Kennan IV - World War IGeorge Kennan, American Diplomacy 

IV. WORLD WAR I

Let me recall once more the nature of the enterprise we are embarked upon in 
this series of lectures. This is not an attempt to recount a sequence of events, 
to report the development of new historical fact, or to give a rounded picture 
of America's diplomacy over fifty years. It is an attempt to look back from a 
present full of uncertainty and controversy and unhappiness, to see whether a 
study of the past will not help us to understand sonic of one present 
predicaments. 
We have now come, in the course of this undertaking, to what seems to me the 
most baffling, most tragic, and - for the historian - most challenging of all 
the phases of human events encountered in the record of this period. By this I 
mean the terrible, prolonged, and wasteful struggle that we know as World War I 
- and all that went with it. 
I would like first to say a word about the total result of these two world wars 
in Europe. These wars were fought at the price of some tons of millions of 
lives, of untold physical destruction, of the destruction of the balance of 
forces on the Continent - at the price of rendering western Europe dangerously, 
perhaps fatefully, vulnerable to Soviet power. Both wars were fought, really, 
with a view to changing Germany: to correcting her behavior, to making the 
Germans something different from what they were. Yet, today, if one were offered 
the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913 - a Germany run by 
conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists, a 
vigorous Germany, united and unoccupied, full of energy and confidence, able to 
pity a part again in the balancing - off of Russian power in Europe - well, 
there would be objections to it from many quarters, and it wouldn't make 
everybody happy; but in many ways it wouldn't sound so bad, in comparison with 
our problems of today. Now, think what this means. When you tally up the total 
score of the two wars, in terms of their ostensible objective, you find that if 
there has been any gain at all, it is pretty hard to discern. 
Does this not mean that something is terribly wrong here? Can it really be that 
all this bloodshed and sacrifice was just the price of sheer survival for the 
Western democracies in the twentieth century? If we were to accept that 
conclusion, things would look pretty black; for we would have to ask ourselves: 
Where does all this end? If this was the price of survival in the first half of 
the twentieth century, what is survival going to cost us in the second half? But 
plainly this immense output of effort and sacrifice should have brought us 
something more than just survival. And then, we can only assume, some great 
miscalculations must have been made somewhere? But where? Were they ours? Were 
they our Allies? 
Eclipsed for many of us by the fresher and more vivid recollections of World War 
II, this first World War has become in many respects the forgotten factor. Yet 
all the lines of inquiry, it seems to me, lead back to it. World War II seemed 
really so extensively predetermined; it developed and rolled its course with the 
relentless logic of the last act of a classical tragedy. And the main elements 
of that tragic situation - the sickness and impatience of Germany, the weakness 
of eastern Europe, the phenomenon of bolshevism in Russia, and the weariness and 
debility in France and England - all these things took their origin so clearly 
in the period of 1914-20 that it seems to be here, if anywhere, that the real 
answers should be sought. 
I do not mean to say that there were not still important things that could have 
been done in the twenties and the thirties, or perhaps even in the forties, to 
avert the worst dangers and to press the stream of events into more hopeful 
channels. Thirty years is a long time in the course of human events. The life of 
an international community can always be inclined to some extent, like a tree, 
by persistent pressure in a single direction over a long space of time. 
But I would submit that a significant narrowing of the choices of the 
generations from 1920 to 1950 began with the outbreak of violence in 1914; that 
with the subsequent emergence of a military deadlock and the disappearance of 
hopes for a compromise peace this process was greatly advanced; and that by the 
time the fire of war had finally burned itself out, and the Treaty of Versailles 
had been signed, the area in which Western statesmen, and above all American 
statesmen, could act to restore genuine health and peace to Western 
civilization, and to give that civilization strength to withstand the growing 
challenge from the East, had been grievously and tragically narrowed. 
So we come back to the fact that much of the cause for the decline in our 
security in the West lay with the course and outcome of the first World War. And 
for this reason our own part in it deserves the most careful scrutiny. 
