Wilson's War

How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II

By Jim Powell

Crown Forum 2005 Hardcover Buy here

Book Review
Reviewed by Scott Shepard

Jim Powell’s recent return to polemical history, Wilson’s War, pledges to demonstrate “how Woodrow Wilson’s great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II.” If this is a promise to prove--or merely contend--that Wilson‘s “Blunder” (entering World War I) was the primary cause of the rise of these evils, Powell breaks it. As a result, the work adds little to historical or popular understanding of the issues considered.

Wilson’s War can be read as a bold new thesis, a revisiting of a more conventional thesis, or, arguably, as a two pronged approach – permitting bold-thesis polemics backed by conventional-thesis historical analysis. The bold thesis, the one most reasonably suggested by its title, indicts Wilson’s Blunder as the main cause of the rise of the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and ultimately World War II, the Iron Curtain and the Cold War (10-11, 289). To provide meaningful support for the bold thesis of Wilson’s War, however, Powell should have demonstrated that the single decision to go to war was the – or at least a – primary cause of dozens of major and thousands of minor subsequent effect events, even though the Blunder was made amidst dozens or hundreds of other decisions or events, many of seemingly greater significance, proximity and relevance to the effect events. He also should have shown not only that “the buck stopped” with Wilson and his Blunder (that he and it, rather than later actors or events, bore responsibility for these horrors), but also that “the buck started” with him (that his Blunder was not merely another event in the previous sweep of history, but was the independent, necessary and sufficient cause – so that he and it, rather than earlier actors or events, bore responsibility). Similar demonstrations of responsibility have been made with some success; Powell himself enjoyed such success with FDR’s Folly. In that effort, though, Powell sought only to demonstrate that a relatively precise temporal relationship (i.e., the economic conditions that followed economic-policy decisions made by the Roosevelt Administration) in fact reflected a causal one.

The more conventional thesis, alternatively, merely recognizes Wilson’s decision to enter World War I as one cause among many – perhaps very many – that led to the ills of Stalinism, Nazi Germany, and the Cold War. While much easier to support, this thesis – especially in its more diluted forms – has long received serious consideration in the academy, and arguably ranks as accepted wisdom. Reading Wilson’s War this way makes the book redundant. 

Powell rhetorically asserts the bold thesis, at least at times. For example, he declares in the first page of the introduction, “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” (1).  Accepting this, it’s easy to accept Powell’s claim that Wilson’s Blunder, as his chapter titles purport: permitted Hitler to recruit 50,000 Nazis and paved the way for the Nazi regime; allowed Lenin to secure power; permitted Stalin’s terror; left World War II as his (and its) legacy; and done all of this as the result of a willful and culpable failure to anticipate these reasonably foreseeable developments. The last in particular would be true if Wilson was a “stubborn, self-righteous man” who feigned neutrality and posed at peace-making while angling for war because he was “[c]onsumed by ambition to be a world statesman,” and thus achieved all of this mayhem “simply [to] pursu[e] his self-interest as a politician.” (73, 88-93, 99) And if Wilson’s Blunder was the chief cause of all this horror, Powell’s detailed consideration of the horror's development (which constitutes a substantial portion of his text) – if it had focused on a demonstration of Wilson’s culpability – would prove his point and thoroughly damn Wilson.

Beneath Powell’s sweeping rhetoric, though, his supported arguments actually present a Wilson less ignoble, far less culpable, and far less powerful than the bold-thesis interpretation requires, as well as a sweep of world history too complicated and too replete with fellow responsibility bearers to leave much determinative blame for the American president. Meanwhile, Powell’s lengthy considerations of the rise of, and the atrocities performed by, the Nazi and Soviet regimes are just that – lacking any comprehensive ascription of the details of those events to Wilson or his Blunder.

Powell’s own dishonor roll begins with figures long predating Woodrow Wilson or the Guns of August. His list of the causes and culprits of World War I begins with an indictment of Napoleon’s early-19th Century empire building. The Little Emperor’s efforts, he notes, cut Prussian territory nearly in half and led to the development of a highly efficient Prussian army. “The consequences of the Napoleonic Wars,” he asserts, “were devastating as they played out decades later in Prussia and throughout Europe.” (18-19) These consequences include the rise of “Otto von Bismarck[,who] did more than anyone else to begin turning the world away from the principles of laissez-faire, free trade, and peace” and onto the path toward war (27).  Bismarck’s efforts were assisted by a re-emergent British desire for additional colonies, and by Randolph Churchill’s and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s new imperialism. (30)  Russia, meanwhile, witnessed the rise of an increasingly authoritarian government under Czar Alexander III (31), and Europe generally endured an increase in tariffs (32-35), an arms race (36-40), and the calcifying of international military alliances (40-45), increasing nationalism (45-48), and a parade of miscalculations by leaders on all sides (48-53).

