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This chapter examines the “better policies” that the internationalist faith suggested which Woodrow Wilson outlined in his “Fourteen Points” address of January 8, 1918. Unfortunately, Wilson was so identified with the idea that nations could cooperate, and might even do so given proper guidelines and inducements, that when he failed to live up to its various and conflicting interpretations, he nearly bankrupted all of them. Yet the number and diversity of people who invested their hopes for a new world order in Wilson reflected more than just the confusion he sowed in the months following his address. Throughout 1918, Wilson and his close advisers expanded the Fourteen Points into a pragmatist program for global governance, one just radical enough to be practical—or at least to seem so to tens of millions worldwide who had borne the burden of nationalist rivalry and political oppression far too long.

This chapter explores American foreign policy and the country’s global position in the early twenty-first century, and in particular during the presidency of Donald Trump, employing the historical background of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Specifically, the chapter discusses the importance of Wilson’s fourteenth point, which emphasizes the need for international cooperation and mutual understanding among nations. It explains why the United States needs internationalism and a strong foreign policy. The chapter concludes by stating the need for America’s involvement with the United Nations, in the midst of Trump’s efforts to separate America from the international community.

Starts by pointing out that if the Berlin and Brussels Acts and the experience of the Congo Free State (as discussed in the last chapter) are understood as representing the internationalization of the idea of trusteeship, then the League of Nations mandates system might be understood as representing its institutionalization in international society. Examines the current of ideas from which the institutionalization of trusteeship arose out of the debates concerning the disposal of German colonies conquered during the First World War, and the subsequent compromise that resulted in the creation of the mandates system, which stands as a response to the problem of ordering relations of Europeans and non‐Europeans by reconciling the obligations of trusteeship and the search for national security in a single institutional arrangement. The victorious Allied powers divided Germany's colonial possessions amongst themselves, in no small part for reasons of national security, but in assuming administrative responsibility for these territories they also accepted the oversight of ‘international machinery’ to ensure that the work of civilization was being done. The seven sections of the chapter are: War and the Old Diplomacy; Trusteeship or Annexation?; From the New World—the effect of the Russian revolution and the entry into the First World War of the US on the French and British annexation policy and Woodrow Wilson's ideas for peace; The Mandates System—the birth of the League of Nations; Impasse at Versailles—the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Versailles Peace Treaty; Trusteeship or Deception—the obligations and defects of the League of Nations Covenant; and Novelty and Tradition—the compromise of the League of Nations system.

This chapter examines the debate over the Fourteen Points on November 13, 1918. The Fourteen Points referred to free navigation and the removal of economic barriers, which seemed to threaten trade discrimination against nations not party to the total peace program. On the issue of diplomacy, Viscount Itō Miyoji expressed his opposition to the outlawing of secret treaties. He also attacked freedom of the seas as “a vague notion that nations will interpret according to their own interests.” Count Makino Nobuaki, on the other hand, argued that Japan’s “old diplomacy” should be reformed through adherence to the diplomatic principles expressed in the Fourteen Points.

This chapter discusses the anti-Simon agitation; the Nehru Report; Jinnah and the Fourteen Points; the Lahore Congress and Independence Day; the first two phases of the Civil Disobedience Movement; the Round Table Conferences; the problem of untouchability; and militant revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. The agitation against the Simon Commission was a turning point in India’s struggle for freedom. It led to a second great mass movement that demonstrated the country’s fixed determination to be free from foreign rule. This showing of strength compelled the British government to deal with Indian leaders as equals. Negotiations begun during this period laid the constitutional foundations of independent India. In 1934, a hush seemed again to have fallen over the country. The Civil Disobedience police repression had silenced the physical-force movement.

This section introduces readers to Woodrow Wilson and the magnitude of the global problems he faced as World War I raged—eventually with formal American participation—with no clear end in sight. More than a statement of war aims, Wilson’s Fourteen Points were a full-throated call for a new world order, one capable of surmounting the inherent problems that had plagued society and international affairs for generations. So profound were Wilson’s words and so great his legacy that historians no longer ask whether subsequent presidents were or were not Wilsonian in their foreign policies and worldviews. We ask how Wilsonian were they? The introduction also previews the fourteen solutions humbly offered in Wilson’s honor for our own times.

This chapter provides a chronological overview of peacemaking after the Great War according to a constructivist interpretation of the “agent-structure problem.” Agents are simply the characters of the story; structures, that which determines the plot. Peacemaking began with the armistices of 1918, as recognizably realist states sought a new realist structure for security. However, Wilsonianism provided a radically new discursive structure which the allies and Germans accepted at the time of the armistice. Accepting Wilsonianism as the ideological foundation of the peace had real consequences, whatever the intentions of the statesmen who had done so. Wilsonianism legitimized the successor state, a new ethno-national agent that would seek to unify ethnic and national boundaries. Great Powers guided by Wilsonianism had created an identity they could not control. Successor states would do much to demarcate the authority of the conference in Europe and in the domains of the defeated empires.

This chapter examines Woodrow Wilson’s pragmatic decision not to declare war on the Ottoman Empire after American entry into the First World War. It explains why this policy choice offers important insights into Wilson’s attitude toward the Allied powers, particularly the British Empire. It evaluates Wilson’s broader attitude to Britain and his attitude toward an Anglo-American alliance. The chapter emphasizes the clash between Wilson and Roosevelt over whether the United States should declare war on the Ottoman Empire, and what this reveals about their humanitarian visions and broader conceptions of international order. In doing so, it traces the emergence of Wilson’s own solution to the Armenian question as part of a reformed, American-led international system.

In 1899 the English writer Rudyard Kipling penned a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden.” The phrase is now famous, though few probably know that Kipling was its author. Fewer still know the full title: “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.” Kipling published the poem to implore the United States, which had just defeated Spain in a war, to assume control of Spain’s former colonies. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States had grown into an economic giant and had shown itself capable of vanquishing a once great European nation. Now, Kipling suggested, it was time to step into its natural role as an imperial power. His final verse made clear the stakes: . . . Take up the White Man’s burden— Have done with childish days— The lightly proferred laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers! . . . Many Americans at the time agreed that victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 demonstrated that the United States was now a world power of the first rank. Yet as the poem suggests, they were not entirely sure about ruling Spain’s former colonial islands. Even if the United States did follow the lead of other great powers and build an overseas empire, it was unclear exactly how its colonies should be governed. Were the islands acquired from Spain subject to the same laws as ordinary American territory, or could the United States rule offshore territories differently simply because they were offshore? In short, as contemporaries put the question, did the Constitution follow the flag? This debate consumed the American public and elites alike. It became a central theme in the 1900 presidential contest between Republican incumbent William McKinley and Democratic challenger William Jennings Bryan. The Democratic Party platform emphatically declared an anti-imperial stance: “We hold that the Constitution follows the flag, and denounce the doctrine that an Executive or Congress deriving their existence and their powers from the Constitution can exercise lawful authority beyond it or in violation of it . . . Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”