>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Well, good afternoon. My name is Jason Steinhauer. I'm a program specialist at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. On behalf of Director, Jane McAuliffe and the office of the Scholarly Program Staff, I welcome you to this afternoon's program. Before we begin, please take a moment to check your cell phones and other electronic devices, and please set them to silent. I'll also make you aware that this afternoon's program is being filmed for future broadcast on the Library of Congress website, as well as our Kluge Center YouTube and iTunes channels. I encourage you to visit these sites to watch past programs featuring hundreds of current and former scholars, including many on foreign policy and international relations. Today's lecture is presented by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Kluge Center is a vibrant scholar center on Capitol Hill that brings together scholars and researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one and other ,to distill wisdom from the library's rich resources, and to interact with the policy makers and the public. The Center offers opportunities for senior scholars and post-doctoral fellows, as well as Ph.D. candidates, to do research in the Library of Congress collections. We also offer free public lectures, conferences, symposia, and other programs, and we administer the Kluge prize, which recognizes lifetime achievement in the study of humanity and which we will award in 2015. For more information about the Kluge Center, please visit our website loc.gov/kluge and I invite you to sign up for our email list to learn about future programs and opportunities to conduct your own research here at the Library of Congress. Today's lecture is titled, Navigating the Blood Dimmed Tides-- Was U.S. Military Intervention in the First World War Worth the Cost. It is delivered by our current Kissinger Chair, Dr. Bradford Lee, and it will analyze how the United States waged war and negotiated peace from 1917 to 1919 and assess whether the value of victory was worth the cost of achieving. Before I introduce Brad, however, I will take a moment to recognize the chair position which he holds. The Kissinger Chair is made possible by the generous donation of the friends and admirers of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. It establishes a non-partisan focus in the nation's capital for the discussion of key issues in foreign affairs, and acts as a catalyst for the fresh analysis of foreign affairs in the global era. One distinguished senior researcher is appointed annually to be in residence at the John W. Kluge Center and research any aspect of foreign policy or international relations involving the United States and using the Library of Congresses unparalleled collections. Past chair holders have included an ambassador who researched the evolution of the relationship between India and the U.S. A member of the British Diplomatic Service who researched Pakistan's strategic culture and how it shapes U.S. foreign policy goals. And an adjunct senior fellow at the council on foreign relations, who researched the growing division between the European Union, NATO, and the former Soviet Union. Our 14th Kissinger Chair is Dr. Lee. Our 15th Kissinger Chair will arrive later this year, and we are most eager to hear from you for your nominations for our 16th Kissinger Chair. So please visit our website to learn more and note that applications and nominations for this position may be submitted through November 1. Now, on to Dr. Lee. As mentioned, Dr. Bradford Lee is the 14th Chair Holder of the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library's John W. Kluge Center. He recently retired as the Phillip A. Crowl Professor of Comparative Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. And prior, he was an Associate Professor at Harvard University teaching the Modern International History of the United States, Europe, and East Asia. He was educated at Yale University, where he was a scholar athlete; at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. ; and at Harvard, where he was a junior fellow in the prestigious Society of Fellows. He is an accomplished scholar of foreign policy, military strategy and international relations and he is currently working on an ambitious book that will assess the results of 100 years of American military intervention, which is the project that brings him here to the Library of Congress this year. An article about his project is currently on our blog, so I encourage you to go to our blog and read that. And on a personal note, the Kluge Center has benefit extraordinarily from Brad's presence the past seven months. He has been a wonderful addition to our intellectual community. He has been a mentor to many of the younger scholars, and he has contributed greatly to the collegiality of the Center, including a wonderful ugly sweater for our Christmas party. It truly, though, has been our good fortune to have Brad here with us for these past few months. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Bradford Lee. [ Applause ] >> Thank you. Thank you for coming. I've noticed it's a very nice day out. I'm sure you all had other things you could've done. So thanks very much for coming to listen to as talk on a very grim subject. I taught military officers for many years and whenever we did this as a case study, it depressed them to no end, the futility of wars, it seemed to them. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Kluge Center. It has been a wonderful time making the transition from being, basically a full time teacher, back to being a full time scholar, and this was just the ideal place and the ideal set of people and the ideal resources, especially over in the manuscripts division, for me to make that transition. By the way, I hope you don't me. I'm not a lectern guy. I hope you don't mind me in front of the lectern. I have some old friend here, and thank you very much for coming. But let's get on with the show. Notice the title. That is a long title. But the little image in the title that stands out is the "Blood-Dimmed Tide" image. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with that came from. It came from a poem by William Butler Yates written in early 1919. The poem was called the second coming. It was written just after Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris to help negotiate the peace settlement for the First World War. I do not think that Yates meant Wilson as the embodiment of the second coming. I'm not so sure about Wilson himself. I have put up part of the poem there, the first stanza. It is an array of arresting images. It has been ransacked by novelists, a famous African novel, a famous American novels, folk singer, even Woody Allen, though there's nothing very funny about this poem. "The widening gyre." It starts with this image of a falconer and a falcon sort of getting out of control. "The center will not hold." I don't feel any guilt about ransacking this poem. Other people have done it for less legitimate purposes. Woodrow Wilson wanted to reestablish the center. In a sense, he wanted the United States to be the falconer around which a new world order would emerge. He knew, as Yates new, that anarchy was, had been loosed. The blood-dimmed tides. World War I was just over, an immense slaughter. And Yates also refers to this widening gyre, as in gyroscope, spiral. There's a lot of mysticism in Yates that I won't get into. Ceremony of innocence drowned. That's certainly applicable to the United States in this case. Notice the last little business, about the worst being full of passionate intensity. What Yates didn't know was, believe it or not, the worst was yet to come. Just think about what followed-- Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, radical Jihadist that we're still dealing with, and my project's really about all that. Start in 1917, but I go right down to when I hope to publish the book in 2017. And what I do here is use this tides metaphor. These tides were [inaudible]. The first blood-dimmed tide was the first World War, then you have the second World War, and in my book, I will be talking about the connections between them. It's one damn thing after another. One leads to the next. The widening gyre, I draw on classical strategic thinking. You'll get some of that later. I also draw on classical geopolitical theory before it had been abused by the Nazis and others. In classical geopolitical theory, a very important distinction is between the heartland of Eurasia and the Rimlands. Eurasia's where all this stuff happens. All these wars happen in Eurasia. The wars are on the land of Eurasia, the land mass and in the maritime approaches to that land mass. I'm