What was the problem for our statesmen? Let us review it again in our minds. 
You all remember how war broke out in 1914. The origins of this war were complex 
in the extreme. I will not try to describe them in detail here. Some were of a 
long-term nature: the still unsolved problems of the breakup of the old Turkish 
Empire, the restlessness of subject peoples in the Danubian basin, the loss of 
what the French call the elan vital in Austria-Hungary, the relative growth of 
German power, the rivalry between Germany and England. Others were of a 
short-term nature: the stupidities and timidities of statesmen, the pressures of 
public opinion, the vagaries of coincidence. if you tried to compute the various 
degrees of guilt, you got a rather fuzzy pattern: the Austrians and the Russians 
no doubt in first place, the Germans with less but certainly with a goodly 
share, and no one with none at all. Above all, you could not say that anyone had 
deliberately started the war or schemed it. It was a tragic, helpless sort of 
war from the beginning. Poor old Europe had got herself into a box. The 
structure of her international life had a weak spot. The shot at Sarajevo struck 
into that weak spot - and suddenly no one knew how not to go to war. 
About the course of the war, once it had started, you also need little 
instruction from me. The course of it was as tragic and as nonsensical as its 
origin. The deadlock was not long in establishing itself on the western front, 
and it is hard today to visualize the full hideousness and wastefulness of what 
ensued: those four long years of miserable carnage; that appalling phenomenon of 
great armies of men facing each other in the muddy trenches day after day, month 
after month, year after year, destroying each other hopelessly, systematically, 
with artillery barrages, with the as yet unanswered weapon of the machine gun, 
with trench mortars and barbed wire and even poison gas, until victory or defeat 
came to seem less a product of military leadership and skill and spirit than a 
matter of some grisly mathematics of cannon fodder and slaughter. "The fire," 
wrote Winston Churchill in 1929, "roared on till it burned itself out."

  Events passed very largely outside the scope of conscious choice. Governments 
  and individuals conformed to the rhythm of the tragedy, and swayed and 
  staggered forward in helpless violence, slaughtering and squandering on 
  ever-increasing scales, till injuries were wrought to the structure of human 
  society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal 
  to the present civilization . . . .1 
"Injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will 
not efface." Churchill knew what he was saying when he wrote those words. The 
injuries were deeper than most people ever dreamed at the time. You could fill 
in the old trenches. You could plow up the fields of Flanders, where the poppies 
grew. You could rebuild the French towns. Life could begin to look normal again 
after a few years. But there were trenches no one could fill, fields where no 
poppy would ever grow again, structures no one could ever rebuild. They were in 
the souls of the men who took part in that war the survivors. And what can one 
say of the six million who never came back? 
I wonder if any of you remember the final passages of Remarque's All Quiet on 
the Western Front - the greatest novel of the first World War. I am going to 
read them to you because I think they have a place in any discussion of that 
war, and they bring out something I can convey to you in no other way. Imagine 
to yourselves a young German GI in a military hospital behind the German lines, 
in the autumn of 1918, shortly before the end of the war.

  It is autumn. There are not many of the old hands left. I am the last of seven 
  fellows from our class. 
  Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it again proves an 
  illusion, then they will break up; hope is high, it cannot be taken away again 
  without an upheaval. If there is not peace, then there will be revolution. 
  I have fourteen days rest, because I have swallowed a bit of gas; in a little 
  garden I sit the whole day long in the sun. The armistice is coming soon, I 
  believe it now, too. 
  Here my thoughts stop and will not go any further. All that meets me, all that 
  floods over me are but feelings - greed of life, love of home, yearnings of 
  the blood, intoxication, of deliverance. But no aims. 
  Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and strength of our 
  experiences we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be 
  weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to 
  find our way any more. 
  And men will not understand us - for the generation that grew up before us, 
  though it has passed these years with us here, already lead a home and a 
  calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be 
  forgotten - and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to 
  us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow 
  older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most 
  will be bewildered; - the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into 
  ruin. 
