Wilson’s Fourteen Points

The peace after World War I was supposed to close the book on global conflict. Instead, it opened a fight that still shapes U.S. foreign policy today: do we try to organize the world to prevent war, or do we protect our independence by refusing binding commitments abroad?

We sit down with Dr. Sean Beienburg to unpack Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the political reality behind them. We walk through the pressures that dragged the United States into World War I, then map Wilson’s attempt to end secret treaties, defend freedom of the seas, reduce arms, and redraw borders around the idea of self-determination. Along the way, we wrestle with the hardest claim under the hood: can “nations” and “states” ever line up cleanly, and what happens when they don’t?

Then we get to the flashpoint: the League of Nations. Wilson sees collective security as a way to deter aggression without constant war. Many Americans see an entangling alliance that could pull U.S. soldiers into conflicts Congress never chose. That’s where Henry Cabot Lodge enters, leading a faction that isn’t trying to torch the treaty, but insists the League cannot be self-executing. We dig into Lodge’s separation-of-powers argument, the clash between international commitments and congressional war powers, and how Wilson’s health and refusal to compromise helped sink ratification.

These aren’t dusty 1919 arguments. They echo in debates over UN authorization, NATO guarantees, intervention, and even today’s border and identity conflicts from the Middle East to Eastern Europe. If you care about the Constitution, the Treaty of Versailles, or America’s role in the world, this conversation connects the dots. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves history, and leave us a review with your take: were Wilson or Lodge closer to the right answer?

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Transcript

Welcome And What’s On Deck

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Welcome back to Civics in here. Today we're talking about Woodrow Wilson, 14 points, Henry Cabot Lodge, who has come up quite a bit, I think, in previous episodes, and some of the speeches on the Versailles Treaty. So we have Dr. Sean Weinberg with us. Dr. Beinberg, let's start with the 14 points. What is, what are Woodrow Wilson's 14 points?