interested in the Rimlands. The Rimlands is the area most directly of concern to the United States. The first World War is on the European Rimland; we might call that the Western Rimland. The second World War, the United States rejects power on an enormous scale, boat to the European Rimland and also to the East Asia Rimland across the Pacific. In my book, I'll show how, eventually, not right away, but eventually, American strategic efforts played off in both of those Rimlands. Now, we're involved in the southern Rimland, or the Muslim part of the southern Rimland, and what I call the wars of the Muslim Rimland from the 1970s on. This has been much more confounding for the United States, and in my book I hope to explain why. But notice the widening gyre. You start in the European Rimland, you go to the East Asian, as well as the European Rimland, now the Southern Rimland as well. Okay. I was going to take a peek at this stuff myself. As I deal with all these wars, not just the whole 100-year period in its entirety, but each war within it. Each of the major chunks of warfare. I, what I do is, is I break them up into various issues. Really, eight issues that I sort of examine for each war, and four I put under the rubric of the way into war, and then the other four are the way out. So they're eight way-stations that I sort of stop and, and examine. And I've, I've listed it up there. And I'm not going to go through them. Oh, that's not the right slide there. Anyway, the big question over-arching it all is was the whole 100 years' worth it in terms of the American strategic exertions that were so monumental over that period and each given war, was it worth it? There were immense costs. We, United States, waged war on a very destructive scale seeking constructive results. It's an interesting issue of rationality, Destruction for the sake of constructive results. Did it happen? Was the United States able to pull it off? Now, I was a teacher of history for; or I was an academic historian, let's put it that way, for basically 18 years. I, I was a teacher and worked with practitioners for 27 years, so you're going to have to indulge me here. I'm not going to stop with just the historical analysis of whether the wars were worth it, I want to look into the counterfactual mode, which you always do when you're educating practitioners. You draw on Clausewitz and what he calls critical analysis. This is how practitioners get better. You give them a case study. The course of action chosen didn't turn out well. Why not? Okay. Not good enough. What else might have been done? Look at the alternatives. Usually considerate of the time. How might they have played out? Practitioners don't like this. How in the hell am I supposed to know how they would have played out? I said, but ah, this is your educational training. Getting use to choosing among an array of options, trying to figure out which will have the most constructive result in the end. Okay. Now, we're, we're back to where I sort of took a short cut to before the business about was it all worth it. What I do for each war. I examine those four things on the way in, the four things on the way out. I'm not going to elaborate now on what they are, because this is going to be the hook on which I hang my presentation today about the first World War. So as we go along, we'll be able to consider each of these in its turn. Now, when you're an author, you have to think about your audiences. And if you go back to the previous slide, that left hand column is for the historian's audience. It's remarkable how infrequently historians look at a war and just ask the simple question, was it worth it for the protagonist? One historian has done it more directly than any other historian that I can recall right off hand. That would be Niall Ferguson in the department I used to be in at Harvard, now. And he did it for Britain in the first World of War, "The Pity of War." Brilliant book. And he says it was not worth it for Britain to intervene in the first World War. He's a big fan of the British Empire, so he's thinking of the consequences long term for the British Empire. And he makes an assumption about Germany that I'll question a little bit later. But he's one of the few people that's actually looked at this question head on. And you might say, boy if he's right about Britain, it wasn't worth it for Britain to intervene, they're across, you know, the English Channel from the continent. We're separated by thousands of miles of ocean, why would have it been worth it for the United States. So keep that in mind. The second column, the second audience of mine, is a practitioner's audience. But the third audience, which I hope to read, reach by going through these eight way-stations. Why? Because it creates a story for each war. It creates a narrative structure. Within that framing, I'm going to be able to bring together like, ho, in a happy marriage, the analytical thrust of what I'm doing with the story, with character sketches of key players, hoping that I will be able to reach a wide audience of citizens. Why citizens? Because they count. They vote. If their sons or daughter go off to the water, they pay the direct cost. Even if they don't have sons and daughters going to war, they pay the indirect costs. They pay the bill, one way or the other, sooner or later. So they should be interested in this. Okay. Let's jump in to the blood-dimmed tide of the first World War. You may see that say [inaudible] Goldberg at work. But I think it's a very useful thing for somebody, not only with an historical bend, but especially an analytical bend, to sort of strip away the details sometime and look at the basic mechanisms at work, the basic forces of causes and affect that are driving things forward. And I don't want to spend too much on this little diagram, but let me take you through it. I start in 1916, almost halfway through the war, and I start with a naval battle, the Battle of Jutland. Let me give you a little back story. The Germans in 1915, and into 1916, had engaged in unrestrictive submarine warfare. Some of you are probably familiar with a book that just came out on the sinking of the Lusitania. This really upset people, not least Woodrow Wilson. And he got into an extensive diplomatic interchange with the Germans, and he finally, in the spring of 1916, extracted a pledge from the Germans that they wouldn't be bad boys anymore. They wouldn't do this again. What happens next in May is this great fleet-on-fleet engagement off the coast of Denmark. Inconclusive in its tactical outcome. As a former teacher of naval officers, I'd say I'm surprised at how well the Germans did. They didn't see it that way. They thought their fleet was lucky to escape and basically, they said we're not going to do that again. We're not that crazy. Well, they were wrong about that. They were crazy. But they were crazy in different ways. Britain still had command of the sea and they were using that command of the sea to wage economic warfare through an economic blockade, [inaudible] blockade of Germany that was having an effect on Germans, especially in the German food supply. And the Germans said, can't let this stand, so we have to do something else with our navy. So they decided to go back to unrestricted submarine warfare. Well, they did it. That brought the Americans into the war. The Germans said, well we thought maybe the Americans would come in if we did this unrestricted business again, but it doesn't matter because they won't be able to make their weight felt before we knock the Brits out of the war and win the whole thing. Well, by the end of 1917, the realized they miscalculated, so the German military, the German Army, which [inaudible] navy in the unrestricted submarine warfare said, oh, we'd better get to it. And so, we, they launched a big offensive. Their really, their biggest offensive yet, in France of 1918. They went past what Clausewitz had called the culminating point of attack, left themselves vulnerable to counter-attack. The allies counter-attack; by the way, the Americans are on the scene by then, and that's the end of the war by November 1918. So what you see in this top line of that diagram is sort defeating German behavior. Sort of a dynamic interaction where, as a result of the American factor, the Germans defeated themselves. But there's more to the diagram than that top line. And, in the subtitle, I speak of episodes and tendencies, and that's drawn from none other than Winston Churchill, a speech in parliament during the war. He said, I get it now. This war's different. It's not just a matter of episodes, in other words big battles on land and at sea, it's a matter of tendencies. Things like economic warfare, grinding down the other side's economy, the other sides' society. I