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The United States entered World War I in April 1917 after unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram. In November the Bolsheviks published the Allies’ secret treaties for dividing the Middle East, China and Africa, and Lenin’s Decree on Peace demanded an end to the war without annexations. Woodrow Wilson answered with a liberal program of his own, drafted with research from the Inquiry, about 150 academics gathered by Colonel Edward M. House at the American Geographical Society in New York. On January 8, 1918, he presented the Fourteen Points to Congress, calling for open covenants, freedom of the seas, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, an independent Poland with access to the sea and a League of Nations.

At Paris in 1919 Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George resisted, Wilson moved talks behind closed doors, and he made Danzig a free city. Colonized peoples read his words as a promise of self-determination, but he dismissed Japan’s crackdown in Korea, let Britain arrest Saad Zaghloul’s Egyptian delegation and backed Japan’s claim to Shandong over Wellington Koo’s objections. He had backed the annexation of the Philippines, and the mandate system rebranded colonial rule as tutelage. Germany sought an armistice on the Fourteen Points, and its generals later blamed defeat on the stab-in-the-back myth.

• Point 12 promised Ottoman minorities security, helping Wilson answer Theodore Roosevelt’s charge of crocodile tears over the Armenian genocide.
• Clemenceau quipped that God needed only ten commandments while Wilson needed fourteen.
• The U.S. Senate rejected Wilson’s proposal for an American mandate over Armenia.
• More than a million Koreans joined the March 1st Movement in 1919.
• China’s May 4th Movement erupted after the Shandong decision.