World War I Forces Wilson’s Hand

The Fourteen Points And Redrawn Borders

The League Of Nations And U.S. Skepticism

Lodge’s Reservations And Treaty Defeat

SPEAKER_01 1:09

So Woodrow Wilson's 14 points are kind of his vision of how World War I ought to be concluded. So we probably should say a little bit about World War I itself. So backstory, you know, in 1915, the Germans sink the Lusitania, which is a British ship carrying arms as it sails from America. So carrying arms is kind of a problem for rules of war. But 100 Americans die on the boat. Americans are quite angry. So Germany then says they won't sink vessels without ensuring the safety of passengers and non-combatants. They don't want to drag America into the war at this point. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson runs as an anti-war candidate with a slogan gloating that he has kept the U.S. out of World War I. This is enough to get him re-elected because by this point the Republican Party, which had split in 1912, right, Roosevelt and Taft, it's reunified. Charles Evans Hughes had been, he left the Supreme Court to run for president, which is wild. He'll go back on the Supreme Court later. Wilson wins New Hampshire by 50 votes, and he barely wins California. And California is a Republican-leaning state, but Hughes had apparently pissed off Hiram Johnson, who was the powerful senator there. So he didn't put his machine only sort of halfway did it. So Hughes goes to bed thinking he's president. And he wakes up in the morning when the California votes have come in and he is not president. Oh no. So Wilson, so Wilson is president, re-elected, after having basically said, like, yep, I'm not doing the war. Well, events somewhat force his hands. The so-called Zimmerman telegram has been released in which Germany tells Mexico that if they'll get on board and with World War I and America gets beaten, then they'll get Texas and the Southwest back. But Americans do not declare war. They're mad about that. That the fact that Germany's like, maybe we should drag America in and beat them down now. But Germany resumes unlimited submarine warfare to choke off England and France. And they torpedo an American vessel. And Wilson basically says, look, at this point my hands are tied. Like I tried to keep us out, but like the Germans are just acting crazy. So he asks for a declaration of war and he gets it. Russia pulls out during World War I when the Communist Revolution deposes what becomes a Russian revolution, the Russian Revolution, which will eventually become sort of the Communist Revolution, basically incapacitates, incapacitates Russia and removes them. So at that point, politics is looking a little different, but by the time the US gets in, or with the US's contribution, there's clearly there's going to be a winner. And it's not going to be Germany. So Wilson releases a vision of sort of 14 points of what he wants the terms to look like. He has other terms. So he wants Germany to have relatively lenient terms because he doesn't want to piss them off. The British and the French, understandably, have had particularly France. I mean, France is like totally destroyed by World War I. And so for Wilson to say, like, oh, let the Germans off easy, is not very palatable. He might be right as a geostrategic matter. Like that's above my pay grade. But this is just, again, as I've said, Wilson is not, Wilson is a professor, he's not somebody that understands people. So when he's sitting in a room and saying, ah, Britain, France, don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. They're a little frustrated. Whereas France wants, like, no, Germany can't have an army. Pay us back. We want some territorial concessions. Like, no. So Wilson again is now spelling out how do we make this thing so that some some good happens from it. And so he wants to have the US work to make the world a broadly freer place. Sometimes this gets pitched as a war to end all wars. Roosevelt's saying the same thing, although Roosevelt will be against the League of Nations, which we'll come back to. Now, this is Wilson is proposing a very sharp shift from George Washington's vision of non-intervention. We think we've had one, maybe two podcasts earlier that covered the farewell address, which is don't get involved in entangling alliances. World War I, they're in fact, Wilson is very careful. He will not call them allies. He will not say that this is an alliance. And so there's separate command. Like he was trying to maintain, like, no, we are not getting dragged in by this because he's has some level of deference to that old understanding that you do not get the US permanently entangled. And so the 14 points, you know, they have a few sections to it. So one, you don't have these secret treaties. You know, this is part of what happens, like, haha, we have a secret treaty with you. Well, we have a secret treaty with you. And it turns out everybody's all got secret treaties. Everybody's got secret treaties with everybody. Yeah, yeah. And so even countries that's not really in their best interest get sort of sucked in to World War I. So, like, no, we don't we don't do these sort of secret treaties thing. Uh, we want to have freedom of the seas, we want to have some levels of disarmament, we want to have a way to you know deal with colonial claims. So Belgium basically gets independence, you know, French. So there's some like sort of territorial, we don't need to get into the details of all that. But the complicated stuff comes in points, I would say, like nine to thirteen, which is we're gonna start breaking up some empires. We're gonna break up Austria-Hungary, we're gonna break up the Ottoman Empire, which also had had its own revolution that the Ottomans have been overthrown basically by secular military folks rather than sort of the religious leadership. So, you know, what do we do with with what was part of Turkey? Uh, we cut that up, you know, we're gonna recarve Poland out. So they're trying to effectively the short kind of version of all that, the theme, is they want to make nations and states coterminous. Now, what do I mean by that? A state is a government, a political community. Okay, a nation is a sort of group of people with a common heritage, language, culture, tradition. Right again, there's going to be some fuzziness in this, but like France is both a nation and a state. Right? Austria-Hungary is not a nation and a