Foreign policy of the Woodrow Wilson administration
Bryan resigned in June 1915 after Wilson sent to Berlin a note of protest in response to the Sinking of the RMS Lusitania, a British passenger liner, by a German U-boat, with the death of 128 Americans.
Lansing expressed his views by manipulating the work of the State Department to minimize conflict with Britain and maximize public awareness of Germany's faults.
House solved the problem by a close friendship with Sir William Wiseman, a British banker who took charge of financial negotiations as well as intelligence operations.
Washington wanted any new president to continue Díaz's policies that had been favorable to American mining and oil interests and produced stability domestically and internationally.
[23] Pancho Villa (1878–1923), a local bandit who built up a regional base, became a major national figure when he led anti-Huerta forces in the Constitutionalist Army 1913–14.
The original draft also asserted the duty of the United States to intervene militarily in case of domestic turmoil – but that provision was rejected by Democrats in the Senate.
[33] E. T. Williams, the senior expert on the Far East in the State Department, argued in January 1915: Wilson has been criticized for accepting at the Paris Peace Conference the transfer of the German concession in Shandong to Japan, instead of allowing China to reclaim it.
President Woodrow Wilson fought vigorously against Japan's demands regarding China, but backed down upon realizing the Japanese delegation had widespread support.
The "Declaration of Purposes" referred to the Jones Law as a veritable pact, or covenant, between the American and Filipino peoples whereby the United States promised to recognize the independence of the Philippines as soon as a stable government should be established.
Additionally many of Wilson's political opponents in the United States, including the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Henry Cabot Lodge, believed that an independent Ukraine should be established.
Despite this the United States, as a result of the fear of Japanese expansion into Russian-held territory and their support for the Allied-aligned Czech Legion, sent a small number of troops to Northern Russia and Siberia.
The Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky and Georgy Chicherin, received British and American envoys respectfully but had no intentions of agreeing to the deal due to their belief that the Conference was composed of an old capitalist order that would be swept away in a world revolution.
Zelikow emphasizes that German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was seriously interested in peace, but he had to fend off the demands of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff who were taking dictatorial control of Germany.
The main reasons were the German submarine campaign to sink American ships carrying supplies to Britain, and his determination to make the world safe for democracy.
The Kaiser and Germany's real rulers, the Army commanders, realized it meant war with the United States, but expected they could defeat the Allies before the Americans could play a major military role.
He neutralized the antiwar element by arguing this was a war with the main long-term postwar goal of ending aggressive militarism and making the world "safe for democracy.
"[65] Apart from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Anglophile high society demanding a Special Relationship with the British Empire, American public opinion in 1914-1916 reflected a strong desire to stay out of the war.
[66] Due in large part to the anti-German atrocity propaganda composed by British Intelligence at Wellington House and introduced into the American news media by Australian-born Providence Journal editor John R. Rathom, pro-Neutrality groups completely lost their broader influence.
[67] While the country was at peace, American banks made huge loans to the Entente powers, which were used mainly to buy munitions, raw materials, and food from across the Atlantic.
By 1917, with Belgium and Northern France occupied, with Russia ending Tsarist rule, and with the remaining Entente nations low on credit, Germany appeared to have the upper hand in Europe.
[68] However, the British economic embargo and naval blockade was causing shortages of fuel and food in Germany, which then decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare.
The aim was to break the transatlantic supply chain to Britain from other nations, although the German high command realized that sinking American-flagged ships would almost certainly bring the United States into the war.
American troops began major combat operations on the Western Front under General John J. Pershing in the summer of 1918, arriving at the rate of 10,000 soldiers a day.
European leaders quickly came to dislike Wilson's constant moralizing, his lack of understanding of the problems of Europe, and his stubborn unwillingness to see the destruction of France with his own eyes for fear, he said, of the devastation hardening his heart toward Germany.
The opposition came from two groups: the “Irreconcilables,” who refused to join the League of Nations under any circumstances, and “Reservationists,” led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted amendments made before they would ratify the Treaty.
[88] Wilson called for the abolition of secret treaties, a reduction in armaments, an adjustment in colonial claims in the interests of both native peoples and colonists, and freedom of the seas.
Most important of all, the Fourteenth Point, was a world organization that would guarantee the "political independence and territorial integrity [of] great and small states alike"—a League of Nations.
Diplomatic historian Walter Russell Mead has explained:Wilson's principles survived the eclipse of the Versailles system and that they still guide European politics today: self-determination, democratic government, collective security, international law, and a league of nations.
[105] Realism is the first alternative school, based on the outlook and policies of Theodore Roosevelt, and represented most famously by George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.
[109][110] The source for 1919 is US State Department, Office of the Historian, "Home Milestones 1914-1920 The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles" (2017), a U.S. government document that is not copyright.
