Lew Rockwell, CA
April 13 2005
What We Can Learn From Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder
The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars
by Jim Powell
The worst American foreign policy disasters of the past century have
been consequences of Wilsonian interventionism. Critics have been
dismissed as “isolationists,” but the fact is that Wilsonian
interventionism has dragged the United States into pointless wars and
ushered in revolution, terror, runaway inflation, dictatorship and
mass murder. It’s past time to judge Wilsonian interventionism by its
consequences, not the good intentions expressed in political
speeches, because they haven’t worked out.
Surely, one of the most important principles of American foreign
policy should be to conserve resources for defending the country.
President Woodrow Wilson violated this principle by entering World
War I which didn’t involve an attack on the United States.
German submarines sunk some foreign ships with American passengers,
but they had been warned about the obvious danger of traveling in a
war zone. People need to take responsibility for their own decisions
and proceed at their own risk. It was unreasonable to expect that
because a few adventurers lost their lives, the entire nation had to
enter a war in which tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands more
people must die.
There never was a serious possibility that Germany might attack the
United States during World War I. The German Navy was confined to
German ports by the British Navy, and British convoys dramatically
reduced the number of merchant ships sunk by German submarines. The
German Army was stalemated on the Western Front, and over a million
German soldiers were engaged on the Eastern Front. German boys and
older men were being drafted to fill the trenches. There wasn’t any
armed force available for an attack on the United States. Despite the
suggestion, in German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s
inflammatory telegram, about a possible alliance between Germany,
Mexico and Japan, America was safe.
Wilson claimed that American national security was linked with the
fate of Britain, but because the British Navy had bottled up the
German Navy and neutralized German submarines, Germany wasn’t capable
of invading Britain. In any case, Britain was struggling to maintain
its global empire. The settlement following World War I had the
effect of adding more territories to the British Empire. Why should
American lives have been lost and American resources spent to expand
the British Empire?
Why, for that matter, should the United States have defended the
French or the Belgians? They were defending their overseas empires,
and both had shown themselves to be brutal colonial rulers. The
Belgians were responsible for slavery and mass murder in the Congo –
the first modern genocide, involving an estimated 8 million deaths.
How could any U. S. president in his right mind have committed
American soldiers to defend Britain and France, whose generals
squandered lives on a stupendous scale? Britain’s General Douglas
Haig, for instance, whose blunders figured in the deaths of 95,675
British soldiers and 420,000 total British casualties at the Battle
of the Somme (1916). Another 50,729 French soldiers were killed. Haig
not only wasn’t fired, but he continued to squander lives in battle
after battle. It was amazing that a U.S. president would seriously
consider conscripting Americans for European killing fields drenched
in blood. There were the battles of the Marne (1914, 270,000 French
and British soldiers killed), Artois (1915, 100,000 French soldiers
killed), Ypres (Second Battle, 1915, 70,000 French soldiers killed),
Gallipoli (1915, 50,000 British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers
killed), Verdun (1916, 315,000 French soldiers killed), Arras (1916,
160,000 British soldiers killed) and Passchendaele (1917, 310,000
British soldiers killed).
There would have massacres even with better generals. As military
historian John Keegan observed, “The simple truth of 1914-18 trench
warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected
by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however
equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by
earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was
bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers…The
effect of artillery added to the slaughter, as did that of bayonets
and grenades when fighting came to close quarters in the trench
labyrinths.”
Woodrow Wilson didn’t need a crystal ball to understand that World
War I wasn’t our war. He knew how the Europeans, with their
entangling alliances, had stumbled into the conflagration. He knew
how they stubbornly refused to quit. He knew how the Allied Powers
had negotiated their secret treaties to carve up Europe and colonial
possessions. He could see how hundreds of thousands of young men were
being slaughtered in the mud.
