From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (69 page)

In dealing with these formidable problems, Wilson was hampered by an inadequate advisory system and his own leadership style. He had never liked or trusted Lansing; during the long stay in Europe, his relationship with Colonel House suffered an irreparable break. The peace commission he chose to accompany him was not a distinguished group—ex-president Taft called them a "bunch of cheapskates"—and did not play a major role. At the president's direction, House in the fall of 1917 assembled a group of scholars to analyze postwar problems, a significant and innovative effort to bring scholarly expertise to bear on foreign policy issues. The so-called Inquiry employed 150 people and produced more than three thousand papers and reports. Its Red and Black Books were extensively used in resolving numerous specific issues, especially the territorial settlements that recast the maps of Europe and the Middle East. As Wilson relied even less on the State Department, the Inquiry's importance grew.
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Ultimately, as was his custom, Wilson depended mainly on himself. Especially after he broke with House, he was largely on his own. Most decisions were made in small groups, the Council of Four and the Council of Ten. The so-called Big Four met 140 times between January and May. The negotiations were arduous and tension-ridden, with frequent threats from various quarters, Wilson included, to bolt the conference. On one occasion, Clemenceau and Lloyd George came close to fisticuffs. After his February trip to the United States, Wilson also recognized that he would face stern opposition from Senate Republicans. He was sixty-three years old, in poor health, and the strain told on him. He became seriously ill in March, largely because he had pushed himself beyond normal limits. His illness may have affected his ability to function in the last stages of the conference. At times, he displayed odd behavior. He took a more hostile position than previously toward Germany; once, oddly, when Lloyd George sought to soften the Allied stand on a particular issue, he sided with Clemenceau.
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Wilson's triumphant arrival in Europe could not but have led him to overestimate the leverage he would have in dealing with his Allied counterparts. His ship, the
George Washington
(a captured and renamed German luxury liner), docked at Brest on December 13, 1918—the president considered thirteen his lucky number. Banners welcomed the "Champion
of the Rights of Man," the "Founder of the Society of Nations." The moaning sounds of bagpipes resounded amidst shouts of "
Vive l'Amérique! Vive Wilson!
" According to one observer, the president's reception in Paris, where crowds lined the Place de Concorde and the Champs-Elysées to view him, was "the most remarkable demonstration of enthusiasm and affection . . . that I have ever heard of, let alone seen."
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This scene was replicated in London and Manchester, Rome, Genoa, Milan, and Turin. Hailed across the Continent almost as a messiah, Wilson, according to British economist and future critic John Maynard Keynes, "enjoyed a prestige and moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history."
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The exuberant greeting misled him to believe that Allied peoples supported his aims regardless of where their leaders stood.

Wilson in other ways seems to have exaggerated his bargaining power. Early in the war, he had confidently predicted that the Allies would be "financially in our hands" and thus could be brought around "to our way of thinking." The Allies in fact owed more than $10 billion to the U.S. government and private bankers, but such leverage worked both ways. The U.S. economy came to depend on war orders from Britain and France. European debts provided useable leverage only if the United States was willing to forgive them, which was never an option.
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At times, Wilson seemed to believe that the threat of a separate peace with Germany might force the Allies to go along with his proposals, but once the armistice had been arranged this weapon lost its potency. Wilson's negotiating position had been compromised before he arrived in Europe. Responding to pleas from fellow Democrats and seeking to build support for his peace plans, he made a blatantly partisan appeal for the election of a Democratic Congress. Republican victories in the 1918 elections weakened him in dealing with European leaders. His commitment above all to a League of Nations and his insistence on including its charter in the treaty gave his adversaries precious leverage over him. The United States emerged from the war relatively much stronger, but it was not powerful enough to impose its will on other nations. The Allies were in a position to ignore him when they so chose.
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Amidst these difficulties, Wilson sought to negotiate a lasting peace. Germany was the most difficult problem, and the terms eventually settled upon
represented a compromise between France's quest for vengeance and future security and Wilson's pleas for a just peace. Clemenceau ultimately yielded his demands for dismemberment of Germany and permanent occupation of parts of it. But the Allies agreed to fixed limits on German military power, temporary occupation of the Rhineland and the Saar Basin, and an Anglo-American pledge (quite unprecedented for the United States) to aid France in the event of German attack. Wilson refused Allied demands that Germany pay the entire cost of the war. Under enormous pressure from France and Britain, however, and in his anti-German phase, he went along with the notorious "war guilt clause," drafted by another Lansing nephew, future U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, which placed responsibility on Germany for all the damages caused by the war. He reluctantly agreed that Germany should pay extensive reparations, the figure to be fixed by a separate commission. He made such concessions mainly because Clemenceau and Lloyd George repeatedly insisted that their people demanded them. He also needed to give them something to secure their support for changes Americans such as Taft insisted must be made in the League of Nations. When Lloyd George belatedly tried to soften the terms, Wilson stood firmly with Clemenceau, indicating his belief that Germany had earned a "hard peace."
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In disposing of the German and Ottoman empires, Wilson confronted stiff resistance from the Allies, who had made secret commitments to each other and Japan. To avert the seemingly inevitable land grab, he proposed that the former German and Ottoman colonies should be governed through "mandates," by which advanced nations operating under the aegis of the League of Nations would serve as trustees to prepare the colonial areas for independence. The European allies and Japan at first adamantly resisted but eventually went along, perhaps confident that mandates could be used to advance their aims. In the Middle East and Africa, the Allies snapped up former enemy colonies. The mandate system proved little more than annexation in disguise.

