Authors: Henry Kissinger
This placed the statesmen of 1919 in a precarious position. Germany was not invited to the peace conference and in the resulting treaty was labeled the war’s sole aggressor and assigned the entire financial and moral burden of the conflict. To Germany’s east, however, the statesmen at Versailles struggled to mediate between the multiple peoples who claimed a right to determine themselves on the same territories. This placed a score of weak, ethnically fragmented states between two potentially great powers, Germany and Russia. In any event, there were too many nations to make independence for all realistic or secure; instead, a wavering effort to draft minority rights was begun. The nascent Soviet Union, also not represented at Versailles, was antagonized but not destroyed by an abortive Allied intervention in northern Russia and afterward isolated. And to cap these shortcomings, the U.S. Senate rejected America’s accession to the League of Nations, to Wilson’s shattering disappointment.
In the years since Wilson’s presidency, his failures have generally been ascribed not to shortcomings in his conception of international relations but to contingent circumstances—an isolationist Congress (whose reservations Wilson made little attempt to address or assuage)—or to the stroke that debilitated him during his nationwide speaking tour in support of the League.
As humanly tragic as these events were, it must be said that the failure of Wilson’s vision was not due to America’s insufficient commitment to Wilsonianism. Wilson’s successors tried to implement his visionary program through other complementary and essentially
Wilsonian means. In the 1920s and 1930s, America and its democratic partners made a major commitment to a diplomacy of disarmament and peaceful arbitration. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, the United States attempted to forestall an arms race by offering to scrap thirty naval vessels in order to achieve proportionate limitations of the American, British, French, Italian, and Japanese fleets. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State Frank Kellogg pioneered the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which purported to outlaw war entirely as “
an instrument of national policy
”; signatories, who included the vast majority of the world’s independent states, all of the belligerents of World War I, and all of the eventual Axis powers, promised to peacefully arbitrate “all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.” No significant element of these initiatives survived.
And yet Woodrow Wilson, whose career would appear more the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy than of foreign policy textbooks, had touched an essential chord in the American soul. Though far from being the most geopolitically astute or diplomatically skillful American foreign policy figure of the twentieth century, he consistently ranks among the “greatest” presidents in contemporary polls. It is the measure of Wilson’s intellectual triumph that even Richard Nixon, whose foreign policy in fact embodied most of Theodore Roosevelt’s precepts, considered himself a disciple of Wilson’s internationalism and hung a portrait of the wartime President in the Cabinet room.
Woodrow Wilson’s ultimate greatness must be measured by the degree to which he rallied the tradition of American exceptionalism behind a vision that outlasted these shortcomings. He has been revered as a prophet toward whose vision America has judged itself obliged to aspire. Whenever America has been tested by crisis or conflict—in World War II, the Cold War, and our own era’s upheavals in the Islamic world—it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow
Wilson’s vision of a world order that secures peace through democracy, open diplomacy, and the cultivation of shared rules and standards.
The genius of this vision has been its ability to harness American idealism in the service of great foreign policy undertakings in peacemaking, human rights, and cooperative problem-solving, and to imbue the exercise of American power with the hope for a better and more peaceful world. Its influence has been in no small way responsible for the spread of participatory governance throughout the world in the past century and for the extraordinary conviction and optimism that America has brought to its engagement with world affairs. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Wilson’s principles were so pervasive, so deeply related to the American perception of itself, that when two decades later the issue of world order came up again, the failure of the interwar period did not obstruct their triumphal return. Amidst another world war, America turned once more to the challenge of building a new world order essentially on Wilsonian principles.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s and by now a historic third-term President) and Winston Churchill met for the first time as leaders in Newfoundland aboard HMS
Prince of Wales
in August 1941, they expressed what they described as their common vision in the Atlantic Charter of eight “common principles”—all of which Wilson would have endorsed, while no previous British Prime Minister would have been comfortable with all of them. They included “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”; the end of territorial
acquisitions against the will of subject populations; “freedom from fear and want”; and a program of international disarmament, to precede the eventual “abandonment of the use of force” and “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”
Not all of this—especially the point on decolonization
—would have been initiated by Winston Churchill, nor would he have accepted it had he not thought it essential to win an American partnership that was Britain’s best, perhaps only, hope to avoid defeat.
Roosevelt even went beyond Wilson in spelling out his ideas of the foundation of international peace. Coming from the academy, Wilson had relied on building an international order on essentially philosophical principles. Having emerged from the manipulatory maelstrom of American politics, Roosevelt placed great reliance on the management of personalities.
Thus Roosevelt expressed the conviction that the new international order would be built on the basis of personal trust:
The kind of world order
which we the peace-loving Nations must achieve, must depend essentially on friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on unassailable sincerity and good will and good faith.
Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945:
We have learned the simple truth
, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.
When Roosevelt dealt with Stalin during the war, he implemented these convictions. Confronted with evidence of the Soviet Union’s
record of broken agreements and anti-Western hostility, Roosevelt is reported to have assured the former U.S. ambassador in Moscow William C. Bullitt:
Bill, I don’t dispute your facts
; they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man … I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return,
noblesse oblige,
he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.
