132 e lusive v ictories
Paris and the treaty debate in the Senate. Yet, as we’ve seen, a president’s
leverage over other political actors seems likely to decline quickly when
the fi ghting ends. Abroad, Wilson found that his recent allies pursued
their particular narrow interests; troops who might have helped impose
order in the vacuum left by collapsing regimes instead were swiftly
demobilized, while the few who were not became demoralized; and new
political forces (armed groups, discharged soldiers, radical movements)
seized the openings created when authority disintegrated. At home,
Congress reasserted itself, as it did at the end of the Civil War, while the
American people turned back to domestic concerns. Wilson might have
secured some of his peace-building program were it not for his illness-
driven rigidity, but he could never have accomplished most of it.
Had Wilson appreciated in 1918 or 1919 that his initial objectives were
overly ambitious, however, he still would have found it impossible to
back down. Like Lincoln before him, Wilson demonstrates how presi-
dents lose flexibility over the course of a war, as their early choices
increasingly constrain their options. Wilson started to frame his vision
of a new postwar order in 1916 and early 1917, but he did not commit
himself irrevocably to an epic peace-building agenda until he asked
Congress to declare war. In view of his professed convictions—Ameri-
cans must only be asked to make great sacrifi ces in exchange for com-
mensurate gains in the broad betterment of the human condition and
the promise of a global order that would prevent another such cata-
strophic confl ict—he could neither accept himself nor justify to his
domestic audience a peace that resembled a return to balance-of-power
politics. His inspiring vision and soaring rhetoric created insur-
mountable obstacles to reaching common ground with realists such as
Clemenceau and Lodge. When he arrived in Paris in December 1918,
pledged to transform the world, he was a captive to that vision.