![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
‘Probably no American of the twentieth century has received more scholarly attention than Woodrow Wilson’ [L.E. Gelfand, ‘When Ideals Confront Self-Interest: Wilsonian Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 125–34, 125] yet this scholarly attention has yet to consider the role that natural resources played in Wilson’s understanding of the world, or to examine how his understanding of concepts that were central to his political writing and decisions, such as self-determination, were tied to access to natural resources. This article will fill this gap and sketch out how both Wilson and ‘Wilsonianism’ consider natural resources and the implications of this.
Notes on contributor
Ashley Dodsworth gained her PhD from the University of Leicester in 2015. She is currently Senior Teaching Associate in Politics at the University of Bristol, where she teaches political thought and US politics. Her research focuses on the intersection of environmental political thought and the history of political thought.
Notes
1. L.E. Gelfand, ‘When Ideals Confront Self-Interest: Wilsonian Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 125–34, 125.
2. T. Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination’, Diplomatic History 35, no. 3 (2011): 445–81, 450.
3. P. Gottfried, ‘Wilsonianism: The Legacy Won’t Die’, The Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 2 (1990): 117–126.
4. R.W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), ix.
5. W. Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Ed. A.S. Link, 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), Vol. 45, 536–7. Hereafter PWW.
6. R. Carlisle, Sovereignty at Sea: U.S. Merchant Ships and American Entry into World War One (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2011), 5.
7. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War, 108.
8. Carlisle, Sovereignty at Sea, 6.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. J.M. Lemnitzer, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality, the Freedom of the Seas and the Myth of the “Civil War Precedents”’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 27, no. 4 (2016) 615–38.
11. Wilson, PWW 45, 472.
12. ‘The Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees’ (PWW 45, 538).
13. ‘An independent Polish state should be erected … . Which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea’ (PWW 45, 538).
14. W. Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s Case for the League of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), 192.
15. For the influence of the Declaration of London see telegram to Spring Rice from Grey, forwarded to Wilson in PWW 31, 155.
16. Carlisle, Sovereignty at Sea, 5.
17. Quoted in PWW 33, 478
18. Wilson, PWW 45, 512.
19. Floyd, M.R., Abandoning American Neutrality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 87.
20. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 70.
21. Lemnitzer, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality’, 63.
22. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 129.
23. Ibid., 69.
24. J.A. Thompson, ‘Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conflict Concept’, International Affairs 86, no. 1 (2010): 27–48, 36.
25. Mezes at al PWW 45: 466, emphasis in original.
26. M.D. Magee, ‘Wilson’s Religious, Historical and Political Thought’, in A Companion to Woodrow Wilson, ed. R.A. Kennedy (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 38–54, 51.
27. Wilson 1894 quoted in Ibid., 51.
28. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 34.
29. Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points’, 451.
30. Ibid., 447 and see also ibid., 446.
31. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 36.
32. Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points’, 466 and see Wilson’s reference to point ten as concerned with ‘territorial integrity and existing political independence’ for support in Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 77–8.
33. Wilson, PWW 45, 513.
34. Ibid., 514 and ibid., 484.
35. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 36.
36. Wilson, PWW 37, 115.
37. K.A. Clements, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Policy 1913–1915’, Diplomatic History 4, no. 2 (1980): 113–36, 113, n1.
38. Wilson, PWW 37, 510.
39. Ibid., 510.
40. L.C. Gardner, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution’, Woodrow Wilson and the Revolutionary World, ed. A.S. Link (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3–48, 5.
41. Wilson, PWW 33, 510.
42. Clements, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Policy’, 122 citing Spring Rice, PWW 29, 228–31.
43. Spring Rice, PWW 29, 229.
44. Clements, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Policy’, 125, see also Wilson, PWW 48, 255.
45. Taken from PWW 33, 44.
46. Wilson, PWW 33, 510.
47. Gardner, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution’, 29.
48. Wilson, PWW 48, 255.
49. Gardner, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution’, 35.
50. Ibid., 40.
51. Mezes et al., PWW 45, 472.
52. Wilson, PWW 33, 510.
53. Floyd, Abandoning American Neutrality, 87.
54. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 175.
55. T.J. Knock, To End All Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 113.
56. Floyd, Abandoning American Neutrality, 87.
57. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 69.
58. The trade in copper and other minerals in this period would also relate to this point, however, I have chosen to focus on the cotton crisis as it was this trade that most concerned both America and Britain and therefore most explicitly highlights this intersection of natural resources, economic stability and trade.
59. Wilson, PWW 33, 526.
60. See his letter of 23rd May 1915, PWW 33, 239.
61. Floyd, Abandoning American Neutrality, 46 and see also Link, The Cotton Crisis, 122.
62. A.S. Link, ‘The Cotton Crisis, The South and Anglo-American Diplomacy 1914–1915’, Studies in Southern History, ed. J.C. Sitterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 122–138, 122.
63. Floyd, Abandoning American Neutrality, 48.
64. Wilson, quoted in Link, The Cotton Crisis, 128.
65. Sharp Williams, PWW 33, 457.
66. Wilson, PWW 31, 233.
67. Link, The Cotton Crisis, 131.
68. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations.
69. W.R. Mead, Special Providence (New York: Routledge, 2002), 134.
70. L. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2.
71. Thompson, ‘Wilsonianism’, 42.
72. Gottfried, ‘Wilsonianism’.
73. Kissinger, quoted in G.J. Ikenberry, ‘Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration and the Future of Liberal Internationalism’, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. G.J. Ikenberry, T.J. Knock, A.-M. Slaughter, and T. Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–24, 6.
74. Wilson, PWW 45, 512.
75. Ibid., 536.
76. Mead, Special Providence, 166.
77. Thompson, ‘Wilsonianism’, 48.
78. W.R. Mead, ‘The American Perspective on Global Order’, Still a Western World? Continuity and Change in Global Order, ed. S. Fabbrini and R. Marchetti (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), 60.
79. T. Deibel, Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic for American Statecraft (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 88.
80. Wilson, Case for the League of Nations, 174.
81. Wilson, PWW 37, 114.