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9780521385855

Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective

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  • ISBN13:

    9780521385855

  • ISBN10:

    0521385857

  • Edition: Reprint
  • Format: Paperback
  • Copyright: 1990-01-26
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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Summary

Woodrow Wilson's contributions to the creation of the League of Nations as well as his failures in the Senate battles over the Versailles treaty are stressed in this account of his leadership in international affairs.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction: Wilson's new world
2. Origins of Wilson's league of nations idea
3. Drafting of the League of Nations Covenant
4. American criticism of Wilson's peacemaking
5. Revision of the League of Nations Covenant
6. The question of control at home and abroad
7. The Versailles Treaty in the Senate
8. American rejection of the Versailles peace
9. The aftermath of Wilson's peacemaking
10. Epilogue: Wilson's legacy
Bibliography
Index.

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The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

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Excerpts


CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Wilson's new world

Woodrow Wilson's quest for orderly progress epitomized the modern American search for control. "We have attained," noted John Dewey, the prominent philosopher and educator, in Quest for Certainty (1929), "at least subconsciously, a certain feeling of confidence; a feeling that control of the main conditions of fortune is, to an appreciable degree, passing into our own hands." Benefiting from science and technology, Americans had subdued nature. Modern industry and cities had transformed their institutions. As new forms of transportation and communication linked the nation closer together and to the rest of the world, personal relations of traditional rural communities succumbed to bureaucratic patterns. A new corporate or organizational society was reshaping the government's role in both domestic and foreign affairs. Profound social and economic changes prompted Americans to seek what Wilson had called "progressive order" in their democracy. Hoping to manage change so as to avoid uncontrollable chaos or anarchy, progressive Americans preferred reform to revolution. It was in this spirit that Wilson created the League of Nations.

Early in the twentieth century American intellectuals had developed a conscious awareness of what sociologist Edward A. Ross, one of Wilson's former students, described as "social control." Concentrating on the foundations of order in the United States, Ross examined the various means of society's discipline over individuals. In Social Control (1901) he only hinted at international implications. But in 1917, after the United States entered the World War, the American Sociological Society devoted its annual meeting to this topic. One of its leading members, Charles H. Cooley, expressed a hopeful view of human nature in a paper on "Social Control in International Relations." He emphasized human potential for cooperation. Pointing to the war as evidence that nations were capable of moral development comparable to that in personal relations, he suggested that "perhaps the surest proof that international social control is possible is that nations have shown themselves capable of feeling and acting upon a disinterested indignation at aggression upon other nations, as in the case of Belgium." He looked beyond a balance of power to "an organic international life" in which nations subordinated individuality to their common welfare. Cooley emphasized the transcendent as well as practical functions of a league of nations. In his vision, benevolent social control would supersede brute force: "Force cannot succeed except as the expression of general sentiment, and if we have that it will rarely be necessary." Here he entrapped himself in circular logic. International good will, while crucial for success, would render a league's guarantee of collective security virtually unnecessary. But when its members needed protection, no league could function in the absence of good will. Cooley acknowledged this basic problem when he admitted that "a single powerful nation, whose heart remains hostile to the system, will probably be able to defeat it, and certainly will prevent its developing any spirit higher than that of a policeman." Yet he did not suggest any way to solve the problem.

President Wilson applied the idea of international social control to American foreign relations, promoting collective security to restrain national egoism. Two other social scientists, economist John Bates Clark and sociologist Franklin H. Giddings, who also articulated the theme of control, had influenced him in this direction. Clark had offered an argument for Curbing the monopolistic power of large American corporations in The Control of Trusts (1901). He did not oppose their size, but wanted to prevent them from abusing their power with unfair business practices. Anticipating the economic policies of Wilson's New Freedom, he advocated an active role for the American government to preserve free competition. Economic rivalry among present or potential competitors would force industrial efficiency thereby benefiting consumers while enabling the United States to capture and dominate foreign markets. For Clark, that was progress. Giddings shared Clark's hope for American hegemony over other countries. In Democracy and Empire (1900) he had justified the war against Spain in 1898 and the new imperialism. He viewed the United States as a "democratic empire." Along with Great Britain, which had reconciled democracy with empire, he wanted the United States to extend its rule around the world. Praising Benjamin Kidd's book on The Control of the Tropics (1898), Giddings urged "the English-speaking race" to assume the burden of governing "the inferior races of mankind" in order that "the civilized world" could continue "its economic conquest of the natural resources of the globe." A Social Darwinist, he accepted international rivalry as a fact, especially between advanced and backward peoples. Yet he voiced the Christian Social Gospel's hope for a new era of peace. He combined science and religion -- or the intellectual traditions of Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy -- in his conception of the democratic empire.