During the first encounter of the two leaders
at Tehran for a summit in 1943, Roosevelt’s conduct was in keeping with his pronouncements. Upon arrival, the Soviet leader warned Roosevelt that Soviet intelligence had discovered a Nazi plot threatening the President’s safety and offered him hospitality in the heavily fortified Soviet compound, arguing that the American Embassy was less secure and too distant from the projected meeting place. Roosevelt accepted the Soviet offer and rejected the nearby British Embassy to avoid the impression that the Anglo-Saxon leaders were ganging up against Stalin. Going further at joint meetings with Stalin, Roosevelt ostentatiously teased Churchill and generally sought to create the impression of dissociation from Britain’s wartime leader.
The immediate challenge was to define a concept of peace. What principles would guide the relations of the world’s powers? What contribution was required from the United States in designing and securing an international order? Should the Soviet Union be conciliated or confronted? And if these tasks were carried out successfully, what type of world would result? Would peace be a document or a process?
The geopolitical challenge in 1945 was as complex as any confronted by an American president. Even in its war-ravaged condition, the Soviet Union posed two obstacles to the construction of a postwar
international order. Its size and the scope of its conquests overthrew the balance of power in Europe. And its ideological thrust challenged the legitimacy of any Western institutional structure: rejecting all existing institutions as forms of illegitimate exploitation, Communism had called for a world revolution to overthrow the ruling classes and restore power to what Karl Marx had called the “workers of the world.”
When in the 1920s the majority of the first wave of European Communist uprisings were crushed or withered for lack of support among the anointed proletariat, Joseph Stalin, implacable and ruthless, promulgated the doctrine of consolidating “socialism in one country.” He eliminated all of the other original revolutionary leaders in a decade of purges, and deployed a largely conscripted labor force to build up Russia’s industrial capacity. Seeking to deflect the Nazi storm to the west, in 1939 he entered a neutrality pact with Hitler, dividing northern and eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. When in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia anyway, Stalin recalled Russian nationalism from its ideological internment and declared the “Great Patriotic War,” imbuing Communist ideology with an opportunistic appeal to Russian imperial feeling. For the first time in Communist rule, Stalin evoked the Russian psyche that had called the Russian state into being and defended it over the centuries through domestic tyrannies and foreign invasions and depredations.
Victory in the war confronted the world with a Russian challenge analogous to that at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, only more acute. How would this wounded giant—having lost at least twenty million lives and with the western third of its vast territory devastated—react to the vacuum opening before it? Attention to Stalin’s pronouncements could have provided the answer but for the conventional wartime illusion, which Stalin had carefully cultivated, that he was moderating Communist ideologues rather than instigating them.
Stalin’s global strategy was complex. He was convinced that the
capitalist system inevitably produced wars; hence the end of World War II would at best be an armistice. He considered Hitler a sui generis representative of the capitalist system, not an aberration from it. The capitalist states remained adversaries after Hitler’s defeat, no matter what their leaders said or even thought. As he had said with scorn of the British and French leaders of the 1920s,
They talk about pacifism
; they speak about peace among European states. Briand and Chamberlain are embracing each other … All this is nonsense. From European history we know that every time treaties envisaging a new arrangement of forces for new wars have been signed, these treaties have been called treaties of peace … [although] they were signed for the purpose of depicting new elements of the coming war.
In Stalin’s worldview, decisions were determined by objective factors, not personal relationships. Thus the goodwill of wartime alliance was “subjective” and superseded by the new circumstances of victory. The goal of Soviet strategy would be to achieve the maximum security for the inevitable showdown. This meant pushing the security borders of Russia as far west as possible and weakening the countries beyond these security borders through Communist parties and covert operations.
While the war was going on, Western leaders resisted acknowledging assessments of this kind: Churchill because of his need to stay in step with America; Roosevelt because he was advocating a “master plan” to secure a just and lasting peace, which was in effect a reversal of what had been the European international order—he would countenance neither a balance of power nor a restoration of empires. His public progam called for rules for the peaceful resolution of disputes and parallel efforts of the major powers, the so-called Four Policemen:
the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China. The United States and the Soviet Union especially were expected to take the lead in checking violations of peace.
Charles Bohlen, then a young Foreign Service officer working as Roosevelt’s Russian-language translator and later an architect of the Cold War U.S. policy relationship, faulted Roosevelt’s “American conviction that the other fellow is a ‘good guy’ who will respond properly and decently if you treat him right”:
He [Roosevelt] felt that Stalin
viewed the world somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin’s hostility and distrust … were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other countries for years after the Revolution. What he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.
Another view holds that Roosevelt
, who had demonstrated his subtlety in the often ruthless way in which he maneuvered the essentially neutralist American people toward a war that few contemporaries considered necessary, was beyond being deceived by a leader even as wily as Stalin. According to this interpretation, Roosevelt was biding his time and humoring the Soviet leader to keep him from making a separate deal with Hitler. He must have known—or would soon discover—that the Soviet view of world order was antithetical to the American one; invocations of democracy and self-determination would serve to rally the American public but must eventually prove unacceptable to Moscow. Once Germany’s unconditional surrender had been achieved and Soviet intransigence had been demonstrated, according to this view, Roosevelt would have rallied the democracies with the same determination he had shown in opposition to Hitler.