It was claimed that the United States would have been threatened if a
single power – Germany – had been able to control the entire European
continent. But that was unlikely, since World War I had been
stalemated for more than three years. The best the Germans might have
hoped for would have been to annex Belgium and northwestern France,
where much of World War I had been fought, as well as territories
gained from Austria-Hungary and western Russia. If the Germans had
won the war, they would have had a hard time holding their empire
together because of all the rebellious nationalities, the same
nationalities that figured in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian
and Russian empires. Most likely outcome of a German victory: costly
civil wars ending in German collapse.
In any event, people have been fighting each other for thousands of
years, and America managed to develop despite a succession of empires
in Europe and elsewhere. America was in its infancy when Spain was
the mightiest power on earth, enriched by precious metals from Mexico
and Peru. During the late 1600s, the French King Louis XIV dominated
Europe, persecuted Protestants and fought one war after another, but
America thrived as a sanctuary. A century later, America broke free
from the British Empire. George Washington, as the first President of
the United States, wisely counseled his countrymen to stay out of
European wars, and this policy was continued by his successor Thomas
Jefferson despite French and British interference with U.S. shipping.
The United States prospered while the French Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte organized the first modern police state, conquered Europe
and marched into Russia.
America’s Founders had the humility and wisdom to recognize that the
United States couldn’t prevent other people from fighting. If the
United States had tried forcing “peace” on foreigners, this would
have required raising and equipping an army, and fighting adversaries
who knew their land much better than we did. We would have had to
fight with allies whose motives turned out to be less pure than we
had supposed. We would have made enemies we didn’t have before. In
the end, we would have widened a conflict, and probably more people
would have been killed than if we had stayed out.
The arrogant Wilson should have learned a lesson when he tried
nation-building in Mexico, and the effort backfired. What could have
been simpler than sending some American soldiers across the Mexican
border to find a bandit and help install a good ruler down there? Yet
Wilson’s intervention failed to find the bandit, failed to install a
good ruler, killed people and made enemies.
Preoccupied with his good intentions, Wilson never seemed to have
considered the possibility that intervening in Europe might do worse
than fail to achieve peace. Because of historic resentments and
staggering battlefield casualties, there was a lot of bitterness in
Europe. Governments were nearly bankrupt, and people were hungry.
They wanted vengeance for their suffering. The political situation
was explosive. If one side were able to achieve a decisive victory,
the temptation would be strong to seek retribution. So, Wilson
intervened, enabled the Allied Powers to achieve a decisive victory,
and the result was the vindictive Versailles Treaty with devastating
political consequences that played out in Germany and around the
world.
Apparently thinking only about what he wanted, he pressured and
bribed the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the war, when he
ought to have known that country had been falling apart ever since it
entered the war in 1914. Wilson ought to have known that millions of
Russian peasants weren’t going to be affected much one way or the
other by what happened on the Western Front, the only thing that
Wilson cared about. He ought to have known that Russian peasants were
deserting the Russian Army by the thousands, to go home and claim
land, and soon there wouldn’t be any army to defend the Provisional
Government. If Wilson didn’t know these things, he didn’t have any
business trying to play an international war game. Wilson’s blunders
made it easier for Lenin to seize power on his fourth attempt in
1917, leading to more than seven decades of Soviet communism.
Wilson ought to have known he was playing with fire when, at the
Versailles Conference following World War I, he participated in
redrawing thousands of miles of national borders. He knew how
nationalist hatreds had exploded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
triggered the Balkan wars and World War I. Turkish nationalists
expelled some 100,000 Greeks from the Anatolian Peninsula where many
families had lived for over a thousand years, and large numbers of
Greek women were raped and Greek men murdered. Turkish nationalists
massacred an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.
Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I had serious
consequences in Iraq, too. Because the British and French were on the
winning side of the war, the League of Nations awarded “mandates” to
Britain and France in the region. If the United States had stayed out
of World War I, there probably would have been a negotiated
settlement, and the Ottoman Empire would have survived for a while.
The Middle East wouldn’t have been carved up by Britain and France.
But as things turned out, authorized by League of Nations “mandates,”
British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was determined to secure
the British Navy’s access to Persian oil at the least possible cost
by installing puppet regimes in the region.
