Donald Trump and the Ghost of Woodrow Wilson

The extraordinary announcement on Thursday that President Donald Trump will meet with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-Un caught the world by surprise. The two leaders have spent the better part of a year calling each other names, such as “Rocket Man,”  “dotard,” and “lunatic,” and threatening to unleash nuclear destruction  and “fire and fury.”  Now they will attempt to negotiate a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. The details regarding when and where the summit will occur remain unknown, but one thing we can say with confidence is that the stakes of the summit meeting—if it actually takes place—will be immense.

Trump’s decision to meet with Kim Jong-Un without consulting Congress in advance is consistent with long-standing American foreign policy. Article II of the Constitution not only makes the president “commander in chief” but also vests in the office of president the full “executive power” of the federal government.  The president must secure the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate to make treaties, but otherwise the president enjoys sweeping latitude in the conduct of foreign affairs. Indeed, in the 1936 case of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, the U.S. Supreme Court described the president as “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” 

Accordingly, many presidents have used international summits to engage in free-wheeling diplomacy, such as FDR’s World War II conferences with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. During the Cold War, summit meetings became a routine feature of Russian-American relations, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s and culminating with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. But without question the most celebrated summit meeting in history was Richard Nixon’s surprise visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972. Nixon’s highly successful meetings with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai opened the door to a dramatic improvement in the relationship between Washington and Beijing. As Trump prepares for his face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-Un, Nixon’s historic trip to China offers an auspicious model for the Trump White House to emulate.

But the Donald Trump—Kim Jong-Un meeting is no ordinary summit and the circumstances that surround it are far more ominous than those accompanying the Nixon-Mao summit in 1972. If Trump fails to achieve a breakthrough with the North Koreans, there is a very real risk of general war on the Korean Peninsula. Accordingly, there is a century-old precedent to Trump's audacious and risky decision to meet one-on-one with the North Korean dictator that should send a chill down Trump’s spine. The ultimate cautionary tale for any summit-bound president is Woodrow Wilson’s personal participation in the diplomatic negotiations to end World War I. Although Wilson's peace mission raised the hopes of the world, his failure to deliver a lasting peace set the stage for an era so destabilizing it led to the nightmarish conflagration of World War II. The tragedy of Wilson's trip to Paris illustrates the enormous risks associated with a president who takes personal responsibility for negotiating peace terms.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919

No international conference has ever had higher stakes than the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. At the end of the First World War, the victorious Allied powers of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States convened in Paris to negotiate post-war terms with the defeated Germans. The goals of the Paris Peace Conference were breathtakingly ambitious. Besides negotiating a formal end to the war, the delegates sought to establish an international organization—called the League of Nations—that would ensure that a similar conflict would never occur again. 

Inspired by the momentous stakes of the conference, President Woodrow Wilson made the extremely bold decision to lead the American delegation himself. Wilson was only the third sitting president in history to leave the United States. But Wilson's trip to France really had no precedent in history. The previous foreign trips by President Roosevelt and President Taft involved visits to nearby countries (Mexico and Panama) for very short stays of a few days at most. In contrast, in December 1918 Wilson traveled halfway around the world and spent 6 months in Europe. By leading the American negotiating team, Wilson gambled his presidency on the idea that his personal presence at the peace negotiations would secure a just settlement and a new global order built on law and the peaceful resolution of international disputes.

Unfortunately, however, Wilson’s gamble backfired in spectacular fashion, and 20 years later the world plunged into an even more devastating conflict, the consequences of which are still felt today.

The Problem of Leverage

The first reason why Wilson failed was the fact that he had very little political leverage in Paris. As Prof. John Milton Cooper, Jr. argues in his outstanding 2011 biography of Wilson, “World War I ended too soon.”  When the Germans capitulated in November 1918 amid an economic collapse at home and battlefield reversals in France and Belgium, the sudden end to the war deprived the Allies of a clear and decisive military victory over Germany. The Germans had essentially quit and gone home to avoid facing precisely the type of humbling, crushing, and overwhelming defeat they would later experience in 1945. 

