A look at whether Woodrow Wilson possessed the will to maintain peace after WWI.
Woodrow Wilson did not possess the will to maintain peace after the Great War. The writer asserts that there were three ways in which Wilson contributed to the build-up of tensions before WWII. First was Wilson’s failure in responding to the members of the Peace Accords in relation to the redrawing of German boundaries; his influence in tearing away predominantly German areas resulted in the planting of seeds for future war. The second reason that Wilson could not maintain peace was his inability to remove himself from partisan politics in America. The third reason was in relation to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, more specifically, the point of self-determination. Close examination of these three points shows why Wilson is partly responsible for WWII.
The Great War was a war of attrition. Many brave men on all both sides of the conflict, Axis and Allied Powers, met their fate fighting for their homelands during the years of 1914-1918. Never before had the world seen such a horrid war fought in the grand scope and magnitude of nations versus nations. Great sacrifices were made in part to the loss of human life through mechanization of artillery to the inception of chemical warfare. (Would such a tragic lesson be reason enough for peace among sovereigns?) Unfortunately, the peace was not afforded to the constituents of the Paris conference, nor those that threw away their lives in the second war that shortly followed in 1939. While there were many causes for the Second World War, it would be a herculean effort to name and attribute them all. A few of the major causes included the onset of war reparations since repayment would be next to impossible for the Germans to meet in the allotted time. Secondly were the sanctions imposed upon the size of the German military which was considered a measure of further alienation, and thirdly were territorial settlement disputes. All three factors were great causes that angered the Nazis to disregard the Peace Accords in the early 1930’s with Hitler’s rise to power.