  …. 
  Here the trees show gay and golden, the berries of the mountain ash stand red 
  among the leaves, country roads run white out to the skyline, and the canteens 
  hum like beehives with rumors of peace. 
  I stand up. 
  I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they bring me nothing, they 
  can bring me nothing. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront 
  them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in 
  my hands and eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is 
  there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.2 
Now that was World War I. Those of you here who are veterans may say: "Why, that 
wasn't just World War I. . . . That was any war." Right you are. And if there 
was anything special about the first World War, it was only that the thing went 
on in the same way and in the same pieces for an awfully long time; there was 
not much movement, not much adventure, not much hope that anything could happen 
that would change the whole fortunes of war at any early date. The losses were 
terrific on both sides. You could practically calculate when your time would 
come. And it was all so unutterably futile. 
But the words of this German soldier are important because there was written in 
them not just the feelings of many fighting men toward the end of the war but 
also something of the pattern of the future. In these words you read practically 
everything that was to come: the maladjustment of the veteran's generation; the 
gap in the age groups; the older men (the Chamberlains, the Hindenburgs, the 
Pétains) who did not understand the postwar world and who were nevertheless 
required to wield power in it and to hold that power too long; the younger men 
who grew up full of frustration, insecurity, and bewilderment and who, as 
Remarque correctly observed, would some day be strange to the veterans and push 
them aside. Here was the forecast of the strength of totalitarianism, and the 
fatigue of democracy, in the period between the wars. 
Now it would be pleasant, and would case our task, if we could say that, as a 
war so sickening ran its course, peoples and governments on both sides sobered 
and became thoughtful, became aware of the increasing emptiness of victory, 
aware that no political objectives could be worth this price, amenable to any 
reasonable suggestion for a compromise peace that would put an end to the 
slaughter. Unfortunately, we cannot say this. There are certain sad 
appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of the 
experiences of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always 
make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than 
governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not 
invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I 
suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and 
would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous 
calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in 
most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not 
really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all but rather 
the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities - 
politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live 
by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of 
water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the 
pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any 
others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, 
because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas 
complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to 
misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be 
supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, 
the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to 
explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: 
plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense 
of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their 
way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing 
the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And 
until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of 
bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves - as perhaps the 
greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government - this 
sort of thing will continue to occur. 
In 1916 people in Europe had not yet learned this, any more than many people in 
the United States have learned it today; and, by consequence, the progress of 
World War I did not bring reasonableness, or humility, or the spirit of 
compromise to the warring peoples. As hostilities ran their course, hatreds 
congealed, one's own propaganda came to be believed, moderate people were 
shouted down and brought into disrepute, and war aims hardened and became more 
extreme all around. 
The Allies came to be interested only in a total victory over Germany: a victory 
of national humiliation, of annexations, of crushing reparations. They resented 
suggestions for an end of hostilities on any other basis. 
The Germans wanted to retain military facilities in Belgium. They wanted to hold 
Belgium for the future in the status of a subordinate state. They wanted a 
slight increase in their own territory, for economic reasons, at the expense of 
France. They wanted an indemnity for evacuating France and Belgium. These aims 
were of course utterly unacceptable to the Allies. 
Now, plainly, all this posed no easy problem for American statesmanship, and I 
would not want it thought that anything I am about to say indicates any lack of 
sympathy for Woodrow Wilson or of appreciation for the depth and bitterness of 
his problems. But none of this absolves us from the duty, of looking coldly and 
critically it the nature of our national reaction to such a challenge. 
In the first place, with respect to the origins of the war: let us note that 
there was for long no understanding in this country that either the origins or 
the issues of the war were of any concern to us. Speaking in 1916, President 
Wilson said that with the objects and causes of the war "we are not concerned. 
