Wilsonian Diplomacy: Friends and Enemies

WILSONIANDIPLOMACY: FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Kathieen Burk. Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914-1918. Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. x + 286 pp. Lloyd C. Gardner. Safe For Democracy: The AngloAmerican Response to Revolution, 1913-1922. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. xxi + 383 pp. A. Lentin. Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany: An Essay in the Pre-History of Appeasement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, I984. xiii + 193 pp. Klaus Schwabe. Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918-19/9: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power. Translated from German by Rita and Robert Kimber. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. ix + 565 pp. Joyce Grigsby Williams. Colonel House and Sir Edward Grey: A Study in Anglo-American Diplomacy. Lanham: University Press of America, 1984. vii + 174 pp. F.M. Carroll Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most compelling figures in American public life. All those who study the twentieth century must at some time attempt to come to grips with Wilson. There are several reasons for this. He had an uncanny ability to put into words sentiments that had appeal to people all over the world, but especially to Americans. As a university professor, as president of Princeton, as Governor of New Jersey, as President of the United States, and finally as a world statesman, Wilson reached into the hearts of countless people and ignited a flame of idealism and hope. For a time, Wilson emerged as the foremost spokesman of liberalism both in the United States and abroad. Paul Kennedy has recently described him as the "new Gladstone waiting in the wings," and, as with Gladstone, Wilson's confident moral righteousness drove conservatives, and later radicals, livid with rage.' John Maynard Keynes derisively accused Wilson of sounding like a Nonconformist minister, but it was exactly that quality that gave his words such a broad appeal. The second reason for Wilson's lasting importance is that he was President during World War I. He held power and responsibility in·'interesting times.'' Because of the changing power relations between Europe and North America, any American president would have been thrust into international prominence. What is sometimes lost sight of in considering World War I is that between 1914 and 1916 Britain and the Entente powers did not have the physical resources to defeat the Germans, and even their capacity to stave off 212 F.M. Carroll defeat by themselves was qualified. Indeed, as one of the books reviewed in this article shows, even before the United States entered the war Britain depended on private investors in America for as much as one-third of the cost of the war and on American resources for forty percent of her food and supplies, simply to carry on. In these circumstances, then, whatever the United States did or did not do would have had profound effects on the war and the settlement. In addition, the fact that Wilson was a powerful liberal spokesman, that he articulated the most highlydeveloped peace program (whatever its deficiencies and omissions), and that in the end the Germans saw their deliverance through a peace treaty on the basis of this program, all served to make Wilson one of the architects of the twentieth century. Yet, having said all this, there is almost universal agreement that things did not turn out as hoped. What went wrong? Was it Wilson-his ideals, his objectives, his methods, his associates, his enemies? Herein lies the tragedy of early twentieth-century history and the compelling interest in searching Wilson's diplomacy to get at the bottom of what happened. 2 One of the earliest agents of Wilson's diplomacy was Colonel Edward M. House. Indeed, he has sometimes been described as the inspiration for Wilson's policies as well as the unofficial agent sent abroad to implement them. To be sure, House's memoirs tended to reinforce that impression. In recent years, as more documents have become accessible, historians have become increasingly critical of him. Although House cannot be ignored as an element in Wilson's diplomacy, the commanding position that House's reputation once enjoyed-"the best diplomatic brain America has yet produced"-has been very...