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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson.

You are projecting post-1945 American hegemony back into the past.

We can argue about whether or not Woodrow Wilson was bad, but he definitely wasn't "the" bad guy because he wasn't a first-tier player. The European Great Powers went to war with each other without taking American policy into account, because they thought the most likely scenario was a short war of maneuver and there was nothing the US could do to affect the results of one. Even had they expected a long war, they would have (correctly) assumed US neutrality absent an exceptionally stupid provocation by the Central Powers.

The first meaningful opportunity for the US to meddle in WW1 (apart from selling materiel to the Allies on normal commercial terms) is when Bethmann Hollweg asks Woodrow Wilson to convene an international peace conference on the basis of status quo ante in December 1916. By this point the bloodiest battles of WW1 (Verdun and the Somme) had already been fought. And Wilson doesn't take the bait at this point - he correctly realises that neither side wanted a status quo ante peace in 1916. (Bethmann Hollweg was trying to maneuver out of situation where German domestic politics would force the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which he opposed on the mostly-correct basis that if it worked it would bring the US in).

The first time the US actually meddles in WW1 is the publication of the Fourteen Points, which happens after the February Revolution in Russia, at which point the messy collapse of Tsarist Russia is already priced and can be added to the "harms of WW1 definitely not Wilson's fault" pile.

the publication of the Fourteen Points

I always like Clemenceau's (possibly fake) quip about Wilson's laundry list - "four more than God."

I so want it to be true. ;-)

OP wasn't addressing what Wilson did before he decided the US needs to enter the war, he was addressing what he did after the war ended.

And Monzer's point remains the same: Wilson wasn't a first-tier player who had the agency to overturn the preferences of the rest, and many of the factors that led to the nature of the end of WW1 (such as breakup of empires into smaller nation-states, but with ethnic mixing) were already baked in.

Wilson was The first tier player and he overrode his allies desires for more realpolitik based solution.

A good summary can be found in the The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles chapter in the Kissinger's Diplomacy