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

by Adam Tooze

In January 1918, in response to the German-Bolshevik talks at Brest, both Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson felt obliged to make powerful statements of the liberal world order they envisioned for the post-war period. Of the two statements it was Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points manifesto that would echo around the world. But far from challenging Lenin and Trotsky, as Cold War legend would have it, Wilson chose to conciliate them. In the process, by portraying Lenin and Trotsky as potential partners in a democratic peace and a unitary ‘Russian people’ as the victim of German aggression, Wilson helped to consolidate the black legend of Brest. Meanwhile, as democrats in Berlin and Vienna looked on in horror, Bolshevik revolutionary tactics combined with the most aggressive impulses of German militarism to eviscerate any attempt to create a legitimate order in the East.