In Mesopotamia, Churchill bolted together the territories of Mosul,
Baghdad and Basra to make Iraq. Although Kurds wanted an independent
homeland, their territory was to be part of Iraq. Churchill decided
that the best bet for Britain would be a Hashemite ruler. For king,
Churchill picked Feisal, eldest son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca.
Feisal was an Arabian prince who lived for years in Ottoman
Constantinople, then established himself as king of Syria but was
expelled by the French government that had the League of Nations
“mandate” there. The British arranged a plebiscite purporting to show
Iraqi support for Faisal. A majority of people in Iraq were Shiite
Muslims, but Feisal was a Sunni Muslim, and this conflict was to
become a huge problem. The Ottomans were Sunni, too, which meant
British policy prolonged the era of Sunni dominance over Shiites as
they became more resentful. During the 37 years of the Iraqi
monarchy, there were 58 changes of parliamentary governments,
indicating chronic political instability. All Iraqi rulers since
Feisal, including Saddam Hussein, were Sunnis. That Iraq was ruled
for three decades by a sadistic murderer like Saddam made clear how
the map-drawing game was vastly more complicated than Wilson had
imagined.
Considering Wilson’s global catastrophes, it’s remarkable that his
interventionist policies have been adopted by Democratic and
Republican presidents ever since. President Franklin D. Roosevelt
followed in Wilson’s footsteps when he maneuvered the United States
into World War II, after promising American voters that he would stay
out. Within five years after Hitler’s defeat, more people than ever –
some 800 million – suffered oppression from totalitarian regimes, in
the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Estonia,
East Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania and
Yugoslavia. Millions in Eastern Europe were liberated from Hitler,
then handed over to Stalin. Both Hitler and Stalin murdered Jews. One
might make a case that the war against Hitler was pragmatic, but
since the United States was allied with Stalin, an even worse mass
murderer, World War II couldn’t be described as a just war. And, one
must not forget, the Pacific war occurred as a consequence of
American efforts to thwart Japanese aggression in China, but China
ended up going Communist. No justice in that, either.
President Harry Truman followed in Wilson’s footsteps with his
undeclared Korean War that didn’t involve an attack on the United
States yet killed more than 38,000 Americans. President Lyndon B.
Johnson followed Wilson with his undeclared Vietnam War, still
another war that didn’t involve an attack on the United States – over
58,000 Americans killed.
Again and again, seemingly easy interventions have become
complicated, starting with Wilson’s fiascos in Mexico and Europe. The
Korean War became a quagmire with its rugged terrain and Chinese
hordes, the Vietnam War with its jungles and guerrilla fighters, and
the Middle East with its cities and suicide bombers. We play to our
strengths defending our country and play to our weaknesses
intervening in the affairs of other countries where people speak
different languages, have different ideas, live in places that are
strange to us – and are embroiled in conflicts that have little to do
with our national security interests. In some cases, such as the
Balkans, the United States intervened in conflicts that have been
going on for hundreds of years, before the United States existed.
And, yes, the United States has made enemies by intervening in
ancient disputes between Jews and Muslims as well as disputes among
Muslim sects in the Middle East. American blood has been shed
defending unpopular Saudi kings and the Shah of Iran, and trying to
maintain order in Lebanon and build a new Iraqi nation following the
overthrow of Saddam. During the past thousand years, the Muslim world
has produced kings, dictators and religious fanatics – it’s a region
largely unfamiliar with religious freedom and constitutional
limitations on government power. Yet Wilsonian nation-builders have
imagined that they could somehow develop a nice liberal democracy by
sending in soldiers and money. What we’ve seen, of course, has been
terror and civil war.
Americans seem surprised when local people have opposed our
well-meaning interventions, particularly after we helped get rid of
an acknowledged evil like Saddam Hussein. But people don’t seem to
want somebody else building their nation, even when they made a mess
of it. They might want Americans to send money and sacrifice some
lives, then go home. A small but determined terrorist minority can
cause a lot of trouble for us.