Like most Americans, Wilson had approved the new imperial role of the United States after the Spanish-American War. He noted the political implications for federal government. In a preface for the fifteenth printing of Congressional Government in 1900, he welcomed the growth of executive power resulting from involvement in foreign affairs. For the United States, he affirmed, the president "must utter every initial judgment, take every first step of action, supply the information upon which it is to act, suggest and in large measure control its conduct." He, too, combined the Social Gospel and Social Darwinism to justify involvement overseas. He later drew upon both traditions for his conception of collective security. He called the League's constitution a covenant and advocated the location of its headquarters in Calvinist Geneva. He used the promise of a postwar community of nations to justify the costs of the World War. Our of conflict and competition would emerge a better world. Like Giddings and Clark, Wilson wanted the United States to provide world-wide leadership in the new League.

Wilson beheld the American presidency as the very fulcrum of change. "One of the greatest of the President's powers," he had asserted in Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), was "control, which is very absolute, of the foreign relations of the nation." Taking the initiative, the president could determine the outcome of international diplomacy. Once he had negotiated a treaty, the United States would be "virtually committed," leaving the Senate almost no alternative but to approve. Adhering to this attitude, Wilson failed to secure the Senate's approval of the Versailles Treaty. Republican senators in 1919-1920 refused to play the role assigned them. Despite efforts to influence them through management of public opinion, including a speaking tour of western states, he lost the treaty fight. The Senate demonstrated that the president's power to control American foreign relations was less absolute than Wilson thought.

Other writers had anticipated Wilson's idea of collective security. Herbert Croly had developed the theme of control in both domestic and foreign affairs. In The Promise of American Life (1909), a classic statement of progressive thought, he advocated subjection of individual purposes to the national interest. Only by strong national government, he argued, could the United States continue to provide its citizens better economic and social conditions while preserving democratic political institutions. He wanted the nation to employ conscious social control -- which he identified as the methods of Alexander Hamilton -- to achieve the equalitarian ends of Thomas Jefferson. Linking reform at home and abroad, Croly proposed "a national foreign policy" to promote "the spread of democratic methods and ideas." Claiming not only that the Monroe Doctrine already committed the United States to join Latin America in creating "a stable and peaceful international system," he anticipated the end of American isolation from the Old World. Because of increasing interdependence, Croly expected the United States to join "a world system" to preserve peace. Opposed to involvement in "an exclusively European system," he urged preparation for war to maintain peace.

Walter Lippmann shared Croly's belief in progressive American leadership at home and abroad. A new challenge faced the nation. According to him, "the battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice, but against the chaos of a new freedom. This chaos is our real problem." The status quo was no longer realistic. Compelled to shape their future either by "drift" or by "mastery," progressive Americans welcomed innovation. "Our tune, of course, believes in change," he observed. Americans became progressive to achieve order. "The only possible cohesion now is a loyalty that looks forward," he asserted in Drift and Mastery (1914). Lippmann thus recommended a pragmatic method to create progressive order in the chaotic modern world.

As editors of the New Republic, Croly and Lippmann initially supported Wilson's foreign policy. They favored intervention in 1917 and advocated a league of nations. Welcoming the president's endorsement of collective security in his 1916 address to the League to Enforce Peace, they used this idea to justify participation in the war. As secretary of the group of experts known as the Inquiry, Lippmann contributed to American preparation for the peace conference. He helped elaborate the principles in Wilson's Fourteen Points. Along with Dewey, who frequently wrote for the New Republic, Croly and Lippmann justified American belligerency as a crusade for democracy. To reconcile their liberal idealism with pragmatism, which required them to vindicate the war by its results, they raised their hopes for a world of democracy and peace. Expecting the United States to transform international relations, they inevitably experienced disappointment. The Paris Peace Conference failed to realize their ideals. Croly, Lippmann and Dewey then denounced the Versailles Treaty and opposed obligations in the League to enforce in. This disillusionment resulted from their unrealistic belief that the United States could control the world. That, however, was beyond the capacity of any nation. The reality of competing national interests forced the president to compromise with the Allies and even with Germany. Pluralism limited Wilson's power to redeem the Old World with his particular vision of interdependence.

