woodrow wilson.

[dazzleman]

He's one of the more complicated presidents.

I really can't say I like him.  He was an ardent segregationist, and had an arrogant moralistic streak that is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter (or maybe Carter is reminiscent of Wilson).

In retrospect, his whole "he kept us out of war" campaign, a few months before he asked congress to declare war, was pretty cynical.  It's hard to believe that at that late date, he didn't have an inkling of where the situation was headed.

I think it was necessary to get into World War I, but Wilson's flubs at the end helped set the stage for World War II, though of course that is the exact opposite of what he intended.

His arrogance and refusal to compromise helped doom US involvement in the League of Nations, and ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.

I think he was foolish to go and negotiate the treaty himself.  I go against conventional wisdom in saying that Versailles was a bad treaty not because it was too harsh, but because it wasn't harsh enough.

I know from my own personal experience and observations that slap-on-the-wrist penalties don't work.  They simply anger the recipient of the penalty without deterring them from future transgressions.  And that's what Versailles was for Germany -- a slap on the wrist.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Germans imposed on the Soviet Union when it surrendered to Germany in 1918, was far, far harsher than Versailles.  Yet that was OK by the Germans, and they whined like little bitches about Versailles and vowed revenge.  Their problem was not with the treaty, but with the fact that they lost the war.  Any treaty would have been seen as bad in those circumstances.

So the punitive clauses either should have been given some teeth, or they should have been eliminated in favor of a strategy of befriending Germany.  Tempermentally, I tend to favor the latter approach, but it doesn't always work.  Wilson's compromise treaty produced the worst of both worlds.

But he did mean well.  That I'll give him.  He was just a little too sure of his own rectitude to have reached his potential as president.  It's a shame.

[dazzleman]

Dazzleman, I would rather say that the problem with Versailles was that it imposed harsh penalties that angered the Germans but that it wasn't sufficiently backed up. In other words, they weren't ready to uphold the conditions of the treaty, which meant that the negative effect of penalizing was there, but not the actual effect of hindering German revanschism. Had the clause prohibiting Germany from having an air force or an army of more than 100 000 men been upheld WWII couldn't have broken out.

But I think we're probably meaning roughly the same thing?

Pretty much.

I don't happen to think that restrictions against military force are all that harsh.  They don't necessarily negatively affect the lives of the average person, especially if nobody is going to attack you.

The reparations were a problem in the early post-war period, but they quickly faded after they were renegotiated, and the German economy boomed in the latter part of the 1920s.

Aside from the psychological humiliation of defeat, which hit the Germans hard, they really were not suffering during that period.

I think it's better not to impose sanctions, than to impose sanctions that you can't uphold.  And it was unrealistic to think those sanctions and restrictions could be upheld for very long.  A stronger Russia, allied with the western powers rather than hostile to them, would have given the whole Versailles system a better chance of succeeding, but in the end, it turned out to be a compromise that got it wrong on every note.

I think we basically do agree, Gustaf.

[dazzleman]

Wilsons arrogance did not doom U.S. involvment in the League, it was the Republican isolationists running the senate at the time that made that happen

But less arrogance on the part of Wilson might have won over more public support to his position.

[dazzleman]

Dazzleman, I would rather say that the problem with Versailles was that it imposed harsh penalties that angered the Germans but that it wasn't sufficiently backed up. In other words, they weren't ready to uphold the conditions of the treaty, which meant that the negative effect of penalizing was there, but not the actual effect of hindering German revanschism. Had the clause prohibiting Germany from having an air force or an army of more than 100 000 men been upheld WWII couldn't have broken out.

But I think we're probably meaning roughly the same thing?

Pretty much.

I don't happen to think that restrictions against military force are all that harsh.  They don't necessarily negatively affect the lives of the average person, especially if nobody is going to attack you.

The reparations were a problem in the early post-war period, but they quickly faded after they were renegotiated, and the German economy boomed in the latter part of the 1920s.

Aside from the psychological humiliation of defeat, which hit the Germans hard, they really were not suffering during that period.

Are you kidding? Germany's economy was in dire straits throughout the 20s, and when it did recover towards the end of the decade the Great Depression caused unemployment and inflation to soar through the roof once more.

That wasn't my understanding.  Germany hyperinflated their economy in the early 20s to devalue the mark and thereby effectively wipe out their reparations.

In the mid-to-late 1920s, their economy was doing reasonably well, peaking in the 1928-29 period.  It was of course severely hit by the depression later, as were the other western powers.