would add to this coalition cohesion on the two sides. This is a coalition struggle. Decide where the most cohesive coalition has a huge advantage, so you have to keep your eye on the trends over time in coalitions. Well the first big break in the coalitions comes in 1917 with the Russian revolution. A source of great excitement with Woodrow Wilson, because there's going to be a democracy in Russia now. But by the end of the year, they're been the Bolshevik revolution. By early 1918, the Russians are out of the war. Back into counter factual mode. Imagine from a German perspective if you had knocked the Russians out without bringing the Americans in. I think what was only possible for them, a victory up to that point, would have become a probability. They would have gotten a favorable outcome without [inaudible] war, I would wager. So, already the United States is playing some role in the outcome. Remember, if you can knock the Russians out without bringing the American's in, you are in really good shape. But that's, they blew that opportunity. Okay. So what. What if the Germans had won? This is where I sort of depart from the path of Niall Ferguson. Niall Ferguson whose specialty is really financial diplomacy and things like that sees the more modern aspects of the German political system. Me specializing on the military side sees something different. By 1917, Germany was basically a military dictatorship. And the dictators, shown there with the Kaiser in the top photo, Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Hindenburg, Ludendorff being the chief of staff to Hindenburg, but really, this is the right way of putting at the brains of the [inaudible]. Had Germany won, these guys would have been in charge. Ludendorff, basically was a nut. He recognized no limit to German ambitions. He wanted to annex everything he could get his hands on. And he turned Clausewitz on his head. Clausewitz is most famous for saying, "War is an instrument of politics. It should serve politics." Not the other way around. Ludendorff said that's not right. If political systems exist to make work, politics should serve war. He only fully expressed this viewpoint in the book on the bottom right, published in the 1930s, but it was already in his thinking in the latter stages of World War I. What I'm thinking is if Germany had won in say in 1918, the next decade would have incredibly turbulent. Germany would have still been rambunctious even though they had won. Now, that's my supposition. Okay. Now, we have to come to the American side. We've already seen the United States as a big factor in how this war played out. But we actually hadn't seen the United States do anything yet. It's just because they simply exist and their in German calculations. So we now need to look at exactly what, what the United States did. This goes back, not to teaching practitioners but to teaching Harvard undergraduates. Once I realized all my hundreds of undergraduates I taught every year were going to law school or Wall Street, I sort of started scratching my head, and said, well, you know, what's in history for them. So I began casting what I taught in terms of patterns and puzzles. Looking for patterns of behavior or structural patterns over time, but equally sensitive to the deviation from those patterns, the things that were sort of out of the pattern, which I called puzzles. And I do that in this book as well. For each war I look at, I look for patterns of American strategic behavior, but I'm also trying to be sensitive to things that don't fit the pattern. To give equal attention to both. How does the United States go to war from 1917 to 2001? There is a very coherent pattern here. The sort of chain reaction that I did for 1916 to 1918, I'm going to do a similar chain reaction for every other war. Usually going back a year or two before the United States gets into war. Those chain reactions always end up in strategic surprise for the United States. Sometimes a direct attack on the United States, 1941, 2001. Sometimes, an attack on a friend or a partner or an ally of the United States, think Korea 1950, Kuwait 1990. Sometimes an attack on American citizens at sea, think 1917. So there's a degree of surprise, right. Then what happens? Well, there's a, a concern inside the administration that if something's not done in response to this attack, things are going to get worse. Usually, it's a concern about a balance of power is going to tilt radically against you. Or in some cases, it's a concern that another attack, maybe a worse attack, is going to follow immediately, or very soon. So that's really what triggers the American decision to go to war. What I'm interested in is what are the internal deliberations in terms of the decision to go to war, and then what's the public justification. Sometimes there's, there's some important differences. Finally, the pattern plays itself out. The United States, caught by surprise, has to improvise. They have to improvise a policy. They have to improvise a strategy. They have to improvise operations. The United States has been extremely good at improvisation. And it's a good thing the United States has, because it's always surprised. One reason George Bush went into Iraq in 2003 is he didn't want to be surprised again. So he had thought about this pattern in broad outline and said, certainly after 9/11 he didn't want to be surprised again when he might have been busy elsewhere by Saddam Hussein. Every time, from 1917 to 2001, the adversary who sprung the strategic surprise had made a calculation about the United States. Usually, it had to do with either American will or American capabilities to respond effectively to the surprise. And in each case, there was a miscalculation. It turned out the United States was able to bring to bear its capability sooner and on a larger scale than the adversary had anticipated. Okay. Now what I want to do is look a little more closely at the Wilson Administration because I'm not sure they fit the pattern. They're at the beginning, but there's some things that don't quite fit. It's not the surprise thing. Wilson had advisors, not least is his closest advisor at that point, Colonel House, also as an ambassador in Germany, who had warned that Germany was likely to resume submarine, unrestricted submarine warfare. But Wilson was so proud of his diplomatic achievement in the spring of 1916, he refused to believe this would happen. And in fact, just before Germany did this, he thought that the diplomacy that he was engaged to sort of mediate an end to the war, the Germans were actually, looked pretty accommodating to that. So that was why he was so surprised. And at the first cabinet meeting after the announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare, he actually speaks of an astonishing surprise. So the surprise pattern holds here. What's a little trickier are, is the business about the fear that if you don't do something, things are going to get much, much worse. Not only will there be new attacks, but the balance of power is going to tilt radically against you. Woodrow Wilson does not like the idea of a balance of power. He does not think in terms of a balance of power. He doesn't want to think in terms of power. He didn't want anybody else to think in terms of a balance of power. So this is what's different from his successors. What you see is a president who, more than any other president I study, is very, very reluctant to go to war. It's interesting to compare to other democratic presidents who were great reformers in domestic politics, Franklyn Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. All three cases have in common that before getting into the war, there was presidential election, 1916, 1940, 1964. In all three cases, the, the sitting president [inaudible] in that election. In all three cases, they ended up in war shortly after. I think you can say that both Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson thought that would happen. They ran one way, but they knew after they were elected, United States was likely to be in a war quite soon. Not so with Woodrow Wilson. He was a little uncomfortable with the "He kept us out of war." slogan, the Democratic Party used in 1916, but he had no intention to go, go to war. Now when he had gotten the Germans to stop unrestricted submarine warfare the first time, in the spring of, of 1916, he had said, if they resume, I'm going to do something bad to them. In other words, I'm going to break relations. Well, it happened. Even so, he's extremely reluctant to even break relations. But he finally does it. Then, what happens is, is American merchant ships stop going out, stop going across the Atlantic. They don't want to get sunk. This is going to deliver a big blow to the American economy. So