Woodrow Wilson
I guess we should always say first that it is not clear how much influence conferences and treaties have on events. In 1919, the Bolsheviks were taking over Russia and a few satellites, unless someone applied considerable force to stop this from happening. Noone was going to. Austria-Hungary was gone. Germany, while soundly defeated in the minds of Allied leaders, was in some ways hardly harmed by the war, and indeed already re-building. In various regions about which the Allies had long discussions, someone who was strong locally was going to take over. These turned out to be the massive facts which brought about World War II and the Cold War.
Wilson's Fourteen Points inspired people all over the world to believe that despite the horrors of war and poverty they had been going through, a new dawn was possible, based on new thinking. The modern world could be good rather than evil. Wilson's most famous pronouncement was "national self-determination," but his recommendations for specific regions were not much help--and probably raised expectations that no one could meet. "Initially, he did not want to break up the big multinational empires such as Austria-Hungary and Russia." Enforcement was often an issue; Allied forces were leaving the battlefields of World War I in droves--and everyone knew it.
[blockquote]At the end of 1919, a chastened Wilson told Congress, "When I gave utterance to those words [that 'all nations had a right to self-determination'], I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day." [/blockquote]
Who are these people? What do they want? Er, they're the people you invited to seek self-determination, sir.
The League of Nations was the most idealistic proposal of Wilson's, but it was also supposed to be the most practical. Instead of the U.S. being dragged into a war that is initially little or none of its business, subject to the approval of Congress and the American public, there should be a collective agency that can act. Not just the most interested parties, who may want to keep the war going, but parties interested enough to seek peace for the sake of trade and security. The status quo (post Mexican wars, Alaska and Hawaii), was always good for the U.S.; why couldn't everyone else see it as good? But surely the majority of peoples can't be expected to see existing boundaries, or a new set drafted in haste in Paris, as just, simply because the U.S. finds them convenient as a way to avoid war?
"Faith in their own exceptionalism has sometimes led to a certain obtuseness on the part of Americans... a tendency ... to assume that American motives are pure where those of others are not." Americans can honestly say they don't want an old-fashioned empire--but they do want the entire world to operate in a way that is favourable to them, and they are prepared to fight wars and develop military bases to ensure this happens. They are generally able to see their self-interest coinciding with justice, and that is what they want to see.
UPDATE: I guess Wilson's two biggest blunders were: entering the war when he did (either earlier or later would have been better); and pushing for an Armistice, instead of something closer to Unconditional Surrender (which has been a U.S. trademark in other wars).
Literally as soon as Wilson announced that the U.S. was coming in--in March 1917, the German and Austrian generals made sure Lenin got into Russia. Maybe there was no way of foreseeing what would happen--at Paris in 1919, no one seemed sure whether the Bolsheviks would be defeated by the Whites, the Poles, the Germans, etc., or would be a force to reckon with. In any case the Allies were no doubt glad to have the U.S. in the war, and no doubt so would I have been if I were alive at the time. I am tantalized by Jonah Goldberg's suggestion that it would have been better if Germany had defeated France. Probably all the Germans wanted was Alsace and Lorraine (again), and a few other places. They would have been a strong liberal democratic/social democratic regime able to face the Bolsheviks. They could have weathered the Depression better than Weimar did. Perhaps: no Hitler?
Then there's the Armistice. Virtually everyone was appalled at the slaughter in the trenches, and it obviously seemed a good idea to stop it somehow. This was Wilson's humanitarianism, his determination to do things better than those cynical, nasty old Europeans. But: the Armistice resolved nothing. Unconditional Surrender, if it is meant literally, may not be a great idea either, but at least it captures the idea that someone has to be soundly defeated before a war is over. No Allied armies ever marched into German cities, so Germans were able to delude themselves that they hadn't really been defeated. In fact their economy and population, as the French kept warning, were in better shape than the French. The German high command, sensing which way the wind was blowing, shifted from an admission of defeat to something different.
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