Yes. And yet, the business being unfinished was very much Woodrow Wilson's fault.
OK, that's flame bait, for sure. I'm working (just mentally, so far) on a lengthy article on that. I was watching a series on Prime last night called "The Ultimate Guide to the US Presidents" or something like that, and it mentioned, for Wilson, that he expressed surprise and displeasure that so much of his second term had to be devoted to foreign policy, when ALL of his training was in domestic policy.
It showed. His astonishing naivete and pigheadedness along with the US's immense power and influence worked to end the war in the worst possible way.
Wilson had managed to wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations, which he was in part responsible for coming up with, and which was actually somewhat popular. But he had to have the Senate ratify the damned thing. The Senate did not ratify it. That precluded our involvement in the whole business and effectively set us adrift from international concerns again. How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification is beyond me.
He did not "wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations" -- they only pretended to agree, to placate him and make him go away.
John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace gives a contemporary deconstruction of the disaster he made, when just leaving the Europeans alone to settle things in their time-honored way could not possibly have been any worse.
As for that villain "the Senate" : they do have a Constitutional role in ratifying treaties. Yet Wilson went to Paris taking along NO representatives of Congress, expecting them to just go along with his wisdom (hence my term "pigheaded"). And in Paris he got rolled. Besides setting up a treaty that brought Hitler to power, he caused lots of small nations to be created that had no chance of defending themselves.
> How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification
He collapsed in Pueblo, CO, not in an address to the Senate. He'd had several strokes before, and suffered the Big One back at the White House.
OK, that's flame bait, for sure. I'm working (just mentally, so far) on a lengthy article on that. I was watching a series on Prime last night called "The Ultimate Guide to the US Presidents" or something like that, and it mentioned, for Wilson, that he expressed surprise and displeasure that so much of his second term had to be devoted to foreign policy, when ALL of his training was in domestic policy.
It showed. His astonishing naivete and pigheadedness along with the US's immense power and influence worked to end the war in the worst possible way.