World War I Historians

The xiv Points
Woodrow Wilson
Each nation entered World War I for its own mixture of pragmatic and imposing reasons. In considering their struggle aims and a possible peace settlement, governments did not anticipate the changes that would go past in this unexpectedly long and costly war. By 1918 heterogeneous governments had fallen and the United States had entered the conflict. On January 8, 1918, in an address to a joint session o the U. S. Congress, President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) presented his Fourteen Points, a delineation of American war aims and proposals for a peace settlement. The Fourteen Points served as a basis for debate at the genus Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and represented the most idealistic statement of what might be gained in a terminal peace settlement.
Consider: The ideals that hold these points together; the grievances recognized and unacknowledged in these points; the assumptions about what measures would preserve peace in the postwar realism.
We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and do the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secured once for all against their recurrence. What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing eccentric to ourselves.



It is that the world be made fit and safe to drop dead in; and particularly that it be made safe for each peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, take care its own institutions, be assured of jurist and fair dealings by the other peoples of the world as against force and egocentric aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we imagine very clearly that unless justice be make to others it will not be done to us. The program of the worlds peace, therefore, is our program; and that program, the only possible program, as we see it, is this:
I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international...If you want to get a full essay, tell apart it on our website: Orderessay



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