Consequently, in the aftermath of 1918, many ordinary Germans felt not beaten but robbed by the war’s outcome. The unexpected and indecisive nature of Germany's defeat laid the groundwork for Adolf Hitler’s sinisterly effective “stabbed in the back” propaganda. As Prof. Ian Kershaw explains in the first volume of his brilliant two-volume biography of Hitler, the "stabbed in the back" argument was "a legend the Nazis would use as a central element of their propaganda armoury." 

Equally important, the war's quick end meant that the victorious British, French, and Italians did not feel particularly indebted to the United States, which had intervened relatively late in the war. The United States lost "only" 117,000 troops dead in the war, whereas Italy lost about 500,000 dead, Britain lost 800,000 dead, France lost 1.2 million dead, Russia lost 1.7 million dead, and Germany lost 1.8 million dead. What's more, those figures only account for military deaths. Civilian losses, particularly in southern and eastern Europe and the Middle East, reached into the millions of deaths as well. Amid such suffering and destruction, America's contribution to Allied victory looked fairly modest as the delegates convened in Paris in 1919. 

Prof. Cooper makes a compelling case that Wilson's negotiating position at Paris would have enormously benefited from a longer war, even by just six months. When the war came to a stunning close in November 1918, over two million fresh American troops had surged onto the western front. If the conflict had lasted into 1919, and if it had culminated in the invasion and conquest of Germany, the United States would have emerged as the central player in Germany’s defeat. Under those circumstances, Cooper explains, “the Allies would have been utterly dependent on America and Wilson would have been able to dictate the terms of the settlement.” Instead, Germany’s sudden collapse meant that Wilson arrived in Paris with the inspiring rhetoric of his Fourteen Points but with no political capital to hold over the victors or the vanquished. 

An Impossible Task

The second problem Wilson faced was the fact that the vast scale of the issues before the Paris Peace Conference exceeded the ability of any single individual to manage successfully. The war not only cost the lives of 9 million troops and at least 5 million civilians, it also inflicted severe physical and emotional trauma on tens of millions of people. Not surprisingly, institutions crumbled across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Three of the world's major powers collapsed during the war—the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires—and a fourth major power—the German Empire—succumbed to political and economic chaos. The profound instability unleashed by the war rippled across Europe and the Middle East for years after the fighting ended.   

Faced with immense challenges and uncontrollable historical forces, Woodrow Wilson took on the impossible task of organizing the post-war world. One of the conference’s defining images is that of Wilson hunched over maps late into the night, redrawing national boundaries across the Eastern Hemisphere.

But the lines that Wilson and the European leaders drew failed to reflect the patchwork quilt of ethnic groups spread across vast stretches of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Paris delegates lacked even the most basic information about the people whose lives would be profoundly shaped by the new borders. Compounding the problem was the fact that throughout the conference the colonial interests of Britain and France took precedence over common sense, resulting in the creation of unstable new nations that 100 years later continue to be rocked by internecine warfare, such as Iraq and Syria. 

In short, Wilson was set up to fail at Paris, and fail he did.

Hitler's "Vindictive Peace"

Even when Wilson succeeded, he failed. Far more than is commonly understood, Wilson did a reasonably good job of watering down the most vindictive demands of the victorious European powers. But he lost the perception battle. Instead of thanking Wilson for giving them a fairer peace than they had a right to expect, the Germans perceived the Treaty of Versailles as an inexcusably harsh and unforgiving peace settlement. Adding insult to injury, even some Allies made erroneous claims that the peace terms were unreasonably harsh on Germany. 

As modern historians have made clear, the actual reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles were not particularly onerous. During the conference Wilson negotiated a major reduction in the reparations initially demanded by the Allies, and in the 1920s the Coolidge and Hoover administrations assumed responsibility for footing the bill for a large share of Germany’s war debt. By the time Adolf Hitler renounced the reparations payments in the 1930s, Germany had only paid a small fraction of its war debt. In fact, by some measures, the total amount of American loans and outright grants to Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s exceeded the total amount Germany paid in reparations payments. In any case, the reparations Germany imposed on the French following France's defeat in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War exceeded the amount that Germany paid in reparations to all Allied powers after World War I. 

