Question

How did American principles and values affected the settlement after the World War (Treaty of Versailles, League of Nations, "self-determination)?

Answer 1

Woodrow Wilson arrived in France on 13 December 1918, the first U.S. president to leave American soil as president, with the aim of making peace in Versailles a new kind. The Allies had won the Great War, known at the time as World War I, due to US influence, and Wilson was hoping to use military success to lock in a diplomatic victory at the forthcoming Versailles peace conference, which was to begin next January. Instead of a settlement that gave the winners a province or two, Europe's practice for centuries, Wilson in a stunning combination of vision and ambition — would try to put in order a world based on rules that favored liberty,

Theyon was aiming for a bigger prize: a new type of world order. The Fourteen Points included freedom of navigation and "equal trade conditions" instead of closed economic empires; abolition of (although not yet an end to) colonialism; welcomed post-war Germany and post-revolutionary Russia into the new system if, but only if, they complied with its rules; welcomed the emergence or re-emergence of Central and Eastern European national states, such as Poland

Wilson or the Fourteen Points weren't kind to historians. We also acknowledged reasonably the contradictions, hypocrisies and unforeseen negative effects of Wilson's strategy for global leadership in the US. As a principle, self-determination is more easily stated than put into practice. Wilson's racial bigotry is a tough mark against him, horrible even for his time. Yet consider the Fourteen Points toward their competition: the world socialist revolution of Lenin, or the great structure of control of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Despite that, one hundred years later, Wilson's dream of a rules-based, liberal world order, called the Free World, stands out well.