A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  On 24 March Joseph Patrick Tumulty, the President’s long-time private secretary, wrote to him that the opinion of the American public, as revealed by editorials in newspapers all over the country, was that if the United States went to war against Germany, “it should be on an issue directly between us and them.”7 America should not be tied to Allied war goals, whatever their merits; Americans should not be asked to die for other people’s causes.

  When Wilson went before Congress the evening of 2 April to ask for a declaration of war against the German Empire, it became evident that he was thinking along the same lines, for he devoted much of his speech to the United States’ special goals. In explaining why he felt compelled to ask for a declaration of war, he narrowed the focus of the quarrel with Germany to grounds on which it was difficult to fault him: the Germans had sunk three American merchant vessels and proposed to sink more. Acts of war were being committed against the United States, to which she had no honorable choice but to respond in kind.

  To emphasize that the quarrel was about the sinking of American ships, the President postponed consideration of relations with Germany’s ally, the Habsburg Empire. He said that since Austria-Hungary had not made war on the United States, the United States, at least for the moment, would not make war on her. (In the event, the United States did not declare war against the Habsburg Empire until the end of 1917.) Emphasizing even further that he proposed to enter the war on political grounds of his own choosing, the President did not mention the Ottoman Empire at all, nor Bulgaria, which had recently joined the Central Powers. In fact the United States never declared or made war against them, although the Porte—as a result of German pressure—broke off diplomatic relations with the United States.

  But he departed from the specific quarrel about the merchant vessels to challenge the German government—and the Allied governments too—on more general grounds. The actions of the Kaiser’s government, he told Congress, constituted “a war against all nations” and so “The challenge is to all mankind.”8 The United States, he said, would fight “for the ultimate peace of the world, and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included” and, in a phrase that became famous, he asserted that “The world must be made safe for democracy.”9 Implicitly distinguishing American policy from that of the Allied Powers, Wilson proclaimed that “We have no selfish ends to serve. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.”10

  The point was later made explicit when the United States—keeping her distance from the Europeans and their suspect political ambitions—declined to become one of the Allies, and chose to be designated as an associate rather than as an ally. This was an extraordinary decision: to fight alongside Britain, France, Italy, and Russia, but to refuse to be their ally; and to fight against Germany, but to refuse to fight against Germany’s allies. It was an indication of a fundamental conflict between the European belligerents and Wilson’s America as to the purpose of the war and the shape of the peace. The intervention of the United States was to cast a long shadow over the gains with which the Entente Powers had promised to reward one another at the end of the war, especially in the Middle East.

  III

  The President was concerned about the attacks on his war policy by Progressive and Socialist leaders in the Middle West, for they represented voting blocs he could not ignore. They denounced his policy as aiding imperialism, and claimed the war was being fought in the service of major financial interests. They pictured the war as a greedy struggle for spoils.

  They attacked where the President felt vulnerable, for he believed, correctly, that the Allied governments had entered into secret agreements with one another to aggrandize their empires, and feared that if these agreements were made known they might confirm the charge leveled against him that he had associated the United States with a war that served essentially imperialistic interests. The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, for example, provided for Britain and France to divide up the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Other agreements provided for Russia and Italy to annex portions of what is now Turkey. Wilson inquired into the details of the secret treaties—even though his political confidant, Edward Mandell House, felt these were matters best not gone into until the war was won. In response to the President’s inquiry, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent copies of the secret agreements to Washington on 18 May 1917. House (who used his honorary Texas title of colonel) was dismayed by their contents. Of the plan to partition the Middle East, Colonel House presciently remarked that “It is all bad and I told Balfour so. They are making it a breeding place for future war.”11

  The Allies would not renounce the claims that they had staked out for themselves in their secret agreements. The President could not use coercion to make them do so: while fighting alongside them he could not hurt them without hurting the United States. Yet he knew that if news of the agreements leaked out it would hurt them all. As an opponent, on principle, of secret treaties, he was pushed into the paradoxical position of trying to keep the Middle Eastern agreements a secret; but he was not able to do so. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, they published the copies of the secret agreements that they discovered in the Russian archives. Fearful of the effect on American public opinion, Wilson tried—but failed—to prevent the publication of the treaties in the United States.