Like Croly, Lippmann and Dewey, other Americans sought to apply social science to international relations. Giddings had pondered the use of rational discussion to limit national sovereignty, "the ultimate social control." To create conditions conducive to peaceful resolution of conflicts, he favored a balance of power. Political integration of empires had already encompassed most lands. The world's interdependence prevented isolation. Now the problem was to avoid war among the "rear powers. Like Wilson, Giddings emphasized leadership. Elite leaders, who were "centers of social control," would determine the world's future. "In the final throwing of the dice of fate,"' he argued, "they are causes of peace and war." The World War challenged Giddings' belief in rationality, but he still affirmed that "the human mind that had mastered nature's way could master and control the ways of man." He acknowledged that obstacles to rational control over human affairs were greater than anticipated. Nevertheless, Giddings persisted in his confidence that the civilized world, especially the English-speaking people, could organize conscience and reason to diminish war. He advocated the federation of nations in a "league of peace." Clark had already reached the same conclusion. In 1915 he saw in the Allies the nucleus for a postwar league of nations. He wanted neutrals like the United States to help form it. To preserve peace, this new international organization would need to fulfill the twofold task of protecting its members from outside attacks and of settling internal disputes between them. Giddings and Clark joined others to establish the League to Enforce Peace. Led by former President William Howard Taft and Harvard's President A. Lawrence Lowell, this bipartisan group became the most effective lobby for the postwar League of Nations. Various others, along with the American Sociological Society, focused on "social control" during the World War.

One of the few Americans to challenge prevailing attitudes was the radical journalist Randolph S. Bourne. Unlike his mentor Dewey, or Croly and Lippmann, he refused to justify involvement in the war with the promise of a league. He observed that the so-called realism and pragmatism of liberals masked their irrational enthusiasm for war. "They wanted a League of Nations," he complained in 1917. "They had an unanalyzable feeling that this was a war in which we had to be, and be in it we would. What more natural than to join the two ideas and conceive our war as the decisive factor in the attainment of the desired end!" Bourne understood that the war generated momentum beyond the control of statesmen. "It is," he continued, "a little unbridled for the realist's rather nice sense of purposive social control." Rejecting the hope for mastery over international relations, he warned that neither Wilson nor anyone else could achieve "any liberal control of events.

The conservative historian Henry Adams shared Bourne's skepticism. He, too, doubted that social scientists could discover laws of human behavior with which to predict and control the future. Adams had searched in vain for some unifying principle to restore order out of chaos. He contrasted twentieth-century multiplicity with thirteenth-century unity under God. "From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy," he observed in The Education of Henry Adams (1918). Unlike Wilson, whose faith in God provided the foundation for his belief in the universality of the world, Adams could not find this principle in religion. Nor could he discover it in science. Despite attempts to apply scientific laws to history, he failed to find any principle that could unite disparate events by explaining cause and effect. Without such a principle the historian could either impose his ideas on the past or admit failure. Adams brilliantly elucidated his own failure. "Historians, he warned, "have got into far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the process in science."

Henry Cabot Lodge evidenced the same skepticism about social control as his friend Adams did. From a conservative philosophical perspective, and not just for reasons of politics, the senator never trusted the promise of Wilson's League. He refused to believe that it could inaugurate a new era of peace. Ironically, Clark and Giddings, who shared Lodge's appreciation for an international balance of power, showed perseverance in advocating the League. They did not succumb to liberal disillusionment. After the war Clark steadfastly favored a "workable" league. Expecting international rivalry to persist, he advocated responsible American participation in the existing international system. Giddings likewise adopted a practical attitude toward the League. He rejoiced that the democratic English-speaking people of the world would exert preponderant power in it. Unlike Croly, Lippmann and Dewey, Clark and Giddings continued to support Wilson throughout the treaty fight.

