Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 148

Nations, potential allies in Japan and Germany were left
at the mercy of their internal enemies. America’s failure,
despite its new power, to support France in deterring potential German aggression defined the interwar era.
Wilson was a Burkean conservative in his intellectual
response to the American Civil War and Reconstruction;
he believed in incremental, generational change and white
supremacy. He was contemptuous of Germany’s new political leadership, and he worried about Japan’s rise in power as Europe was tearing itself apart in war. The author
presents the Treaty of Versailles as a peace settlement that
created its own problems, given its respect for German
national sovereignty, as opposed to earlier settlements in
1648 and 1815. He notes that Wilson habitually raised
hopes of American intervention and support for nascent
democracies—and then dashed them, especially regarding
postwar G