But the perception of a “vindictive peace” proved more important than facts. With a demonically cynical understanding of how ordinary people perceived events, Hitler exploited the myth of “crushing” reparations to propel the Nazi Party to power in 1933. Only by opposing all reparations payments and territorial adjustments would Wilson have preempted Hitler's “vindictive peace” myth, but the British and French governments would never have permitted such an outcome. The Germans had not only imposed severe reparations and territorial concessions on defeated enemies in the past, they had even done so during World War I. When Russia sued for peace in March 1918, the Germans imposed far more severe terms on the Russians in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk than the Allies imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. That fact was not lost on the Allied representatives in Paris in 1919. In light of the harsh terms Germany had always pursued when it had the upper hand over its enemies, it was simply not politically feasible for the Allies to let Berlin off the hook without reparations payments of some kind. 

Consequently, Wilson was doomed to a public relations failure no matter what the Paris peace terms ultimately contained. Indeed, the ink was not even dry on the Treaty of Versailles before the British economist John Maynard Keynes excoriated the reparations payments in his incredibly (but unjustifiably) influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Years before Hitler emerged as a major player in German politics, Keynes's erroneous claim that the Treaty of Versailles imposed economically ruinous terms on Germany shaped public perception far more profoundly than Wilson could ever counter with arguments and speeches of his own. 

Wilson's Political and Personal Collapse

But Wilson was more than just a victim of circumstance. He brought his worst defeat on himself. 

For all its shortcomings, the Treaty of Versailles brought an end to the war and created the League of Nations, the first international organization for peace and security in history. As Prof. Margaret MacMillan explains in her exceptionally even-handed account of the conference, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, the covenant of the League of Nations "underlined the idea that there were certain things that all humanity had in common and there could be international standards beyond those of mere national interest." In light of the important step forward the League represented, the Treaty should have been ratified by the United States Senate.

But congressional elections in the United States one week before Germany’s surrender transformed the terms of debate in Washington. Republicans won control of the Senate by a 2-seat margin after 6 years of Democratic control. Led by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republicans opposed Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which provided for collective defense. Lodge viewed Article X as a violation of Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which entrusts the House of Representatives with the power to declare war. Lodge insisted that America should only approve the Treaty (and thereby join the League of Nations) under the critical reservation that Article X did not apply to the United States.

Although partisan politics clearly played a role in Lodge's decision-making, his position on Article X was not without merit. Wilson could and should have found common ground with Lodge and the other Senate Republicans. Nevertheless, in a self-destructive act of stunning proportions, Wilson obstinately refused to compromise with the Republicans. In Paris Wilson had been highly flexible and amenable to compromise, but not in Washington. Irrationally rigid in his outlook, he insisted the Treaty was all or nothing. With the president unwilling to meet the Republicans halfway, the Treaty fight raged in the Senate through the summer and fall of 1919. Aware that time was running out, Wilson went on a barnstorming lecture tour across the United States to build public support for the Treaty.

But after weeks on the road, he collapsed of exhaustion in Colorado and was rushed back to the White House. A few days later, in early October 1919, Wilson suffered a devastating stroke that paralyzed his left-side and nearly blinded him. He would never give a public speech again. In dramatic votes in November 1919 and March 1920, the Treaty of Versailles failed to gain the necessary two-thirds support in the Senate. Wilson left office in March 1921 a shell of the man who had entered the White House in March 1913.

The United States would never join the League of Nations. Instead, it would watch from the sidelines as Nazi Germany's escalating aggression triggered the biggest war in human history in the late 1930s. By the time the United States belatedly joined the war in December 1941, it would take years of fighting and millions of deaths to stop Hitler and Nazi Germany. 

The Lessons of History

The tragic outcome of the Paris Peace Conference demonstrates just how much risk any president assumes in personally leading high stakes peace negotiations. When Wilson arrived in Paris in December 1918, he was widely hailed as the world’s greatest leader. One year later, he was a physical and emotional wreck, and his administration was shattered.