The obscure foundations from which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are 
not interested to search for or explore."3 "America," he said on a later 
occasion, "did not at first see the full meaning of the war. It looked like a 
natural raking out of the pent-up jealousies and rivalries of the complicated 
politics of Europe."4 Here, we may note, there was no recognition that what 
might be at issue in the European war was anything that concerned us. There was 
the same denial we saw in the case of the Far East - of the legitimacy of the 
real interests and aspirations of other peoples, the same dismissal of these 
things as unsubstantial and unworthy of our attention, as "jealousies and 
rivalries" too silly, too "complicated," to deserve our respect. 
Proceeding on this basis, it was logical that the only American interest in the 
war we were inclined to recognize for a long time was the defense of our neutral 
rights according to the established laws of maritime warfare, as they had been 
known in the past. We did not understand that new modalities of warfare and new 
weapons - above all, the total blockade and the submarine - had rendered 
obsolete some of the more important of these rules. Not only had their 
observance become physically impracticable, but each side had come to feel that 
its chances of victory and survival depended on the violation of one or another 
of them. Either side would have preferred to accept war with us rather than 
refrain from violating certain ones of them. This meant that a strict insistence 
by us on their observance could eventually lead us, theoretically, into war with 
both belligerents - a paradoxical ending for a policy designed to keep us out of 
war. 
Looking backward today on these endless disputes between our government and the 
belligerents over neutral rights, it seems hard to understand how we could have 
attached so much importance to them. They irritated both belligerents and 
burdened our relations with them, and I find it hard to believe that they 
involved our national honor, it might be our privilege to defend tire rights of 
our citizens to travel on belligerent Vessels, but it was hardly it duty, unless 
we chose to define it as a duty to ourselves. 
As time went on, there grew up, of course, alongside this outlook, something 
quite different: a realization of the danger of defeat that confronted the 
Entente powers and in awareness of the damage that would be done to our world 
position by the elimination of England as a strong force in the world. In 
addition to this, the superiority of British propaganda, and other factors, 
began to work to the benefit of the Allied cause. The result was a gradual 
growth of pro-Allied sentiment, and particularly in the minds of the responsible 
American leaders. This sentiment was enough to cause Wilson and House to water 
down our neutrality policy to the benefit of the British and to make cautious 
efforts to stop the war, in 1915 and 1916, as the best means of averting the 
danger of a British defeat. But this pro-Ally feeling was never sufficient to 
constitute, for the national consciousness as a whole, adequate justification 
for entering the war; and you will remember that our entry, when it came, was 
over an issue of neutrality. 
Once in the war, we had no difficulty in discovering - and lost no time in doing 
so - that the issues involved in it were of the greatest significance to us. 
It is surely a curious characteristic of democracy: this amazing ability to 
shift gears overnight in one's ideological attitudes, depending on whether one 
considers one's self at war or at peace. Day before yesterday, let us say, the 
issues at stake between ourselves and another power were not worth the life of a 
single American boy. Today, nothing else counts at all; our cause is holy; the 
cost is no consideration; violence must know no limitations short of 
unconditional surrender. 
Now I know the answer to this one. A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like 
to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked 
to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its 
adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then 
becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger - it fights for the very 
reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was 
rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it - to reach that power a lesson it 
will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be 
carried to the bitter end. 
This is true enough, and, if nations could afford to operate in the moral 
climate of individual ethics, it would be understandable and acceptable. But I 
sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably 
similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room 
and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and 
pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath - in fact, you 
practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are 
being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind 
determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his 
native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have 
taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have 
seen whether he could not have prevented some of these situations from arising 
instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath 
equally undiscriminating. 