state because it's Austrians and Hungarians and other chunks of the Balkans that are basically governed by those folks. The Ottoman Empire is not a nation-state because it is a state of Turks that are also governing chunks of the Arab world and whatnot. So the sort of the overall theme that Wilson is pushing here is that nations and states should look more similar. So you don't have basic because that's that's been sort of the cause of World War I is right, basically Serbian nationalists wanting to overthrow what they viewed as an imperial power over them. Well, that requires some modifying of borders and things, but there are also some places where Wilson's not quite willing to go that far. So point five, he says, a free, open-minded, and impartial adjustment of all colonial claims based upon an observance of the principle that the sovereignty of the populations must have equal weight with the claims of the government whose title is to be determined. Which is to say, well, there are some folks that, you know, we gotta be, we gotta make sure we're taking care of the imperial governments too. And Wilson is not that keen on pushing for in his other writings, he does say, look, eventual independence for basically non-European countries is should happen, but like they need training wheels for a while. So he is not an anti-imperialist and, like, ah, well, India should be released from Britain tomorrow, kind of thing, right? Uh again, not that surprising considering what we know about Wilson's views on other things. More or less what I said before is not that controversial for lots of folks. In America, the big deal is the 14th point. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. This is the League of Nations. And so, what he wants is basically a league of non-aggression, where if you attack one of the countries that's in this league, everybody else will gang up and hammer you. And so the idea is this will basically deter wars of aggression. And so he said, you know, and he he goes around the country pushing this. This is not that popular in America because people still are into their George Washington theory. Like, hey, yes, we don't give a damn what happens in Europe. You leave us alone in the Western Hemisphere, we will leave you alone, and we'll be good. Now, Wilson is in trouble because he's in poor health and he had not been that popular at the Versailles negotiations, and he's not that good because again, he's mostly just like, hey, France and Britain, suck it up. Um and he's not that politically savvy in America either, because there ends up being two factions of people that are against the League of Nations. There's one faction that's mostly progressive Westerners and Midwesterners, and these are called the irreconcilables. It's a great name. And these are the folks that say name under no circumstances will we sign off on the League of Nations. We don't do alliances, we don't give a damn, we don't care what happens to Europe, we don't care what, like we don't care, not our problem. There are a fair number of them, but they're not that's not enough to sink it. There's a third faction, and this is Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge leads basically a faction of mostly conservative Republicans who say, we're on board with the treaty, we're on board with a league, but we will not tolerate it being self-executing. This is a complicated thing, but basically, we do not think America can be dragged into a war because the league asked us to. We need to make sure that Congress has the authority to say, in order to enforce the league, war is declared against X, Y, and Z. And so he gives various speeches saying it's inconsistent, whatever we like, it's bad enough to throw George Washington under the bus, but like maybe we have to do that. He's skeptical of that, so he doesn't want to have too much aggression, you know, too much participant. But his main objection is that there seems something wrong with sending American young people off to die in a country that Congress never even said, Yep, we're good with this. Uh and so Lodge basically says renegotiate the treaty, throw in a proviso that Congress basically has to approve, and Lodge's faction will deal with it. Wilson by this point is not only cranky because he's a cranky professor type, but he's in bad health, he's got a stroke. His wife is possibly actually the president. This is his own, you know, is Edith Wilson actually the president? Yes. So Wilson just says, nope, no negotiations. Well, Lodge is basically like Lodge's faction of like persuadable skeptics and the irreconcilables is enough to say that sinks the treaty. So the U.S. does not get engaged in the League of Nations, I would say largely because Wilson won't sort of play ball with Lodge. And this ends up becoming sort of an obviously a this is this remains a live issue when the League of Nations gets sort of revived as the United Nations later. Is a United Nations authorization sufficient? Truman argues it is in Korea. Others are skeptical of that, and you get sort of a sort of secondary Lodge version called the Meffer for the Bricker Amendment during Eisenhower. But that's jumping ahead a whole bunch of years. So that's your takeaway. Wilson has this very idealistic vision of using political power to sort of remake the world for freedom, which is why Wilson is often regarded as sort of the as a father of kind of an idealistic interventionist foreign policy, which, you know, in some sense, like George W. Bush will pick that up, saying we need to sort of remake the Middle East to be friendly for democracy, which has some echoes of Wilson. So it's not, you know, and otherwise, like Wilson and George W. Bush are not close ideologically. So it cuts foreign policy as it often does, cuts across domestic policy lines. But yeah, Wilson wants the league and he wants to have the US sort of not again. Wilson isn't saying we need to like invade, you know, China to invent and end imperialism or like invade these places to stop it, but like use as much of its soft power as it can. Again, and Lodge very much is taking the sort of constitutionally cautious version of like that may be, but you can't amend the constitution by a treaty vote. Like you need to amend the constitution if we're doing that. Or we could just make it easy and amend the treaty so that we just have to get Congress's permission.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