Wilson has to think about how do I get these ships moving again, which leads him to thinking what are the two choices. The Navy can convoy them, and the Navy says, no thank you, don't want to do that, because our ships will get sunk, too. Okay. We can arm them, arm the merchants. And what that actually means is putting naval officers on board with guns, but it won't be a naval ship. It'll be the, the private ship, but with naval officers arming, arming the ships. So by early March, that's put into place. And I think Wilson hopes that this will be enough. But then what happens is there's a bunch of sinkings. And, at that point, he makes the decision. Well, got to take the next step, got to get into this war, got to get into it fully. Now, what's interesting is there's a series of cabinet meetings from early February to early March where these issues are talked about quite intensely. It's very hard to get from the exist; there's no, no minutes of these meetings. We have diaries and letters that people were in the meetings the other cabinet secretaries wrote. But there's very little on Wilson. He doesn't say a whole lot, at least that's recorded. Then what happens? No more cabinet meetings for about three weeks in March. Why? Because he gets sick. Every time Woodrow Wilson faced a serious decision that I'm familiar with, he got sick. And he cloistered himself up in the White House, he stayed in bed, he didn't even play golf, which was his favorite thing to do, and we don't know what went on. But sometime in those three weeks, he said, got to make the step, much against my better judgment. I'm really reluctant to do this. And then he goes back to having cabinet meeting again. By the time he has his next one on March 20, he originally, he had a cabinet that was equally split between hawks and doves by March 20, after the rash of sinkings, especially March 17 and March 18. Everybody in the cabinet wants to go to war, and he goes along. March 30, I have to put this little twist in. The highlight of that cabinet meeting is he's writing his speech for the declaration of war, but he won't tell his colleagues what's in it. So they have this sort of discursive discussion. He gets up in the middle and starts doing calisthenics. This is jumping jack your way into war. Not aware that the 100 years of blood-dimmed tides that I sort of go after that, that that ever happened again. Okay. Then he goes to Congress. Makes what many people consider, maybe his greatest speech, and he was a very good-- he did not like making decisions, but he did like making speeches and he was very good at it. What did he emphasize? Well, the same things that were discussed in the cabinet. We have got to protect our sovereign rights. But he did do is he said our sovereign rights are human rights. They're the rights of all humanity. This is not just us that's being victimized by the Germans, it's everybody. So he dressed it up, sort of gave it more [inaudible]. But he did something else. He said, and there'd been a lot of discussion in the cabinet, because the Russian revolution had happened. The Tsar's regime was gone. It looked like there was going to be a new democracy in Russia. Everybody said this is your chance. Make this, make your case for the war, democracy against autocracy. He didn't want to go quite that boldly. So what he did is he talked about making the world safe for democracy. What would that mean? If you're a military leader and your, your marching orders are make the world safe for democracy. What do you do? You know. This is your guidance, what do you do? Well, what he says to Congress is, what we need is a, a sort of a, a concert of free nations. Not a balance of power, a concert. A community of power, a partnership. And what he's pointing toward there is a new international institution which became the League of Nations. Something he said in his speech that I don't think people altogether seriously at the time, he said, we're going to use all our resources. And then, that meant a draft, it meant a mass Army. Congressmen said no one told us he was going to do that. You're not going to send those boys over to Europe are you? And fight in that god-awful war there? He was. But he had to put what was at stake at such a high level that it would justify this enormous the United States was about to make. Let's go looking at some oldies but goodies. Two great of classical strategic thinking, Clausewitz who I've already mentioned, [inaudible] wrote in the 1820s, and somebody even older, but just as good, the Athenian, Thucydides, in the 5th Century BC, the first grade book on war that sort of analyzed war. Herodotus is an anthropologist of war. Thucydides is a recognizable historian and strategic thinker on war. I'm just going to pluck from these oldies a couple things. Notice the first bullet under Clausewitz. No one in their right mind goes to war unless they know what they're trying to achieve and how they're going to achieve it. Sounds simple doesn't it? You'd be surprised. It does not often happen where the people who take a country into a war, whether Americans or otherwise, really have crystalized their thoughts on those two issues. Then in a quintessential statement of strategic rationality, Clausewitz says how long are you going to fight? You're going to fight as long as the value of the object is not exceeded by the cost that you're paying. And he defines cost in terms of the magnitude of your effort and the duration of your effort. How much you're going to do, how long you're going to do it. He says, you know, in war you can't measure value in quantitative terms. But you want to make sure that the value of what you're fighting for is greater than the cost you pay. What are we supposed to with that. Thucydides gives us some help. He says, great powers are really motivated by three things, fear, honor, and interest. And by interest, he means material interest. So if you take that and map it onto the value of the object, you can start thinking about the value of your object. What am I saying about Wilson? Fear, I'm not so sure. I mean, he thought the Germans had gone mad. He wanted them curbed. He did not want them crushed. But, Thucydides second point is, in our jargon now, do a net assessment as you're getting into the war. As you can see at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war between the, the two major leaders, Pericles of Athens and Archidamus of Sparta. They do a net assessment right at the beginning of that book. I bet you some people in Wilson's cabinet had actually read that. Those were back in the days of classical liberal education. And what are you trying to figure out. Okay. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the two sides? Given those strengths and weaknesses, what might we do? What might they do? How's this war going to play out? Nothing like that was done in the United States in 1917. The United States did not have the institutional infrastructure to produce that sort of net assessment. The people who were in the upper levels of the government didn't have the sort of minds that could have done it. There's no assessment here. What about the fear, honor, interest? There is some fear of Germany, there is some interest because of the fact that your, your commercial merchant ships are being [inaudible] port. But the real big thing here is honor. Two sorts of honor, American national honor not to let its ships be sunk without doing something about it, and this higher level of honor, the building the new world order that Wilson was interested in doing. Okay. When Clausewitz says you ought, no one goes into war, no one in their right mind goes into war unless they know what they're trying to achieve, the label we hang on that is policy. And it's a much abused word, but it's basically about what you want to achieve. And I break it into sort of a bunch of different things. One is you start with a general political purpose. In Wilson's case, it is to vindicate American rights against German merchant ships, German submarines sinking merchant ships, and it's also to create this new world order, right. There's this general, general purpose. But that's not enough. You need to get more specific in terms of what you're trying to achieve over time. We would call these political objectives now. And they come, usually, in three layers. The most basic layer that almost every war is about, is what political system is control what chunk of territory at the end of the war. And Wilson was very interested in that. That's what half of his 14 points are all about. Where are the borders going to be in Europe. What is the map of Europe going to look like after this war. He was very interested in that layer of political objectives. The second layer is what's the regional balance of power. Wherever