Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

28 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020

UNTIL 1917, STEERING CLEAR

OF FOREIGN RIVALRIES HAD

CONSTITUTED A SACRED PRECEPT

OF AMERICAN STATECRAFT

white. Pacifying “little brown brothers” (Taft’s disparaging term for Filipi-

nos) was like playing baseball in Rochester or Pawtucket. Now the United

States was ready to break into the big leagues.

For Americans today, it is next to impossible to appreciate the im mensity

of the departure from tradition that President Wilson engineered in 1917.

Until that year, steering clear of foreign rivalries had constituted a sacred

precept of American statecraft. The barrier of the Atlantic was sacrosanct, to

be breached by merchants but not by soldiers.

“The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations,” George

Washington had counseled in his Farewell Address, “is in extending our com-

mercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”

This dictum had applied in particular to U.S. relations with Europe. Wash-

ington had explicitly warned against allowing the United States to be dragged

into “the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary

combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”

The Great War persuaded President Wilson to disregard

Washington’s advice. At the war’s outset, in 1914, Wilson had

declared that the United States would be “neutral in fact, as

well as in name.” In reality, as the conflict settled into a bloody

stalemate, his administration tilted in favor of the Allies. By

the spring of 1917, with Germany having renewed U-boat

attacks on U.S. shipping, he tilted further, petitioning Con-

gress to declare war on the Reich. Congress complied, and in

short order over a million doughboys were headed to the

Western Front. In terms of sheer roll-the-dice boldness, Wil-

son’s decision to go to war against Germany dwarfs Lyndon

Johnson’s 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War and George

W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was an action utterly

without precedent.

And as with Vietnam and Iraq, the results were costly

and disillusioning. Although U.S. forces entered the fight

in large numbers only weeks before the armistice in No-

vember 1918, American deaths exceeded 116,000—this

when the total U.S.  population was less than one third

what it is today. Happy to accept American help in defeat-

ing the Hun, British and French leaders wasted little time

once the fighting had stopped in rejecting Wilson’s gran-

diose vision of a peaceful world order based on his famous

Fourteen Points. By the time the U.S.  Senate refused to

ratify the Versailles Treaty, in November 1919 and again

in March 1920, it had become evident that Wilson’s stated

war aims would remain unfulfilled. In return for rallying to

the Allies in their hour of need, the United States had

gained precious little. In Europe itself, meanwhile, the seeds

of further conflict were already being planted.

A deeply disenchanted American public concluded, not

without reason, that the U.S. entry into the war had been a mistake, an as-

sessment that found powerful expression in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway,

John Dos Passos, and other interwar writers. The man who followed Wilson

in the White House, Warren G. Harding, agreed. The principal lesson to be

drawn from the war, “ringing” in his ears, “like an admonition eternal, an

insistent call,” Harding declared, was, “It must not be again!” His was not a

controversial judgment. During the 1920s, therefore, George Washington’s

charge to give Europe wide berth found renewed favor. Accord-

ing to legend, the United States then succumbed to two decades

of unmitigated isolationism.

The truth, as George Marshall and his military contemporaries knew,

was more complicated. From 1924 to 1927, Colonel Marshall was stationed in

Tianjin, China, where he commanded the 15th Infantry Regiment. The year

Surrendered U-boats off the coast of Harwich, England, after the

Armistice in 1918 © The New York Public Library/Science Source