The incompletely democratic, multisided search for order that emerged was not necessarily doomed from the start.

The result in the 1920s was a pattern of indirect participation in international affairs that evoked no more than minimum compliance from governments that were themselves grappling with such immediate problems as war debts and reparations and such long-term issues as global geopolitics and imperial reconfiguration. Tooze describes these as manifestations of immaturity, of the United States’ reluctance to accept its responsibilities as a hyperpower avant la lettre, clinging instead to a constitutional interpretation that deprived the federal government of the economic and political power needed to implement Wilson’s vision. Wilson’s plan, however, was stymied by the refusal of Congress to ratify the peace treaty and by America’s rejection of the league. The only credible alternatives were insurgency, typified by fascism and bolshevism, and a hyperpower fulfilling America’s self-defined Manifest Destiny on a global scale through the League of Nations. The pre-1914 world order had been irrevocably shattered. Wilson’s vision might have been improbable, but his approach was grimly realistic. Wilson proposed to develop a new approach to government, moving beyond politics to focus instead on economic and social concerns. In particular President Woodrow Wilson believed this combination would enable the rule of law to replace the great-power ideologies of autocracy and militarism that had brought the world to the edge of collapse. His fundamental contention is that the United States entered the conflict not to make the world safe for some combination of democracy and free trade but in pursuit of a capitalist world order based on moral authority, military power, and economic supremacy. The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1918–1931ĪDAM TOOZE BUILT HIS EUROPEAN REPUTATION specializing in the economic history of the Third Reich, and he makes a brilliant transition to Yale University and the American side of the Atlantic with his seminal analysis of the new power relationships that emerged from World War I. MHQ Review: The Deluge, by Adam Tooze Close

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