In any case, once we were at war, it did not appear to us that our greatest 
danger might still lie precisely in too long a continuation of the war, in the 
destruction of Europe's equilibrium, and in the sapping of the vital energies of 
the European peoples. It did not appear to us then that the greatest interest we 
had in the war was still that it should be brought to an end as soon as possible 
on a basis involving a minimum maladjustment and as much stability as possible 
for the future. Prior to our entry into the war, many people had thought that 
way. As late as January, 1917, Wilson was still arguing against total victory, A 
"peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished," he 
said, "would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable 
sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which 
terms of peace would test ... as upon quicksand."5 But, once we were in the war, 
these ideas were swept away by the powerful currents of war psychology. We were 
then as strong as anybody else in our determination that the war should be 
fought to the finish of a total victory. 
Considerations of the power balance argued against total victory. Perhaps it was 
for this very reason that people in this country rejected them so emphatically 
and sought more sweeping and grandiose objectives, for the accomplishment of 
which total victory could plausibly be represented as absolutely essential.6 In 
any case, a line of thought grew up, under Wilson's leadership, which provided 
both rationale and objective for our part in fighting the war to a bitter end. 
Germany was militaristic and antidemocratic. The Allies were fighting to make 
the world safe for democracy. Prussian militarism had to be destroyed to make 
way for the sort of peace we wanted. This peace would not be based on the old 
balance of power. Who, as Wilson said, could guarantee equilibrium under such a 
system? It would be based this time on a "community of power," on "an organized 
common peace," on a League of Nations which would mobilize the conscience and 
power of mankind against aggression. Autocratic government would be done away 
with. Peoples would themselves choose the sovereignty under which they wished to 
reside. Poland would achieve her independence, as would likewise the restless 
peoples of the AustroHungarian Empire. There would be open diplomacy this time; 
peoples, not governments, would run things. Armaments would be reduced by mutual 
agreement. The peace would be just and secure. 
In the name of such principles you could fight a war to the end. A future so 
brilliant would surely wash away the follies and brutalities of the war, redress 
its injuries, heal the wounds it had left. This theory gave us justification 
both for continuing the war to its bitter and terrible end - to the end 
described by that young German soldier in the military hospital - and at the 
same time for refusing to preoccupy ourselves with the practical problems and 
maladjustments to which the course of hostilities was leading. Under the 
protecting shadow of this theory, the guns continued their terrible work for a 
final year and a half after our entry. Under the shadow of this theory Wilson 
went to Versailles unprepared to face the sordid but all-important details of 
the day of reckoning. Under this theory he suffered his tragic and historic 
failure. Under this theory things advanced with a deadly logic and precision to 
a peace which was indeed "forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon 
the vanquished, accepted in humiliation, under duress"- a peace that did indeed 
leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory, and upon which its own terms came 
later to rest "as upon quicksand." 
And the tragedy of this outcome was not substantially mitigated by the fact that 
we were not signatories to the Treaty of Versailles and kept ourselves aloof 
from its punitive provisions. The damage had been done. The equilibrium of 
Europe had been shattered. Austria-Hungary was gone. There was nothing effective 
to take its place. Germany, smarting from the sting of defeat and plunged into 
profound social unrest by the breakup of her traditional institutions, was left 
nevertheless as the only great united state in Central Europe. Russia was no 
longer there, as a possible reliable ally, to help France contain German power. 
From the Russian plain there leered a single hostile eye, skeptical of Europe's 
values, rejoicing at all Europe's misfortunes, ready to collaborate solely for 
the final destruction of her spirit and her pride. Between Russia and Germany 
were only the pathetic new states of eastern and Central Europe, lacking in 
domestic stability and the traditions of statesmanship - their peoples 
bewildered, uncertain, vacillating between brashness and timidity in the 
exercise of the unaccustomed responsibilities of independence. And to the other 
side of Germany were France and England, reeling, themselves, from the 
vicissitudes of the war, wounded far more deeply than they themselves realized, 
the plume of their manhood gone, their world positions shaken. 
Truly, this was a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it as 
by the devil's own hand. It was a peace, as the French historian Bainville said, 
which was too mild for the hardships it contained. And this was the sort of 
peace you got when you allowed war hysteria and impractical idealism to lie down 
together in your mind, like the lion and the limb; when you indulged yourself in 
the colossal conceit of thinking that you could suddenly make international life 
over into what you believed to be your own image; when you dismissed the past 
with contempt, rejected the relevance of the past to the future, and refused to 
occupy yourself with the real problems that a study of the past would suggest. 
