The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

In truth, despite the appearance Wilson created of speaking to them directly, China, Russia and Germany were objects of his strategy. They were not his real interlocutors. Transformation in such alien places was no doubt welcome, but it was at best a long-term process and one from which America should keep its distance. Wilson’s public rhetoric, his diplomacy and strategy were not directed to them, but to containing the dangerous association he had been forced to enter into with the British Empire, the rampaging Japanese, and the vindictive and unpredictable French, an association all the more dangerous because the Machiavellian imperialists of the old world had so many powerful and self-interested friends in America itself, in Congress and on Wall Street. It was Wilson’s determination to preserve the upper hand over this network of forces closer to home, not the uncertain prospects for progress in faraway places in Asia or Europe, that dominated every other consideration.