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

by Adam Tooze

But what differentiated Wilson from most of his Republican rivals was that he coupled this vision of America’s role in a new world order with an explicit refusal to take sides in the current war. To do so would be to forfeit America’s claim to absolute pre-eminence. With the war’s ‘causes and its objects’, Wilson announced, America was not concerned.37 In public he was content to remark simply that the war’s origins were ‘deeper’ and more ‘obscure’.38 In private conversation with his ambassador in Britain, Walter Hines Page, Wilson was blunter. The Kaiser’s U-boats were an outrage. But British ‘navalism’ was no lesser evil and posed a far greater strategic challenge for the United States. The atrocious war was, Wilson believed, not a liberal crusade against German aggression, but a ‘quarrel to settle economic rivalries between Germany and England’. According to Page’s diary, in August 1916 Wilson ‘spoke of England’s having the earth and of Germany wanting it’.