The Illusion of Victory: America
in World War I
Thomas Fleming
Basic Books, 2003
As the
title indicates, this book is more than a detailed scholarly history. It is also a work of hard-hitting
analysis. Thomas Fleming has written an
extended essay about American involvement in World War I that gives an
informative factual account while also expressing a definite point of view.
His
perspective runs counter to the conventional wisdom that reveres Woodrow Wilson
and counts him as among the best of American presidents. In Fleming’s account, Wilson
emerges as a man who, although deeply caring and confident, is uncompromising,
vindictive, naïve, duplicitous, craving of fame, and utopian.
Fleming has
written more than twenty books. These
include several histories and biographies on a variety of subjects, as well as
nine works of fiction. When he writes
about the “illusion” that the United States
was a victor in World War I, however, he has something of a personal stake in
the subject: his father, a sergeant in the 78th Division, received a
battlefield commission when all the officers of his company were killed or
wounded.
The
American intervention into World War I is arguably the most pivotal event of
the twentieth century. Before leading
the country into war, Wilson, he
says, first pursued a period of “sham neutrality” that applied a double
standard to the British and Germans.
Fleming ponders what would have happened if the United
States had followed a true
neutrality that would not have provided abundant material support to the
Allies.
He
concludes that “the war might have ended in 1916 with a negotiated peace based
on the mutual admission that the conflict had become a stalemate.” Had this occurred, the stage would have been
set much differently for the rest of the century than it turned out to be. Among countless other things, millions of
lives would have been spared, Europe would not have depleted itself internally
and on the world stage, the Treaty of Versailles
with its aftermath of national socialism in Germany
would not have come about, there would have been no Second World War, and Russia
would not have fallen under the sway of the Marxism-Leninism that towered over
the world for seventy-some years and itself took millions of lives. Without Communism in Russia,
it is doubtful that Mao would have conquered China
and that the Korean and Vietnam
wars would have come about.
Some
readers will be content to value the book merely as an excellent chronicle of
the war years and of Wilson in the
context of the politics and personalities of the time. Its greater worth, however, lies in its
analysis. It has much to teach.
In a final
chapter summarizing his conclusions, Fleming comments about the messianic
utopianism that we know today is central to the debate about the United
States’ role in world affairs. Fleming sees it as foolish and dangerous:
“Idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue. It only sounds that way. The most dangerous aspect of American
idealism is its tendency to become utopian, to propose as ideals a foreign
policy or political reforms or a world order that ignores the realities of the
way men and women – and nations – live and prosper.”
He then
refers to “utopian derangements.” This
goes to the heart of the matter. Much of
the thrust of the book has been to show the vast extent to which the messianic
outlook of the Wilson
administration and, through it, of much of the American people was based on
misinformation, disinformation, myth, and conceptual blindness. The
Illusion of Victory may be seen as a case study in the folly that seems so
chronically a prime mover in much that humanity does.
The
derangement that Fleming speaks of is seen in the clichés that prevailed in
Wilson’s
thought:
1. “Democracy.” Wilson
famously said “the world must be made safe for democracy,” which was to be
accomplished by defeating the German threat.
There was, however, so consensus for “democracy” either in the world in
general or among the major powers, as was evident at the time and was made
clear during the decades that followed.
A similar, though arguably much worse, self-deception occurred later
when the United States
allied itself with Stalin in fighting Hitler, doing so in what seemed a moral
crusade on behalf of all that is right. Democracy
dominated the rhetoric, but was divorced from the reality.
Fleming is correct in pointing out this
illusion. It is worth noting as an
aside, however, that Senator LaFollette overstated it when, as paraphrased by
Fleming, he asked: “Had the British shown the slightest interest in extending
democracy to Ireland, to Egypt’s millions, to India’s hundreds of
millions?” This repeats some gross
over-simplifications about Britain’s
role in each of those places. Egypt,
as one example, was never a British colony.
It had existed for centuries under despotic and often brutal Turkish
rule until 1885, when Britain
intervened and made it in effect a British protectorate, still nominally under
Ottoman rule. The with the outbreak of World War I, Britain deposed the Turkish
rulers and administered it as a protectorate until 1922, when it obtained a
measure of self-rule, achieving full self-government fourteen years later. In this time period and these circumstances
it was hardly Britain’s
responsibility to transform Egypt
into a working democracy.
2. “Militarism.” Illusion again applies to the image of Germany
under the Kaiser as unspeakably militaristic.