It seems unlikely that President Trump has spent any time studying the Wilson Administration, let alone the broader history of American foreign relations. Other than claiming that Sen. Orrin Hatch ranks him as a better president than Washington and Lincoln, President Trump has never displayed much interest in history.

But as he prepares to meet with Kim Jong-Un, he would be wise to learn from the lessons of Woodrow Wilson’s trip to Paris. The Korean Peninsula is a tinderbox, and any conflict on it would likely draw in not only the United States, but also the world’s two other major superpowers: China and Russia.

Accordingly, the high stakes of Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-Un resemble those of Wilson’s negotiations in Paris a century ago. We can only hope that the outcome is far better this time around. 

Comments

[anon]

You're right. No matter what he does, there is a historical precedent. And, that historical precedent always demonstrates that he is always wrong. History tells us so. History knows.

[anon]

And, btw, I know it is the fashion to just make s... up to fit the most derogatory, hyperbolic slander one can possibly imagine about the current president (who to be sure has his faults, but really, scholars posing as MSNBC or CNN hate mongers is just unseemly, IMHO), but I would really be interested to read what you base this whopper of a shady claim on:

"It seems unlikely that President Trump has spent any time studying ... the broader history of American foreign relations."

ANY time? Really, and you know this, how?

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

The President’s inordinate fondness for Twitter, television, and the telephone is well known. And his lack of a disposition for reading anything of substantive length, like a book, or an article, is well-attested and not surprising, given his pathological narcissism (Narcissistic Personality Disorder; see my paper discussing this). Trump’s habitual rhetorical reliance in public speeches upon crude, hyperbolic, and often child-like adjectives and metaphors (with corresponding child-like or homologous and associationist thinking: mistaking bigness for greatness; the quantitative valuation of virtually everything; connecting competition, success and size; the attraction of novelty; a thirst for sensationalism; an overweening sense of privilege and superiority rooted in a fascination with sheer power if not megalomania, and so forth and so on), the harm of which is exacerbated by mendacious Manichean propaganda within an overarching framework of narcissistic nationalism.

See too this recent article from The Atlantic:

“Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While, like many of the tendencies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral communication over the written word demand closer examination. ‘He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,’ Wolff writes. ‘He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.’

Wolff quotes economic adviser Gary Cohn writing in an email: ‘It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.’ While Trump and his allies, as well as some mainstream journalists, have attacked the accuracy of Wolff’s book, Trump’s allergy to reading is among the most fully corroborated assertions Fire and Fury makes.

Ahead of the election, the editors of this magazine wrote that the Republican candidate “appears not to read.” Before the inauguration, Trump told Axios, ‘I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.’ In February, The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include lots of graphics and maps. Mother Jones reviewed classified information indicating Trump’s briefings were a quarter as long as Barack Obama’s.

In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon. And amid the hype over Wolff’s book, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote a column Friday saying that in September 2015, he confronted Trump over poor debate performances, saying, ‘Can you read?’ Met with silence, Scarborough pressed again: ‘I’m serious, Donald. Do you read? If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?’ Trump replied by brandishing a Bible from his mother and saying he read it all the time—probably a self-aware joke, given Trump’s proud impiety and displayed ignorance of the Bible.

The Scarborough anecdote is the strangest of these. This is not only because Scarborough held on to the story for nearly a year and a half, and continued to hype Trump’s candidacy on air and advise him privately. (As James Fallows notes, the real scandal of the Wolff book is that so many people have such grave misgivings about Trump but have kept their heads down.) It is also unfortunate because Trump is clearly, in strictly literal terms, literate. He displays his basic grasp of the language—if in sloppy, often typo-ridden ways—on Twitter on a roughly daily basis. Such stories, by dint of their hyperbole, offer a bit of a distraction from how serious the problem is.

Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders could fall back on semi-plausible excuses, such as arguing that his information consumption was typical of the business world from which he had come. The AP reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis used charts and maps in the briefing on America’s role because that was ‘a way the businessman-turned-politician would appreciate.’ [….]

