Woodrow Wilson as the worst president

WILSON’S WAR: HOW WOODROW WILSON’S GREAT BLUNDERS LED TO HITLER, LENIN, STALIN

& WORLD WAR II

By Jim Powell

Crown Forum, $27.50,

332 pages

REVIEWED BY DOUG BANDOW

Based almost entirely on his rhetoric, President Woodrow Wilson has become a liberal icon. Both he and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were dedicated to remaking the world. Only Roosevelt succeeded in doing so, but, as Jim Powell explains in “Wilson’s War,” Wilson probably was the more consequential president. For without Wilson’s misguided decision to take the United States into World War I — despite the lack of any serious American interest in that tragic conflict — there probably would have been no Bolshevik revolution, and there certainly would have been no Nazi triumph or World War II. Even the Middle East would have looked dramatically different. As Mr. Powell points out, “bitter adversaries were forced into a new nation — Iraq — thanks to the Versailles Treaty made possible by Wilson.”

Mr. Powell speaks bluntly. The conventional wisdom sees Wilson as a great progressive who called all mankind to better itself and inaugurate a new international order. To the contrary, writes the author: “Wilson made a decision that led to tens of millions of deaths. Far from helping ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ as he claimed, he contributed to the rise of some of the most murderous dictators who ever lived. No other U.S. president has had a hand — however unintentional — in so much destruction. Wilson surely ranks as the worst president in American history.”

By the end of the 19th century support for classical liberalism — international peace, free trade, limited government — had been largely superseded by the forces of collectivism, militarism and nationalism. Nor was Wilhelmine Germany solely to blame. As Mr. Powell explains, dreams of “imperial glory” were widely shared. The strongest contestants in the growing arms race were the Entente powers, which spent far more than Germany and Austria-Hungary on the military.

Alliances spread, allowing an assassination in a Balkan state to touch off a murderous conflict among most of the globe’s major powers.

But even after so many other nations jumped off of the geopolitical cliff, there was no need for the United States to follow. The author nicely debunks the reasons offered for America going to war. For instance, the United States had no interest in protecting the right of U.S. citizens to travel on armed merchantmen carrying munitions through a war zone, Woodrow Wilson’s position in the submarine controversy.

Nor could even a victorious Germany threaten America. The allied powers were no paragons of moral virtue. There was the anti-Semitic despotism of czarist Russia. Democratic Britain was suppressing Irish self-determination. Indeed, far more people worldwide were oppressed by the Entente members than by the Central Powers. Perhaps the most important reason Wilson chose war was a desire to transform the world. Only as president of a victorious belligerant power could he impose his vision.

Achieving that victory may have been the worst consequence of the war. For the United States turned a stalemate that most likely would have led to a compromise peace into an allied triumph. And that triumph yielded a so-called peace treaty which spawned totalitarianism and war. An allied victory need not have had that impact. But it did in large part through his blunders. They were many, and Mr. Powell offers a detailed explanation of each.

One was to encourage the Russian provisional revolutionary government to remain in the war. In the end, Mr. Powell shows, the war sapped the strength of democratic forces and opened the way to power for Lenin and, even more notably, Stalin. Another error was to raise and then dash hopes for a humane peace. Wilson’s arrogant sanctimony mixed with shocking ignorance left him as the weakest of the leading statesmen in Paris in 1919. The result was a treaty that was vindictive, thereby ensuring enduring enmity — and Hitler’s rise — yet which lacked sufficient legitimacy to be forever enforced to prevent a German revival.

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