the war's taking place, whatever region or regions, what will the balance of power look like at the end of the war? This is where Wilson didn't even want to think about that. He thought balance of power, bad, bad, bad. Third layer is issues or world order both in terms of institutional structure and values, norms. And he was very locked into that, right. Also, though, usually as part of policy, there is some sort of negative side-- what we now call political restraints, things that you don't want to happen or that you don't want do. And in Wilson's case, before he got into the war, in January 1917, he had made a speech. This was the Peace Without Victory speech. He said, what I'm really after both in my diplomacy before he got into the war and once he gets into the war, I'm really after a durable peace here. And I think the chances of a peace being durable are best when neither side wins a one-sided victory. Now once he gets into the war, it's pretty hard to think through and find evidence for how he feels about this. The evidence I found is, for the most part, he still believes in this. He does not want the United States, France, and Britain to win a crushingly one-sided victory over Germany. There are vacillations on Wilson's part, and particularly after the Germans make the very harsh peace with the New Soviet Union at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. That so infuriates him, that for a period of months, he's speaking in a different tone. But as the summer of 1918 turns into the fall, I think he's back into this peace without victory mode if it can be done. Okay. What's else does Clausewitz say? You have to know what you're trying to achieve, and I think Wilson did know what he was trying to achieve. I think he had a blind spot on the balance of power thing and we'll get back to that, but not bad. How you're going to do it. It is useful early on in the war, as soon as possible, to have an overall strategic concept for how you're going to wage it and win it. And in fact, in World War II and in the Cold War, this was strength of the United States. It's been a terrible weakness in the so-called Global War on Terrorism. But it was a strength in World War II and the Cold War. What about World War I? Sort of in between those cases. I've put four pictures up here. Woodrow Wilson, of course. To the right of him there is his Secretary of War, Newton Baker. Sort of an odd Secretary of War because he was pacifist. But actually, in some ways I think he did a very good job in that position. Not in terms of industrial mobilization, but in dealing with the, the military officers and John Pershing in the field, who I'll get to. That interesting looking gentleman in the lower left is the Army Chief of Staff when the United States goes into war, Hugh Scott, and the bottom right there, is John Pershing. Notice no Secretary of Navy, no Chief of Naval Operations in that picture. Why? Because at the beginning of this war, the Navy had no confidence that it, it could wage a maritime war and stop the Germans from sinking American ships. So the Army had the run. And the Army staff working under General Scott, came up with a general strategic concept. They said what we're going to do is we're going to build a mass army. We're going to use conscription which the Wilson administration's willing to do. People are predicting it's going to mean blood in the streets like it did in the Civil War by 1863, but it doesn't happen. You're going to conscript a bunch of, bunch of guys, train them in the United States, build up this huge army, and then ship it to Europe. In 1919, you're going to win a decisive victory with that army. You're going to be the war winner. That, that force that you ship across the Atlantic that you trained and equipped in the United States. Secretary of War, Baker, says, 1919, huh. I wonder what the American people would think of all these people being trained in the United States for over a year before they're sent across. I think they're going to get impatient. Maybe you guys better be thinking about doing something earlier. And then, the new allies, or associated powers of the United States, Britain, and France, said we need some guys now. We're running out of manpower. Help. And a French general, the famous victor of the Battle of The Marne in 1914, Marshall Joffre came to Washington in the spring of 1917 and he was able to talk Wilson into sending a force, a small force, over right away under the leadership of General Pershing. Now once that force got there, as time went on, there's just unrelenting pressure from the Brits and France saying more, more guys. Get them into the trenches as soon as possible. Oh by the way, under the command of our officers, not your officers. The American concept is no, we want an independent army under our own officers. The public won't stand for feeding American boys into the meat grinder under French and British commanders. Now think of who the British commander is, the notorious Sir Douglas Hague, right. Okay. So you do have a general strategic concept there. It's not sure it's going to work all that well, but let's see what happens. The whole problem is handed over to the theater commander, that's John Pershing. It's useful to step back and think about what does a theater commander do. Think Dwight Eisenhower in World War II, David Petraeus, in Iraq. What does a theater commander do? Well a theater commander, to be successful, has to be good at making assessments. What is the situation? And whether the dynamics of the situation are going to drive things one way or the other. He's got to be good at playing a bunch of chess games. Think of a theater commander as one of those chess types who's playing three or four games simultaneously, going from one board to the other, interacting, obviously, with the enemy, but also with your allies, and not least with your political superiors and your service chiefs back home. You've got to be good at those three games at once if you're going to be successful. Okay. I'm not going to; running a little bit out of time. I want to talk about two theater commanders. A lot of the work I've done this year is about the American Naval Commander, the maritime theater commander, Admiral William Sims. I got interested in Sims because one of my friends called me up many years ago and said, I live next door to this woman who was the daughter of a President of the Naval War College where you work way back at the end of the first World War. So I went to lunch with this woman. She was delightful woman. She was about 80 years old, but sharp as a tack. She says, you know, my husband has not been properly studied. And I said, [chuckles] and then went, went on my way. Well, I spent a lot of time here this year looking at Sims' papers and they are fascinating. He was a really good theater commander. Why do I say that? Because he understood the nature of the war he was in. He understood this was a big coalition struggle and the side that did the best job or harmonizing their coalition would have a huge advantage. Operationally, he understood that in 1917, when he arrives in London, critical place in the war is not on the ground in France, but it's off the coast of the U.K. Why? Because if those ships don't get across the Atlantic to Britain with food, the Brits are going to be starved out. That's the whole point of the German decision to resort to unrestricted submarine warfare, to prevent enough food from getting to Britain, it will cause domestic turmoil and the Brits will make a negotiated peace favorable to Germany. Sims says, when he gets to London, nobody had any idea back in Washington just how critical the situation was. He quickly sees how critical it is and then started pounding the table back to Washington. Now, he has an interesting way of going about his business. He pounds the table back in Washington. Remember, no VTCs at this point. This is all by written communication. Got to be able to write. Not only cables, but you had to be able to write letters to the right people in literate pros that's persuasive. He says we need to get all the destroyers we can here as fast as possible, because otherwise the Brits are in deep doo doo. Meanwhile, he is establishing extremely close relationship with all the key players, both on the military side in Britain in the admiralty, and also on the political side, including the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. I'm going to make the argument, I'm going to have to do a little more research on the British side of this in, in their public record office; I'm going to make the argument that Sims actually is an important tipping point in this decision on the part of the Brits the [inaudible], which is what solves the problem, or at least makes the problem manageable. Very