An interventionist foreign policy requires a president with the
highest level of foreign policy expertise, but there isn’t any method
of assuring that only such people will occupy the White House. Many
factors other than foreign policy expertise influence the outcome of
presidential elections, such as a candidate’s personality,
achievements and positions on other issues. In any case, the worst
foreign policy decisions, such as entering World War I, the Korean
War and the Vietnam War, have tended to involve a consensus among
foreign policy experts – “the wise men,” as Walter Isaacson and Evan
Thomas called them in their book about postwar policy. “The best and
brightest” was David Halberstam’s phrase in his critique of the
Vietnam War.
How could the experts be wrong? Predicting foreign policy outcomes is
as difficult as predicting anything else. Intervening in the affairs
of other nations means taking sides. It isn’t easy to predict which
among many personalities and groups might emerge as enemies. Anyway,
an outsider has a limited number of options, including support for a
sympathetic regime and conquest, both of which would inflame
nationalist hatreds.
The catastrophes Woodrow Wilson unleashed ought to serve as a warning
that humility is urgently needed in U. S. foreign policy. It is not
possible to control what other people do. We can only control what we
do. We will have our hands full making this the best country it can
be.
U.S. foreign policy ought to be guided by the following principles:
(1) Defend America from terrorism. The focus should be protecting the
national security interests of the United States, not defending other
countries from a wide range of threats. Nor should the United States
try to counter political instability elsewhere. There has always been
political instability in the world, and most of it doesn’t affect the
national security of the United States. We should avoid having
American forces permanently stationed in other countries. American
blood and treasure should be reserved for safeguarding Americans. We
should repeal proliferating restrictions on civil liberties which,
enacted in the name of fighting terrorism, do little if anything to
protect national security.
(2) Stay out of other people’s wars. By definition, these don’t
involve an attack on the United States. We should phase out alliances
that obligate the United States to enter wars unrelated to American
national security interests, such as the NATO alliance obligating the
United States to enter wars in which any of 19 member nations might
become embroiled. The United States should phase out similar
obligations in the Middle East, Korea and elsewhere. The more
American resources expended in other people’s wars, the less are
available to protect American national security interests.
(3) Don’t try to build other people’s nations. Independent nations
cannot be built by stationing U.S soldiers in a territory and giving
the government foreign aid. For better or worse, people must build
their nations by making their own choices. People don’t want
foreigners trying to build their nations, because the foreigners – in
particular, a foreign government – would be making the choices. When
the United States pursues nation-building, American soldiers are
killed enforcing choices that local people don’t want. This
essentially means American soldiers die in vain.
(4) Be open to the world. Maintain freedom of movement for people,
goods and capital, among other things to minimize the risk that
economic disputes escalate into political and military conflicts. We
should abolish immigration quotas and welcome immigrants from all
nations, except immigrants with known terrorist or other criminal
backgrounds. Immigrants should perhaps be excluded from welfare state
benefits (which, considering the debilitating effects of welfare,
would probably give immigrants an advantage over those born in the
United States). There shouldn’t be any tariffs, import quotas,
antidumping penalties or other import restrictions. Nor should there
be foreign exchange controls or other restrictions on capital flows.
The goal should be to minimize government-to-government contacts and
facilitate the entire range of peaceful, private contacts around the
world.
More immigrants have come to the United States than to all other
destinations combined. Immigrants created new technologies, built
great companies, enriched American cuisine and the American language
itself. This was anything but “isolationism.” America became a rich
and influential country precisely because of a willingness to learn
from everybody.
America cannot save the world by fighting endless wars, but we can
set an example. We must protect a flourishing free society which
peaceful people are welcome to join or emulate in their own lands.
April 13, 2005
Jim Powell, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of
Wilson’s War, How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led To Hitler,
Lenin, Stalin And World War II (2005), FDR’s Folly, How Roosevelt and
His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003), and The Triumph
of Liberty, A 2,000-Year History Told Through The Lives Of Freedom’s
Greatest Champions (2000).