  Falling back on a suggestion by his brilliant young journalist supporter Walter Lippmann, then an editor of the New Republic, Wilson took the offensive by redefining the goals for which the war was being fought, in a way that he judged would purify the Allied cause, in the hopes of boosting public morale on his own side and of again appealing to the German people over the heads of their leaders.12

  Wilson defined the new war goals in several ways and on a number of occasions. Most famous were the Fourteen Points, which he outlined to a joint session of Congress on 8 January 1918. Of these, some were of a general nature: no more secret agreements between countries; diplomacy and negotiation always to take place in the public view; freedom of the seas; freedom of trade, and an end of tariff and other economic barriers; general disarmament; and the establishment of an association of nations to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all nations. Others dealt with specific issues; and, of these, Point Twelve, although the United States was not at war with the Ottoman Empire, outlined American objectives with respect to it: “12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” In an earlier draft, Wilson had proposed that Turkey be wiped off the map;13 his main interest in the Middle East was missionary and, like Lloyd George, he seems to have kept in mind the Turkish massacres of Christians. The final version, however, drafted by his advisers, was in line with the President’s claim that the United States was fighting the governments rather than the peoples of her adversaries.

  Point Twelve expressed the view, shared by Wilson and House, that the Middle East should not be divided among the belligerent powers; that peoples hitherto ruled by the Turks should become autonomous.14 Only a year before, however, Wilson and House had agreed that it would be unwise for the President to discuss in public his plans for displacing the Ottoman regime because his words might endanger the American missionary colleges in Beirut and outside Constantinople.15

  A month later, on 11 February 1918, Wilson spoke to Congress and defined in a general way the Four Principles upon which the peace settlement should be made. The second and third principles were:

  2. That peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game, even the great game, now for ever discredited, of the balance of power; but that

  3. Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the
populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states…

  In a speech on 4 July 1918, Wilson defined the Four Ends for which the United States and its associates were fighting as including

  The settlement of every question, whether of territory or sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.

  Wilson’s peace proposals were received with ardent enthusiasm, but, revealingly, not by the Allied governments. As Walter Lippmann’s biographer has written,

  At first this puzzled Lippmann, for he had assumed that Wilson had coordinated his plan with the Allies before making it public. He had not, and for a good reason: he knew they would turn it down. Defeated in his efforts to persuade the Allies to repudiate the secret treaties, he had tried to induce the peoples of Europe to put pressure on their own governments. The tactic failed, and as a result the Fourteen Points were simply a unilateral American pronouncement rather than a declaration of Allied policy.16

  Indeed they represented a challenge to the Allied as well as to the enemy governments.

  IV

  Point Twelve was not only unilateral but also anomalous: the President was proposing to dismember the Ottoman Empire, with which the United States was not at war. It also seemed an anomaly that the United States should have declared war against Germany and later against Austria-Hungary without also declaring war against their allies.

  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee appeared to be in favor of issuing the additional declarations of war. Its chairman asked Secretary of State Lansing for a fuller explanation of the Administration’s reasons for not doing so. In a lengthy memorandum submitted by Lansing in reply, the Secretary of State cited a number of reasons.17 At the time, the United States held no significant trade, economic, or political stakes in the Middle East other than two Protestant missionary-supported colleges—Robert College and the Syrian Protestant College—with which Wilson’s friend and chief financial supporter, Cleveland Dodge, was intimately concerned. But Lansing argued that safeguarding these institutions in itself was of sufficient importance to justify the Administration’s policy. He indicated that these institutions were worth millions of dollars and might be confiscated in the event of war. He also warned that, in the event of war, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire might become the victims of new massacres. Lansing saw no particular advantage to be gained by declaring war, and pointed out that Turkey had not attacked the United States.

  Despite the many reasons cited by Lansing for the Administration’s decision, Congress remained unconvinced, and a resolution was introduced in the Senate in 1918 calling for the additional declarations of war. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lansing said that the decision was essentially one for Congress to make. At the request of the committee, he agreed to sound out the Allies as to whether they believed the additional declarations of war would help or hinder the war effort.

  In May, Lansing reported to the President that the Allies were of the opinion that it would be helpful if the United States were to issue the additional declarations of war. Lansing pointed out to the President, however, that more than a million dollars a month was being sent to American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to feed and care for Syrians and Armenians, and that this aid would be cut off in the event of war.18

  The President reaffirmed his decision not to declare war. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was so informed and reluctantly accepted his decision. Thus the United States remained at peace with the Ottoman Empire while the President continued to formulate his plans for breaking it up.

