Misreading Putin and History

The problems bequeathed by that war were aggravated by a peacemaker, one of Kerry’s precursors among American progressives eager to share with the world their expertise at imposing rationality on untidy societies. Unfortunately, Woodrow Wilson’s earnestness about improving the world was larger than his appreciation of how the world’s complexities can cause improvers to make matters worse.

Wilson injected into diplomatic discourse the idea that “self-determination” is a universal right and “an imperative principle of action.” Several of his Fourteen Points concerned self-determination. But of what “self” was he speaking? Sometimes he spoke of the self-determination of “nations,” at other times of “peoples,” as though these are synonyms. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wondered “what unit has he in mind” and warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” But they resonated. In the Atlantic Charter of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill affirmed the rights of “peoples.” The U.N. Charter endorses the self-determination of “peoples.” Which became a third ingredient, ethnic self-determination. Wilson had sown dragon’s teeth.

Lansing said the “undigested” word “self-determination” is “loaded with dynamite. … It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.” While Wilson was making phrases in 1918, a German corporal recovering from a gas attack was making plans. And on Sept. 27, 1938, the corporal, then Germany’s chancellor, said “the right of self-determination, which had been proclaimed by President Wilson as the most important basis of national life, was simply denied to the Sudeten Germans” and must be enforced. So Czechoslovakia was dismembered. Still, the war came.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,”