2001/01/01 by Ross A. Kennedy · 4 citations
Social Sciences · #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact #Military History and Strategy #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
paper · doi:10.1111/0145-2096.00247
openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Eighty years after the guns of the First World War fell silent, the conflict still looms large over the historiography of American diplomacy. Indeed, the publication over the last thirty years of Arthur Link's monumental editorial effort, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, has stimulated a new wave of scholarship about America's participation in the Great War. Nearly all recent interpretations of Wilson's leadership rightly stress the influence of the president's belief in American exceptionalism and in the notion that the United States had a “mission,” in Link's words, “to serve mankind through leadership in moral purposes and in advancing peace and world unity.” But scholars have failed to grasp the other key factor behind Wilson's diplomacy during World War I: the president's conception of U.S. national security. This is not to say that the subject has been ignored in the literature. It has not. Lloyd E. Ambrosius, N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Thomas Knock, Tony Smith, Klaus Schwabe, David M. Esposito, John Milton Cooper, Jr., and Link, among others, have, to widely varying degrees, addressed it or at least alluded to it. None of these authors, however, has put forward a convincing, coherent, and sustained analysis of exactly how President Wilson defined U.S. national security interests during World War I and how his ideas about national security influenced his policies. As the war in Europe developed, the president began to perceive two closely related but distinct external threats to America's well-being: “balance-of-power” politics in general and the power of Germany specifically. Both endangered America's ability to avoid becoming an authoritarian, militarized state constantly on the verge of war. This conception of U.S. national security, no less than Wilson's missionary moralism, animated the president's response to the First World War.1