  V

  At the President’s request, Colonel House, by-passing the State Department, began in early September 1917 to assemble a group of assistants to help him formulate America’s plans for the postwar world. It was to be an independent group to which no publicity was to be given: it was code-named “the Inquiry.” It met at first in the New York Public Library. At Wilson’s suggestion, House drew participants principally from the academic world, beginning with names recommended by the president of Harvard University and by the editor of the New Republic. President Wilson personally chose Walter Lippmann. At its peak, the group assembled by House numbered 126. The vast majority of its members had received their final academic degrees from one of four élite universities—Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale—and many were recruited directly from the faculties of those or similar institutions.19

  Yet the Inquiry—apart from its professionally drawn maps—20 was conducted amateurishly. The Middle Eastern group, composed of ten scholars operating out of Princeton University, did not include any specialists in the contemporary Middle East; its chairman was a student of the Crusades. The chairman’s son, also a member, was a specialist in Latin American studies. Among other members were an expert on the American Indian, an engineer, and two professors who specialized in ancient Persian languages and literature.21

  The choice of the New York Public Library as its first headquarters symbolized the approach adopted by the Inquiry: having raised all the political questions that divide the human race, the Inquiry proceeded to look them up. Many of the researchers did no more than summarize the information that they found in an encyclopaedia. Many delved into questions of literature and architecture that could have no conceivable bearing on the terms of an eventual peace treaty. Few of the reports had any bearing on the question of American national interests.22

  It was typical that even in the economic section of the Middle Eastern group’s report, there was no mention of the possibility that significant deposits of petroleum might be found in that part of the world. Yet in 1918, in waging a twentieth-century war in which tanks and airplanes made their appearance, the United States discovered (as did France that same year, and as Winston Churchill had done in Britain before the war) that the vast quantities of petroleum required in modern warfare had rendered the potential oil resources which were suspected to exist in the Middle East of considerable importance. That the Inquiry’s reports on the Middle East ignored the oil issue was an indication of the unworldliness of the President’s men that boded ill for the future Peace Conference.23

  VI

  While the President’s peace program was in some respects quixotic, the extraordinary response that it evoked throughout the world showed that it expressed a widespread yearning to understand why the war was being fought. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Balfour, said that the war “was perhaps the biggest event in history” but that, beyond that, his mind would not go: “Coming generations might find it possible to see the thing as it really existed,” but he and his generation could not.24 The war, by 1917, had grown so much larger than the events that caused it that its causes seemed almost absurdly insignificant by comparison.

  The day after Woodrow Wilson delivered his speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war, Walter Lippmann wrote to him (in words that were to appear in the New Republic later in the week): “Only a statesman who will be called great could have made America’s intervention mean so much to the generous forces of the world, could have lifted the inevitable horror of war into a deed so full of meaning.”25 Lippmann, as he so often did, had found the word for it: the President, by adopting the goals that he did, had given the war a meaning.

  Years later, in off-the-record comments aboard ship en route to the peace conferences in 1919, Wilson told his associates that “I am convinced that if this peace is not made on the highest principles of justice, it will be swept away by the peoples of the world in less than a generation. If it is any other sort of peace then I shall want to run away and hide…for there will follow not mere conflict but cataclysm.”26

  However, neither Wilson nor those who took part i
n his Inquiry had formulated concrete programs that would translate promises into realities: the President’s program was vague and bound to arouse millennial expectations—which made it practically certain that any agreement achieved by politicians would disappoint.

  32

  LLOYD GEORGE’S ZIONISM

  I

  As human beings, no two men could have been less alike than the austere American President and the charming but morally lax British Prime Minister. As politicians, though, they were similar: loners who had won power through the fluke of a party split. Each carried on a personal foreign policy, by-passing the Department of State and the Foreign Office. Both Wilson and Lloyd George had been reluctant to let their countries enter the war and, after opting for war, had found it difficult to keep their pacifist and anti-war supporters in line. Both men were of the political left; but there the similarities came to an end, for while Wilson was moving in an ever more progressive and idealistic direction, Lloyd George was doing just the opposite.

  Had his political past been a guide to his future performance, Lloyd George could have been expected to share the United States’ aversion to imperialist designs on the Middle East. In his Radical youth he had opposed British imperialism and it would have been in character for him, on becoming Prime Minister, to have overturned the Asquith Cabinet’s agreement with the Allies to expand their empires—but he did not do so.

  Lloyd George felt much the same need to reformulate war goals that Wilson did, but arrived at different conclusions. Wilson proclaimed that the enormity of the war required peace without annexations. Lloyd George took the other view: the enormity of the war required indemnities and annexations on an enormous scale.