It would violate the American diplomatic tradition that President George Washington had established with his 1796 Farewell Address. It would also justify intervention by the League in the Western Hemisphere, thereby undermining the Monroe Doctrine by permitting other great powers to interfere in the region that Americans regarded as their own primary sphere of influence. Lodge favoured democratic governance at home but, like Salisbury, did not regard it as a guarantee of peace abroad. He thought the United States still needed to engage in the world of power politics in pursuit of its own independence or self-determination.
Like Condra, David Clinton places Wilsonianism in a transatlantic historical framework that spanned centuries. In his essay he examines five anniversaries, beginning with 1607 and ending with 1947, all of which helped establish liberal democratic governance and international cooperation as important features in American and world history. Placing Wilson’s statecraft and diplomacy in this context, Clinton clearly reveals that the president’s ideas were not original with him. Nor were they distinctively his legacy. What later generations called Wilsonian was part of a much longer transatlantic history.
Clinton traces the Wilsonian tradition back to 1607 when the British established their first permanent settlement in America at Jamestown. These settlers began to form a new society with habits and institutions, such as their representative assembly in 1619, that would eventually become characteristically American. They also initiated slavery as a source of labor. In 1776, nearly two centuries later, the 13 British colonies fulfilled this promise of self-government by declaring their independence. After the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 drafted a new constitution for the new nation. This was the second of Clinton’s anniversaries that anticipated Wilsonianism. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, building on the Declaration of Independence, asserted their sovereignty as American citizens to establish a federal government that would ensure their freedom and serve their common good. It would enable them to protect their new republic against foreign enemies. Empowered by the Constitution, the federal government could adopt a foreign policy that would, as Clinton explains,
be a policy designed to make the world safe for American democracy to be practiced in America. It would be a Wilsonian government in that it rested on the conviction that popular government was the best form of government for human beings
With the third of his anniversaries, Wilson’s address to the Senate on 22 January 1917, and his war message to Congress on 2 April 1917, Clinton focuses directly on Wilsonianism. The president, he emphasises, believed that popular government was essential to international peace. Democracy would transform international relations, enabling modern states to join together in a League for Peace to guarantee their collective defense and protect their self-determination. This new international institution would replace the old order with its balance of power and military alliances. Wilson would later seek to implement his vision of a new world order by creating the League of Nations. He included Article 10 in its Covenant to promise the guarantee of political independence and territorial integrity for the states in the League.
Clinton recognises, however, that the tenets of Wilsonianism might be contradictory. The League’s purpose might be to guarantee self-determination for its members but it could not do so without exercising its power to deny self-determination to any of them that committed aggression. ‘Far from being mutually reinforcing,’ he observes,
these two elements of Wilsonianism came to be seen as a logical impossibility – one could advocate the right of all peoples to determine their own political future in free and open discussion among themselves, or one could advocate an international body that could coerce and impose its will on any particular government, but one could not have both. Thus was the stalemate created that kept Wilson’s own country out of the institution for which he had sacrificed so much.
Clinton examines the Pact of Paris or Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 as the fourth of his anniversaries. On 6 April 1927, one decade after Congress voted for war against Germany, the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand called on the United States to enter a bilateral treaty with France that would commit both nations never to resort to war against each other. Frank B. Kellogg, the American Secretary of State, eventually entered into discussions that expanded the treaty into a multilateral commitment by any state that signed it not to resolve international disputes by war. Although often identified as Wilsonian, Clinton notes that contemporary advocates of the Pact of Paris such as Nicholas Murray Butler made a sharp distinction between it and Wilson’s League. Because it did not create an international institution as a method of enforcement, it was essentially voluntary.
With the fifth of his anniversaries, Clinton identifies President Harry Truman with the Wilsonian tradition in his treatment of the Truman Doctrine of 12 March 1947. Truman’s rhetoric in this founding document of the Cold War emphasised popular government, although Greece and Turkey, the two countries for whose benefit he delivered his message to Congress, were not democratic. This example shows the frequent contrast between Wilsonianism in theory and in practice.
‘It has been the contention of this essay,’ Clinton concludes,
that Wilsonianism has rested in part on a conviction that popular government, government responsible to the people, is right and that it is also advantageous to the United States in that popular governments will by nature be peaceful members of international society, thereby allowing the US to live in peace. Wilson himself paired this belief with a second – that, in part because of the possibility that not all states would attain popular government simultaneously, the world needed an international security apparatus powerful enough to overawe any state or group of states that might consider undertaking aggression.
In agreement with Condra and Clinton, Ashley Cox places President Wilson in the framework of transatlantic relations between the United Kingdom and the United States. In his essay, he argues that Wilson affirmed ‘transatlantic values’ that had originated in those two countries during the nineteenth century. The two pillars of those Anglo-American values were the promotion of democracy and the international rule of law. Cox interprets Wilson’s decision for war against Germany in 1917 as a manifestation of those values, contending that ‘Wilson viewed German militarism a distinct threat and one that did not fit with the norms of transatlantic society that had built up in the century since the end of the War of 1812.’
In developing his argument that Wilson’s decision for war was essentially a defensive act to preserve the transatlantic society, Cox rejects the perspective of Realist scholars. Contrary to their focus on strategic interests, he highlights the president’s emphasis on making the world safe for democracy and upholding the international rule of law. Although America’s entry into the war obviously reshaped the military balance between the two sets of belligerents, Wilson’s decision in 1917 affirmed the framework of transatlantic values. It was not primarily a strategic calculation. Also downplaying economic interests in Wilson’s thinking about the war, Cox asserts that ‘there are clearly economic factors that led to American intervention in the First World War but these factors alone do not explain the conflict.’
Instead of strategic and economic interests, Cox emphasises transatlantic values as the best framework for understanding Wilson’s decision for U.S. intervention in the war. He argues that for the Wilsonian School, in contrast to the Realist School, moral philosophy surpassed any consideration of strategic or economic interests in decisions about war and peace. Thus, when Wilson faced the crisis of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, he assessed the threat coming from Germany within the framework of his transatlantic values. Fortunately for him, the Russian revolution seemed to open the opportunity to promote democracy in Russia. Defeating German militarism, which threatened Wilson’s understanding of international law, could thus become the means not only of protecting democracy in Western Europe but also of spreading it to Russia. This was the right moment for Wilson to act to make the world safe for democracy.
After focusing on Wilson’s rationale for America’s entry into the First World War in 1917, Cox makes the larger argument that Wilsonianism provides the best framework for understanding the president’s decisions. Rather than trying to view him from some other perspective, scholars should interpret his statecraft and diplomacy by adopting the framework of transatlantic values that he affirmed. Thus, Cox concludes,
The Wilsonian framework gives us several important insights into the debate. Making the ‘world safe for democracy’ has become synonymous with Wilson and the American declaration of war upon Imperial Germany. The role this ideology plays in this declaration is an important one.
All four authors place Wilson’s decision for war in 1917 in the broader framework of international history, particularly of transatlantic relations. Although scholars have studied his role during the First World War for a century, offering a variety of interpretations, Dodsworth, Condra, Clinton and Cox seek to provide fresh perspectives. They recognise that his worldview did not originate with him. He articulated ideas that came from the transatlantic exchange between the British and the Americans over many generations. They also agree that the president’s legacy of Wilsonianism continues to be relevant, although controversial. These essays add to that ongoing debate.
Notes on contributor
Lloyd E. Ambrosius is Emeritus Professor of History and Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which honoured him with the Louise Pound-George Howard Distinguished Career Award in 2015. He is the author of Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Scholarly Resources, 1991), Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2017).