Fourteen Points

Fourteen Points (1918). President Woodrow Wilson's pronouncement of 8 January 1918 was the most important statement of war aims during World War I. Wilson made his address primarily in response to the revolutionary upheaval in Russia. By the end of 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had pulled their ravaged homeland out of the war, thus permitting Germany to transfer great numbers of troops to the Western Front, and called for a peace based on self‐determination. Publishing the Allies’ secret treaties (signed by the Tsarist regime) for carving up territory after victory, the Bolsheviks appealed to the soldiers of the Allied and Central Powers alike to lay down their arms and demand that their governments repudiate plans for conquest. Because many liberal and socialist groups among the Allies were already questioning the seemingly endless carnage, it fell to Wilson to remove the suspicions hanging over the Allied cause and explain why the conflict was still worth fighting.

The president argued that German militarism must be crushed in order to create a new and better world. Drawing upon his anti‐imperialist “Peace without Victory” formula of 1917, he then outlined the American peace program. Seven of the points dealt with territorial readjustments, including the “unembarrassed opportunity” for Russia to shape her own destiny. The others were characteristically Wilsonian—open covenants openly arrived at free trade; national self‐determination, reductions in armaments; impartial adjustment of colonial claims; freedom of the seas; and, the capstone, a League of Nations.

Hailed by liberals and socialists throughout Europe and America, Wilson's progressive internationalist response to the Bolshevik challenge provided the ideological cement that held the Allied coalition together for the remainder of the war. Although not endorsed by the other Allies, the Fourteen Points set the public agenda for the Paris peace conference. They became a source of controversy, however, when the Treaty of Versailles only partially fulfilled Wilson's program for a new world order.
See also Foreign Relations: Overview; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Internationalism.

Bibliography

Arno J. Mayer , Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918, 1959.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.

Thomas J. Knock