Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Wilson’s sermons on “self-determination” and Lloyd George’s hymns to the “rights of small nations” had been heard beyond the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. The genie of nationalism was out of the bottle. Balfour had promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. To defeat the Turks, T. E. Lawrence had stirred up the smoldering embers of Arab nationalism. Not a day passed that some popular leader did not arrive in the lobby of Wilson’s hotel to plead for independence for a province or colony he had never heard of. At Paris, British diplomat Harold Nicolson spoke of “that sense of a riot in a parrot house.”96 A “chastened Wilson” returned to tell Congress: “When I gave utterance to those words [that “all nations had a right to self-determination”] I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.”