Unlike Trump, [George W.] Bush also read for pleasure and edification. Late in Bush’s presidency, Karl Rove wrote a notable column in which he detailed the president’s reading habits. At the time, Richard Cohen described Bush’s list as too closed to critical ideas: ‘Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.’ Such a critique of Trump is unthinkable, because the idea of him recommending any volume that is not either by him or a hagiography of him is unthinkable. One can deride the reading of Bush and Obama—who last week continued a tradition he began as president, posting his reading list for the year—as performative, but Trump, a consummate performer in so many other respects, cannot even be bothered to perform here.

There’s been plenty of attention paid to Trump’s excessive (and implausibly denied) television watching, but it’s really more of a piece with his broader orientation away from the written word and toward oral culture. The president likes verbal briefings, phone conversations, and television because they’re all conducted aloud, sans reading. [….]

The president’s actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff—even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes—10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.” [….] – From David A. Graham’s “The President Who Doesn’t Read,” The Atlantic (January 5, 2018)

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Let him give it a shot. At least while they are talking for a few days, we will have peace. It will buy some time. Maybe a few months of purchased peace... It's like our gig/free lance bullshit Amazon job/Uber/craft beer economy. You lurch from one to another. Yeah, it may not be a life long career at Kodak, but in the end, when you put it all together, you will have had an income and a taste of middle class lifestyle.

[anon]

PTSOD

YOu seem quite willing to believe ANYthing negative, can't allow for the possibility of a condition otherwise, as you seem to believe the statement above that a person acting as POTUS has not spent "ANY time studying ... the broader history of American foreign relations." That statement is false, almost by definition.

This preposterous statement is not refuted because you can find online and then cut and paste here some person's writing, in the press, who shares your anger, hostility and hyperbolic claims about the current president. As stated above, we can find 24/7, 365 nonstop opprobrium on CNN, MSNBC, etc. Why not quote Lawrence O'Donnell? He's the voice of reason!

The key is to try, just try, to think, and not just post long diatribes as an angry adversary. For instance, above, you cite an argument that praises George W. Bush to ridicule and slander the POTUS.

One suspects you didn't even read what you posted. If any issue involving that man was discussed here, it is likely you would be larding up the comments with law review length essays and reading lists on the subject, excoriating the man for being stupid, and ignorant and evil.

Just once, PTSOD, stop arguing and dial it back.

[Anon]

"Just once, PTSOD, stop arguing and dial it back."

You may wish to take your own advice. I know of no one who defends Trump as knowledgeable about international relations or historical precedents. It is as if he consciously avoided knowing about either of those things his entire life. So I think Gaughan's original statement is not only justified, but potentially too forgiving of the so-called president.

And no, I am not just repeating MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell or CNN, but thank you (in advance) for assuming I am so as to denigrate my thoughts on this matter. So I repeat: stop arguing and dial it back

[anon]

The tell here is the post above, and PTSOD just furthers it. (Can't admit that ANY is an overstatement ...)

Regarding the issue, one would expect if speaking about the risks, to mention the Clinton deal with NOKO. The recent arrangement with another nuclear power comes to mind.

But, no. We are not "studying ... the broader history of American foreign relations," and coming to objective views about the risks/rewards.

Instead, we are asked to search for a MISTAKE, for a blunder, to blame, in advance, on this POTUS, literally suggesting dire ruin and that this effort may be a prelude to WWIII.

In order to drive this suggestion in, the author delivers, at the end of this sort of, well, opinionated piece ("As modern historians have made clear, the actual reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles were not particularly onerous") unsupportable blows against the POTUS personally.

Leave it to someone in the comments to come forward to throw some fuel on the fire in response to even the hint of an objection to this hyperbole about not being cognizant of ANY history in this regard (a risible claim, really). So long as someone is getting skewered who some folks want to see skewered (the "so called president"), these folks will take any low road to get there. And, it is a low road to speak that way, though few these days seem to think so.

So sad. Give peace a chance, haters. Concerns about the risks, sure. Historical precedents, or course (if the most relevant; again, notice how the author avoids this). But, just dumping on the POTUS in this instance is playground politics.