Fleming points out how during the Napoleonic era (a mere century before)
it was France
that had shown a “love of military glory and lust for conquest.” Britain,
not Germany,
had the world’s largest fleet. The
“militarism” charge was reinforced by the Allies’ demonizing the Kaiser, who
liked to dress up in military regalia, and whom they called “a megalomaniac
with a hunger to rule the world,” as well as “the Mad Dog of Europe” the “the
Beast of Berlin.” Fleming points out how
incongruous this was in light of the New
York Times’ headline in 1913, just the year before World War I: “Kaiser,
Twenty Five Years a Ruler, Hailed as Chief Peacemaker.” Fleming says “the accompanying story called
Wilhelm ‘the greatest factor for peace that our time can show.’”
3.“Germany planned to dominate the world.”
In tandem with the “militarism” aspect, a central feature of Americans’
“war rage” was the image of Germany
as a behemoth that was out to dominate the world. Wilson
wrote that “the object of this war is to deliver the free peoples of the world
from the menace of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible
government, which, having secretly planned a dominate
the world….” But in a speech in
Saint
Louis, Wilson
later made what Fleming calls “a baffling remark” in total contradiction to the
“domination” thesis: “This was, in its
inception, a commercial and industrial war.
It was not a political war.”
4. “Germany started the war.” It was the claim of exclusive war guilt,
solemnized within the Treaty of Versailles, that so greatly infuriated Germans
and contributed to the anger that was manifest in Hitler’s national
socialism. Fleming calls it a
“bizarre accusation.” “No one claimed
that the Germans had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo
in 1914, nor that this murder… did not have a great
deal to do with precipitating the conflict.
The war guilt clause pretended this central event never happened.” The debates among
historians since 1914 show that there is a great deal of complexity to the “war
guilt” issue. Germany’s
culpability, as especially its “sole” culpability, is disputed by many of those
who have studied the issue.
5.
“Neutrality.” Wilson
railed against German submarine warfare and insisted that Americans had a right to travel
on British ships in the war zone. But he
did nothing effectual to protest the British blockade that so thoroughly choked
off Germany’s
supplies and created the desperate expedient of unrestricted submarine warfare
to counter it. Fleming says “Wilson
talked – and talked and talked – about neutrality,” but that the United
States evolved “into a branch of the British
armament industry during the thirty-two months of its neutrality.”
6. “Self-determination.” Wilson’s
naivete and idealistic over-simplification was perhaps best shown by his
principle of “self-determination” that was included among his 14 Points. Fleming says “the idea had opened a Pandora’s
box that would be difficult if not impossible to close. Albanian warlords, tribal chieftains from
obscure valleys in the Caucusus and Carpathian mountains,
would-be politicians from Armenia,
the Ukraine and
Bessarabia appeared… seeking redress and
recognition.” Needless to say, these
examples barely scratch the surface. As
it turned out, the peace conference declared “mandates” that “handed over some
17 million people to the victorious Allies.”
“The British acquired Palestine
and Iraq, and
the French got Syria
and Lebanon.
What Wilson forgets, perhaps, is that there was little profit in these mandates
(except, for a time, the opportunity to develop the oil wealth of Iraq, which
investments were lost to Britain after that country was deemed ready to manage
its own affairs), but considerable onerous and costly responsibilities,
notably, in the case of Palestine, when Jewish refugees began to pour into that
country from Europe following the Allied victory in World War II."
7. “Open covenants, openly
arrived at.” Fleming said Wilson
lied when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had not known
of the other Allies’ secret treaties before he arrived in Europe
for the peace conference. And the “open
covenants” principle was immediately shunted aside when “the press… found themselves barred from all sessions of the Council of Ten
(the Big Five and their foreign ministers)” at the peace conference.
8. “A war to end all wars.” The irony of the claim to be ending all
wars is shown by world history since 1919, but it is enough to point to the
fact, as Fleming does, that in early 1919 “there were no less than fourteen
small wars in progress in supposedly pacified Europe” as
“armies began shooting at each other over disputed slices of territory.”
There is much, much more in Fleming’s account. Although the book’s title speaks of
“illusion” and Fleming refers to “derangement,” he does not bring out the
points for separate discussion as we have done here. He presents them, instead, as parts of a vast
tapestry. The history of World War I,
its causes and consequences, is a matter of great importance about which all educated
people would do well to reacquaint themselves.
Almost ninety years have passed since that war began, and we are
hopefully better able by this time to take an objective look at it.
Dwight D. Murphey