What Wilson was trying to do in January 1918 was to untangle a confusion that since 1917 had become nearly complete.41 In the course of the last year he himself had been forced to abandon his own ‘peace without victory’ formula, thereby forcing Russia’s democrats to fight a war they could only lose. Lenin and Trotsky, the chief beneficiaries of that disaster, were negotiating on the basis of the peace formula proposed by their despised democratic opponents. Meanwhile, the Reichstag majority and its vision of a peace based on self-determination had been made to seem like a mere smokescreen for
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