successful theater commander. Pershing, a little tougher, a little tougher to evaluate him. He had a hard job. He's supposed to take a newly built up army and defeat what was operationally the best army in the world, the Germans. Not easy. Experienced, really good staff officers. Very good field commanders. What did Pershing have? A bunch of guys who knew nothing about war. There was a small regular army, but the officers in the regular army had not even begun to think about what the European war was like. Their focus was elsewhere. The last thing Pershing did before he went to France is chase Poncho Villa around in Mexico. That is not good training for fighting Germans in France. So he had to have a whole mental adjustment. He really wasn't able to do that. When you look for his doctrine that he insisted on with the American forces how they should fight, it's delusional. It's as if nobody paid any attention to anything that happened in France from 1914 to 1917. The French were very polite, they said, you know, that's not quite right how you're telling your forces to fight. Let us train the forces for you. But he wants to retain his independence and it, he pays a cost. Now he does, until the end of the war, handle the Washington end pretty well. He's able to keep on board both his Secretary of War, Newton Baker, and the President, Woodrow Wilson, for his idea we've got to keep the American Army independent. But what happens is is when the Germans launch its offensive in the March of 1918, it looks like the allies are going to go under. Panic. And then there's real table pounding. Get us more guys over here as fast as you can. And Pershing to his credit bends. He does get guys into the trenches sooner than he had planned to, even some guys under French and British command to sort of deal with the short term emergency. And then he wants to go back to establishing the independent army and then go from there. Well, what happens? The critical question you have to ask is how important was the American expeditionary force that Pershing commanded to the defeat of Germany. I would argue that Sims in the maritime realm was very important to preventing Germany from defeating Britain at sea. What about in the land domain? This is a tougher nut to crack. In June 1918, the French look like they're in trouble. The Germans started their offensive, mostly concentrating on the Brits. Then they swung around to try to knock the French out. They get to within about 30, 40 miles of Paris. People fleeing out of Paris in panic. The Americans step in, the 2nd Division, One Army Brigade, One Marine Beret, where the Brigade Commander was an Army Officer-- little unusual-- actually steps forward, really didn't know what they were doing, but they fought like hell. They really did. And those of you who know about the Marines at the Belleau Wood will know what I'm talking about. Was this critical? Had it not been for especially the Marine [inaudible] in Belleau Wood, but also the Armored Brigade nearby, would the Germans have gotten to Paris? Would the French war effort have collapsed? In 1917, I would say if that all had happened in 1917, the answer would be yes. The French political system was in total disarray in 1917, they were mutinies in the French Army. 1918, George Clemenceau is now Prime Minister, the tiger. I don't, can't imagine what would have happened to make him give in. And there was a French Army Commander, Peyton, who had sort of stabilized the situation of the Army. So, this is important. Is it a war saver, I'm not sure. Now Pershing's problems began really after that. And this is directly relevant to this question of was it all worth it. Because in September, he becomes part of a grand allied offensive. Now, his plan had been in 1919 to attack [inaudible] east of Verdun here and dislocate the German rail system thinking that that would undermine the German military effort on the Western front. Instead, what happens is as part of the larger allied plan in 1918, he is told to attack north towards Sedan. There is; he has to take his force and shift its axis of attack from one place to another in a very short time into very difficult terrain and the, this is the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. It is a bloody mess. This is the bloodiest offensive, bloodiest campaign of American history. More than anything in 1864 in Virginia in the Civil War. More than the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, late 1944. More than Okinawa in early 1945. This is the bloodiest battle of American history. Lots of guys got killed, not much to show for it. Pershing is incredibly frustrated. His whole dream of winning the war has been, gone down the drain. At this point, we get into war termination because even though Pershing's had his problems in his force, the British have done really well. At the end of September, Ludendorff decides the Germans have had it. He tells the political leadership, such as it is. They're all really puppets of his by that point [inaudible]. We got a, got a appeal for an armistice, let's appeal on the basis of Wilson's 14 points. If they're applied to us, we're not going to lose much territory. This is great. So we go to Wilson, say hey, we want to make peace, talk about peace anyway, on the basis of the 14 points. At this point, at this point, we're in the war termination phase. It looks like the allies are going to win. What do you have to think about in the war termination phase. A-Just how far are you going to go militarily? How much longer are you going to fight on? Are you going to go deep into Germany? When the Germans sue for an armistice, there's not a single French, British, or American soldier on German soil. Are you going to take the war into Germany? Even it means going into 1919. As you'll see, Pershing's answer's yes. The second thing, what exactly are you going to demand of the enemy? Now you've had your general purpose of fighting the war and your political objectives and the different layers, but you really have to get granular at this point. What specifically are you going to demand? First of all, the armistice terms. Finally, you have to think about leverage. Well leverage is a big deal here, not simply over the Germans, but over your allies. Why? Because Wilson's war aims are radically different than his allies' war aims. And he's conscious of it, and his allies are conscious of it. So he's got to end the war in such a way that you not only get the Germans to do you will, but to get your allies to do your will. What happens? From Wilson's point of view, it's a tremendous diplomatic triumph for him. The Germans appeal to him, not to the French or British, and he sort of stiff arms and the French and British say, I'll take care of this. Doesn't even tell them much about what's going on. He negotiates with the Germans, and he does it skillfully. In fact, he nudges the Germans into changing their regime, changing toward a more democratic regime. Eventually the Kaiser takes it off to, to [inaudible], so he's looking [inaudible], I'm doing, I'm doing great. Then he goes to the allies and say the Germans are suing for peace and I've cut sort of a deal with them on the basis of the 14 points. You believe in the 14 points don't you. Then there's some real hard bargaining and he thinks the allies sort of buy into the 14 points. The allies don't see it that way, but Wilson says-- eh. With the, having sent his main foreign policy advisor, Colonel House, that did negotiating, he thinks, boy everything's great. Here's where Wilson did something that actually worked against its purposes. Okay. What about armistice terms with the Germans? It's traditionally been considered it's the military's job to make the armistice terms. So he says okay. The French, British, American commanders, you figure out the armistice terms. I only ask for one thing. Just make sure that if the negotiations break down, the Germans won't be able to resume the war. Well, the armistice terms certainly made it so the Germans couldn't resume the war. They were pretty hard. Wilson looks at them, and says, can't we make them softer. The French wanted to occupy the western part of Germany, the [inaudible], and Wilson's not real happy about this, but he doesn't feel that, you know, it's the military's job to decide what's necessary, so he goes along with it. Now, Senator Lodge has been a big domestic foe at this point, other than Teddy Roosevelt, who says, ought oh, Wilson doesn't understand what he's just done. His leverage over his allies resides in the fact the German Army's still a threat. Once it's no longer a threat, he's lost leverage. Now Wilson's counter-argument to Lodge, would have been, if they'd talked, would have been, look, I have other means of leverage. They're dependent on