Wilson is often caricatured as a starry-eyed idealist; the truth is close, but less kind. The real Wilson was a romantic whose thinking in foreign affairs was replete with half-baked ideas. Many of those ideas have lived on long after his death.
Indeed, Wilson’s foreign policy was not dominated so much by idealism as by fuzzy-headed thinking. As one of his best biographers, Arthur Herman, thoroughly documented, Wilson advocated for policies that he himself often couldn’t define or weren’t fully formed. Concepts like self-determination and their application to distant parts of the world were not well thought out. “When the President talks of ‘self-determination,’” his Secretary of State Robert Lansing asked, “what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community…. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.”
Wilson’s vision of collective security was similarly hazy. As Herman recounts, when making his case for the League of Nations to Senator Lodge, Wilson couldn’t even articulate the differences between a “moral” and “legal” obligation that would necessitate the United States’ military intervention.
Wilson viewed the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I not as a loss for Germany “but of an entire way of organizing the world,” Herman observes. “Balance of power, armed alliances, secret treaties…would now be thrown out,” and a new world order “based on self-determination, peace and democracy would take their place.”
That is not how the world works, either then or now.
The French statesman George Clemenceau, who would spar with Wilson over peace terms in Paris, noted that the American president “believed you could do everything with formulas and fourteen points.”
“Please do not misunderstand me,” Clemenceau told Wilson, “We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations that you express so often and so eloquently.” Yet, France, like the rest of Europe, “had been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live.”
Wilson often failed to see reality. He initially dismissed the Bolshevik coup in Russia “as an extreme form of democratic anti-imperialist idealism.” As Herman notes, Wilson “saw Lenin and the Bolsheviks as essentially liberals who had lost their way and embraced extremism,” remaining convinced that their “ultimate objective was democracy as well as peace.”