w aging w ar to t ransform the w orld 85the civil liberties of groups and individuals who opposed the war that
eclipsed anything done by the Lincoln administration.
With battlefi eld triumph in hand, Wilson faced the fi nal key task of
wartime leadership: peace-building. Lincoln had accomplished his
central goals by defeating the Confederacy and destroying slavery in the
process. Not so with Wilson and Armistice in November 1918. Th at did
no more than open the door for what the president insisted must
follow—a just postwar order that would be generous to the enemy,
assure that emerging peoples could choose their own form of gov-
ernment, and protect smaller states from aggression by larger ones. And
here his grand design collapsed. Allied leaders frustrated the president
at the peace conference, while domestic opponents thwarted his bold
eff ort to engage America in a system of collective security to guarantee
the peace.
His failure resulted from both the circumstances specifi c to his situ-
ation and factors that recur across wars. Historians have tended to focus
more on the former, in particular Wilson’s personality attributes and his
failing health. But we should attend, too, to the elements that any
wartime president is likely to encounter when the guns fall silent. Pres-
idential power, especially leverage over other political actors and a dom-
inant voice in shaping public opinion, begins to ebb immediately. Th us
Wilson discovered that he could not impose his will on other Allied
leaders, on distant armies contesting the borders of newly emerging
countries, or on the United States Senate. His struggles with the Senate
also demonstrate that peace brings into play another political force—a
resurgent legislative branch—that can thwart the presidential postwar
agenda. His own mistakes and the general decline in presidential
capacity following a war, then, combined to prevent him from deliv-
ering the kind of peace he had promised.
Th e Perils of Neutrality
When Europe stumbled into war in August 1914, the belligerents recog-
nized that the United States could have a decisive impact on the
outcome. Industrial expansion had propelled the United States to the
forefront of the world economy, while American agricultural exports
also boomed. Warring nations, especially the Entente or Allies (Great