Political scientists followed Wilson's interpretation, developing the theme of control. Edward S. Corwin, whose career Wilson had promoted at Princeton while serving as its president, emphasized executive prerogatives in The President's Control of Foreign Relations (1917), Corwin surveyed the history of war- and treaty-making powers in the United States since the Constitution's adoption, and concluded that "the net result of a century and a quarter of contest for power and influence in determining the international destinies of the country remains decisively and conspicuously in favor of the President." The fight between Wilson and the Senate over the Versailles Treaty revived this perennial contest.

Defeat in 1919-1920 did not kill the idea of collective security. The political scientist Quincy Wright, for one, preserved Wilson's legacy through World War II and into the Cold War. In advocating the League of Nations and later the United Nations, he emphasized social control. Analyzing the mandates under the League, he praised them as an alternative to colonialism for supervising "backward peoples." A specialist in international law, he viewed the League as the best hope for peace prior to World War II. He concluded that "in the matter of world organization there is, at least, the possibility that man has means of controlling the future more than in any other enterprise that he had undertaken." In practice, the League had experienced difficulty accomplishing this purpose. Still, he affirmed that, as an instrument for dealing with the problems of the interdependent world, "it must become universal."

After World War II, Wright advocated the United Nations. Combining progress and order, he wanted it to foster "dynamic equilibria" in world affairs. "As civilization advances," he asserted, "methods are discovered and employed for regulating or controlling an increasing proportion of the events which affect human life, and institutions increasingly function as agencies of social control." Fulfillment of this task, he recognized, would require acceptance of certain "universal values" which were "essential to the peaceful coexistence of diverse peoples." Attempting to reconcile this requirement for universality with the world's pluralism, he argued that "acceptance of some universal values does not preclude great diversity in cultures and value systems among different groups." Yet if other nations refused to accept an American definition of these "universal values," he neglected to explain how the United Nations could fulfill its task or what policy the United States should then adopt.

This problem with collective security, for which its advocates never provided a solution, had plagued Wilson. He, too, was entrapped in circular logic. Despite failure after World War I, he remained confident in his vision's ultimate triumph. But it never resolved the persistent dilemma of American foreign relations. As an alternative to traditional isolationism, it failed. Wilson's League and his legacy of liberal internationalism provided unrealistic guidance for the United States in the interdependent and plural world of the twentieth century.

Accepting the myth of American innocence and virtue, Wilson made a sharp distinction between the Old and New Worlds. He viewed the United States as "a virgin continent." As Lippmann recognized, "Wilson, in spite of the complexity of his character and his mind, was moved by the old American feeling that America is a new land which must not be entangled with Europe." Assuming a polarity, he fluctuated between isolationist and internationalist alternatives. He attempted to maintain neutrality until 1917; then, leading the United Stares into the European war, he called for a new order under the future League. Hoping either to avoid or redeem the Old World, he never dealt with Europe on its own terms. His response to the World War epitomized the difficulty of the United States in defining a realistic foreign policy in the twentieth century. He failed to overcome the country's inadequate diplomatic tradition. Prior to the war, the United States had attempted to avoid entanglement in the Old World, while maintaining diplomatic, cultural and commercial relations with European countries. For Wilson, as for earlier generations, American independence seemed to require political and military isolation from Europe. At the beginning of the World War he attempted to maintain this tradition. As he developed a new policy, he experienced the difficulty of escaping the American heritage, which proved to be an impossible task for him.

In 1913, when Wilson replaced Taft in the White House, most Americans had forgotten the reasons for American isolation. They simply adhered to this tradition without question. One exception was a member of the diplomatic service, Lewis Einstein, who saw the implications of Anglo-German rivalry. He warned that a German victory against Great Britain in a future war would threaten American security. "Unperceived by many Americans," he explained, "the European balance of power is a political necessity which can alone sanction on the Western Hemisphere the continuance of an economic development unhandicapped by the burden of extensive armaments. At no time, even unknown to the United Stares, were European politics a matter of indifference to its vital interests. But if hitherto it was impotent to alter their march, a fortunate destiny preserved the existing balance." Recognizing that the United States now possessed the power to take a decisive part in European affairs and that Germany potentially threatened to disrupt the power balance, Einstein concluded that the American government should adopt a new policy. Unlike most of his countrymen, he understood the limits of the American diplomatic tradition.