Having labeled these manifold factors causes of World War I, Powell fails to explain why their historical force or their causal culpability had thereby been spent – why they, having been assigned the burden of bringing about the 1914-1918 cataclysm, bore no responsibility for the events that would arise from it. If Napoleon’s Prussian intrigues of the first years of the 1800s bore responsibility for the World War more than one hundred years later, why does that culpability not extend further – to the consequences and ramifications of that war? Even had Napoleon’s guilt somehow run dry after 1918, why did not Bismarck’s survive for a similar century – leaving him not only partially culpable for the Third Reich but also a far more probable, direct, and relevant cause than far-away Wilson? Similarly, if Napoleon remained partially to blame for World War I, despite the multitude of actors and events after his passing, how could Wilson’s antecedents in American authority avoid fault? Why Wilson’s War? Why not Taft’s & Roosevelt’s War and guilt for dividing their majority party and thus permitting the wily Wilson into the executive chair? Why not Lincoln’s War? Had he not crushed the Confederate States of America, arguably neither the U.S. nor the Confederacy could have afforded to meddle in European conflicts. Nor surely without that war would the U.S. federal government have aggregated the powers, theretofore unknown to it, necessary to undertake a sustained foreign war; and, most certainly of all, the Virginia-born and southern-bred Wilson would never have occupied the northern presidency. Silence as to these issues casts a long shadow over any bold-thesis interpretation of Powell’s work, and diminishes a conventional-thesis reading as well by allowing the inclusion of dozens more to the team that “led” to Hitler, Stalin, and WWII, of which Wilson numbers but one.

Powell attempts to blame Wilson for the rise of the Soviet Union, but to do so he strays from his central assertion. Powell drops his Wilson and the Blunder (i.e., American war entry) claim, positing instead that the Wilson Administration’s pressure on the Kerensky government to continue its prosecution of the war led to the Bolshevik soviet victory. By Powell’s acknowledgement, though, Wilson’s pressures were not the sole force pushing Kerensky to break Republican Russia on the wheel of the Great War; manifestly Britain and France similarly pressured the Russian government, and in similar fashion. Powell does not suggest that American pressure was determinative, or even that it was equal in effect to those of any Allied government. Moreover, Powell’s consideration of the events that led to both the collapse of Czarist Russia and the eventual victory of the Soviets provides a litany of causes and characters – Russian, Bolshevik, Allied, and other – that seem obviously and vastly more charged with the course of events than could have been any American exertion of any kind (Chapters 4, 6, 8). Powell admits that the most he can suggest is that “the Bolsheviks … needed everything in their favor, and Wilson’s decision made a difference.” (7) His history suggests that, far from bearing blame for the developments in Russia during the period, Wilson and the United States generally lacked knowledge of events in Russia, much less the means to affect them. At most, then, Powell reasonably demonstrates that Wilsonian foreign policy, following that of the Allies,  benefited from neither omniscience nor much leverage in Petrograd, and so was, in retrospect, only one minor cause in a multitude of causes that collectively impelled Russia toward the revolution that, in the end, and despite impressive odds, the Soviets won.

Finally, of course, Powell blames the form and consequence of the Treaty of Versailles on Wilson and his Blunder. A multitude of other historical forces and actors would again seem to bear at least as much responsibility as Wilson for the outcome of the peace conference, not least those European political and military figures who had started and prosecuted the war, whose careers required and whose polities demanded -- perhaps objectively (and with the benefit of hindsight) -- harsh retribution upon its conclusion. To isolate Wilson, above these others, as a primary or central culprit, Powell must show American intervention to have played a similarly primary or central role in the decisive Allied victory that permitted the aggressive settlement of Versailles. Powell fails to make such a case. In fact, the balance of the evidence he adduces provides stronger support for the nearly opposite conclusion: that the Treaty of Versailles provisions most punishing of Germany  would have emerged on the heels of an Allied victory over the Central Powers even if Wilson (and the U.S.) had failed to enter the fray.

Powell asserts repeatedly that “[u]ntil the United States entered the war … it was stalemated.” (2) While this was true on the Western Front, it was also true, as Powell avers that “[t]he British navy maintained a blockade that prevented the Germans from importing just about anything, including food, and the Germans had no way to invade England.” (2) As a result, Germany and her soldiers were slowly starving. By the spring of 1918, when “American forces weren’t yet at full strength,” the Germans mounted their last offensive and failed, “During the summer of 1918, the Allied Powers captured some 6,400 German guns and 363,000 German prisoners – half of the German guns in the field, and one-quarter of the soldiers.” (133-34) Beyond that, the great influenza epidemic of that year hit the starving Germans much harder than the Allies, and “Germany’s allies were all trying to quit the war.” (ibid.) Powell provides no evidence to suggest that the Allies could not have survived until the summer of 1918, and thus until German collapse, without American intervention. His own text, then, erodes the stalemate argument, and  supports the proposition that they could have achieved the decisive victory that permitted the “real-world” Treaty of Versailles even had the Americans stayed home.

