A Ghost Of War’s Past

Woodrow Wilson was an inadvertent villain. David A. Andelman's new book, "A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today" (327 pages. Wiley), doesn't say so outright, but all the evidence is there. Every high-school student learns how the punitive Treaty of Versailles the American president helped negotiate in Paris pushed Germany toward militarism, National Socialism and eventually World War II. Andelman looks beyond Hitler, surveying the worldwide havoc the document wrought. There is no dearth of material.

Of course, Wilson wasn't the sole architect of that global catastrophe. But unlike the incompetents, cynics and partisans who populate Andelman's account, Wilson entered (and won) the war on behalf of his Fourteen Points, which promised freedom and self-government for every people. Instead, the treaty, enabled by his naivet?, betrayed those ideals and laid the groundwork for another world war, followed by 50 years of imperial chess. And the victims whose self-determination Wilson signed away at Versailles represent, to Andelman, the nails in his coffin.

Why did he do it? For a fantastical notion called the League of Nations—a precursor to the United Nations that he hoped would prevent future wars. Wilson understood it was a hard sell—why should the winners surrender any sovereignty?—so he knowingly allowed the Allies to make greedy (and colonial) territory assignments, guessing that his deference would buy enough good will to make the League real. Once it existed, he assumed, it would simply fix the mistakes of Versailles. Wilson, Andelman is careful to note, wasn't the grand puppeteer behind badly drawn borders, but he was a willing bystander.

In accordance with the Fourteen Points, many nations should have gotten a state; each chapter tackles a case where they didn't. There were Jews, whose abandonment by the British left them unable to migrate to Palestine in large numbers, and thus vulnerable to extermination. There were Arabs (serially double-crossed by the British and French), whose self-proclaimed representatives were enthroned in made-up countries like Iraq. There were Vietnamese, whose case—drawn from the Fourteen Points and eloquently argued by a young dishwasher who hadn't yet changed his name to Ho Chi Minh—was tragically ignored. And so on.

Predictably, the League of Nations was never going to right these wrongs. In fact, the U.S. Senate wouldn't even approve its creation, and without American muscle it had no real power. Around the globe, the mistakes of Versailles then began to multiply. Maps that had been drawn strategically to divide coal mines and ports rendered states with indefensible borders and irredentist minorities: ethnic Germans in Poland, for example, clamored noisily to rejoin the fatherland until Hitler's panzer divisions granted their wish just two decades later.

Meanwhile, native peoples—from Algeria to China—subjugated by Allied colonies after Versailles furnished inviting targets for communist insurrections throughout the century. And in outposts like Saudi Arabia, where revolutionaries failed to eject Western-friendly despots, anticolonial feelings often turned anti-Western. Wilson hoped the 117,000 American dead in World War I would fertilize the seed of democracy; instead, Andelman says, they produced Al Qaeda.