But suppose you hadn't taken this line. Would things have. been different? Was 
there another line you could take? 
It does seem to me there was. 
You might have begun, I should think, with a recognition of the importance to us 
of what was brewing in Europe in those years before the outbreak of war. You 
will remember that Wilson dismissed all this as something we were not even 
interested to examine. 
Yet, was it all so silly, so unworthy of attention? I said in the beginning that 
some of the causes of the war were deep ones. The absence of a major war on the 
Continent during the century before 1914 had rested on a balance of power which 
presupposed the existence of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia as 
dominant elements - and all of this flanked by an England instinctively 
conscious of her stake in the preservation of the balance among them and 
prepared to hover vigilantly about the fringes of the Continent, tending its 
equilibrium as one might tend a garden, yet always with due regard for the 
preservation of her own maritime supremacy and the protection of her overseas 
empire. In this complicated structure lay concealed not only the peace of Europe 
but also the security of the United States. Whatever affected it was bound to 
affect us. And all through the latter part of the nineteenth century things were 
happening which were bound to affect it: primarily the gradual shift of power 
from Austria-Hungary to Germany. This was particularly important because 
Austria-Hungary had not had much chance of becoming a naval and commercial rival 
to England, whereas Germany definitely did have such a chance and was foolish 
enough to exploit it aggressively, with a chip on her shoulder, in a way that 
gave the British a deep sense of concern and insecurity. 
It is not only in retrospect that these things are visible. 
In the winter of 1913 there appeared, anonymously, and in an English magazine 
(because no American magazine would take it), an article written by an American 
diplomatist of the time, Mr. Lewis Einstein.7 In this article, Mr. Einstein drew 
attention to the storm clouds gathering over Europe, to the depth of the 
Anglo-German antagonism, to the danger that war might arise from some relatively 
insignificant incident, and to the effect that such a war might have on the 
equilibrium and stability of Europe. He then went on to trace out the 
significance of such a European war for the security of the United States. He 
never doubted that we would have to intervene to save England, if the 
alternative were clearly her destruction. But he warned against the assumption 
that we would not be affected by any drastic alteration either way in the 
balance of forces in Europe:

  Unperceived by many Americans, the European balance of power is a political 
  necessity which can alone sanction on the Western Hemisphere the continuance 
  of an economic development unhandicapped by the burden of extensive armaments. 

  . . . The disappearance or diminution of any one state in Europe would be a 
  calamity, varying with its degree. . . . 
  It is no affair of the United States even though England were defeated, so 
  long as the general balance is preserved. But if ever decisive results are 
  about to be registered of a nature calculated to upset what has for centuries 
  been the recognized political fabric of Europe, America can remain indifferent 
  thereto only at its own eventual cost. If it then neglects to observe that the 
  interests of the nations crushed are likewise its own, America will be guilty 
  of political blindness which it will later rue. 


Now you could, it seems to me, have taken this view - so well substantiated by 
the subsequent course of events - as your point of departure, let us say, from 
1913. You might then, departing from the recognition that serious troubles were 
brewing in Europe and that our own interests were endangered, have seen to it 
that this country provided itself right then and there with something in the way 
of an armed establishment, so that our word would carry some weight and be 
listened to in the councils of the powers. When war broke out, you could have 
ignored the nonsensical timidities of technical neutrality and used our 
influence to achieve the earliest possible termination of a war that nobody 
could really win. Admittedly, if there were any possibility of this, it was in 
the first months of the war, and we would have had to be armed. If this had not 
succeeded, then you would have had to carry on through the war, exercising what 
moderating influence you could, avoiding friction with the belligerents on minor 
matters, holding your power in reserve for the things that counted. And if you 
finally had to intervene to save the British from final defeat (which I am quite 
prepared to accept as a valid ground for intervention), then you could have gone 
in frankly for the avowed purpose both of doing this and of ending the war as 
rapidly as possible; you could have refrained from moralistic slogans, refrained 
from picturing your effort as a crusade, kept open your lines of negotiation to 
the enemy, declined to break up his empires and overthrow his political system, 
avoided commitments to the extremist war aims of your allies, retained your 
freedom of action, exploited your bargaining power flexibly with a view to 
bringing its full weight to bear at the crucial moments in order to achieve the 
termination of hostilities with a minimum prejudice to the future stability of 
the Continent. 