my allies financially and economically, and if the British get uppity, I can threaten to build a bigger navy than theirs and that always gets them excited. But Wilson thinks this is a great triumph, Pershing thinks entirely differently. He goes to the conference on October 25, with the Supreme Commander Marshall [inaudible], Peyton, Hague, and they put together the armistice, but Pershing is really because they don't discuss the most basic issue, shall we be making an armistice at all. And he leaves the meeting and he goes back home and he gets sick, and he sits in his bed and he stews about this. And at the end of the month, he writes a letter addressed not to Wilson, but the Supreme War Council, in other words, to Clemenceau and the British Prime Minister Lloyd George and all those guys saying we shouldn't be making an armistice. We ought to carry on the war. Now Wilson had told Pershing, if you have any comments to make about armistice terms you want me to know about, tell me, or work through Colonel House. Instead Pershing addresses his letter to the Supreme War Council. There's a whole lot of interesting detail here that I dredged up this year. I'll be able to explain this a whole lot better. But the basic point is is this is a shock to Wilson, to Secretary of War, Baker, that Pershing's gone off the reservation. Military leaders aren't supposed to get into these political issues. There is a Congressional mid-term election going on and Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator Lodge, are savaging Wilson for not doing, going for unconditional surrender, like happened with Grant in the Civil War, right. And the Republicans are doing well in these elections. And Wilson's under tremendous political pressure. And now Pershing, and the rumors that he might be interested in being the Republican candidate in 1920 stepping in, it's viewed as a political thing. I don't think that was Pershing's motivation. What he really wanted to do was to stick to his original plan of being the decisive force in the winning of the war in 1919, and now it's being denied him. What he needed to do in the letter is address it to Wilson and say look, I'm solving a problem for you here. He said in his letter, a complete military victory, he linked it to a notion of a more durable peace. What you have to do is make the Germans feel defeat. They don't feel defeat now. No one back in Germany feels defeat, because there are no allied troops in the country. Well Pershing gets put down and off we go. How much time, Jason? Five minutes. All right. I'm actually more charitable toward Wilson and the peace settlement than most people are. Why? Because I think of what was he trying to achieve? He was trying to redraw the map of Europe. Now Wilson got tagged with speaking of self-determination and most people assumed he meant ethnic self-determination. That's not what he meant. It was Lloyd George who first used the word self-determination. Wilson used the word self-government, and he realized not everybody necessarily was ready for self-government and he realized that if you're going to set up a self-governing political community it's got to be a viable one. It's got to have some chance of surviving economically and in security terms. So he made some compromises in the line drawing exercise. But I think they were very reasonable compromises. I think the map that emerges sort of fits Wilson's notions fairly well. He also gets the League of Nations, and he gets the features in the League of Nations that he's really interested in. So I think what he achieves at Paris makes sense from his point of view. Now, what about that intermediate layer of political objective of the balance of power thing. As I've said, he didn't like the whole idea of a balance of power. But he had a bend on that in Paris. Why? Because the French Premier Clemenceau's under pressure from the French Military Leader [inaudible] to occupy the Rhineland and even set up separatist governments there, [inaudible] away from Germany to create a better balance of power in the future. Now, I don't think this would have worked. I don't think the people in the Rhineland would have been calm under that new regime, right. Wilson's very upset. This is really a violation of what he means by, you know, the consent of the government and all that, and so he, he's, has a real conflict with Clemenceau there, and finally a deal's reached. The Americans give a security guaranty to France, the Brits join in it. So you have an Anglo-American French security pack. In return, Clemenceau backs away from his demands on the Rhineland. So I think, much against Wilson's preferences, you do get sort of the, the kernel of a balance of power solution here. Of course, he gets back home and he gets attacked from all sides. He gets attacked from the left because not every ethnic group got its, you know, political utopia. He gets attacked by Lodge who says, I'm looking at this League of Nations, especially Article 10 of the Covenant, this is going to drag us into wars all over the place. And Lodge probably had a point, except, neither Lodge nor Wilson really understood international politics. They didn't have the savvy to realize that if you set up something like the League of Nations with its Article that says if somebody attacks somebody else, you know, you got to do this, that, and the other thing. The people, every great power's going to look at its natural interest, national interest before deciding what to do, right. This is not that big of deal. If you'd had Lodge see that, and if you'd had Wilson sort of stick to the notion that France, France's security needed to be guaranteed, I think you get a pretty decent outcome here. However, I'm not going to go through all this, but I had a big long geopolitical thing here. Poof. It goes up into electronic vapor, but the basic point remains, there is an insoluble problem on this Rimland at this time. If you do what the East Europeans regard as just, given their individual nation states, but you leave Germany intact, there's no way in this period you can have a stable balance of power. And even the Anglo-French American Security Pact, would, it would have been better than what came out of it. It might not have been good enough. Okay. Bottom line time. I'm going to be a little wiggly here. What was gained? The defeat of Germany. You obviously know that I think this is important because of the nature of the German regime by 1917, 1918. Any regime dominated by somebody like Ludendorff is going to be a problem in the future. So I think that's important. However, you defeat Germany, a new regime, a democratic regime's set up, you don't do enough to support that regime, and the regime succumbs to the great depression and Hitler, so the defeated Germany doesn't stick. Twenty-one years after the last shots of the first World War, you have the first shots of the second World War. So it's a yes, but. What about the new self-governing states? Well, most of them proved not to be viable. Not is not so great for any of them, except Czechoslovakia, till it's dismembered in, in the end of war period. So they don't work out so well either. What's third on the list? League of Nations. The Americans don't play, but it's still there. In the 1930s, it fails its challenges as I think would be fairly predictable. What else? Well, the real problem here is the settlement, the outcome of World War I is favorable from an American point of view, it's just not durable. And really, Wilson's ultimate purpose was that durability thing. What about cost here? The human cost. Now the United States is in war for a very short time. American troops are in ground combat in any serious way only for six months. It's a very short period. Lots of them died. The killed-in-action, casualties-in-action per month of intense ground combat's the worst in American history. This is a serious cost and a lot of people that lived through it, come home, their lives are ruined. You have the post-traumatic stress disorder that we talk about now, in those days was called shell-shock, on a large scale. The economic cost, second in American history to World War II. The economic cost of World War II [inaudible] cost us much greater, but World War I is the second most costly. The political system. Wilson, although inclined to the most liberal of sentiments, his war regime in the United States was pretty repressive. Dissent was treated very harshly. There were all sorts of problems. There were race riots in 1919, which means whites against blacks, not blacks rising, but whites rising against blacks coming north to work in the war factories. There's a red scare. You know, red under every bed. There's all sorts of stuff that's very repressive. Maybe the most repressive war regime ever in the United