The Neutrality Board and Armed Merchantmen, 1914-1917

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson looms over American politics to a remarkable degree today, especially in connection with foreign policy debates. Both critics and supporters present Wilsonianism as a supposedly idealistic foreign policy focused on upholding international law and promoting democracy overseas. This picture of Wilson's approach to international relations is not entirely inaccurate. It is certainly true that Wilson feared and loathed traditional European diplomacy as it was practiced on the eve of World War I-a diplomacy he called power politics or balance-of-power politics that involved arms races, alliances, and unrestrained imperialism. It is certainly true, too, that Wilson wanted to reform international politics and build an international system based more on democratic principles, arms control, and collective security. However, Wilson's relationship with power politics was significantly more complicated than is often depicted.Wilson saw the system of power politics as inherently unstable and as the fundamental cause of the war; but he simultaneously saw Germany as an aggressive, hostile state and German power specifically as a threat to the United States. These two ideas were in tension with each other. Seeing the balance-of-power system as the problem in world affairs implied that all the major states, including Germany, had to be involved in fixing it, which was especially the case because the international reform Wilson had in mind would be based in large part on collective security (i.e., a system in which all states promised to protect each other against aggression anywhere it occurred). On the other hand, seeing Germany specifically as a threat to America implied that the United States should ally with others to contain Germany's power- in other words, that the United States should practice power politics itself to protect its national security. Wilson struggled during World War I to reconcile these two views but was not successful-and in fact, his effort to do so had some damaging consequences.Wilson's attempt to reconcile his desire to reform power politics with his fear of Germany's power went through two phases: one before 1917 and America's entry into the war, and one after. From 1914-17, he focused on convincing German leaders to abandon their pursuit of conquest, accept a settlement based on the status quo ante bellum, and embrace his vision of international reform. He tried to get the Germans to see that a decisive in the war was unlikely and, even if it happened, the Allies would sooner or later recover from their defeat and seek revenge. A new round of arms races and war would commence, with disastrous results for all nations. The wise policy for the Germans, then, would be to settle for what Wilson called a peace without victory and join the United States in the effort to build a more secure world based on arms control and collective security.The Germans, however, were not convinced by this argument. Peace without victory, from their point of view, amounted to a for the Allies because Germany would have to evacuate the Allied territory it occupied at enormous cost in blood and treasure. Not surprisingly, Germany interpreted Wilson's proposed terms as a thinly disguised attempt to reduce its power. His terms seemed to assume that Germany had been defeated in the war-and German leaders did not think Germany had been defeated. Implicitly, the Germans also did not believe that international reform would give them real security; the proposal for a collective security league was, after all, a radical departure from traditional international politics. The Germans therefore opted to stick with their pursuit of victory. This policy eventually drove the United States into the war because of German submarine attacks on American shipping.Once in the war, Wilson had to rethink how to harmonize his goal of ending power politics with the goal of containing Germany's power. …