Without Einstein's understanding, Wilson remained a prisoner of his heritage. He denounced the European balance of power. When he developed a new foreign policy, he projected his conception of American nationalism onto the world. He felt that the closing of the frontier in 1890 -- not a shift in the European balance of power -- forced the United States to involve itself overseas. He incorporated his version of historian Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis into his rationale for the League. Like him, Wilson attributed the distinctive American character to the influence of the West. Turner had presented his famous paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" to the American Historical Association in 1893. A leading political scientist and historian at that time, Wilson had become the first prominent scholar to endorse the frontier thesis. With the end of free land in the West, he feared, the "complex civilization" of the East, which was "more like the Old World than the New," would engulf the nation. Wilson predicted that "the twentieth century will show another face." The United States, having concentrated on domestic development, must now assume "its special part and place of power" in the world.

The frontier's closing, Wilson thought, had forced Americans to search for "new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas." Regarding the Spanish-American War of 1898 as the natural consequence of this shift from domestic to foreign expansion, he applauded the willingness of Americans to become "apostles of liberty and of self-government" in Cuba and the Philippines. He believed that because of these countries' lack of progress toward democracy under Spanish rule, the United States needed to contribute to their political education, as England had done to the American colonies. When the Filipinos revolted against this forceful instruction, their behavior seemed to Wilson to demonstrate their ignorance about the necessity for order in a democratic society. He wanted the United States to control them. "They must first take the discipline of law," he stressed, "must first love order and instinctively yield to it.... We are old in this learning and must be their tutors." Paradoxically, only after they submitted to American rule could they be entrusted with independence. This paternalistic, yet essentially non-colonial, form of American imperialism rarer became Wilson's model for mandates under the League. In this manner, and without recognizing the irony, he hoped Americans would "seek to serve, not to subdue, the world." He thus rejected the idea of pluralism for other countries, including Cuba and the Philippines. Instead, he advocated American control.

President Wilson projected the American image onto the world during the European war. He continued to believe, as he had affirmed in The State (1889), that history moved in a single direction toward the triumph of democracy. His confidence in progress toward democracy, and his interpretation of the frontier's closing in 1890, provided an explanation for involvement in world affairs. He combined these ideas in a new foreign policy during the World War. "It is not by accident," the president proclaimed in 1916, "... that only eight years elapsed before we got into the politics of the world. It was in 1898, you remember, that the Spanish war came.... We had, as it were, touched a house of cards, and it had collapsed, and when the war was over we found the guardianship of Cuba, the possession of Porto Rico, the possession of the Philippines in our hands. And the frontier which no man could draw upon this continent in 1890 had been flung across the sea 7,000 miles to the untrodden forests of some part of the Philippine Islands. Ever since then we have been caught inevitably in the net of the politics of the world." Wilson nonetheless paid homage to President George Washington's Farewell Address: "You know that we have always remembered and revered the advice of the great Washington, who advised us to avoid foreign entanglements. By that I understand him to mean to avoid being entangled in the ambitions and the national purposes of other nations." Wilson's determination to control foreign affairs enabled him to reconcile the unilateral and universal elements in his diplomacy. He believed Washington's advice did not require strict adherence to traditional neutrality, but it did obligate this nation to preserve its character while becoming involved in foreign affairs. Thus Wilson maintained the Old World -- New World polarity, which had shaped the American diplomatic tradition of isolation, even as he concluded that the United States should join a postwar league. He reaffirmed his earlier announcement to the League to Enforce Peace that in looking forward "to the end of this war, we want all the world to know that we are ready to lend our force without stint to the preservation of peace in the interest of mankind." As a consequence of the American frontier's closing, he argued, the United States should adopt this new policy. "What disturbs the life of the whole world is the concern of the whole world," he proclaimed, "and it is our duty to lend the full force of this nation, moral and physical, to a league of nations which shall see to it that nobody disturbs the peace of the world without submitting his case first to the opinion of mankind." The United States should promote democratic international social control. With this rationale for a league, Wilson internationalized his understanding of the American heritage.