States. Finally, Wilson himself. You know, he suffers a stroke. Boom. Okay. I'm the judge, but you're the jury. What do you think? Comments. Questions. >> Pretty much. It's working. I think you pretty much summed it up in the beginning by saying he made great speeches but did not really achieve anything. There was this one point that were on the screen when you mentioned that he wanted a peace that is between equal partners and not going to be the consequence of the next war. But that was completely avoided at the end. And the division of Austria, Hungary at the same time was in the 14 points. Now, the way Austria and Hungary was divided was the natural course of the war and that was, that was also the country that had most of the [inaudible] of the world, and, and so, it actually led to partly, to the Holocaust. >> One comment and then one question. The comment is that Wilson actually was, had much more complicated thoughts about what should happen in the Austro Hungarian Empire. He did not want it to be dismantled. He wanted some sort of confederation in which there would be local home rule for different groups. People assumed that he wanted it broken up. He did not. Now the question for you. Your Woodrow Wilson at the end of March 1917, what's your decision? Do you take the United States into war, or not? Now we can see with the benefit of hindsight. >> [Inaudible] division of Austria Hungary. >> Yeah. That was, you know, somebody else's thing. I should have redone it. >> [Inaudible] I was just reading your charts. >> Yeah. Yeah. Now on a lot of these things, people, his thoughts were a lot more complex. They didn't fit into the sort of sound bites he gave in his speeches. In that case, in particular, it's extremely interesting. >> [Inaudible] the, the new borders that were created [inaudible], they're not real nations, they just created new minorities. So the new borders were a natural cause in the next war and, so that was like, there was no way to, not to have a war after that. >> You're right. But there's no way of drawing those lines where you wouldn't have that happen, really. And how it was solved after the second World War was not very nice. People were moved, mostly by the Soviets, you know. Okay. You're going to move from here to here. And that'll solve it. Maybe. Yes sir. >> There's a theory that, and I more or less anticipate what you'd say about it. But there is one theory that by the time Wilson had decided to go to war, that the powers on both sides were so exhausted that the populations were so fed up with what was happening but there was in effect a stalemate there and that if Wilson had not intervened, then they would have just come to some kind of peace that would have been pretty the same it was beforehand, so that Wilson really screwed things up by going to war because that led to the second World War. >> You know, as I point out. If the Americans hadn't, if Wilson hadn't come and the Russians had gone out, it really tilts the probabilities in favor of the Germans, but it doesn't give the Germans all they really want, or at least it doesn't give Hindenburg and Ludendorff all they really want. But it does give them a more favorable thing than what thought they had in 1914. Is that a good thing or not? In my telling it's not, because you still have Ludendorff around and he's, he's, he's well on his way to becoming a bad man. You know he cooperated with the Nazis for a while and even the Nazis decided he was too much of a lunatic to have anything to do with. So I'm not sure I'm directly answering your question. [ Inaudible Audience Response ] You know, here's the thing. Essentially, the Kaiser had been essentially neutered by the, the military duo. The military duo were squeezing chancellors and it was his prerogative, the Kaiser, the appoint chancellors. But they were getting these guys out. If Germany had had a successful outcome in the war, there was a very strong, if [inaudible] left in, in Germany. But if Germany had won the war, they would have all [inaudible] in the benefit of the guys who had won the war, which in this hypothetical scenario would have been Hindenburg and Ludendorff. I don't think you have a great situation there if Germany wins the war. [ Inaudible Audience Response ] Yeah. What I'm saying is, once again, if the Americans don't come, but the Russians get knocked out, which was very likely. It's not going to be a stalemate. I mean, it's not going to be, you know, they're not going to march to Paris and London. But I, I do think the French would have given in and I don't think it would have been on very favorable terms. >> Thank you, Dr. Lee, for a very provocative presentation. >> Well, thanks for all your help over the months. >> Well, thank you. But thank you. Yes, I mean, you've stimulated my thought. And I'd like to go back to some of these documents and find out even more about them. You admitted that you're more charitable toward Woodrow Wilson than many other historians and certainly the many popular writers who are, who are not academic historians. So I'm going to look at Wilson with a peace. What do you think? Was it in Wilson's character not being able to negotiate with his political opponents at home who, many of whom were willing to meet him half way, reservation? And would, Herbert Hoover himself admitted that he voted for a Democratic Congress in 1918, although he never would have wanted that, but he thought the incumbent president needed his own party to begin. I mean, Hoover didn't want to do that, but he was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. And then, he even dismissed his close friend, Colonel House, who wanted to negotiate with Lodge. What was about Woodrow Wilson's character? >> I think that, and this shall be familiar to anybody who's been living in Washington in recent years. I think the Partisan atmosphere was so poisonous. And the personal dislike of Lodge for Wilson and Wilson for Lodge, of Roosevelt for Wilson, and Wilson for Roosevelt, I think that poisoned everything. And Lodge was a pretty formidable character. He was Wilson's equal as a speech maker and intellect and all that. And he wasn't going to knuckle under. Now there were people who were willing to make compromises for sure. [Inaudible] would be a good example there, Taft for example. But it was never going to be enough to sort of get Wilson over that hump. You know, that's a, that's a tough hurdle to get over, the number of votes you need. And, so Lodge knew if hung tough, he could foil Wilson. Now I, I suggest it. I think, you know, for the good of the future of Europe and the United States, I, I, I think that Lodge should have compromised. I, I, I think his fears about Article 10 of the League of Nations covenant reflected the fact that he didn't really understand how international politics worked. It was very hard for an American, even a, a very smart American like Lodge or Wilson to understand. They had no experience. They're sort of coming into this game new. Now, Roosevelt did have a sense of how it worked, and a pretty good sense. But I don't think that carried over to Lodge, even though Roosevelt and Lodge were so close. Of course, Roosevelt died in early 1919. Yeah. [ Inaudible Audience Response ] It's very interesting. If you walk down the next two rooms down the hall, right through here, and see what we have there of Wilson's library. Now I've done this. How many books on Germany are there? There is one. There's hardly any book on the continent of Europe at all. There is not book on international politics. None. He basically, before, when he comes to office, he says, wouldn't it be horrible if I ended up as a president of war. He, he knows he doesn't understand how, how the system works. Now his answer to that is, well, let's change the system. But the system is much more deeply rooted. To think about international politics without thinking about the balance of power is like thinking economics and forgetting supply and demand. I mean, it's, it's, it's an equivalent mistake. It's not the only story. What Wilson had to understand is he made a binary opposition between concert of power, like in the League of Nations, and balance of power. Actually, they're mutually reinforcing. A balance of power would have made it, the challenges less for the League of Nations, and the League of Nations would have helped the domestic politics that are necessary to maintain the balance. That would be my story, and I'm sticking to it. >> So, unfortunately, we do not have time for any other questions. But we will have a reception, and Brad will stick around. So if you have additional questions, you can direct them to Brad at that time. So now, I just hope you'll all join me in thanking Brad. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at www.loc.gov.