7 - Stepping upon the Global Stage, 1913–1921

Summary

Woodrow Wilson produced one the greatest changes in American strategic history: America would now go abroad to establish democratic governments. He was also America’s most interventionist president and commonly used American military power to force Latin American nations to behave as he thought they should. Wilson fought wars in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and two against Mexico, and sent troops into Cuba. He most famously took the US into the First World War because of German unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping and the Zimmerman Telegram. Wilson sought a democratic German government and to create a stable peace, but he was reluctant to consider the aims of the other Allied coalition nations, Britain, France, and Italy. The US was unprepared to enter the First World War but built an enormous army under John J. Pershing that it deployed to France and used to help win the war in 1918. Wilson sought peace on the basis of his Fourteen Points. The Treaty of Versailles settled the war and established the League of Nations, but Wilson’s stubbornness prevented the treaty’s approval by the US Senate.