Powell himself unwittingly provides a comprehensive evisceration of a bold-thesis interpretation of his own text. In consideration of the “war guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles, he writes:

[t]his was the most … preposterous clause in the entire treaty – the idea that one nation was responsible for everybody’s stupid decisions in the war! The Germans must bear responsibility for prodding the Austrians to provoke the Serbians in 1914, but the Russians bear responsibility for mobilizing their army, the French bear responsibility for backing the Russians, the British bear responsibility for secretly agreeing to back both. Britain, France, and Russia must also bear responsibility for staying in the war and spurning opportunities to cut their losses and get out. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans that the British had incompetent generals like Douglas Haig, that the French had incompetent generals like Robert-Georges Nivelle, or that the Russians had incompetent generals like Nikolai Yanushkevich. (153)

Just so. And by exactly such reasoning, not only must all of the actors precipitant of and participant in the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles bear responsibility for their own actions, but so must Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, the inflationists of the Weimar Republic, Chamberlain, and the whole grand host of other actors on the world stage from 1918 to 1939 – or 1945 or 1989 – bear their own responsibility. It would be preposterous to make Wilson alone carry their stupidity, cowardice, or guilt for war, appeasement, or tyranny.

Nothing remains to ascribe to Powell’s text, then, but a conventional thesis – and naught but a particularly pallid version of that conventional thesis. Powell’s portrayal – minus the unsupported invective – leaves Wilson no more than a minor,  tangential contributor to the rise of the Soviet Union, wholly faultless for one of Powell’s predicates  to the rise of the Nazis and probably irrelevant to the emergence of the other. Meanwhile, Powell’s review of multiple, sometimes-attenuated causes of and contributors to the Great War adds a vast swath of historical figures and forces that are not, by any argument in Wilson’s War, excluded from sharing, in some part, guilt for the 20th Century’s great evils; and suggests by analogy a further bevy of characters whose culpability Powell does not designate but that can likewise be accused. 

And yet even this narrowest of theses lacks support in Wilson’s War. Its success requires a firm demonstration that Wilson was the central or primary cause of American entry into World War I. Powell, though, does not reveal a Wilson hell-bent on entering the European War. Rather, his evidence supports, at most, the proposition that Wilson’s foreign policy may have favored Britain over Germany, which favoritism might have helped bring about the German aggressions – including the Zimmerman Telegram and the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping – that led the American people, Wilson’s cabinet, and the Congress all to support war. Powell admits, though the admission is buried in unsupported assertions to the contrary, that after his re-election, “ Wilson drafted a peace note, hoping he could persuade the belligerents to rise above their desire for vengeance and offer generous settlement terms.” (92, emp. added) He further recognizes that Wilson may have continued throughout the period from March 4 to April 2, 1917 to vacillate between the options of war and peace until a unanimous cabinet and a united country demanded it. (96-97)

In short, Powell has provided virtually no persuasive evidence that could meaningfully lead to the conclusion that Woodrow Wilson had much of anything at all to do with the emergence of the Nazis, or the Soviets, or the catastrophe of the Second World War. Common historical wisdom, unaided, suspects him of deeper complicity. It also suspects that Wilson, as an out-of-his-league do-gooder at the peace conference, may in the end have made the world less safe for democracy by his participation, despite his intentions. This last point, though, goes beyond the averred range of Powell’s argument, as he posits in his introduction that “[n]othing Wilson did [afterward] could avert the consequences of his decision to enter World War I.” (12)

The profound weakness of Powell’s historical case undermines the argument against foreign intervention that constitutes his last chapter, in part because Powell has not adequately shown what negative consequences actually flowed from Wilson’s intervention per se, nor what portion of those negative consequences can fairly be attributed to the intervention, rather than to other causes.  Nor has he weighed the possibility that some good might have resulted from the intervention, nor the possibility that “Wilson’s” intervention might stand as an exception, rather than exemplar, of a rule.  Neither, finally and obviously, can Powell’s admonition against intervention be thought the first to warn Americans that “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe” or the rest of the world, we must “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of [its] ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice.” (Washington’s Farewell, 1796)

There lies within the strong polemics and weak thesis of Wilson’s War a tantalizing argument: that the rise of classical-liberal political theory, and partial adherence to it during the post-Napoleonic era, generated a beneficial peace; and that withdrawal from it at the beginning of the 20th Century helped to precipitate the First World War. Should some future author attempt to flesh out this premise, without the Wilsonian baggage, his effort may yet bear important fruit.