His response to the World War alternated between isolationist and internationalist thoughts. He saw no inconsistency in adhering to neutrality until 1917, while developing the idea of collective security. His plan for a league, as Lippmann noted, evidenced "the instinctive American isolationist view of Woodrow Wilson." At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while drafting the Covenant, Wilson steadfastly opposed any definite commitment to participate in the Old World's politics or wars. In the form of a veto over the League's future actions, he intended to preserve American independence. His conception of nationalism, embracing the frontier, easily accommodated both universalism and unilateralism. The common element in both tendencies was his desire for the United Stares to control its own destiny.

Christian faith undergirded Wilson's confidence in progress. He thought God had predestined victory for faithful men and nations. Progress was inevitable for Christians. In the struggle of life between good and evil, continuing despite the certainty of God's ultimate triumph, Wilson looked to the Bible as the source of universal laws of morality and history. He viewed the United States as the epitome of Christianity: "America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture." Religion and patriotism were synonymous, for he recognized no difference between Christianity and Americanism. From his perspective, the United States appeared in the vanguard of world history, leading toward universal progress.

Wilson justified American involvement in the war as a Christian crusade for democracy. George D. Herron, a Social Gospel theologian, became an authentic interpreter of the president's foreign policy. Affiliated with the American legation in Switzerland, he published articles in various European journals. In Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace (1917), a collection of these articles, he proclaimed the kingdom of God on earth as the president's ultimate goal. The theologian explained that "Woodrow Wilson beholds this vision, he follows this faith, because he is both sturdily and mystically Christian in his view of our common life's collective possibilities. The uttermost democracy, the democracy that scales the whole human octave, is to him the certain issue of the idea for which Jesus lived and died.... He believes that the Sermon on the Mount is the ultimate constitution of mankind; and he intends, by hook or crook if you will, by the wisdom of the serpent and the secrecy of the priest, to get this foundation underneath the unaware American nation. He cunningly hopes, he divinely schemes, to bring it about that America, awake at last to her selfhood and calling, shall become as a colossal Christian apostle, shepherding the world into the kingdom of God." Wilson's conception of a league expressed the American mission to redeem the Old World. His purpose was "so revolutionary" that few persons understood in. "His eyes are fixed upon a goal that is far beyond the present faith of nations. His inaugural address before the League to Enforce Peace is perhaps the most pregnant utterance of a national chief in two thousand years." Herron's perception of the ultimate goal of American foreign policy pleased Wilson. To the New York publisher of the theologian's book, the president wrote in 1917: "I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes."

A notable prudence, as well as idealism, characterized Wilson's diplomacy. He personified the competing impulses of the American character that Van Wyck Brooks labeled as "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow." Another radical critic, Harold Stearns, observed that his leadership evidenced "mystical practicality. He was at once idealistic and practical. Emphasizing this duality, Stearns concluded that "in President Wilson we have seen its ultimate culmination in a man who talks like a Transcendentalist and who bargains like any huckster, although even in this extreme case, probably, without conscious hypocrisy." His goals were utopian, but he prepared for the peace conference and displayed skill in the negotiations. The Versailles Treaty incorporated many of his ideas, despite unavoidable compromises. During the drafting of the Covenant, he called for some revisions to meet Republican objections. Yet he never made any compromise that violated his ultimate purpose. At some unpredictable point, the president refused further concessions by appealing to ideals. In the case of the League, which he regarded as the instrument for world redemption through international social control, he rejected substantial changes either at Paris or in the United States.

Wilson's response to the World War expressed the remarkable dualism of the American character. Assuming a polarity between the Old and New Worlds, he alternated between isolationist and internationalist tendencies. He hoped to preserve American innocence either by maintaining neutrality or by redeeming Europe in a crusade for democracy. Viewing the United States as the model, Wilson projected its image to the world. He sought control over foreign affairs. Lacking adequate guidance from the American diplomatic tradition, he internationalized the heritage of his country. From his understanding of science, religion and history, he proclaimed his vision of a league to transform international relations. His belief in progress, based on faith in God, seemed to guarantee the triumph of ideals. Yet the idea of collective security, or international social control, furnished no realistic American policy for the twentieth century. It failed to resolve the fundamental dilemma of interdependence and pluralism. Wilson's contribution to the American diplomatic tradition never overcame its limits.

Copyright © 1987 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

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