The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy By Matthew C ...

The President believed that the post-war order could be established on the basis of a system of international justice, and that unless it was, any peace would only be the interlude to a new and even bloodier war.

To realize the objective of a new world order, Wilson said, was not an exclusively American aspiration. “What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world should be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to…be assured of justice and fair-dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others, it will not be done to us.”³¹

The first five Points addressed principles of general concern to international order. The renunciation of secret treaties (Wilson called for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”), freedom of the seas, elimination of trade barriers, arms reduction, and decolonization. The next eight Points referred to specific European territorial issues, from the evacuation by the Central Powers of Russian lands to “autonomous development” for the national groups within Austria-Hungary, and recognition of an independent Polish state. The final Point and the most widely noted, called for the establishment of an “association of nations…for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike.”

The idea of a coalition of nations united to preserve world peace was not a new one. Teddy Roosevelt had proposed such an association in 1910, with the United States and Britain at its core, “righteousness” as its motive and, if necessary, military force to enforce its ends. In 1915 William Howard Taft, the former president, headed the League to Enforce the Peace, which advocated the resolution of international disputes through mediation, supported by force.³²

Wilson’s internationalist optimism may have drifted toward the utopian when he declared the proposals to be “the moral climax…of the culminating and final war for human liberty,” but the speech was widely acclaimed in the United States, where The New York Times called it a “Second Emancipation Proclamation.”³³