It's so interesting because the text of the 14 points is not long at all. No, it's not. Um and he, you know, he talks about Russia, who I went I definitely went through a phase in, I think, my 20s of like the Romanov, the House of the Romanovs and the dynasty and you know, all of that thing. But why would it be important for us, you know, especially in an age where like World War I is so far away for us? Why is this document itself still important to study?

Why The Debate Still Matters

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Well, so I mean, particularly, there's a couple of questions of should nations and states look the same in their borders, right? Like this was a big part of why Iraq was a mess over there, because Iraq is a Shia and Sunnis and Kurds. In some sense, it's three cultures that are bolted together because at the end of World War I, when they're drawing up particularly what's left of the Ottoman Empire, they actually don't do a very good job of drawing up the nations and states co-line, right? Lebanon is the same thing, right? So they kind of try to do it, but it doesn't work or populations change a little bit. Like this is still a live issue today. You know, you're seeing versions of this, you know, it plays out differently, but you know, the argument that like Ukraine isn't really a nation, right? And so they you get versions, so the same kinds of conversations of should nations and states, at least in, you know, it's not really applicable in the United States in the same way, but what's the relationship between those two? So that's still a debate in foreign policy. The debate about to what extent should US power, hard or soft, be used to sort of advance a version of sort of liberal democracy. That's a debate, you know, versus isolate what level of sort of isolationism versus a sort of, you know, the isolationism label gets thrown around, I think, too cavalierly to people who are probably closer, like Lodge is not an isolationist. And there are people today who get tagged as isolationists who are not. But there are also people who are actual isolationists, right? So what's the role of the United States in that? Again, it goes back to like why we studied the farewell address that carries on to that. And then finally, the relationship between you know, uh whether it's the UN or NATO, like they're different things, but to what extent should the US be making these extensions of a basically a guarantee that we will militarily intervene? Under what circumstances do you do that? You know the UN expands beyond the League of Nations in in some ways. Uh so it's not just League of Nations version two or renamed, it's different. So, you know, you have debates about to what extent the U.S. ought to be participating in some of these multinational or multilateral kinds of treaties or things like that, right? So, yeah, though, as you said, a lot of the specifics, like what should the Romanian territory look like, that feels pretty alien. But the sort of under-the-hood debates about the League of Nations really do engage with questions of what's the what pot what's the capability of foreign policy to make political change in countries? Under what under what circumstances should the US extend its security guarantees or not? Under what circumstances I guess this is more on the Lodge piece. Under what circumstances must Congress be involved in war making? So I I think those are all still pretty relevant. You can read Lodge's speeches today, and most of them are actually you could read most of Lodge's like speeches that he's giving uh in the League of Nations, and they're not even that specific to like the particular context. It's about separation of powers, it's about intervention versus non-intervention. The the the Wilson piece is a little more specific to that time, but it's broadly part of Wilson's other stuff. So I think it's definitely still a text worth they're text worth engaging with. The Lodge pieces people don't always assign. I've always been very adamant that if you assign the Wilson, you need to assign the Lodge because A, it's got more of a constitution focus, which I care about. Yeah. But but B, I I think it raises again, and Lodge is not Lodge is not like one of the hardcore irreconcilables that's just like throwing a fit. Like he he actually is trying to balance things. Not saying he's right necessarily, but like yeah, I'm sympathetic to him, but the Lodge is definitely worth worth reading. His speeches in February 28th and August 12th if you're looking for the specific ones.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yes, the February 28th one, there is a line in it. I've always loved one flag, and I cannot share that devotion with a mongrel banner created for a league. And then he like, I mean, really just goes on to talk about like his allegiance to you know to the flag and to our nation. And it's, I mean, it is a great pairing to again just talk about these conversations that were being had about the League of Nations, but just you know, essentially politically in 1919. So absolutely. I mean, Henry Cabalodge, I think he's just come up a lot lately. He is somebody, I don't know that we study a whole lot in history, but he's he sure had a lot to say.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

He he and Alec Hugh Root are two people that were big deals at the time who have fallen away. I think for at least for people who are serious about political history, are are worth spending some time with because they're they're they are not just political pundits or like they are like thoughtful, like scholar, scholar, scholar participants in a way that we don't often see so much anymore.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Maybe those could be good future podcast episodes. Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much. You know, I think that sometimes we get into World War I and we talk a lot about like the battles and things that were happening, but really, you know, the writings and looking at Wilson's 14 points in the conversation uh that surrounded it and surrounded our essentially never joining the League of Nations. And I'm sure we'll talk in future podcast episodes about the League of Nations eventual failure. But all of these political writings, you know, are really, really important. So thank you.