The Fourteen Points

SOURCE Supplements to the Messages and the Papers of the Presidents Covering the Second Administration of Woodrow Wilson. January 18, 1918.

INTRODUCTION World War I was to be the "war to end all wars." To that end, in January 1917, before the United States entered the war, President Woodrow Wilson called for a peace that would remove the causes of future wars and create a League of Nations to help maintain peace. In January 1918 he articulated his "Fourteen Points," which were meant to serve as the basis for a peace agreement. The intention was to reduce the will of the Germans and their allies to continue the fight by suggesting an agreement that would guarantee national independence and self-determination for all combatants. This excerpt includes his six general points, and, as can be seen, Wilson calls for the removal of trade barriers. His eight specific points call for the restoration of Belgium; goodwill toward the Russians, who were in the midst of their revolution; an independent Poland; the handover of Alsace-Lorraine to France; and self-determination for the individual states in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.

In October 1918 the German chancellor wrote to Wilson requesting an immediate armistice and negotiations based on the Fourteen Points. Wilson led the U.S. delegation to the peace conference, which began in January 1919. Ultimately, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were harsher than those Wilson had suggested. Wilson made a number of compromises, but he won more of his points than he lost. The British entered a reservation concerning Wilson's second point, and both the British and the French demanded reparations for the damage to civilian property. Wilson was unable to deliver peace on the exact terms under which Germany had agreed to cease fire, and the Germans later noted that they felt "betrayed." With the revival of isolationism in the United States, the requisite two-thirds vote for ratification of the treaty could not be obtained in the Senate, so in 1921 the United States signed a separate peace treaty with Germany. Under the Treaty of Versailles the League of Nations was created, but the United States was never a member. ∎

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. . .

We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secure once for all against their recurrence. What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The programme of the world's peace, therefore, is our programme; and that programme, the only possible programme, as we see it, is this:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined. . .

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.