At a time when all hope was lost and the nations of Europe were engulfed in one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in world history, Woodrow Wilson stepped onto the world stage to present his guidelines for a "New World Order" based on eternal peace. On January 8, 1918, in an address to a joint session of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, President Wilson gave his famous speech outlining the "Fourteen Points" necessary to ending the war and bringing a lasting peace to the world. The competing powers were in the midst of a stalemate on the Western Front, and Wilson attempted to turn the tide and bring the warring nations to the negotiating table. Wilson wanted to end the stalemate on the Western Front and attempted to do so by luring the Germans to negotiate a "peace without victory." Moreover, it attempted to keep the Russians in the war, but ultimately failed with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, in which Russia and Germany agreed to a separate peace and an end to German-Russian hostilities.
             Wilsonian ideals "engendered almost limitless hopes and expectations in the minds of a traumatized population craving for assurances that peace would endure." Idealism could not solve the crisis at hand, and his "Fourteen Points" were purely idealistic, and more importantly, incompatible with the war aims of the Allies and their view of the world after the war. Animosity towards the Germans was too intense to permit a moderate peace, the Wilsonian answer, and several aspects of the peace were inconsistent with American policy as well as the national interests of Britain and France, the two main Allied powers. Furthermore, his naive belief that power politics could be trumped by world opinion or abolished by the stroke of a pen was severely mistaken. In order to understand the situation facing Wilson and the world at large, a brief background needs explanation.
             Leading up to World War I,...