Moral and Religious Aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points

A retrospective analysis of the genesis of the peace settlement program in the European continent after the end of the First World War, proposed by W. Wilson in January 2018, shows that the US President attached greater importance to the moral and religious aspects of his peace plan, rather than to specific peace terms. Based on American sources, many of which are considered for the first time in Russian American Studies, it is shown that the moral and religious aspects of the “Fourteen Points” stemmed from the ideas of American exceptionalism that Woodrow Wilson sought to put into the minds of the European elites, thereby making it clear that the centre of world politics after the end of the First World War was gradually shifting from the Old to the New World, from Europe to America.

The article concludes that the W. Wilson Peace Settlement Program, which formed the basis of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, was the first doctrinal document to embody the claims of the US cosmopolitan elite in the early twentieth century to establish world hegemony of the United States. The most important feature of the “Fourteen Points” program was that it became the first conceptual document of US foreign policy developed by a group of American scholars. Subsequently, the experience gained from developing the “Fourteen Points” program, as well as the scholars who took part in it, formed the basis of the first “think tank” of American foreign policy — the New York Council on Foreign Relations. At that turning point in world history, Woodrow Wilson and his inner circle hoped that the implementation of the “Fourteen Points” would ensure a lasting peace on the European continent, which would no longer become the epicenter of a new world cataclysm.

Keywords

Woodrow Wilson, 14 points, the democratic world, Paris Peace Conference, scientific diplomacy, human rights, the United Nation

Received

10.02.2020

Publication date

27.03.2020

Number of characters

27023

Cite

GOST	Travkina N. Moral and Religious Aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” // Novaia i noveishaia istoriia – 2020. – Issue 2 C. 182-191 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://nni.jes.su/S013038640008664-8-1 (circulation date: 19.04.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S013038640008664-8
MLA	Travkina, Natalya "Moral and Religious Aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 2 (2020):182-191. DOI: 10.31857/S013038640008664-8
APA	Travkina N. (2020). Moral and Religious Aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”. Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (2), pp.182-191 DOI: 10.31857/S013038640008664-8

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