Fourteen Points

The immediate cause of the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917 was the German announcement of renewed unrestricted submarine warfare and the subsequent sinking of ships with Americans on board.

[10] Their job was to study Allied and American policy in virtually every region of the globe and analyze economic, social, and political facts likely to come up in discussions during the peace conference.

[12] The Armenian genocide that began in April 1915 attracted much media attention in the Allied nations at the time, and throughout the summer and fall of 1917 Wilson had been the subject of fierce criticism by Republican politicians such as the former president Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge for his unwillingness to ask Congress to declare war on the Ottoman Empire.

[13] In a foreshadowing of the "Germany First" strategy of World War Two, Wilson and other senior figures in his administration argued that the United States should commit its power to defeat the German Empire first and that any operations against the Sublime Porte would be a waste of American resources.

Both Roosevelt and Cabot Lodge argued in various speeches and columns that the United States had a moral duty to stop the Armenian genocide by declaring war on the Ottoman Empire.

[15] In response to such criticism, Wilson had asked Colonel House and the authors of "the Inquiry" such as Lippmann to come up with a plan to protect the Armenians after the hoped for Allied victory, even though the United States was not at war with the Ottoman Empire.

Colonel House advised Wilson that the genocidal "homogenization" of Anatolia required an American response, writing to the president: "It is necessary to free the subject races of the Turkish empire from oppression and misrule.

[24] Wilson, in common with other world leaders, were afraid of the possibility of Communist revolutions inspired by the Russian example breaking out elsewhere, and decided to offer his set of idealistic war aims as a way to challenge Lenin's claims to the moral high ground.

[29] Lippmann's task, according to House, was "to take the secret treaties, analyze the parts which were tolerable, and separate them from those which were regarded as intolerable, and then develop a position which conceded as much to the Allies as it could, but took away the poison....

"[29] In the speech, Wilson directly addressed what he perceived as the causes for the world war by calling 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.

The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

Lloyd George stated that he had consulted leaders of "the Great Dominions overseas" before making his speech, so it would appear that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland were in broad agreement.

[8] The duumvirate that ruled Germany that consisted of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff were supremely confident that the offensive planned for March 1918 code-named Operation Michael would win the war.

[8] Indeed, in a note sent to Wilson, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the German imperial chancellor, in October 1918 requested an immediate armistice and peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

[42] During this 'Wilsonian moment', there was considerable optimism among anti-colonial nationalist leaders and movements that Wilson and the Fourteen Points were going to be an influential force that would re-shape the long established relationships between the West and the rest of the world.

A common belief among anti-colonial nationalist leaders was the U.S., once it had assisted them in gaining independence from colonial rule or foreign influence, would establish new relationships which would be more favorable and equitable than what had existed beforehand.

[47] When the Allied leaders gathered together in January 1919, it took them so long to agree to a set of common terms that they chose not to negotiate with the Germans when they presented their demands on 7 May 1919 least the fragile consensus break down, forcing them to start all over again.

[49] Weinberg noted that the vast majority of Germans in the interwar period believed that their country had actually won World War One with the Reich only being defeated by the alleged "stab-in-the-back" that was the November Revolution of 1918.

[61] As a consolation prize, Clemenceau was offered a military alliance with the British empire and the United States, under which Anglo-American forces would come to France's aid in the event of German aggression.

[63] Clemenceau likewise supported the Polish claim to Danzig, but Lloyd George was stoutly opposed as he argued that it would be unjust to force a city whose population was 90% German unwillingly into Poland.

[63] An impasse emerged at the Paris peace conference with Clemenceau and Wilson supporting the Polish claim to Danzig while Lloyd-George maintained that the city should remain within Germany.

[68] The German historian Detlev Peukert argued that the way that different peoples were mixed together in Central Europe into a patchwork with no straight lines between them made the principle of national self-determination very difficult to apply.

[68] Peukert used Upper Silesia, an ethically mixed region inhabited by Germans and Poles that was a center of coal mining and heavy industry as an example of how "...these problems could not be fundamentally resolved if national self-determination were to be the sole criterion to be applied".

[74] The American historian Richard Pipes noted that many of the Allied conditions were more properly internal Russian matters such as forcing Kolchak to agree in advance that there would be no restoration of the monarchy in Russia after the expected White victory.

[76] The Italian Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino, wrote that he was "disgusted" by Wilson's principles of national self-determination as he preferred the traditional elitist power politics of European diplomacy.

[77] At the peace conference, Wilson supported the Italian claim based on the Treaty of London to have the Brenner pass as the new Italian-Austrian frontier and to add the South Tyrol province of Austria to Italy.

During the interwar period, the Grand Fascist Party under the leadership of Benito Mussolini used the vittoria mutilata thesis to paint the entire Italian political class as pusillanimous politicians who allowed Wilson to deny Italy its rightful share of the spoils of war.

[89] Wilson felt that the way that the Armenian community of Asia Minor had been devastated with the survivors of the genocide living in destitution that Armenia could not stand as an independent state for the foreseeable future.

In 1919, a war broke out with Greece as the Turks under the leadership of their future president, General Mustafa Kemal, chose to resist by force the Greek plans to annex parts of Asia Minor.

[93] The British historian Evan Easton-Calabria noted that the Greek-Turkish compulsory population exchange was the final rejection of Wilson's vision outlined in the 14 points of the different peoples of Asia Minor co-existing together, and instead marked the triumph of the "homogenization" viewpoint.