Fourteen Points

Fourteen Points (1918). President Woodrow Wilson's statement of January 1918 was the most important on war aims advanced during World War I. Based on his anti‐imperialist “Peace without Victory” formula of the previous year, Wilson made his address owing primarily to the revolutionary upheaval that had seized Russia. By the end of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had pulled their ravaged homeland out of the war, thus permitting Germany to transfer huge numbers of troops to the western front. They also published the Allies' secret treaties (signed by the czarist regime) for parceling out territory after victory. The Bolsheviks then summoned the soldiers of both the Allied and Central Powers to lay down their arms and repudiate plans for conquest. Because many liberal and socialist groups among the Allies had already begun to question the continuation of the carnage, it fell to Wilson to remove the suspicions hanging over their cause and explain why the conflict was any longer worth fighting.

The president argued that German militarism must be crushed, first, in order to create a new and better world. He then outlined the American peace program. Seven of the points dealt with territorial readjustments, including the “unembarrassed opportunity” for Russia to shape its own destiny. The others were characteristically Wilsonian—open covenants openly arrived at; free trade; self‐determination; disarmament; impartial adjustment of colonial claims; freedom of the seas; and a league of nations.

Wilson's progressive response to the Bolshevik challenge provided the ideological cement that held the Allied coalition together for the remainder of the war. The Fourteen Points also set the public agenda for the Paris Peace Conference, but became a source of controversy when they were only partially fulfilled in the Treaty of Versailles.
[See also League of Nations; World War I: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

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

Thomas J. Knock