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

by Adam Tooze

Given the sacrifices already made by all sides by 1917, a ‘peace without victory’ could only be contemplated by a government willing to break with the past. It implied the utter futility of the most costly war in history. It required governments willing to dissociate themselves, like Wilson, from the question of war guilt and to criticize imperialism on all sides. Only such a government could accept a peace without victory as something other than a humiliation. It was precisely for that reason that the political class of Britain and France had so doggedly resisted Wilson’s call. They could not accept his moral equivocation. They understood that they had no place in his vision of the political future. Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result? Could the war have continued? Might democracy in Russia have been saved? As the departing German ambassador to Washington Count Bernstorff noted in agonized retrospect: If Germany over the winter of 1916–17 had ‘accepted Wilson’s mediation, the whole of American influence in Russia would have been exercised in favour of peace, and not, as events ultimately proved, against’ Germany.