All these things, as I say, you might conceivably have done. If you ask me, "Can 
you guarantee that this would have produced a better outcome and a happier 
future?" my answer is, "Of course not." I can say only that I fail to see how it 
could have produced a much worse one. And I can say that it would have been a 
conceptual framework more closely related to the realities of the world we live 
in and that in the long run - in the law of averages - conduct realistically 
motivated is likely to be more effective than conduct unrealistically motivated. 

But I think I hear one great, and even indignant, objection to what I have 
suggested; and I must speak to it before I close. People will say to me: You 
know that what you have suggested was totally impossible from the standpoint of 
public opinion; that people in general had no idea that our interests were 
affected by what was going on in Europe in 1913; that they would never have 
dreamed of spending real money for armaments in time of peace; that they would 
never have gone into a war deliberately, its a result of cold calculation about 
the balance of power elsewhere; that they would have made war only upon direct 
provocation; that they could never have been brought to forgive such provocation 
and to refrain from pressing such a war to its final conclusion. And you know 
that they would not have been happy unless they had been able to clothe their 
military effort in the language of idealism and to persuade themselves that 
anything so important as Americans fighting on foreign soil had to end with a 
basic alteration of the terms of life among nations and a settlement of this 
business for once and for all. You - these people will say to me - hold yourself 
out as a realist, and yet none of these things you are talking about were even 
ever within the realm of practical possibility from the standpoint of domestic 
realities in our own country. 
I have no quarrel with this argument. I am even going to concede it. I do think 
that political leaders might have made greater efforts than they did, from time 
to time, to inform themselves and to tell people the true facts, and I think 
people might even have understood them and been grateful to them if they had. 
But let us let that go and say that basically the argument is sound. I still 
have one thing to say about it. 
I am not talking here about the behavior of Woodrow Wilson or Colonel House or 
Robert Lansing. I am talking about the behavior of the United States of America. 
History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable 
in. terms of our domestic politics. If you say that mistakes of the past were 
unavoidable because of our domestic predilections and habits of thought, you are 
saying that what stopped us from being more effective than we were was 
democracy, as practiced in this country. And, if that is true, let us recognize 
it and measure the full seriousness of it - and find something to do about it. A 
nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own 
habits can excuse itself into complete disaster. I said in the first of these 
lectures that the margin in which it is given to us to commit blunders has been 
drastically narrowed in the last fifty years. If it was the workings of our 
democracy that were inadequate in the past, let us say so. Whoever thinks the 
future is going to be easier than the past is certainly mad. And the system 
under which we are going to have to continue to conduct foreign policy is, I 
hope and pray, the system of democracy.




FOOTNOTES

1. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1915 (New York, 1929), pp. 1-2. 
2. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A.W. Wheen 
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1929; London: Putnam & Co., LTD, 1929), p. 290. 
3. Address to the First Annual Assemblage of the League To Enforce Peace, May 
27, 1916. 
4. Speech on the "S.S. George Washington," July 4, 1919. 
5. Address to the Senate, January 22, 1917. 
6. This was not true of Wilson - at least in the beginning of 1917. His mind was 
able to entertain simultaneously thoughts of peace without victory and expansive 
concepts of a future world order which explicitly rejected the balance of power. 

7. National Review, LX(January, 1913), 736-50.