Wilson's most damaging concession politically was on the Chinese province of Shandong, which Japan had seized from Germany in 1914. Chinese nationalists demanded restoration of the birthplace of Confucius, "the cradle of Chinese civilization," they called it, a "dagger pointed at the heart of China."
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Throughout the world, Shandong became an emotionally
charged symbol of Wilson's failure to honor self-determination. Already angry that the Big Four had rejected their proposal for a clause on racial equality, the Japanese threatened to leave the conference and stay out of the League if they were not permitted to "carry out their obligations to China."
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To secure their endorsement of the treaty, Wilson accepted their verbal assurances that Chinese sovereignty would be restored by 1922. It was the "best that could be accomplished out of a 'dirty past,' " he told his physician.
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On the other hand, the president resisted Italy's demands for Fiume on the Adriatic and appealed to the Italian people over the heads of their leaders, provoking anti-American demonstrations across Italy and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando's departure from Paris.

Redrawing the maps of Central Europe and the Balkans posed special problems. The term
self-determination
had never been defined with any clarity, and its practical application in regions of mixed nationalities and ethnic groups proved nightmarish. Wilson admitted that he had no idea what demons the concept would unleash. The peacemakers established a number of new independent nations, including Poland, to which Wilson was deeply committed, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, not only to satisfy nationalist aspirations but also to create buffers between Germany and Russia. They attempted to draw boundary lines on the basis of ethnic considerations and collaborated in containing a Communist revolution in Hungary. But large numbers of Germans still lived in some of the new states; some also included ethnic groups that despised each other. The settlements left old problems unresolved and created new ones, setting off conflicts that would vex international relations into the next century.
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Although it was not on the agenda, the Russian problem, in delegate Herbert Hoover's words, was "the Banquo's ghost sitting at every conference table."
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Preoccupied with other issues, the Allies never developed a consistent policy toward revolutionary Russia. Efforts to arrange meetings with Bolshevik leaders failed, in part because of Big Four absorption in matters deemed more pressing. Russia's exclusion from the conference seriously weakened the settlement. The end of the war eliminated much of the rationale for the military interventions. Confronted with rising
political opposition at home and declining morale and even the threat of mutiny among the troops, Wilson withdrew U.S. forces from North Russia in June 1919. Americans remained in Siberia for almost another year.

Wilson could never quite make up his mind what to do with Bolshevik Russia. He had learned from Mexico the limits of military intervention. He stubbornly rejected various Allied proposals, including one by British cabinet officer Winston Churchill, to eliminate the Bolshevik government through a full-fledged military effort—"trying to stop a revolutionary movement by troops in the field is like using a broom to hold back a great ocean," he snapped.
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He distrusted opposition leader Adm. Alexander Kolchak and feared a return to traditional Russian autocracy. Yet, as in Mexico, he continued to delude himself that limited intervention was not intervention at all. He may have hoped that the Bolshevik government would collapse of its own weight. He persisted in sending clandestine military aid to opposition forces through the still-functioning Washington embassy of the Provisional Government. Persuaded that food was "the real thing" to combat Bolshevism, he also authorized the American Red Cross and Hoover's American Relief Administration to distribute food and other relief supplies to anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region. The United States did just enough to anger the Bolsheviks but not nearly enough to achieve the aim of a non-Communist Russia.
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Committed above all to establishing a workable League of Nations, Wilson justified concessions on other issues to attain that goal. He also hoped that a strong League in time would modify the harsh terms of the treaty and resolve issues left unsettled. In designing an international organization, the president had to struggle with people like Lansing, who opposed any commitments, and with the French, who preferred to maintain the wartime alliance. He finally secured Allied agreement to a League composed of an Assembly of all nations and a Council made up of the five victorious powers and four other nations elected by the Assembly. It would be empowered to supervise the mandated territories, encourage peaceful resolution of disputes through arbitration and adjudication—the key peacekeeping provisions, in Wilson's mind—and employ economic and military sanctions against aggressors. The most controversial provision was a collective security mechanism that Wilson hoped would "disentangle all the alliances in the world." Article X provided that member nations would "respect and preserve as against external aggression the political integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League."